The Group (53 page)

It was an embarrassment to Helena when the hymn came, one of her mother’s favorites, Number 245: “He leadeth me.” She herself had wanted to have Bach’s hymn, from the Passion Chorale: “O Sacred Head surrounded by crown of piercing thorn.” But her mother said the other was more inspiring, which meant that it sounded like a revival meeting under canvas. She knew all the words by heart and did not even feign, as Helena did, to make use of the hymnal. Her big breathy voice, off key, competed with the organ. With the last lines, Mrs. Davison let all the stops out. “E’en death’s cold wave I will not flee/Since God through Jordan leadeth me.” Helena dryly pictured God assisting her mother by the hand to cross the River Jordan, and she feared that everyone in the church had been furnished with the same tableau. Yet her mother was a complete agnostic, like the majority of the mourners. She did not believe in a future life for Kay, so what was there to be inspired about? Nothing. Helena’s realism forbade her to cry. Who was there to cry for? Kay? But there was no Kay any more. That left no one to be sorry for that Helena could see.

They knelt down to pray. Suddenly it was over. The congregation found itself on the sidewalk, disbanded, and the undertaker’s men went in to get the coffin. Libby wondered why they had not had pallbearers; it would have been much more impressive. And she thought the casket should have been left open. Spying Connie Storey, she rushed off to greet her. She was not going to the cemetery, and Connie, who was a working woman too, might like to share a taxi with her. Tonight, before she and her husband went out, she meant to write down her impressions of the ceremony. It had been almost unbearably moving.

Cars had been ordered to take everyone to the cemetery who wished to go and did not have a car of his own. They were lined up outside the church behind the hearse. Helena had the list and was checking it off. No provision had been made for Harald. He could have gone with Norine, except that Norine was not going, thank Heaven; it was a miracle, everyone agreed, that that youngster had not acted up during the service—he had nodded wearily on his mother’s lap. Harald stood on the sidewalk, alone and enigmatically smiling. “Jim and I can take him in our car,” volunteered Polly. “One of us
has
to speak to him.” Helena was less Christian. “My mother will invite him. She has ‘an open mind.’ Let her do it.” But Harald had approached Lakey. “May I ride with you?” they heard him ask. Lakey had a smart bottle-green European two-seater waiting at the curb. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have no room for you.” But the Baroness excused herself. “If you do not mind, Elinor, I will not go to the interment.” “Very well,” said Lakey to Harald. “Get in. Can you drive?” Harald took the wheel. As the cortege began to move, the mourners saw the green two-seater dart out ahead of the hearse. “What do you bet he makes advances to her?” said Polly tearfully. She and Jim and Helena and Mr. Andrews were in the Ridgeley Ford. “Let us hope he does,” said Mr. Andrews mildly. “I understand the Baroness packs a pair of brass knuckles.”

The return of Lakey on the
Rex
had been a thrilling event for the group. They had gathered at the dock one April morning to meet her, seven strong. Kay had been alive then of course, just back from Utah, and Dottie had fitted it in with a vacation trip to Bermuda. The idea of surprising Lakey by meeting her in a body had been Pokey’s; Pokey was unconscious of the passage of time and scoffed at the thought that Lakey might be different. Some of the others had misgivings, though, as they watched the gangplank being lowered. They were afraid Lakey might have outgrown them. She was almost bound to find them provincial after the professors, art historians, and collectors she had been living among in Europe. The return addresses on some of her letters and post cards suggested, as Helena said, that Lakey had been “broadened”—she always seemed to be staying with important people in villas,
palazzi
, and chateaus. The last time she wrote, to say she was coming home because she thought Italy would be in the war soon, was from the house of Bernard Berenson, the famous art critic, in Settignano. Lined up on the dock, straining their eyes for a glimpse of her, preparing their hands to wave, the more sensitive girls were conscious of being a staid settled group with husbands and children at home, for the most part; Pokey now had three, and Polly had a little girl.

When they saw her come down the gangplank, with her swift, sure step, her chin raised, in a dark violet suit and hat and carrying a green leather toilet case and a slim furled green silk umbrella, they were amazed at how young she looked still. They had all cut their hair and had permanents, but Lakey still wore hers in a black knot at the nape of her neck, which gave her a girlish air, and she had kept her marvelous figure. She saw them; her green eyes widened with pleasure; she waved. After the embraces (she kissed them all on both cheeks and held them off to look at them), she introduced the short, stocky foreign woman who was with her—someone, the girls took it, she had met on the crossing.

On the pier, there was a long wait for Lakey’s luggage. She had dozens of suitcases, thirty-two wardrobe trunks, beautifully wrapped parcels tied with bright colored ribbon, and innumerable packing cases containing paintings, books, and china. On her customs declaration, she was a “returning foreign resident,” which meant she did not have to pay duty on her personal and household belongings. But she had masses of presents, which, being Lakey, she had declared, and she was an interminable time with the customs man and the lists she had made out in her large, clear, oblong writing. There was nothing the group could do to help, once her luggage was assembled, and they did not like to stare at the contents of the trunks and suitcases the man directed her to open, yet even Pokey’s eyes bugged at the quantities of underwear, handkerchiefs, nightgowns, peignoirs, shoes, gloves, all wrapped in snowy tissue paper—not to mention dresses, hats, scarves, woolen coats, silk coats, beautifully folded and in tissue paper too. This impressive array—yet she did not have a single fur coat, Libby reported—made the girls think awkwardly of schedules, formula, laundry, diapers. They could not spend all morning on the pier. As they waited, restlessly tapping their feet (you could not smoke), they realized that the Baroness, who had finished with customs, was waiting too. She seemed to be with Lakey and was not very friendly to the girls, who tried politely to make conversation with her about conditions in Europe. She was a German, it transpired, who had been married to a French baron; she had had to leave France in September when the war broke out. Like Lakey, she had been staying in Florence, but she did not know Libby’s aunt in Fiesole. Every now and then she would go over and say something to Lakey; they heard her call her “Darling” with a trilled r. It was Kay who caught on first. Lakey had become a Lesbian. This woman was her man.

Slowly the group understood. This was why Lakey had stayed abroad so long. Abroad people were more tolerant of Lesbians, and Lakey’s family in Lake Forest did not have to know. It was a terrible moment. Each girl recognized that she was, they were
de trop
. They had made a fearful
gaffe
in coming to welcome Lakey with open arms, as if she belonged to them, when plainly she belonged exclusively to the Baroness. They could not help gleaning that the two of them would be staying together at the Elysée Hotel. Lakey, the Baroness said, in reply to Kay’s blunt question, was going to Chicago for a brief visit to her family. After that, she would look for a place in the country, outside New York. “Something very qu-i-et,” said the Baroness. The girls got the point. Lakey wanted to be alone with the Baroness, undisturbed by neighbors and old friends. Or at least that was what the Baroness wanted.

The girls eyed each other. They had had the day planned. Pokey’s family’s chauffeur was waiting outside to drive Lakey to her hotel and install her. Then later they would all meet for an elegant lunch. Afterward, each girl wanted to be the first to show Lakey her apartment, her husband, her child or children. Except Kay, who had nothing to show her but who therefore felt she had the best claim on her. Now they did not know whether to jettison these plans completely or to proceed with them and include the Baroness. They did not know whether to be discreet about this relationship or open. What did Lakey want? Would she like them to go away? Perhaps she would never forgive them for surprising her like this at the dock. By instinct, the group turned to Kay, who, with her experience in the theatre, ought to be able to tell them what to do. But Kay was nonplused. Her open face clearly showed her disappointment, chagrin, and irresolution. It occurred to them all that Lakey, who had always been frightening and superior, would now look down on them for not being Lesbians. On the other hand, she had seemed truly glad to see them.

Studying Lakey with the customs man, they asked themselves, in silence, how long Lakey had been a Lesbian, whether the Baroness had made her one or she had started on her own. This led them to wonder whether she could possibly have been one at college—suppressed, of course. In the light of this terrible discovery, they examined her clothes for telltale signs. It was a Schiaparelli suit she was wearing; Kay had asked that straight out—she had guessed it was a Schiaparelli. “Schiap makes all Elinor’s clothes,” the Baroness had remarked, and they had watched that nickname, casually pronounced, take the wind out of Kay’s sails. Lakey had on silk stockings, quite sheer, high-heeled calf shoes, a green silk blouse with a ruffle. If anything, she looked more feminine than before. With the Baroness you could tell, though she did not have a boyish haircut or a man’s tie; she wore a heavy tweed suit, service sheer stockings, and pumps with Cuban heels. Yet it was odd to think that the Baroness had been married and Lakey had not.

As soon as Lakey was through with the customs man, she had solved their difficulties with the utmost naturalness. She accepted the offer of Pokey’s chauffeur to take her and the Baroness to the hotel. As for lunch, she sent the Baroness off to the Metropolitan Museum, telling her to eat in the cafeteria: it would introduce her to America. “Maria is a bear,” she said, laughing. “She growls at strangers.” She had lunch with the group herself and that evening she invited those of them who were free and their husbands to have cocktails with her and the Baroness in the Monkey Bar of the hotel. That, the girls found, was the pattern. If it was an occasion when husbands would be present, the Baroness came; otherwise Lakey was on her own.

Once the group understood the convention by which the Baroness was “my friend” like a self-evident axiom, their stiffness relaxed. Gradually, in the weeks that followed, the Baroness unbent too. Far from snubbing the group because they were not Lesbians, she seemed to find it a point in their favor. It was only of Kay, living alone at the Vassar Club and divorced, that she appeared to be suspicious. The group was surprised to find that both Lakey and Maria were strong anti-fascists. They would not have expected Lakey to be so human as to have common garden political sympathies. But she was more human in many ways than they remembered. The other surprise was that she liked children. The very thing the girls would have thought a Lesbian would be contemptuous of—their maternity—was a source of attraction to Lakey. Having brought a lovely set of Italian embroidered bibs for Polly’s baby, she would put one on her and feed her in her lap whenever she came to the apartment. To Priss’s Stephen, she had brought a prism and a set of antique toy soldiers; she liked to tell him stories and finger-paint with him. And when she went down one weekend to stay with Pokey at Princeton, she visited the stables and played Hide-and-Seek with the twins. She loved to do cutouts and make jumping mice out of her huge linen handkerchiefs.

Both she and Maria were very practical. They knew a great deal about food and dressmaking and were interested, for instance, in designing a new kind of maternity dress for Polly, who was pregnant. Maria had studied nursing, which, it seemed, was quite common among the European aristocracy, going back to the days when the lady of a castle had to prescribe for the peasants and take care of the wounded in war. The fact that none of the group, except Polly, could cut out a dress or make a bandage shocked Maria, as if they were barbarians.

It was astonishing, but within a month some of the girls found themselves talking of “having Lakey and Maria to dinner,” just as they might speak of a normal couple. When she and Maria finally took a big house outside Greenwich, Polly and Jim and Kay and Helena all went out to stay with them.

Yet side by side with this the group felt, with one accord, that what had happened to Lakey was a tragedy. They tried not to think of what she and Maria did in bed together. Only Kay claimed to be able to picture their “embraces” with equanimity. They liked Maria as a person; if only she could have finished in a tail, like a mermaid! The same with Lakey, who in fact resembled a mermaid, with her large green eyes and white skin. Polly and Helena, who had become close friends now that Helena lived in New York, had tried to discuss the question as dispassionately as they could. They could not escape the gentle sense that the relationship these two had was perverted. One sign of this was the Baroness’s jealousy. Maria was very jealous of both men and women—indeed, of all strangers. She carried a revolver her husband had given her and had made Lakey buy two ferocious watchdogs. And now there were these brass knuckles that Mr. Andrews had somehow learned about! It was too easy to picture Maria using them on any man who would try to save Lakey. And the word, save, was indicative. On the one hand, there were Lakey-and-Maria, as you might say Polly-and-Jim, a contented married pair; on the other, there was an exquisite captive of a fierce robber woman, locked up in a Castle Perilous, and woe to the knight who came to release her from the enchantment. But it was possible to see it the other way around. Supposing it were Lakey, the inscrutable, intelligent Lakey, who had made poor Maria, who was not very bright, her prisoner and slave? The fact that it was possible to reverse the relation like an hourglass was what the girls found so troubling. In the same way, it troubled them to wonder which one of the pair was the man and which the woman. Obviously, Maria, in her pajamas and bathrobe, was the man, and Lakey, in her silk-and-lace peignoirs and batiste-and-lace nightgowns, with her hair down her back, was the woman, and yet these could be disguises—masquerade costumes. It bothered Polly and Helena to think that what was presented to their eyes was mere appearance, and that behind that, underneath it, was something
of which they would not approve.