The Group (17 page)

In a few minutes Norine strode in with a tray of plates and a box of paper napkins, and Harald followed with his chile. Everyone ate. The radio actor resumed his critique of
Sheepskin
. “The fall of a just man is precipitous,” replied Harald, with a side glance at Helena. He set his plate down with a slight lurch. “Excuse me while I go to the toilet.” “The fall of a just man,” repeated the actor. “How well Harald puts it. The college president starts at the top, politicians put the skids under him, and he shoots right down to the bottom. It’s a bold conception, no doubt, but not an
actor
’s conception.” “Wasn’t Shakespeare an actor?” suddenly spoke up the naval officer. “What’s that got to do with my point?” said the actor. “Well, I mean,
King Lear
,” said the officer. “Doesn’t he start at the top?” “King Lear,” remarked Helena, “was hardly a just man.” They heard the closet flush. “And there’s relief in
Lear
,” said the actor. “Cordelia. Kent. The fool. In Harald’s play there’s no relief. Harald claims that would be fakery.” “Clara’s cake!” cried Kay, as coffee was being served. “Harald! We’ve got to serve Clara’s cake. I promised her. I’m afraid her feelings were hurt when we wouldn’t let her pass it with the punch.” “When
I
wouldn’t let her pass it,” corrected Harald with a melancholy air. “Why don’t you say what you mean, Kay?” Kay turned to the others. “Wait till you see it. She made it for our party and brought it down from Harlem on a paper lace doily. Clara’s a wonderful character. She runs a high-class funeral parlor. Tiger Flowers was buried from it. You ought to hear her description of him ‘laying in state.’ And I love it when she talks about her competitors. ‘Those fly-by-night undertakers are takin’ our business away.’” “Get the cake,” said Harald. “Your darky imitation is terrible.” “
You
imitate her, Harald!” “Get the cake,” he repeated. They waited for Kay to come back. They could hear her washing up. The cat seemed to have got Norine’s tongue, and “Putnam Blake” was no conversationalist. Dottie passed the coffee again. When it was his turn to be served, he nudged Helena. “Look, real cream!” he said, his peculiar eyes aglow. Helena could see that this excited him more than anything that had happened at the party.

Kay came in with fresh plates and a cake on a doily on a pink glass platter. The frosting was decorated with a maraschino cherry tree and a chocolate hatchet. “Oh, bless her heart!” said Dottie. “Her old black heart,” said Harald, eying the cake askance. “Straight from a Harlem bakery,” he pronounced. Kay put a hand to her cheek. “Oh, no!” she said. “Clara wouldn’t tell me a lie.” Harald smiled darkly. “A most villainous cake. ‘Let them eat bread.’ Don’t you agree, my friend?” He turned to the naval officer. “Look at the frosting,” said the actor. “It’s pure Lavoris.”

Tears appeared in Kay’s eyes. Defiantly, she began to cut the cake. “Kay loves to be a gull,” said Harald. “In the simplicity of her heart, she imagines that old coon happily baking for ‘Miss Kay’ and ‘Mister Man.’” “
I
think it’s touching,” said Dottie quickly. “And I’ll bet it tastes delicious.” She accepted a piece and began to eat it. The others followed suit, except for Harald, who shook his head when the platter was passed to him. “Down the incinerator with it!” he declared with a flourish of his coffee spoon. There was a laugh and a silence. It appeared that Harald had been right. “It’s like eating frosted absorbent cotton,” murmured the actor to Helena. Helena set her plate aside. In Kay’s place, she would not have served the cake—from a purely practical motive: so that the maid would not be encouraged to waste her money again. But she did not find Harald’s “antic hay” very amusing, all things considered. He had put on the motley, she felt, for her special benefit to tell her that he was a Man of Sorrows. Was he afraid she would give him away, poor devil? Helena would have been glad to reassure him. “I shall listen to no tales, Helena,” her mother had always admonished her if she came to report on a playmate. Helena did not “care for” what she had seen, but she assumed the bottle was responsible and felt a certain sympathy for Harald’s present discomfort. He was being bad to Kay, she supposed, because if he were amiable, Helena would consider him a whited sepulcher.

Across the room Kay was talking—rather boisterously, Helena felt—about wedding presents. Helena’s pity for her had taken the form of acute embarrassment. Kay was on a stage without knowing it. Three ironic spectators, counting Helena, were watching her and listening. The
strangest
objects, she was saying, were still arriving by parcel post—right in a class with Clara’s cake. “Look at these, for instance.” She brought out an ugly red glass decanter and six little cordial glasses that had come (she could hardly believe it) from one of her childhood friends in Salt Lake City. “What can we do with them? Send them to the Salvation Army?” “Give them to Clara,” said the actor. Nearly everyone laughed. “Down the incinerator with them!” said Harald suddenly.

They were examining the decanter, holding it up to the light, arguing about workmanship and mass production, when they heard the front door close. The pink glass platter with the remains of the cake on it was gone. Harald was gone too. “Where did he disappear to?” said the naval officer. “
I
thought he was in the kitchen,” said Norine. Then the doorbell rang. Harald had locked himself out. “Where have you been?” they demanded. “Giving the cake a Viking’s funeral. A
beau geste
, was it not?” He saluted the group. “Oh, Harald,” said Kay sadly. “That was Clara’s cake plate.” The actor giggled. With an air of decision, Harald began to collect the little red cordial glasses. “You take the decanter, my friend,” he said to the actor. The actor obeyed and followed him, humming the Dead March from
Saul
. “Are they spiffed?” whispered Dottie. Helena nodded. This time Harald left the door open, and the group in the living room could hear a distant crash of glass breaking as the set went down the incinerator in the hall. “Next?” said Harald, returning. “What next, my dear?” Kay tried to laugh. “I’d better stop him,” she said to the others, “or he’ll make a general holocaust of all our goods and chattels.” “Yes, stop him,” urged Putnam. “This is serious.” “Don’t be a wet blanket,” said the actor. “Let’s make a game of it. Everybody choose his candidate for the incinerator.” Kay jumped up. “Harald,” she said, coaxing. “Why don’t you read us your play instead? You promised.” “Ah yes,” said Harald. “And it’s getting late. And you have to work tomorrow. But you give me an idea.” He went into the dinette and took a manuscript in a gray folder from a cupboard.

“Down the incinerator with it!” His tall, lean, sinewy figure paused a moment by the bookcase, then began to skirt the furniture: Norine’s voice was heard ordering someone to stop him, and Putnam and the naval officer moved to block his way to the door. The actor leaped for the manuscript, and there was a sound of tearing paper as Harald wrenched it away. Holding it tight to his chest, with his free hand he pushed off his pursuers, like somebody racing for a touchdown. At the door, there was a scuffle, but Harald managed to open it, and it slammed behind him. He did not return. “Oh, well,” said Kay. “Could he have thrown
himself
down the incinerator?” whispered Dottie. “No,” said the actor. “I thought of that. It’s too small for a man’s body.” For a moment no one spoke.

“But where has he gone, Kay?” said Norine. “He hasn’t got an overcoat.” “Downstairs probably,” replied Kay matter-of-factly. “To have a drink with Russell.” This was the publisher’s reader. “I guess you’d better go home,” Kay continued. “He won’t come back till you’re all gone. I always used to be scared when he disappeared like that. I thought he was going to throw himself in the river. Then I found out that he went to Russell’s. Or over to Norine and Put’s.” Putnam nodded. “But he can’t be there,” he said simply. “Because we’re here.” They were all putting on their coats. “And his manuscript, Kay?” said Dottie, venturing a discreet reminder. “Oh,” said Kay. “Don’t worry. Bergler has a copy. And Walter Huston has one. And there’re three on file with Harald’s agent.” Kay, reflected Helena for the second time, had always been a “blurter.”

In the taxi, Helena and Dottie held a post-mortem. “Were you scared or did you guess?” asked Dottie. “I was scared,” said Helena. “Everyone in that room was gulled good and proper.” She grinned. “Except Kay,” said Dottie. “That’s funny,” she added after a moment. “Harald must have known Kay knew. That he had other copies, I mean.” Helena nodded. “Did he count on her silence?” Dottie wondered, in a voice that still sounded impressed. “And she betrayed him!” “She’s not a gangster’s moll,” said Helena shortly. “Would you have exposed him like that, in her place?” persisted Dottie. “Yes,” said Helena.

She was dourly composing a new version of the Class Notes. “Washington’s Birthday Report. Yestreen I saw Kay Strong Petersen’s new husband in Norine Schmittlapp Blake’s arms. Both were looking well, and Kay is expecting a promotion at Macy’s. Later in the evening the guests were treated to a ceremonial manuscript-burning. Kay served Fish House Punch, from an old colonial recipe. Kay and Harald have an elegant apartment in the East Fifties, convenient to the river, where Harald will be able to throw himself when his marriage goes ‘on the rocks.’ Re this, Anthropology major Dottie Renfrew opines that the little things, like lying, become so important in marriage. If she married a man who was a born liar, she would conform to his tribal custom. How about this, ’33? Write me your ideas and let’s have a really stimulating discussion.”

Six

T
HE MORNING AFTER KAY’S
party, Helena was planning to breakfast with her father, who had arrived on the sleeper from Cleveland; they were going to do the silversmiths together for her mother’s anniversary present. She was to meet him at the Savoy Plaza, where he kept a bedroom and sitting room for the times when he was in New York on business; they gave him a special rate. Helena herself usually stayed at the Vassar Club in the Hotel New Weston, where her mother sometimes joined her, finding the atmosphere “suitable.” Mrs. Davison had the heart of an alumna, and it was a cross to her not to be eligible for the Women’s University Club in Cleveland, in which so many of her acquaintances were active and where she often figured as a guest. “I am not a university woman myself,” she would begin when invited by the Chair to comment on a lecture that trenched on one of her fields of interest. “I am not a college woman myself,” Helena would overhear her telling the Vassar Club secretary or some Class of ’10 alumna in the lounge at teatime, laying aside the current issue of the
Vassar Alumnae Magazine
with the confidence of a born speaker. Simply by clearing her throat, her mother could command an audience, of which only Helena was an unwilling constituent. “We are taking out a five-year membership for Helena at the Vassar Club here,” Mrs. Davison’s measured tones continued, “so that she can always have a place to go, a
pied-à-terre,
like her father’s in New York. ‘A Room of One’s Own,’ dontcha know.” Her mother’s “decisions,” especially those pertaining to Helena, were not simply announced, but promulgated. For this very reason, Helena was uncomfortable at the Vassar Club, which had come to seem to her like one of her mother’s purlieus, yet she continued to stay there, whenever she was in New York, because, as Mrs. Davison said, it was central, convenient, economical, and she could meet her friends in the lounge.

This morning the phone rang while she was still in the shower. It was not her father; it was Norine, calling from a pay station in a drugstore and declaring that she had to see Helena right away, as soon as Putnam had gone out. He was in the bathroom now, shaving. All Norine wanted from her, plainly, was the assurance that she was not going to tell anybody, but since Norine did not say this on the telephone, Helena could not say, either, that Norine did not have to worry. Instead, she found herself agreeing philosophically to come to Norine’s place and canceling her date with her father, who was quite put out; he could not see what was so urgent that it could not wait till afternoon. Helena did not specify; she never lied to her parents. She was unable to see, herself, to come down to brass tacks, why Norine couldn’t have met her for tea or a cocktail or lunch tomorrow. But when Helena had proposed this in her driest tones, there had been a silence on the other end of the wire, and then Norine’s clipped voice had said dully, “Never mind; forget it. I should have guessed you wouldn’t want to see me,” which had made Helena deny this and promise to come at once.

She did not look forward to the interview. Her light, mildly aseptic irony was wasted on Norine, who was unaware of irony and humorous vocal shadings; she listened only to the overt content of what was said and drew her own blunt inferences, as she had just now on the telephone. Under normal circumstances, Helena would have been interested to see Norine’s apartment, which Kay had described as a “sketch,” but right now she would have preferred to meet Norine in more impersonal surroundings—the Vassar Club lounge, for instance. She had no curiosity to hear whatever explanation or extenuation Norine, she supposed, was going to offer her, and it struck her as unjust that she should be haled to Norine’s place just because, through no fault of her own, she had witnessed something that was plainly none of her business. It was like the time her father had been haled into court because he had innocently witnessed a traffic accident; when those darned lawyers got through with him, he declared he had no character left.

Norine, at any rate, did not live in some remote part of Greenwich Village, as might have been expected. Her apartment was quite near the New Weston Hotel, on a pretty street a block east of the Lexington Avenue subway stop that had trees and private houses with window boxes, a block just as good as Kay’s block, if not somewhat better. This surprised Helena. She found Norine, dressed in an old pair of ski pants, a sweat shirt, and a man’s leather jacket, sitting on the front stoop of a yellow stucco house and anxiously scanning the street; her hand shaded her eyes. “Sister Ann, Sister Ann,” Helena, who knew most of the fairy tales in Grimm and Perrault by heart, muttered to herself, “do you see anyone coming?” Putnam’s bluish beard, a razored shadow on his white face, had caught her notice the night before. Sighting Helena, in her ocelot coat and bobbing Robin Hood cap with a feather, Norine waved and beckoned. “Put has just gone,” she reported. “You can come in.” She led Helena through an arched doorway into the ground floor of the house and past the open door of what appeared to be an office. The house, she explained, interrupting herself to call a greeting to someone unseen in the office, belonged to a firm of modern decorators, husband and wife, who had been hit by the depression; they lived on two floors upstairs and rented the garden apartment, which had formerly been a showroom, to Norine and Put; the top floor was rented to a secretary who worked for a law firm in Wall Street and doubled as a paid correspondent in divorce cases—“the Woman Taken in Adultery,” Norine appended with a terse laugh.