The Group (16 page)

Afterward, Kay declared that Mr. Davison’s ideas were surprisingly unfair and that the trip to Europe was a bribe that would corrupt Helena’s integrity. She was amazed (and she repeated it today, right to Helena’s face) that Helena had gone meekly off to Europe with her tail between her legs and stayed till just before Christmas. And now that she was back she was making no effort to get a job but talking of studying dry point in Cleveland and taking a course in acrobatic dancing at the Y.W.C.A., of all places. Nor was it a question of just marking time till she got married, like some other girls; Helena, Kay said, would never get married—she was a neuter, like a little mule. Therefore it was up to her to realize her potentialities. She and Kay were just the opposite of each other, Kay had been telling Mr. Bergler this afternoon.

“Really?” said Mr. Bergler. “How?” “In college I wanted to be a director,” Kay replied. “Come here, Helena,” she called loudly. “We’re talking about you.” Unwillingly, Helena approached; she was wearing a skullcap hat and a black velvet dress, with buttons straight down the front and a little old-lace collar with her cat’s-eye brooch. “I was saying I always wanted to be a director,” Kay continued. “Well!” said the producer, an unassuming grey-haired Jewish man with white soft skin and flat grey fish eyes. “So that’s what you and Hal have in common.” Kay nodded. “I directed one of the Hall Plays at college. That’s different from DP—Dramatic Production, which Hallie teaches—Hallie Flanagan, have you heard of her? Anyway, the Hall Plays are part of Philaletheis, which is just a student thing. It sounds like stamp collecting. But it means something different—loving the theatre. In DP, Hallie would never let me direct. I worked on the lighting with Lester—Lester Lang, her assistant; you probably haven’t heard of him. And I built scenery.” “And now?” “I gave it up,” said Kay with a sigh. “Now I work at Mr. Macy’s, in the training squad. I have the drive but not the talent. That’s what Harald said when he saw the Hall Play I directed. It was
The Winter’s Tale
—in the Outdoor Theatre. Helena played Autolycus.”

The producer turned his eyes to Helena. “That’s what I started to say,” Kay went on, remembering. “I lost the thread for a minute. I have the drive but not the talent, and Helena has the talents but not the drive.” “You’re interested in a stage career?” inquired the producer curiously, bending down to Helena. “Oh no,” Kay answered for Helena. “Helena’s a mime but not an actress. That’s what Harald thinks. No. But Helena has so many other talents that she can’t choose between them—canalize. She writes and sings and paints and dances and plays I don’t know how many instruments. The compleat girl. I was telling Mr. Bergler about your parents, Helena. She has the most remarkable parents. How many magazines does your mother ‘take in’? Her mother is a Canadian,” she added while Helena stood pondering with a fresh cup of punch in her hand. She was being called upon, she recognized, to perform for Mr. Bergler, and she was going to do it, just as she used to recite or play under her mother’s eye, feeling like a conscientious wind-up toy. She had a “searching” anxious little gaze, which she now directed upward at Mr. Bergler from under the reddish eaves of her brows.

“Well,” she began, grimacing and drawling her words, “there’s the
National Geographic
,
Christian Century
, the
Churchman
,
Theatre Arts Monthly
, the
Stage
, the
Nation
, the
New Republic
,
Scribner’s
,
Harper’s
, the
Bookman
, the
Forum
, the London
Times Literary Supplement
, the
Economist
, the
Spectator
,
Blackwood’s
,
Life and Letters Today
, the
Nineteenth Century and After
,
Punch
,
L’Illustration
,
Connaissance des Arts
,
Antiques
,
Country Life
,
Isis
, the
PMLA
, the
Lancet
, the
American Scholar
, the annual report of the College Boards,
Vanity Fair
, the
American Mercury
, the
New Yorker,
and
Fortune
(those four are for Daddy, but Mother ‘glances them over’).”

“You’re forgetting some,” said Kay. Mr. Bergler smiled; he was supposed to be rather a Communist. “The
Atlantic Monthly
, surely,” he suggested. Helena shook her head. “No. Mother is having a ‘feud’ with the
Atlantic Monthly
. She disapproved of something in the Jalna series and canceled her subscription. Mother dearly loves canceling her subscriptions—as a painful duty. Her feud with the
Saturday Review of Literature
has been very hard on her, because of the ‘Double-Crostic.’ She’s thought of resubscribing in our maid’s name, but she fears they might recognize the address.” “She sounds a most awesome lady,” said Mr. Bergler, responding to Helena’s faint grin. “Tell me, what does she find objectionable in the
Saturday Review of Literature
? Has sex reared its head there?” “Oh,” said Helena. “You misjudge my mother. She’s impervious to sex.” A publisher’s reader who lived in the apartment downstairs had come up to listen; he gave Libby MacAusland’s arm a little squeeze. “I love that, don’t you?” he said. “Mother’s shock area,” continued Helena imperturbably, “is confined to the higher brain centers; the ‘bump’ of grammar and usage is highly developed. She’s morally offended by impure English.” “Like what?” encouraged Kay. “Dangling modifiers. Improper prepositions. ‘Aggravating’ to mean ‘annoying,’ ‘demean’ to mean ‘lower,’ ‘sinister.’” “‘Sinister’?” echoed the publisher’s reader. “Mother says it only means left-handed or done with the left hand. If you tell her a person is sinister, all she will infer, she says, is that he’s left-handed. A deed, she allows, may be sinister, if it’s done sidewise or ‘under the robe’ or ‘on the wrong side of the blanket.’” “I never heard
that
!” cried Pokey, as if indignant. The group around Helena had grown larger and was forming into a circle. “‘Infer,’ ‘imply,’” prompted Libby, eager to be heard. “Ummhum,” said Helena. “But that’s too commonplace to be under Mother’s special protection. ‘Meticulous,’ which is not a synonym for ‘neat.’ She sets great store by Latin roots, you notice, but she frowns on the ablative absolute as a construction in English.” “Yow!” said Harald’s friend, Mr. Sisson, the one who had taken pictures at the wedding. “Oh, and ‘I cannot help but feel.’” “What’s wrong with that?” asked several voices. “‘I cannot help feeling’ or ‘I cannot but feel.’” “More!” said the publisher’s reader. Helena demurred. “I cannot help feeling,” she said, “that that is enough of Mother’s ‘pet peeves.’”

Her mother’s habit of stressing and underlining her words had undergone an odd mutation in being transmitted to Helena. Where Mrs. Davison stressed and emphasized, Helena inserted
her
words carefully between inverted commas, so that clauses, phrases, and even proper names, inflected, by her light voice, had the sound of being ironical quotations. While everything Mrs. Davison said seemed to carry with it a guarantee of authority, everything Helena said seemed subject to the profoundest doubt. “I saw ‘Miss Sandison,’” she had been telling Kay and Dottie, “in the ‘British Museum,’” signifying by the lifting of her brows and the rolling about of the names on her slow, dry tongue that “Miss Sandison” was an alias of some wondrous sort and the “British Museum” a front or imposture. This wry changing of pitch had become mechanical with her, like a slide inserted in a trombone. In fact, she had a great respect for her former Shakespeare teacher and for the British Museum. She had had a library card virtually from the time she could walk and was as much at home with the various systems of cataloguing as she was with the Furness
Variorum
. At college she had excelled at the “note topic”—a favorite with Miss Sandison too—and had many wooden boxes full of neatly classified cards on her desk beside the portable typewriter she had got for Christmas junior year—Mrs. Davison had not wished her to take up typing till her handwriting was formed; for a period in Cleveland she had had a calligraphy lesson every other day between her music lesson and her riding lesson and she had learned to cut her own quills from feathers. Nothing, moreover, was more natural than that she should find her teacher, an Elizabethan specialist, in the British Museum, yet Helena had gone on to explain methodically, as though it required accounting for, the circumstances that had brought this about: how Miss Sandison was doing a paper, in her sabbatical leave, on a little-known Elizabethan, “Arthur Gorges,” and Helena was looking up an early publication of “Dorothy Richardson” and had stopped to see the “Elgin Marbles.” In relating such “true particulars,” Helena lowered her voice and gravely puckered her forehead, with a confidential air like her mother’s, as though giving privileged news from a sickroom in which lay a common friend.

“A cute kid, that,” the producer told Harald, when he was leaving. “Reminds me of the young Hepburn—before they glamorized her. Clubwoman mother there too.” Helena found nothing to object to in the last part of this “tribute.” “Mother
is
a clubwoman,” she pointed out mildly to Kay, who felt that Mrs. Davison had been disparaged. “And I don’t like Katharine Hepburn.” She wished people would stop making this comparison. Mrs. Davison had been the first to notice a resemblance. “She was a Bryn Mawr girl, Helena. Class of ’29. Davy Davison and I saw her with Jane Cowl. She wore her hair short like yours.”

Wearily, Helena eyed the bedroom door. She wanted to go home or, rather, to go have dinner with Dottie at the Forty-ninth Street Longchamps, across from the Vassar Club. She knew that when she got back to Cleveland, she would be bound to report to her mother how she had “found” Kay and Harald, what their new apartment was like, and how Harald was making out in his career. “I have always been partial to Kay,” Mrs. Davison would state, satisfied, when Helena had finished her narration. It was one of Mrs. Davison’s peculiarities, well known to Helena, that, like royalty, she insisted that all news be favorable and reflect a steady advance of human affairs.

It was wonderful news, of course, that Harald’s play was going to be produced, yet neither Kay nor Harald seemed very happy. Possibly, as Dottie suggested, success had been too slow in coming. Dottie had heard a painful story: that Harald had been helping a puppeteer who gave shows at vulgar rich people’s parties; someone had seen him behind the scenes working the lights in the little portable puppet theater—he was not allowed to mingle with the guests. Kay had never mentioned this to a soul. Today, she looked strained and tired, and Harald was drinking too much. He was right; the party had not “jelled.” The producer and his wife had seemed mystified by so much Vassar; Helena feared Harald’s stock had gone down. Kay craved the limelight for the group, but the limelight did not become them. As Harald said, they did not know how to “project.” Of all the girls here this afternoon, only Kay, in his and Helena’s opinion—they had agreed on this, by the punch bowl—was a genuine beauty. Yet she was losing her vivid coloring, which would distress Mrs. Davison, who admired the “roses” in Kay’s cheeks.

The bedroom door opened. The love birds had made it up. Kay was smiling dewily, and Harald’s cigarette holder was cocked at a jaunty angle. He had a big bowl of chile con carne, Kay announced, that he had fixed this morning, and everyone was to stay and eat. Afterward, if the guests were agreeable, he was going to read aloud an act from his play. There was no help for it, Helena and Dottie were bound to stay; Kay was counting on them. Harald went out to the kitchen, refilling his punch glass en route; he would not let Kay help him—she was tired, and this was her holiday. “Isn’t that touching?” murmured Dottie. Helena was not touched. Harald, she presumed, knew Kay as well as she did, and if there was anything Kay hated, it was being left out; she was a glutton for making herself useful. They heard Harald moving about in the kitchen, the rattle of plates, the creak of drawers opening. Kay could not contain herself. “Can’t I make the coffee?” she called out. “No!” Harald’s voice retorted. “Entertain your guests.” Kay looked around the circle with a defeated, anxious smile. “
I’ll
help him,” volunteered Dottie as the rattle of crockery continued. “No,” said Norine. “I’ll do it. I know the kitchen.” With a purposeful stride, she went out; the shuttered door trembled as she pulled it shut. “She’ll make the coffee too weak,” Kay said sadly to Helena. “And she’ll want to use paper napkins.” “Forget about it,” advised Helena.

The radio actor turned to Kay. He was more than a little drunk; the cigarette in his hand wavered. “Give me a light, will you?” Kay looked around; there were no matches; all the little booklets were empty. Putnam silently proffered his burning pipe. As the actor stabbed his cigarette into the bowl, some coals fell on the newly waxed floor. “Oh, dear!” cried Kay, stamping them out. “I’ll get some matches from the kitchen.” “I’ll do it,” said Helena.

In the small kitchen, behind the slatted door, she found Norine and Harald locked in an embrace. Her classmate’s tall, rangy figure, like that of a big lynx or bobcat, was bent back as Harald kissed her, pressing forward in a sort of feral lunge. The scene reminded Helena, for some reason, of German silent films. Norine’s tawny eyes were closed, and an Oriental turban she wore—her own millinery achievement—had come partly unwound. A dish towel was lying on the floor. Their wet mouths drew apart as Helena entered, and their heads turned to look at her. Then they heard Kay call. “Did you find them? Harald, give her the kitchen matches, will you?” Helena saw the box of matches on the stove. Norine and Harald backed away from each other, and she hurriedly dodged between them. “Gangway,” she said. She picked up the towel and tossed it to Harald. Then she seized the matches and made for the living room. Her small hand shook with borrowed guilt as she struck the big sulphur match and held it for the actor to take a light from. It went out. She lit another. The room, she noted, was full of the smell of brimstone.