The Group (18 page)

Norine had a husky, throaty, cigarette voice and talked continuously, emitting a jerky flow of information, like an outboard motor. She had been regarded as “nervous” by the medical staff senior year at college, and her abrupt, elliptical way of speaking, as if through a permanent cloud of cigarette smoke, had been developed at that time. When not leading a parade or working on the college newspaper or the literary magazine, she could be found off campus drinking Coca-Cola or coffee and baying out college songs at a table at Cary’s with her cronies, all of whom had deep hoarse voices too. “Here’s to Nellie, she’s true blue; she’s a rounder through and through; she’s a drunkard, so they say; wants to go to Heav’n, but she’s going the other way.” Helena’s musically trained ear, unfortunately, could still hear those choruses and the thump of glasses that accompanied them after 3.2 beer was made legal; and she could remember seeing Kay, now and then, sitting with those gruff Huskies and adding her true voice, harmonizing, to their ensemble, putting ashes into her coffee, as they did, to see if it would give them a “lift” and playing a game they had invented of who could think of the worst thing to order: two cold fried eggs with chocolate sauce. Norine’s chief interest at college had been journalism; her favorite course had been Miss Lockwood’s Contemporary Press; her favorite book had been
The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens
; her favorite art had been photography, and her favorite painter, Georgia O’Keeffe. Up until senior year, she had been one of the overweight girls, given to Vassar “Devils,” a black fudgey mixture that Helena had never so much as tasted, and to trips to the Cider Mill, where doughnuts were served with cider; Helena and
her
friends bicycled to the Silver Swan, because the name reminded them of madrigals, or dined with a faculty member at the Vassar Inn, where they always ordered the same thing: artichokes and mushrooms under glass. But now Norine, like Kay, had grown thin and tense. Her eyes, which were a light golden brown, were habitually narrowed, and her handsome, blowzy face had a plethoric look, as though darkened by clots of thought. She rarely showed her emotions, which appeared to have been burned out by the continual short-circuiting of her attention. All her statements, cursory and abbreviated, had a topical resonance, even when she touched on the intimate; today she made Helena think of the old riddle of the newspaper—black and white and red all over. She spoke absently and with an air of preoccupation, as though conducting a briefing session from memorized notes.

“Your loyalties lie with her; I know it,” she threw out over her shoulder as they came into the apartment. The barking of a dog in the garden rerouted the train of her ideas. “There’s a bitch in heat upstairs,” she said with a jerk of her head, “and we keep Nietzsche chained to prevent miscegenation.” Her short, monosyllabic laugh came out like a bark. This laugh, of the type called “mirthless,” was only a sort of punctuation mark, Helena decided—an asterisk indicating that Norine’s attention had been flagged by one of her own remarks. Norine went on now, like some gruff veterinarian, to narrate the mating history of the dog upstairs, shunting off, via a parenthesis, to the mating history of its owners. Norine’s language had roughened since she had been married; it was not clear to Helena whether the poodle or the wife of the landlord was the “bitch upstairs” who was going to have an operation on her Fallopian tubes. “Both,” said Norine shortly. “Margaret’s tubes are obstructed. That’s why she can’t conceive. She’s going to have them blown out. Insufflation.
Liza
’s tubes are going to be tied up. They do it now instead of spaying. That way, she can still enjoy sex. Have some coffee.”

Helena looked around the apartment. It was painted black, so as not to show the dirt, she would have presumed if Norine had been practical. But doubtless the color was a banner or slogan of some kind, as in Putnam’s shirt, though a puzzling one to Helena, since black, she had always understood, was the color of reaction, of clerical parties and fascists. The kitchen was part of the living room, and the sink was full of unwashed dishes. Above it was a long shelf with cottage-cheese glasses, jelly glasses, plates, and cans of food, chiefly soups and evaporated milk. French doors tacked with orange theatrical gauze led to the garden. Along one wall, on either side of a white brick fireplace, were bookcases made of orange crates lined with folded black oilcloth and containing pamphlets, small magazines, and thin volumes of poetry. There were few full-size books, except for Marx’s
Capital
, Pareto, Spengler,
Ten Days That Shook the World
,
Axel’s Castle
, and Lincoln Steffens. Across the room, a big lumpy studio bed was covered with a black velveteen spread and piled with orange oilcloth cushions rudely stitched on a sewing machine and coming apart at the corners. On the black-and-white linoleum floor was a very dirty polar-bear rug. Below the sink stood a dog’s dish with some half-eaten food. On the walls were framed reproductions of Georgia O’Keeffe’s vulval flowers and of details from murals by Diego Rivera and Orozco and framed Stieglitz photographs of New York City slum scenes. There were two steel lamps with improvised shades made of typewriter paper, a card table, and four collapsible bridge chairs. On the card table were a toaster, a jar of peanut butter, an electric curling iron, and a hand mirror; Norine had evidently begun to curl her fine blond hair and stopped midway through, for the hair on one side of her head was frizzed in a sort of pompadour and on the other hung loose. This sense of an operation begun and suspended midway was the keynote, Helena decided, of the apartment. Someone, probably Norine’s husband, had tried to introduce method and order into their housekeeping: beside the icebox, on a screen, was an old-fashioned store calendar with the days crossed off in red pencil; next to the calendar was a penciled chart or graph, with figures, which, Norine explained, was their weekly budget. On a spike driven into the wall by the stove were their grocery slips and other receipts; on the drain-board, a milk bottle was half full of pennies, which Norine said were for postage.

“Put makes us keep a record of every two-cent stamp we buy. He got me a little pocket notebook, like his, for my birthday, to write down items like subway fares so I can transfer them at night to the budget. We do the accounts every night, before we go to bed. That way, we know where we are every day, and if we spend too much one day, we can economize on the next. All I have to do is look at the graph. Put’s very visual. Tonight I’ll be short a nickel—the one I used to call you. He’ll take me back, step by step, over my day and say, ‘Visualize what you did next,’ till he can locate that nickel. He’s nuts about accuracy.” A brief sigh followed this eulogy, which had caused Helena’s eyebrows to rise in disapproval; she had been given her own bank account at the age of ten and taught to keep her own check stubs. “Let me supply the nickel,” she said, opening her pocketbook. “Why don’t you make him give you an allowance?” Norine ignored the question. “Thanks. I’ll take a dime if you don’t mind. I forgot. I called Harald first to find out where you were staying.” The click of the dime on the card table underscored the silence that fell. The two girls looked each other in the eyes. They listened to the dog bark.

“You never liked me at college,” Norine said, pouring coffee and offering sugar and evaporated milk. “None of your crowd did.” She sank into a bridge chair opposite Helena and inhaled deeply from her cigarette. Knowing Norine and feeling this to be a lead sentence, Helena did not contradict. In reality, she did not “mind” Norine, even now; ever since she had heard about the bookkeeping, she felt a kind of sympathy for the big frowsy girl, who reminded her of a tired lioness caged in this den of an apartment, with that other animal chained in the garden and the flattened polar bear on the linoleum. And at college she and Norine had worked together quite amicably on the literary magazine. “You people were the aesthetes. We were the politicals,” Norine continued. “We eyed each other from across the barricades.” This description appeared to Helena fantastic; the scholar in her could not allow it to pass. “Isn’t that a rather ‘sweeping statement,’ Norine?” she suggested with a “considering” little frown shirring and ruching her forehead in the style of the Vassar faculty. “Would you call Pokey an aesthete? Or Dottie? Or Priss?” She would have added “Kay” but for an unwillingness to name her casually this morning or to seem to discuss her with Norine. “They didn’t count,” replied Norine. “The ones who counted were you and Lakey and Libby and Kay.” Norine had always been an expert on who “counted” and who did not. “You were Sandison. We were Lockwood,” pursued Norine somberly. “You were Morgan. We were Marx.” “Oh, pooh!” cried Helena, almost angry. “Who was ‘Morgan’?” In her cool character the only passion yet awakened was the passion for truth. “The whole group was for Roosevelt in the college poll! Except Pokey, who forgot to vote.” “One less for Hoover, then,” remarked Norine. “
Wrong
!” said Helena, grinning. “She was for Norman Thomas. Because he breeds dogs.” Norine nodded. “Cocker spaniels,” she said. “What a classy reason!” Helena agreed that this was so. “All right,” Norine conceded after a thoughtful pause. “Kay was Flanagan, if you want. Priss was Newcomer. Lakey was Rindge. I may have been oversimplifying. Libby was M.A.P. Smith, would you say?” “I guess so,” said Helena, yawning slightly and glancing at her watch; this kind of analysis, which had been popular at Vassar, bored her.

“Anyway,” Norine said, “your crowd was sterile. Lockwood taught me that. But, God, I used to envy you!” This confession embarrassed Helena. “Dear me, why?” she inquired. “Poise. Social savvy. Looks. Success with men. Proms. Football games. Junior Assemblies. We called you the Ivory Tower group. Aloof from the battle.” Helena opened her mouth and closed it; this view of the group was so far from the facts that she could not begin to correct it; she herself, for instance, had no particular looks and had never been to a college football game (Mrs. Davison despised “spectator” sports) or a prom, except at Vassar, where she had had to make do with Priss Hartshorn’s brother for a “man.” But she was not going to be drawn by Norine into a counter-confession; she supposed, moreover, that if you rolled the whole group into one girl, she would be what Norine said—a rich, assured, beautiful bluestocking. “You mean Lakey,” she said seriously. “She summed up the group. Or what Miss Lockwood would call its ‘stereotype.’ But nobody was really like her. We were her satellites. Old Miss Fiske used to say that we ‘shone in her reflected light.’” “Lakey had no warmth,” asserted Norine. “She was inhuman, like the moon. Do you remember the apples?”

Helena felt herself color, remembering very well the quarrel with Norine over Cézanne’s still lifes of apples in the new Museum of Modern Art. “The smoking room of Cushing,” she admitted with a grimace. “When was that? Freshman year?” “Sophomore,” said Norine. “You and Kay had come to dinner with somebody. And Lakey was there. You two were playing bridge. And Lakey was playing solitaire, as usual, and smoking ivory-tipped cigarettes. It was the first time she ever spoke to me.” “Us too,” said Helena. “And it was the first time I remember seeing
you
, Norine.” “I was a mess,” said Norine. “I weighed a hundred and sixty, stripped. All soft blubber. And you stuck your harpoons into me, the three of you.” Helena raised her candid eyes from her coffee cup. “The ‘spirit of the apples,’” she quoted, “versus ‘significant form.’” She could not remember, exactly, what mushy thoughts Norine, sprawled on a sofa, had been expressing about the Cézannes to the smoking room at large, but she could see Lakey now, on whom she and Kay had had a distant crush, look up suddenly from her solitaire as she said coldly and distinctly that the point of the Cézannes was the formal arrangement of shapes. Norine had begun repeating that it was “the
spirit
of the apples” that counted; whereupon Kay, laying down her bridge hand and glancing toward Lakey for approval, had charged in with “significant form,” which she had learned about in Freshman English with Miss Kitchel, who had had them read Clive Bell and Croce and Tolstoy’s
What is Art?
. “You’re denying the spirit of the apples,” Norine had insisted, and Helena, laying down
her
bridge hand, had mildly cited T. S. Eliot: “The spirit killeth, and the letter giveth life.” With everybody watching, Norine had started to cry, and Lakey, who had no pity for weakness, had called her a “bovine sentimentalist.” Norine, yielding the field, had lumbered out of the smoking room, sobbing, and Lakey, uttering the single word “oaf,” had gone back to her solitaire. The bridge game had broken up. On the way home to their own dormitory, Helena had said that she thought that three against one had been a bit hard on poor Miss Schmittlapp, but Kay said that Schmittlapp was usually in the majority. “Do you think she’ll remember that we came to her rescue?” she demanded, meaning Lakey. “I doubt it,” said Helena, having sat next to Miss Eastlake (Davison being just ahead of her in the alphabet) for a full half-term in an art-history course without evoking a sign of notice. But Lakey
had
remembered Kay, when they were on the Daisy Chain together that spring, and talked to her about Clive Bell and Roger Fry, so that you might say, Helena reflected, that the argument with Norine had pointed the way that had led, in the end, to their grouping with Lakey and the others in the South Tower. Helena, who was as immune to social snobbery as she was to the “fond passion,” had not felt the charm of the South Tower group to the same extent as Kay, but she had raised no objections to the alliance, even though her teachers and her parents had worried a little, thinking, like Norine, that an “exclusive elite” was a dangerous set to play in, for a girl who had real stuff in her. Mrs. Davison’s comment, on first meeting the group, was that she hoped Helena was not going to become a “clothes rack.”

“I reacted against Lakey’s empty formalism,” Norine was saying. “I went up to my room that night and spewed out the window. That was Armageddon for me, though I didn’t see it yet. I didn’t discover socialism till junior year. All I knew that night was that I believed in something and couldn’t express it, while your team believed in nothing but knew how to say it—in other men’s words. Of course, I envied you that too. Let me show you something.” She rose from her chair, motioning Helena to follow, and flung open a door, disclosing the bedroom. Over the bed, which was made, hung a reproduction of a Cézanne still life of apples. “Well, well, the apples of discord!” remarked Helena in the doorway, striving for a sprightly note; she had stumbled over a dog’s bone in the matted fur of the polar bear; her ankle hurt; and she could not imagine what the apples were expected to prove. “Put had them in his college room,” Norine said. “He’d made them the basis for his credo too. For him, they stood for a radical simplification.” “Ummm,” said Helena, glancing about the room, which was clearly Putnam’s sphere. It contained steel filing cabinets, a Williams College pennant, an African mask, and a typewriter on a card table. It struck her that Norine’s apartment was all too populous with “significant form.” Every item in it seemed to be saying something, asserting something, pontificating; Norine and Put were surrounded by articles of belief, down to the last can of evaporated milk and the single, monastic pillow on the double bed. It was different from Kay’s apartment, where the furniture was only asking to be admired or talked
about
. But here, in this dogmatic lair, nothing had been admitted that did not make a “relevant statement,” though what the polar bear was saying Helena could not make out. The two girls returned to their seats. Norine lit a fresh cigarette. She stared meditatively at Helena. “Put is impotent,” she said. “Oh,” said Helena, slowly. “Oh, Norine, I’m sorry.” “It’s not your fault,” said Norine hoarsely. Helena did not know what to say next. She could still smell Put’s tobacco and see his pipe in an unemptied ashtray. Despite the fact that she had had no sexual experience, she had a very clear idea of the male member, and she could not help forming a picture of Put’s as pale and lifeless, in the coffin of his trousers, a veritable
nature morte
. She was sorry that Norine, to excuse herself for last night, had felt it necessary to make her this confidence; she did not want to be privy to the poor man’s private parts. “We got married in June,” Norine enlarged. “A couple of weeks after Commencement. I was a raw virgin. I never had a date till I knew Put. So when we went to this hotel, in the Pennsylvania coal fields, I didn’t catch on right away. Especially since my mother, who hates sex like all her generation, told me that a gentleman never penetrated his bride on the first night. I thought that for once Mother must be right. We’d neck till we were both pretty excited, and then everything would stop, and he’d turn over and go to sleep.” “What were you doing in the coal fields?” inquired Helena, in hopes of a change of subject. “Put had a case he was working on—an organizer who’d been beaten up and jailed. In the daytime, I interviewed the women, the miners’ wives. Background stuff. Put said it was very useful. That way, he could write off our whole honeymoon on office expenses. And at night we were both pretty bushed. But when we came back to New York, it was the same thing. We’d neck in our pajamas and then go to sleep.” “What possessed him to want to get married?” “He didn’t know,” said Norine.