The Group (32 page)

“Are you a virgin?” he said suddenly, stopping right in the middle of his fell design. Libby nodded speechlessly. Her only hope, she now felt, was to throw herself on his mercies. “Oh, what a bore!” he said, half relaxing his hold. “What a bore you are, Elizabeth!” He grimaced. “Libby, I should say.” With a shake, he disengaged himself. Libby had never been so hurt in her whole life. She lay there, gulping, in her ruined dress, looking piteously up at him out of her big, brown affrighted eyes. He pulled her skirt down roughly over her glove-silk bloomers. “It would not even be amusing to rape you,” he said. And with that he rose from her sofa and calmly went into her bathroom. Libby was left alone with the
Oxford Book of English Verse
. She could hear him go to the toilet without even running the water or shutting the door. Then, whistling, he let himself out of her apartment. She heard the latch click and his step on the stairs, and that was that.

Libby tottered to her feet and headed straight for the mirror. She looked like the Wreck of the Hesperus. Moreover, she was hungry; he had not even waited till after dinner. And she had let Ida take the
pâté.
“‘You are generous,’” she said to herself in the mirror. “‘Beautiful Elizabeth.’” Her feelings were in the strangest turmoil. Nils, of course, could not have meant that she was a bore; he had to vent his chagrin at finding out that she was a virgin. His code as an aristocrat had made him stop then. It was the code that was a bore to him. He wanted to rape her and go berserk like the old Vikings. At least that would have been something dramatic and conclusive. She would have lost her honor. But she would have found out what it was like when a man did it to you. Libby had a little secret; she sometimes made love to herself, on the bath mat, after having her tub. She always felt awful afterward, sort of shaken and depleted and wondering what people would think if they could see her, especially when she took herself what she called “Over the Top.” She stared at her pale face in the mirror, asking herself whether Nils could have guessed: was that what made him think she was experienced? They said it gave you circles under your eyes. “No,” she said to herself, shuddering. “No.” Perish the thought. Nobody could guess. And no one would ever guess the shaming, sickening, beastly thing that had happened, or failed to happen, this evening. Nils would not tell. Or would he?

Ten

P
RISS HARTSHORN CROCKETT WAS
nursing her baby. That was the big news. “I never expected a breast-fed grandson,” said Priss’s mother, laughing and accepting a martini from her son-in-law, Dr. Sloan Crockett, the budding pediatrician. It was the cocktail hour in Priss’s room at New York Hospital—terribly gay. Over the weekend, Sloan stopped in every afternoon and shook up martinis for visitors. He had done his residency at the hospital, so that he could get ice from the diet kitchen and generally break the rules.

“You never expected a
g-grandson
, Mother,” pointed out Priss with her slight nervous stammer from the bed. She was wearing a pale-blue bed jacket, and her thin ashy hair was set in waves; the student nurse had done it for her that morning. On her lips, which were dry, was a new shade of lipstick, by Tussy; her doctor had ordered her to put on lipstick and powder right in the middle of labor; he and Sloan both thought it was important for a maternity patient to keep herself up to the mark. Priss, whose personality was confessed to be rather colorless, looked unreal to herself sitting up in bed all bedecked and bedizened—like one of those New York children in furs and trailing satins and their mothers’ slippers to beg in the streets at Halloween. Little Ella Cinders, Sloan called her, after that funny in the paper. She would have been more comfortable in the short cotton hospital nightshirt that tied in back, but the floor nurses every morning made her struggle into a satin-and-lace “nightie” from her trousseau. Doctor’s orders, they said.

The nurses treated Priss as a special pet because she had been in Obstetrics and Gynecology three times with miscarriages before she had made the grade. To be sure of coming to term this time, she had quit her job with the League of Women Shoppers and stayed in bed or on the sofa for the first five months of pregnancy—her uterus was retroverted. Even so, in the last month she had had a kidney complication; they had rushed her to the hospital and fed her intravenously till the inflammation went down. But now, as Mrs. Hartshorn said, the nativity had been accomplished. Glory be, on the Feast of St. Stephen, the day after Christmas, Priss had been brought to bed with a seven-and-a-half-pound son; delivery had been normal, though labor had been protracted—twenty-two hours. Her room was full of holly, mistletoe, azaleas, and cyclamen, and there was a little Christmas tree by her bedside. The child was to be called Stephen, after the first martyr.

He was in the nursery now, behind the plate-glass window at the end of the corridor—roaring his head off; his feeding time was six o’clock. Priss was drinking an eggnog, to help her lactate; liquids were very important, but she had lost her taste for milk during pregnancy, doing nothing and having to force herself to drink that quart a day that the doctors insisted on if she were not to lose her teeth building the baby’s bones. Now, to tempt her, the nurses flavored her milk with egg and sugar and vanilla and gave her fruit juices on the hour and ginger ale and Coke—every kind of liquid but alcohol, for if she drank a martini, Stephen would have gin for his dinner.

Sloan rattled the ice in the silver shaker and chatted with Priss’s brother, Allen, who was down for the holidays from Harvard Law. Those two were great friends, both being staunch Republicans, unlike Priss and Mrs. Hartshorn. Liberalism seemed to run in the female line: Mrs. Hartshorn and her dead husband had had a running battle over Wilson and the League, and now Priss and Sloan were at swords’ points over Roosevelt and socialized medicine. It had been a red-letter day for Sloan and Allen when the Supreme Court killed the Blue Eagle and put Priss out of a job. Working for the League of Women Shoppers had never seemed as exciting to her; it was more like a volunteer thing, which had made it easier for her to resign to have Stephen.

Priss had been good about that, though she missed her work and fretted about finances, since Sloan was just getting established in practice (with an older pediatrician), and they had depended on her salary for cigarettes and concerts and theatres and contributions to charity and their library membership—Priss was a great reader. Her mother could not help very much, because she still had her two youngest in college (Linda was at Bennington), which was quite a bit for a poor widow woman, as Mrs. Hartshorn gaily called herself, to swing. She had been sending Priss her maid, the faithful Irene, to do the housework mornings, and most evenings Lily, the cook, would nip over with a casserole for Priss to heat, so that Sloan would have one good hot meal, at least, in his daily round. When Priss came home from the hospital, Irene, who had had children of her own, was to move in for two weeks and sleep on an army cot in the baby’s room (the dining room as
was
) to save the cost of a practical nurse.

This was Mrs. Hartshorn’s present to the young parents; to the newborn himself she was giving an English pram, a mad extravagance, and, come the spring, she was going to send them Linda’s old crib, which was shut up in the attic in Oyster Bay, and her high chair and odds and ends, though high chairs, they said, were out now. For the time being, Stephen would sleep in a laundry basket on the baby-carriage mattress—quite a clever idea that Priss had got from a pamphlet on child care issued by the Department of Labor.

“Yes, my dear, no pun intended,” said Mrs. Hartshorn to Polly Andrews, who had dropped in to see Priss. Allen guffawed. “Why not the Department of the Interior?” Priss winced at her brother’s witticism. “The pamphlet’s an excellent home manual,” she said earnestly. “Sloan thinks so too, believe it or not, Allen.” “Some of your friend Madam Perkins’ work?” retorted Allen. In the bed, Priss grew tense, preparing an answer; her lips moved voicelessly, in spasms. “No politics today,” said Mrs. Hartshorn firmly. “We’ve declared a moratorium. Priss has to think of her milk.”

Lakey, she went on to Polly, had sent the most exquisite christening robe from Paris, fit for a dauphin—a great surprise, because she had not written for ages; she was doing her doctorate at the Sorbonne. And Pokey Prothero Beauchamp, who had had twins herself the year before, had sent a baby scales, a most thoughtful gift. Everyone had been frightfully kind. Dottie Renfrew Latham had arranged, from way out in Arizona, for Bloomingdale’s to deliver a sterilizer, all complete with bottles and racks, instead of the conventional baby cup or porringer. That would come in handy later on, when Priss’s milk ran out.

Mrs. Hartshorn glanced at her daughter and lowered her voice. “Just fancy little Priss being the first of your set to do it, Polly. She’s so flat that she’s never had to wear a brassiere. But Sloan says it’s not the size that counts. I do hope he’s right. The miracle of the loaves and fishes,
I
call it. All the other babies in the nursery are on bottles. The nurses prefer it that way. I’m inclined to agree with them. Doctors are all theory. Nurses see the facts.” She swallowed her martini in a single draft, like medicine; this was the style among advanced society women of her age. She wiped her lips and refused a “dividend” from the silver shaker. “Which way progress, Polly?” she demanded, in a slightly louder voice, shaking her white bobbed locks. “The bottle was the war cry of my generation. Linda was bottle-fed. And you can’t imagine the difference. For us, the bottle spelled the end of colic, and the frantic young husband walking the baby all night. We swore by the bottle, we of the avant-garde. My mother-in-law was horripilated. And now, I confess, Polly, I’m horripilated myself.”

Her son-in-law pricked up his ears and gave a tolerant smile. He was a tall young man with glasses and an Arrow-collar profile who had worked his way through medical school; his father, an army surgeon, had died of influenza during the war, and his mother was a housemother at a girls’ school in Virginia. Priss had met him at her cousin’s coming-out party junior year, through another cousin, a medical student, who had been ordered to bring some extra men.

“Medicine seems to be all cycles,” continued Mrs. Hartshorn. “That’s the bone I pick with Sloan. Like what’s his name’s new theory of history. First we nursed our babies; then science told us not to. Now it tells us we were right in the first place. Or were we wrong then but would be right now? Reminds me of relativity, if I understand Mr. Einstein.”

Sloan ignored this excursion. “By nursing Stephen,” he said patiently, “Priss can give him her immunities for at least the first year. He won’t be liable to chicken pox or measles or whooping cough. And he will have a certain protection from colds. Of course, in some cases the mother’s milk disagrees with the child. You get a rash or stomach upsets. Then you have to weigh the advantages of breast feeding against the negative side effects.”

“And psychologically,” appended Polly, “isn’t the breast-fed baby supposed to have a warmer relation with his mother than the bottle-fed baby?” Sloan frowned. “Psychology is still a long way from being a science,” he declared. “Let’s stick to measurable facts. Demonstrable facts. We can demonstrate that the breast-fed infant gets his mother’s immunities. And we know from the scales that Stephen is gaining. An ounce a day, Cousin Louisa.” This was his name for Mrs. Hartshorn. “You can’t argue with the scales.”

The sound of a baby’s crying made itself heard in the silence that followed this speech. “That’s Stephen again,” said Mrs. Hartshorn. “I recognize his voice. He yells louder than any other baby in the nursery.” “Shows he’s a healthy young fellow,” replied Sloan. “Time to worry if he didn’t cry for his dinner. Eh, Priss?” Priss smiled wanly. “Sloan says it’s good for his lungs,” she said, grimacing. “Develops them,” agreed Sloan. “Like a bellows.” He drew air into his chest and released it.

Mrs. Hartshorn looked at her watch. “Can’t the nurse bring him in now?” she wondered. “It’s quarter of six.” “The
schedule
, Mother!” cried Priss. “The reason babies in your time had colic wasn’t because they were breastfed, but because they were picked up at all sorts of irregular times and fed whenever they cried. The point is to have a schedule and stick to it absolutely!”

There was a knock on the half-open door. More visitors were arriving: Connie Storey and her husband and young Dr. Edris, who had been Sloan’s roommate in medical school. The conversation grew louder, and the room was full of cigarette smoke. Mrs. Hartshorn opened a window and tried to produce a
courant d’air
. What was the point of keeping the infant behind glass if he were then brought in to nurse in a smoke-filled room? “Not to mention our germs,” she added, exhaling with a certain complacency, as though her germs were especially vigorous and well-pedigreed. Sloan shook his head. “A baby needs to build up some immunities before going home from the hospital. If he’s never been exposed to germs, he gets sick the minute he gets home. I think we overdo the sterility business, don’t you, Bill? Just a bit?” “Depends,” said Dr. Edris. “You can’t impress it too much on the average mother.” Sloan smiled faintly. “‘Boil baby’s rattle every time he drops it,’” he quoted. “Don’t you believe in boiling everything, Sloan?” anxiously demanded Priss. “That’s what the child-care pamphlet says to do.” “You goop,” said her brother. “That pamphlet was written for slum women; by a Vassar graduate, I bet.” “Rattles are out anyway,” Priss replied stoutly. “Everyone knows they’re unsanitary and likely to break.” “A dangerous toy,” agreed Sloan. There was a silence. “Sometimes Sloan likes to play the heretic,” smiled Priss. “You should hear him
épater
the floor nurses.” Mrs. Hartshorn nodded. “A promising sign in a doctor. Inspires confidence,” she observed. “Though goodness knows why. We all trust a doctor who doesn’t believe in medicine.”

In the middle of the general laugh, a nurse tapped at the door. “Excuse us, ladies and gentlemen. Feeding time.” When the room was cleared of guests, she closed the window Mrs. Hartshorn had opened and then brought the baby in on her shoulder. He was wearing a long white nightgown and his face was red and swollen; she placed him next to Priss in the bed. It was exactly six o’clock. “Which one is it tonight, dear?” she demanded. Priss, who had managed to lower one shoulder of her nightgown, indicated her right breast. The nurse swabbed it with cotton and alcohol and laid the baby to suck; as usual, he made a face at the alcohol and pushed the nipple away. The nurse settled it firmly in his mouth again; then she went about the room emptying ashtrays and collecting glasses to take back to the diet kitchen. “You had quite a party tonight.”