The Group (35 page)

“No,” he said, in a dead voice. “It doesn’t make so much difference. We wanted to give Stephen the best possible start, that’s all. If you’d been able to nurse him even a month or two …” “I’m sorry,” said Priss. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s this damned hospital. I know them. They wouldn’t let you try. You would have come through with flying colors. Just one more day would have done it. Two more days.” “What do you mean?” “Stephen would have settled down and stopped crying for the moon. Your milk supply has been building. Look at the chart. That’s what I told Turner. Nobody here has the guts to go through with an experiment. A baby yells and they hand him a bottle. You can’t make any progress in medicine unless you’re willing to be hard. It’s the same with your friend Roosevelt and those softheaded social workers in the White House. The economy would have recovered by itself if they’d left it alone, instead of listening to the whimpers of the down-and-outs. Recovery! There hasn’t been any recovery. The economy is sick and pumped full of formula.” He gave a sudden boyish laugh. “Pretty good, that, wasn’t it, Prissy?” “It was funny,” she said primly, “but I don’t admit the comparison.”

“Good old Priss,” he said fondly, still pleased with his pun. “Never give an inch.” “What did you tell Dr. Turner?” she said. He shrugged. “What I just told you. He said it was no use trying to experiment under present-day hospital conditions. The nursing staff is against you. It’s a conspiracy.”

“What do you mean, Sloan, exactly, when you say ‘experiment’?” “To prove that any woman can nurse,” he said impatiently. “
You
know; you’ve heard it a hundred times.” “Sloan,” she said coaxingly, “be fair. Stephen cries about ten hours a day.”

Sloan raised a finger. “In the first place, ten hours is exaggerated. In the second place, what of it? In the third place, the nurses pick him up and fuss over him when he cries.” Priss could not answer this. “Of course they do,” said Sloan. “So that naturally he cries some more. Already, in the second week of life, he’s learned to cry to get attention.” He folded his arms and stared, frowning, at Priss.

“We’ll fix that,” he said, “when we get him home. You’re not to let Irene pick him up, except to change him. Once you’ve established that he’s not cold or wet, back he goes in his basket.” “I agree with you utterly,” said Priss. “I’ve already had a talk with Irene. She understands that babies are treated differently now. But what about the bottle?” “He’ll get one supplementary bottle,” Sloan said. “For the time being. When we get him home, I have a little idea to try.”

Priss felt a chill; he alarmed her. Ever since she had been in the hospital, her feelings for Sloan had been undergoing a change. Sometimes she thought she was not in love with him any more. Or perhaps it was a thing that happened to many women: now that her baby was born, she felt divided in her interests. She had begun to see that she might have to defend Stephen against Sloan, and the more so because Sloan was a doctor and therefore had a double authority. She found that she was checking what Sloan said against what the nurses said, against what the Department of Labor pamphlet said, against
Parents’ Magazine
. When Sloan declared that the baby should sleep in an unheated room, she was amazed to find that the Department of Labor agreed with him; the nursery in the hospital, of course, was heated. There was a side of Sloan, she had decided, that she mistrusted, a side that could be summed up by saying that he was a Republican. Up to now this had not mattered; most men she knew were Republicans—it was almost part of being a man. But she did not like the thought of a Republican controlling the destiny of a helpless baby. In medicine, Sloan was quite forward-looking, but he was enamored of his own theories, which he wanted to enforce, like Prohibition, regardless of the human factor. She wondered, really, whether he was going to make a very good pediatrician.

“What’s your idea, Sloan?” she asked, trying not to sound anxious. “Oh, a thought I had.” He got up and strolled to the window. “I wondered how Stephen would do on a three-hour cycle.” Priss’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “The four-hour cycle isn’t sacred, Prissy,” he said, coming to her bedside. “Don’t look so severe. Some of the new men are trying a three-hour cycle. The point is to find the right one for the individual baby. All babies aren’t alike, you know.” Priss pondered the implications of this, which did not sound like Sloan exactly. It occurred to her that he had been doing some homework in the latest medical journals. “Obviously,” he went on, “you can’t try out the three-hour cycle in a hospital; the routine isn’t geared to it. You’d have all the nurses up in arms. But if a baby’s unusually hungry and cries a great deal, it can easily be tried at home.” Priss’s heart was touched. She took back everything she had just thought. He had been worrying about Stephen too, though he had not showed it. Probably he had been reading far into the night. But, like all doctors, he would not admit openly to having made a mistake or even to having changed his mind. “It’s even simpler, Priss, with the breast than it would be with the bottle. You could give him the breast every three hours for a week or two, then revert to the four-hour schedule. The main thing is to have a regular cycle, whatever the length of the intervals.” “But would I have enough milk?” The vision of Stephen leaving her breast hungry eight times a day was rather daunting. “Your milk ought to be stimulated by nursing more frequently,” he said. “Anyway, I’d like to try it.” Priss could not see the harm, provided her milk held out. But she felt it her duty to put a last question. “You’re sure you’re not turning the clock back? I mean, the next thing would be feeding the baby every two hours and then every time he’s hungry. And before we knew it, we’d be back to Mother’s day,” Sloan laughed. “Or Grandmother’s day,” he said. “Don’t be silly.”

You would never guess what happened after Sloan left. Priss had just finished giving Stephen his afternoon feeding when she got a telephone call from Julie Bentkamp, another classmate, who was an editor of
Mademoiselle
. Julie had heard from Libby MacAusland, who was now a high-powered literary agent, that Priss was nursing her own baby. She thought that was very exciting and she wondered whether Priss would like to write an article on how it felt for
Mademoiselle
. Priss said that she couldn’t think of it; she was sure it was against medical ethics for a doctor’s wife to write a piece like that. A few minutes later, Libby herself rang up—the same old Libby. She said that if Priss wrote it, she was positive she could resell it to the
Reader’s Digest
. “You could write it under a pseudonym,” she pointed out. “Though personally I should think Sloan would welcome the advertisement. Let me call him and ask him.” “Doctors don’t advertise,” said Priss coldly. “That’s just the point, Libby.” Priss was annoyed; this was the “high-pressure salesmanship” that she hated. Who could have told Libby, she asked herself—an idle question. What she feared was that Sloan, if Libby got at him, instead of being stuffy, would urge her to do it; she tried to imagine old Mrs. Drysdale, Dr. Drysdale’s wife, writing such a thing even when she was young. …“I’ll ask Sloan for a drink,” Libby went on. “Now that he’s a lonely bachelor. With Julie. I’m sure we can talk him into it. You should see Julie now; she’s a knockout.” “If you d-dare, Libby—” cried Priss. “The thing is,” said Libby, “you must be sure to put in your bust dimensions. Not in so many words. But you have to let the reader know that you’re not a perfect thirty-six. Otherwise the reader would miss the point.” “I understand, Libby,” said Priss. “And put in that you were Phi Beta Kappa at college and worked for the government. If Sloan agrees, of course, they’ll run a picture of you in the contributors column.” “
I’m not going to do it
,” said Priss. “I only know how to write reports on economics. My style is too dry.” “Oh, I’ll rewrite it for you,” said Libby airly. “I’ll do all the descriptive parts and the emotions, if you want. If you just tell me honestly what it’s like.” “
I’m not going to do it
,” Priss repeated. “Under any circumstances.” “You can have a nurse for six months with the profits if we sell it to the
Reader’s Digest
. A nanny with a cap—do they wear streamers?—to take the baby to the park …” Priss held the receiver away from her ear; finally there was a silence. Then Libby’s voice resumed in a different tone. “Why not?” Priss hesitated. “It’s in poor t-taste,” she stammered. “I don’t see that,” said Libby. “I don’t see that at all.” Her voice grew louder and louder. “Is it in poor taste to talk about it? Why, it’s the most natural thing in the world. In Italy, the women do it in public, and no one thinks a thing about it.” “I’m not going to do it in public,” Priss said. “And if it’s so natural, why are you so excited about putting it in a magazine? You think it’s unnatural, that’s why.” And she hung up the telephone. It
was
unnatural, she said to herself forlornly. Accidentally, she had put her finger on the truth, like accidentally hitting a scab. She was doing “the most natural thing in the world,” suckling her young, and for some peculiar reason it was completely unnatural, strained, and false, like a posed photograph. Everyone in the hospital knew this, her mother knew it, her visitors knew it; that was why they were all talking about her nursing and pretending that it was exciting, when it was not, except as a thing to talk about. In reality, what she had been doing was horrid, and right now, in the nursery, a baby’s voice was rising to tell her so—the voice, in fact, that she had been refusing to listen to, though she had heard it for at least a week. It was making a natural request, in this day and age; it was asking for a bottle.

Eleven

P
OLLY ANDREWS AND GUS
LeRoy had been having a love affair for nearly a year. Still she lived in a furnished room-and-bath and went to work every morning at Medical Center, and he shared an apartment with another man just around the corner—a book designer who, like Gus, was separated from his wife. Every night after work Gus came to Polly’s for drinks, unless he had to go out with an author, and after drinks she cooked them dinner on her hot plate. Afterward they went to a movie or to a meeting about the Spanish Civil War or silicosis or the sharecroppers or they played Polly’s phonograph, but every week night he went home to sleep because it was simpler that way—he had his shaving things there and his pipes and the manuscripts he was reading; it did not disturb him if the book designer had women in the other bedroom, so long as Gus could have his corn flakes and coffee the next morning in his bathrobe without having to make conversation with a third party.

Saturdays he worked till noon, but they had Saturday afternoons together, to go for walks in the Italian section or in Chinatown or to the Hispanic Museum or the Barnard Cloisters. Coming home, they usually marketed, if Polly had not done it Saturday morning; Gus would buy wine on University Place, and they would walk past Wanamaker’s with bags of groceries all the way to St. Mark’s Place and cook in Polly’s landlady’s kitchen if the landlady and her husband had gone to their weekend cottage in New Jersey. Or else Gus would take Polly to a French or Spanish place for dinner and dancing. Saturday nights, he stayed at Polly’s, in her narrow bed, and Sunday mornings they had a late breakfast together and read the papers. Sunday afternoon he spent with his little boy, taking him to the Bronx Zoo or to ride on the Staten Island Ferry or climb up the Statue of Liberty or walk across the George Washington Bridge or visit the Aquarium at the Battery or the Snake House in the little zoo on Staten Island; it was Polly who planned their expeditions, but she would not go along. “Not until we are married,” she said, which always made Gus chuckle because the phrase sounded so old-fashioned, as though she were refusing him her favors until she had a wedding ring. But that was the way she felt. So Sunday afternoons Polly saw her old friends, and Sunday evenings, when Gus brought young Gus home, he stayed for a glass of beer with his wife and afterward fixed himself a sandwich in his kitchen. Sunday night, they had agreed, was his “night off” from Polly, which she used to do her laundry and wash her hair.

It was Sunday night now, and Polly’s underwear, stockings, and girdle hung in her bathroom. In the living room her English ivy and Delicious Monster had just had their weekly bath too, and her blouses were pinned to a stout cord festooned across her window; she was brushing her long damp hair with an Ogilvie Sisters hairbrush and rubbing it with a towel. On another towel a white wool sweater was stretched out to dry. Doing her laundry, Polly had found, was a working girl’s cure for depression, and Sunday nights she was depressed. The soapsuds, the steam, the smell of damp lamb’s wool, the squeak of her clean hair gradually made her feel, though, that somehow it would “all come out in the wash.” If she ironed six white blouses in her landlady’s kitchen, mended her stockings, and started on a diet to lose five pounds, Gus would decide that they could not wait any longer to get married.

Five afternoons a week, before coming to Polly’s, he had an hour with his psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst said it was a principle of analysis that the patient should not change his life situation while undergoing treatment; this would upset the analytic relation. Therefore Gus had hot done anything about getting a divorce. When he was “ready” for a divorce—the analyst’s expression—he assumed he would go to Reno for six weeks. But Reno divorces were expensive, and Polly did not know how Gus was going to pay for one, when his savings were being spent on psychoanalysis and half his salary was made over to his wife for temporary maintenance and child support. Polly had her doubts too that Gus’s wife would agree to give him a divorce. She had promised him one when he was finished with his analysis, but Polly suspected that she and the analyst were in cahoots to wear him out by attrition. He had been in analysis three months when he met Polly at Libby’s May wine party, and the analyst was quite taken aback when he heard they had started a serious relationship—he felt that Gus had broken his promise. As if a man could control falling in love!