The Group Read online

  The worst fate, they utterly agreed, would be to become like Mother and Dad, stuffy and frightened. Not one of them, if she could help it, was going to marry a broker or a banker or a coldfish corporation lawyer, like so many of Mother’s generation. They would rather be wildly poor and live on salmon wiggle than be forced to marry one of those dull purplish young men of their own set, with a seat on the Exchange and bloodshot eyes, interested only in squash and cockfighting and drinking at the Racquet Club with his cronies, Yale or Princeton ’29. It would be better, yes, they were not afraid to say it, though Mother gently laughed, to marry a Jew if you loved him—some of them were awfully interesting and cultivated, though terribly ambitious and inclined to stick together, as you saw very well at Vassar: if you knew them you had to know their friends. There was one thing, though, truthfully, that made the group feel a little anxious for Kay. It was a pity in a way that a person as gifted as Harald and with a good education had had to pick the stage, rather than medicine or architecture or museum work, where the going was not so rough. To hear Kay talk, the theatre was pretty red in tooth and claw, though of course there were some nice people in it, like Katharine Cornell and Walter Hampden (he had a niece in the Class of ’32) and John Mason Brown, the thingummy, who talked to Mother’s club every year. Harald had done graduate work at the Yale Drama School, under Professor Baker, but then the depression had started, and he had had to come to New York to be a stage manager instead of just writing plays. That was like starting from the bottom in a factory, of course, which lots of nice boys were doing, and there was probably no difference between backstage in a theatre, where a lot of men in their undershirts sat in front of a mirror putting on make-up, and a blast furnace or a coal mine, where the men were in their undershirts too. Helena Davison said that when Harald’s show came to Cleveland this spring, he spent all his time playing poker with the stagehands and the electricians, who were the nicest people in the show, and Helena’s father said he agreed with him, especially after seeing the play—Mr. Davison was a bit of a card and more democratic than most fathers, being from the West and more or less self-made. Still, nobody could afford to be standoffish nowadays. Connie Storey’s fiancé, who was going into journalism, was working as an office boy at Fortune, and her family, instead of having conniptions, was taking it very calmly and sending her to cooking school. And lots of graduate architects, instead of joining a firm and building rich men’s houses, had gone right into the factories to study industrial design. Look at Russel Wright, whom everybody thought quite the thing now; he was using industrial materials, like the wonderful new spun aluminum, to make all sorts of useful objects like cheese trays and water carafes. Kay’s first wedding present, which she had picked out herself, was a Russel Wright cocktail shaker in the shape of a skyscraper and made out of oak ply and aluminum with a tray and twelve little round cups to match—light as a feather and non-tarnishable, of course. The main point was, Harald was a natural gentleman—though inclined to show off in his letters, which was probably to impress Kay, who was inclined to drop names herself and talk about people’s butlers and Fly and A.D. and Porcellian and introduce poor Harald as a Yale man when he had only gone to graduate school at New Haven. …That was a side of Kay that the group did its best to deprecate and that drove Lakey wild. A lack of fastidiousness and consideration for the other person; she did not seem to realize the little social nuances. She was always coming into people’s rooms, for instance, and making herself at home and fiddling with things on their bureaus and telling them about their inhibitions if they objected; it was she who insisted on playing Truth and on getting everybody in the group to make lists of their friends in the order of preference and then compare the lists. What she did not stop to think about was that somebody had to be on the bottom of every list, and when that somebody cried and refused to be consoled, Kay was always honestly surprised; she would not mind, she said, hearing the truth about herself. Actually, she never did hear it because the others were too tactful ever to put her at the bottom, even if they wanted to, because Kay was a little bit of an outsider and nobody wanted her to feel that. So instead they would put Libby MacAusland or Polly Andrews—someone they had known all their lives or gone to school with or something. Kay did get a bit of a shock, though, to find that she was not at the top of Lakey’s list. She was crazy about Lakey, whom she always described as her best friend. Kay did not know it, but the group had had a pitched battle with Lakey over Easter vacation, when they had drawn straws to see who was to invite Kay home for the holidays and Lakey had got the shortest straw and then refused to play. The group had simply borne down on Lakey in a body and accused her of being a poor sport, which was true. After all, as they had swiftly pointed out to her, it was she who had invited Kay to group with them in the first place; when they saw that they could get the South Tower for themselves if they had eight in the group instead of six, it was Lakey’s idea that they should invite Kay and Helena Davison to join forces with them and take the two small single rooms.

  If you were going to use a person, then you had to make the best of them. And it was not “using,” anyway; they all liked Kay and Helena, including Lakey herself, who had discovered Kay as a sophomore, when they were both on the Daisy Chain. She had taken Kay up for all she was worth, because Kay, as she said, was “malleable” and “capable of learning.” Now she claimed to have detected that Kay had feet of clay, which was rather a contradiction, since wasn’t clay malleable? But Lakey was very contradictory; that was her charm. Sometimes she was a frightful snob and sometimes just the opposite. She was looking so furious this morning, for instance, because Kay, according to her, should have got married quietly in City Hall instead of making Harald, who was not to the manor born, try to carry off a wedding in J. P. Morgan’s church. Now was this snobbish of Lakey or wasn’t it? Naturally, she had not said any of this to Kay; she had expected Kay to feel it for herself, which was just what Kay couldn’t do and remain the blunt, natural, unconscious Kay they all loved, in spite of her faults. Lakey had the weirdest ideas about people. She had got the bee in her bonnet, last fall, that Kay had worked her way into the group out of a desire for social prestige; this was not at all the way it had happened, and it was a peculiar thing, really, to think about a girl who was so unconventional that she had not even bothered to have her own parents to her wedding, though her father was very prominent in Salt Lake City affairs.

  It was true, Kay had rather angled to get Pokey Prothero’s town house for the reception, but she had taken it with good grace when Pokey had loudly lamented that the house was in dust covers for the summer, with only a caretaking couple to look after Father on the nights he spent in town. Poor Kay—some of the girls thought that Pokey might have been a little more generous and offered her a card to the Colony. In fact, on this score, nearly all the group felt a little bit conscience-stricken. Each one of them, as the others knew, had a house or a big apartment or a club membership, if it was only the Cosmopolitan, or a cousin’s digs or a brother’s that might possibly have been put at Kay’s disposal. But that would have meant punch, champagne, a cake from Sherry’s or Henri’s, extra help—before one knew it one would have found oneself giving the wedding and supplying a father or a brother to take Kay down the aisle. In these times, in sheer self-protection, one had to think twice, as Mother said, fatigued; there were so many demands. Fortunately, Kay had decided that she and Harald should give the wedding breakfast themselves, at the old Hotel Brevoort down on Eighth Street: so much nicer, so much more appropriate.

  Dottie Renfrew and Elinor Eastlake made their way out of the chapel together, onto the sunny pavement. The service had seemed awfully short. There had been no blessing of the ring and “Who giveth this Woman” had had to be left out, obviously. Dottie frowned and cleared her throat. “Wouldn’t you have thought,” she dared to suggest, in her deep military rumble, “that she would have had someone? Isn’t there a cousin in Montclair?” Elinor Eastlake shrugged. “The plan miscar
ried,” she said. Libby MacAusland, an English major from Pittsfield, thrust her head into the tête-á-tête. “What’s this, what’s this?” she said jovially. “Break it up, girls.” She was a tall, pretty blonde with perpetually dilating brown eyes, a long, arching, inquisitive neck, and a manner of anxious conviviality; she had been president of the class sophomore year and had just missed being elected president of Students. Dottie laid a cautionary hand on Lakey’s silken elbow; Libby, as everyone knew, was an unrestrained gossip and gabbler. Lakey lightly shook off Dottie’s fingers; she detested being touched. “Dottie was asking,” she said distinctly, “whether there wasn’t a cousin in Montclair.” There was a faint smile in the depths of her green eyes, which had a queer dark-blue rim around the iris, a sign of her Indian blood; she was searching the distance for a taxi. Libby became exaggeratedly thoughtful. She laid a finger to the center of her forehead. “I believe there is,” she discovered, nodding three times. “Do you really think—?” she began eagerly. Lakey raised a hand for a taxi. “Kay kept the cousin in the background, hoping that one of us would supply her with something better.” “Lakey!” murmured Dottie, shaking her head in reproach. “Really, Lakey,” said Libby, giggling. “Nobody but you would ever think of such a thing.” She hesitated. “If Kay wanted somebody to give her away, she had only to ask, after all. Father or Brother would have been glad, any of us would have been glad. …” Her voice broke off, and she precipitated her thin form into the taxi, where she took the jump seat, turning around, in half a minute, to survey her friends with cupped chin and brooding eyes: all her movements were quick and restive—she had an image of herself as a high-bred, tempestuous creature, a sort of Arab steed in an English sporting primitive. “Do you really think?” she repeated, covetously, biting her upper lip. But Lakey said no more; she never enlarged on a suggestion, and for this had been named the Mona Lisa of the Smoking Room. Dottie Renfrew was distressed; her gloved hand twisted the pearls that had been given her for her twenty-first birthday. Her conscience was troubling her, and she resorted, from habit, to the slow, soft cough, like a perpetual scruple, that caused her family such anxiety and made them send her to Florida twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. “Lakey,” she said gravely, ignoring Libby, “one of us, don’t you think, should have done it for her?” Libby MacAusland caracoled about on the jump seat, a hungry look in her eyes. Both girls stared into Elinor’s impassive oval face. Elinor’s eyes narrowed; she fingered the coil of Indian-black hair at the nape of her neck and readjusted a hairpin. “No,” she said, with contempt. “It would have been a confession of weakness.”

  Libby’s eyes protruded. “How hard you are,” she said admiringly. “And yet Kay adores you,” pondered Dottie. “You used to like her best, Lakey. I think you still do, in your heart of hearts.” Lakey smiled at the cliché. “Perhaps,” she said and lit a cigarette. She was fond, at present, of girls like Dottie who ran true to type, like paintings well within a style or a tradition. The girls she chose to collect were mystified, usually, by what she saw in them; they humbly perceived that they were very different from her. In private, they often discussed her, like toys discussing their owner, and concluded that she was awfully inhuman. But this increased their respect for her. She was also very changeable, which made them suspect great depths. Now, as the cab turned toward Fifth Avenue on Ninth Street, she made one of her abrupt decisions. “Let me out here,” she commanded in her small, distinct, sweet voice. The driver instantly stopped and turned to watch her step out of the cab, rather stately, despite her fragility, in a high-necked black taffeta suit with a white silk muffler, small black hat, like a bowler, and black very high-heeled shoes. “Go ahead,” she called back impatiently, as the cab lingered.

  The two girls in the taxi interrogated each other. Libby MacAusland craned her gold head in a flowered hat out the window. “Aren’t you coming?” she cried. There was no answer. They could see her straight little back proceeding south, in the sun, on University Place. “Follow her!” said Libby to the driver. “I’ll have to go round the block, lady.” The cab turned into Fifth Avenue and passed the Brevoort Hotel, where the rest of the wedding party was arriving; it went on into Eighth Street and back up University Place. But there was no sign of Lakey anywhere. She had disappeared. “Wouldn’t that jar you?” said Libby. “Was it something I said, do you think?” “Go round the block again, driver,” interposed Dottie quietly. In front of the Brevoort, Kay and Harald were climbing out of a taxi; they did not see the two frightened girls. “Did she just up and decide not to go to the reception?” continued Libby, as the cab made the second circuit, without any result. “She seemed terribly off Kay, I must say.” The cab paused before the hotel. “What are we going to do?” demanded Libby. Dottie opened her pocketbook and gave a bill to the driver. “Lakey is her own law,” she said firmly to Libby as they dismounted. “We must simply tell everyone that she felt faint in the church.” A disappointed expression came into Libby’s sharp-boned, pretty face; she had been looking forward to the scandal.

  In a private dining room of the hotel, Kay and Harald stood on a faded flowered carpet, receiving their friends’ congratulations. A punch was being served, over which the guests were exclaiming: “What is it?” “Perfectly delicious,” “How did you ever think of it?” and so on. To each one, Kay gave the recipe. The base was one-third Jersey applejack, one-third maple syrup, and one-third lemon juice, to which White Rock had been added. Harald had got the applejack from an actor friend who got it from a farmer near Flemington; the punch was adapted from a cocktail called Applejack Rabbit. The recipe was an icebreaker—just as Kay had hoped, she explained aside to Helena Davison: everyone tasted it and agreed that it was the maple syrup that made all the difference. A tall shaggy man who was in radio told several funny stories about Jersey Lightning; he warned the handsome young man in the knitted green necktie that this stuff packed an awful wallop. There was a discussion about applejack and how it made people quarrelsome, to which the girls listened with fascination; none of them had ever tasted applejack before. They were very much interested, just at this time, in receipts for drinks; they all adored brandy Alexanders and White Ladies and wanted to hear about a cocktail called the Clover Club that was one-third gin, one-third lemon juice, one-third grenadine, and the white of an egg. Harald told about a drugstore he and Kay knew on West Fifty-ninth Street, where you could get prescription whisky without a prescription, and Polly Andrews borrowed a pencil from the waiter and noted down the address: she was going to be on her own this summer, keeping house for herself in her Aunt Julia’s apartment with a terrace, and she needed all the tips she could get. Then Harald told them about a liqueur called anisette that an Italian in the theatre orchestra had taught him to make, from straight alcohol, water, and oil of anis, which gave it a milky color, like Pernod. He explained the difference between Pernod, absinthe, arrack, and anisette; the girls spoke of green and yellow chartreuse, green and white crème de menthe, which Harald said varied only in the color that was added, artificially, to suit a fancy market. Then he told them about an Armenian restaurant in the twenties, where you got rose-petal jelly for dessert, and explained the difference between Turkish and Armenian and Syrian cooking. “Where did you get this man?” the girls cried, in unison. In the pause that followed, the young man in the knitted tie drank a glass of punch and came over to Dottie Renfrew. “Where’s the dark beauty?” he asked in a confidential voice. Dottie lowered her voice also and glanced uneasily toward the far corner of the dining room, where Libby MacAusland was whispering to two of the group. “She felt faint in the chapel,” she murmured. “I’ve just explained to Kay and Harald. We’ve packed her off to her hotel to lie down.” The young man raised an eyebrow. “How perfectly frightful,” he said. Kay turned her head quickly to listen; the mockery in the young man’s voice was evident. Dottie flushed. She cast about bravely for a new subject. “Are you in the theatre too?” The young man leaned back against the wall, tilting his head upward. �
��No,” he said, “though your question is natural. In point of fact, I’m in welfare work.” Dottie eyed him gravely; she remembered now that Polly had said he was a painter, and she saw she was being teased. He looked very much the artist—handsome as a piece of Roman statuary but somewhat battered and worn; the muscles of the cheeks were loosening, and there were somber creases on either side of the flawless, straight, strong nose. She waited. “I do posters for the Women’s International League for Peace,” he said. Dottie laughed. “That’s not welfare work,” she retorted. “In a manner of speaking,” he said. He glanced down at her, carefully. “Vincent Club, Junior League, work with unwed mothers,” he enumerated. “My name is Brown. I come from Marblehead. I’m a collateral descendant of Nathaniel Hawthorne. My father keeps a general store. I didn’t go to college. I’m not in your class, young lady.” Dottie remained silent, merely watching him sympathetically; she now thought him very attractive. “I am an ex-expatriate,” he continued. “Since the fall of the dollar I occupy a furnished room on Perry Street, next to the bridegroom’s, and do peace posters for the ladies, as well as a little commercial work. The john, as you girls call it, is down the hall, and in the closet there’s an electric grill. Hence you must excuse me if I smell like a ham-and-egg sandwich.” Dottie’s beaver-brown eyes twinkled reproachfully; from the theatrical way he spoke she could see that he was proud and bitter, and she knew he was a gentleman from his well-cut features and his good, if old, tweed suit. “Harald is moving on to higher things,” said Mr. Brown. “An apartment on the fashionable East Side—above a cordial shop and a cut-rate cleaner’s, I’m told. We met like two passing elevators, to modernize the figure, one on the way up, one on the way down. Yesterday,” he went on, frowning, “I was divorced downtown in Foley Square by a beautiful young creature named Betty from Morristown, New Jersey.” He leaned forward slightly. “We spent last night in my room to celebrate. Are any of you people named Betty?” Dottie reflected. “There’s Libby,” she said. “No Libbys, Beths, or Betsys,” he cautioned. “I don’t like the names you girls have nowadays. But what of the dark beauty? How is she called?”