The Group (3 page)

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?”

At this moment, the door opened and Elinor Eastlake was shown in by a waiter, to whom she handed two brown-paper parcels she was carrying in her black kid-gloved hand; she appeared perfectly composed. “Her name is Elinor,” whispered Dottie. “We call her Lakey because her last name is Eastlake and she comes from Lake Forest, outside of Chicago.” “Thank you,” said Mr. Brown, but he made no move to leave Dottie’s side and continued to talk to her in an undertone, out of the corner of his mouth, offering wry comments on the wedding party. Harald had hold of Lakey’s hand, which he swung back and forth, as he stood back to admire her suit, a Patou model. His quick, lithe movements went oddly with his solemn long head and face, almost as if his head, a thinking machine, did not belong to him and had been clapped on his body in a masquerade. He was an intensely self-absorbed young man, as the girls knew from his letters, and when he spoke of his career, as he was doing now to Lakey, he had a detached impersonal eagerness, as though he were discussing disarmament or deficit spending. Yet he was attractive to women, as the girls knew from his letters too; the group admitted that he had S.A., the way some homely men teachers and clergymen had, and there was something about him, a dynamic verve, that made Dottie wonder, even now, as she and her companion watched him, how Kay had brought him to the point. The idea that Kay might be
enceinte
had stolen more than once into her quiet thoughts, though Kay, according to herself, knew all about taking precautions and kept a douche in Harald’s closet.

“Have you known Kay long?” asked Dottie curiously, remembering in spite of herself the toilet he had mentioned in the hall of Harald’s rooming house. “Long enough,” replied Mr. Brown. This was so cruelly outright that Dottie flinched, just as though it had been said of
her
, at her own wedding reception. “I don’t like girls with big legs,” he said, with a reassuring smile—Dottie’s legs and slim, well-shod feet were her best points. Disloyally, Dottie looked with him at Kay’s legs, which were indeed rather beefy. “A sign of peasant forbears,” he said, waving a finger. “The center of gravity’s too low—a mark of obstinacy and obtuseness.” He studied Kay’s figure, which was outlined by the thin dress; as usual, she was not wearing a girdle. “A touch of steatopygy.” “What?” whispered Dottie. “Excessive development of the rump. Let me get you a drink.” Dottie was thrilled and horrified; she had never had such a risqué conversation. “You and your social friends,” he continued, “have a finer functional adaption. Full, low-slung breasts”—he stared about the room—“fashioned to carry pearls and
bouclé
sweaters and faggoting and tucked crepe de Chine blouses. Narrow waists. Tapering legs. As a man of the last decade, I prefer the boyish figure myself: a girl in a bathing cap poised to jackknife on a diving board. Marblehead summer memories; Betty is a marvelous swimmer. Thin women are more sensual; scientific fact—the nerve ends are closer to the surface.” His grey eyes narrowed, heavy-lidded, as though he were drifting off to sleep. “I like the fat one, though,” he said abruptly, singling out Pokey Prothero. “She has a thermal look. Nacreous skin, plumped with oysters. Yum, yum, yum; money, money, money. My sexual problems are economic. I loathe under-privileged women, but my own outlook is bohemian. Impossible combination.”

To Dottie’s relief, the waiters came in with the breakfast—eggs Benedict—and Kay shooed everyone to the table. She put the best man, a very silent person who worked on the
Wall Street Journal
(advertising department), on her own right, and Helena Davison on Harald’s right, but after that all was confusion. Dottie was left stranded at the end of the table between Libby, her bête noire, and the radio man’s wife, who was a stylist at Russeks (and who, of course, should have been seated on Harald’s left). It was a hard table to seat, with so many girls; still, a more tactful hostess could have arranged it so that the duller ones were not all put together. But the radio man’s wife, a vivacious beanpole of a woman, dressed in plumes and jet accessories like a film vamp, seemed perfectly content with her company; she was a graduate of the University of Idaho, Class of ’28, who loved, she said, a good hen fest. She had known Harald from a boy, she announced, and his old folks too, though long time no see. Anders, Harald’s father, had been the principal of the high school in Boise she and Harald had gone to, way back when. “Isn’t Kay a honey?” she at once demanded of Dottie. “Awfully nice,” said Dottie, warmly. Her neighbor was the sort that used to be called “peppy”; on the whole, Dottie agreed with the English teacher who said that it was wiser not to use slang because it dated you so quickly. “How come her parents didn’t show?” the woman continued, lowering her voice. “‘Show’?” repeated Dottie, at a loss—could she mean show dogs or cats? “Turn up for the wedding.” “Oh,” said Dottie, coughing. “I believe they sent Kay and Harald a check,” she murmured. “Rather than make the trip, you know.” The woman nodded. “That’s what Dave said—my husband. He figured they must have sent a check.” “So much more useful,” said Dottie. “Don’t you agree?” “Oh, sure,” said the woman. “I’m kind of an old softy, myself. I was married in a veil. …You know, I told Harald I’d have liked to give the wedding at my place. We could have scrounged up a minister and Dave could have taken some pictures, to send to the folks back home. But Kay had made all the arrangements, it seemed, by the time I got my bid in.” She stopped on a rising note and looked inquiringly at Dottie, who felt herself in deep waters. Kay’s plans, she said tactfully, turning it into a joke, were “as the laws of the Medes and the Persians”; nobody could change her. “Who was it said,” she added, twinkling, “that his wife had a whim of iron? My father always quotes that when he has to give in to Mother.” “Cute,” said her neighbor. “Harald’s a swell gent,” she went on, in a different voice, more thoughtful and serious. “Kind of a vulnerable gent, too. Though you might not think so.” She looked hard at Dottie and her plumes nodded belligerently as she downed a glass of punch.

Across the table, farther down, on Kay’s left, the auburn-haired descendant of Hawthorne, who was talking to Priss Hartshorn, caught Dottie’s troubled eye and winked. Not knowing what else to do, Dottie gamely winked back. She had not imagined she was the type men winked at. The oldest of the group, nearly twenty-three now, thanks to the poor health that had kept her out of school as a child, she knew she was a bit of an old maid; the group teased her for her decorum and staid habits and mufflers and medicines and the long mink coat she wore on campus to keep off the cold, but she had a good sense of humor and quietly joined in the laugh. Her beaux had always treated her with respect; she was the sort of girl that people’s brothers took out and she had a whole string of pale young men who were studying archaeology or musicology or architecture in the Harvard Graduate School; she read out bits of their letters to the group—descriptions of concerts or of digs in the Southwest—and, playing Truth, admitted to having had two proposals. She had fine eyes, everyone told her, and a nice flashing set of white teeth and a pretty, if thin, cap of hair; her nose was rather long, in the pointed New England way, and her brows were black and a little heavy; she resembled the Copley portrait of an ancestress that hung in the family hall. In a modest way, she was fun-loving and even, she suspected, rather sensuous; she loved dancing and harmonizing and was always crooning to herself snatches of popular songs. Yet nobody had ever tried to take a liberty with her; some of the girls found it hard to believe this, but it was true. And the strange thing was, she would not have been shocked. The girls found the fact funny, but D. H. Lawrence was one of her favorite authors: he had such a true feeling for animals and for the natural side of life.