The Group (36 page)

Polly’s family did not have an inkling of what was going on, but her friends guessed there must be a married man in the picture because she was so silent about how she was spending her time. The theory was that it must be one of the doctors at the hospital. Polly was reticent about their love, not because she was ashamed but because she could not bear the thought of advice and sympathy. The only people who knew for certain were the people who could not avoid knowing: the book designer, Polly’s landlady and her husband, the two lodgers, and Ross, her Aunt Julia’s maid, who had been in the habit of dropping in evenings to give Polly “a hand” with her knitting or sewing. Not even Miss Bisbee, Gus’s secretary, knew. Polly would not go to literary cocktail parties with Gus (“After we’re married,” she said), partly from a dread of meeting Libby but mainly from that same sense of propriety that made her balk at spending Sundays with little Gus and his father, so long as his father and mother were man and wife. Polly hated questions—the questions young Gus would ask and the questions his mother would put to him, the questions her appearance at cocktail parties would solicit from the people in Gus’s office. “When are you going to get married?” was what everyone immediately wanted to know when they saw a girl and a man in love. It was what Ross had asked, straight off, and Mr. Schneider, who did not believe in marriage, and the landlady, who belonged to a nudist group in New Jersey, and Mr. Scherbatyeff. And a truthful answer to this question led everyone at once to ask another one, as if in a single voice: why was Gus going to a psychoanalyst? What was the matter with him?

It was a question that, strangely enough, no one had ever asked about her father, when he had been “put away” in Riggs, poor darling, though her father’s disease had a name—melancholia—which would have made it easy to answer queries. If only Gus had talked to himself or refused to talk or engaged in weeping fits or what the doctors called bizarre behavior, no one would have asked what was wrong with him! But the trouble here was just the opposite. Polly could not see that there was anything the matter with Gus. He was one of the most normal men she had ever met, at least to the naked eye, which was all she had to judge with. No loathed melancholy or black bile or antic disposition. He liked to dance cheek to cheek and play tennis and drive a car—he had an old Hupmobile jacked up in a garage in Brooklyn. Like most New Englanders, he was cautious with the pennies, but he always went to the best shops when buying presents—he had given Polly a beautiful handbag, some carved lapis lazuli earrings, and a soft blue sweater from Brooks Brothers; every week, practically, he brought her flowers, and when they went out to dance on Saturday he bought her violets or a camellia. On the other hand, he did not care what he wore; he had two rather threadbare suits bought off the rack at Wanamaker’s, a tweed jacket, flannels, and some bow ties. He had Blue Cross hospital insurance and went to the dentist three times a year to get his teeth cleaned. He watched his waistline and checked up on young Gus’s visits to the pediatrician, who was one of the best younger men in the city, like Gus’s analyst, who had been Brill’s favorite pupil. Though he was only thirty, he was a second father to his authors, very patient in listening to their troubles and getting them lawyers, theatre tickets, discount books, an apartment, a secretary, a girl friend—whatever they needed. He had been active in starting the unit of the Book and Magazine Guild in his office, though he could not be a union member himself because he was considered part of management.

He smoked union-made cigarettes when he did not smoke a pipe and tried to look for the union label on whatever he bought; unlike Priss, however, he was a secret believer in name brands, like Arrow shirts and Firestone tires and Teacher’s Highland Cream and Gillette razors. He could not be persuaded by the consumer movement that something at half the price was just as good. It tickled him to watch Polly mix her powder and cold cream at home, to save money; she failed to count the cost of her labor, he pointed out.

His liking for name brands was what had sold him on Communism years ago, when he graduated from Brown spank into the depression. Shaw had already converted him to socialism, but if you were going to be a socialist, his roommate argued, you ought to give your business to the biggest and best firm producing socialism,
i.e.
, the Soviet Union. So Gus switched to Communism, but only after he had gone to see for himself. He and his roommate made a tour of the Soviet Union the summer after college and they were impressed by the dams and power plants and the collective farms and the Intourist girl guide. After that, Norman Thomas seemed pretty ineffectual. Gus never took any notice of the little splinter groups, like the Trotskyites, which Polly’s friend Mr. Schneider, across the hall, belonged to, or the Lovestoneites or the Musteites—every big movement, he said, had its share of cranks. Yet he had not joined the Party when he and his roommate got back. He did not want to hurt his father, the owner of a job-printing business in Fall River that had been in the family for four generations. The LeRoys were respected by the mill-owning families whose wedding and funeral announcements, visiting cards, dance programs, “Keep Off” signs, and foreclosure sale notices they had been printing since the Civil War; in their shop below the presses on Main Street, they also sold school supplies, Christmas cards, Valentines, and gift-wrapping paper. If Gus became an active Communist, those flinty millowners were perfectly capable of boycotting the LeRoy shop. Besides, the American Communists did not seem to Gus as responsible as the Russian ones. Instead, he married a Party member—a Jewish girl he had met on a double date at a dance at Webster Hall; she taught the first grade at a downtown progressive school.

Kay Petersen, Polly knew, would say that Gus’s attraction to Communism—and in particular to Communist women—was a sign of emotional instability. But Polly herself did not think so; she could not see the Party as the Scarlet Woman in Gus’s life. Moreover, he was phlegmatic in his sympathy. He never took part in demonstrations or marched in May Day parades or referred to the police as Cossacks; the only part of the
Daily Worker
he read was the sports page. He did not argue with the infidels, including herself, and in fact did not seem to care about spreading the faith, unlike poor Mr. Schneider, who was always trying to convert her to Trotskyism and just now was extremely exercised about the Moscow trials, which he brought up every time he met Gus on the stairs. They were too far away, Gus said, to judge the rights and wrongs of—history would have to decide. To him they seemed insignificant in comparison with the war in Spain, which was something he was really excited about.

He was busy commissioning books on Spain—an anthology of Loyalist war poetry, a picture study of the International Brigade, a new translation of
Don Quixote
. He had tried to get Hemingway to do a book on El Campesino, but unfortunately he was already signed up with Scribners, and Vincent Sheean, his other idea, did not answer his cables. He hoped for a great novel to come out of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, and at one point this winter, when they were recruiting, he decided to join up himself and slipped off during his lunch hour to have a physical, without even telling his analyst. The picture of Gus as a brave volunteer in a beret appealed to Polly; she thought he would have made an excellent officer. But when his wife heard about it (he was going to leave his life-insurance policy to take care of Gus Fourth), she accused him of irresponsibility. In Gus’s case, she said, enlisting would be an escape mechanism, which would make his action politically invalid. According to her, he was unwilling to finish his analysis and instead was running away from his real problems, which concerned her and their son, and incidentally who was going to pay the child support while Gus was fighting the Fascists or hanging around cafés in Madrid? Hearing this, Polly was sorry for his wife, in the same way that she was sorry for a person like Libby, who was always lying to herself. But then, trying to be fair, she wondered whether it was really the money or whether the money was not an excuse his wife gave herself for worrying that Gus might be killed; perhaps his wife in her way loved him more than she did, who would be quite willing to let him risk his life for a cause. Polly sympathized warmly with the Spanish Republicans and when asked about the reason for her allegiance, she would answer smiling, “I’m a Basque.” This was a reference to the fact that there was a Catholic strain in Polly’s ancestry; on her mother’s side she was an Ayer and related to Lord Acton. Politically, she and Gus were opposites; her heart hastened to the losers in any battle, and she loved small sects with quaint doctrines, like Döllinger’s Old Catholics, who denied the infallibility of the Pope, the Dukhobors, who went to Canada to escape the Czar’s military service, the virtuous Anabaptists, the Chassidic Jews, who danced and leapt for joy in Polish villages; she championed “lost” races like the Basques, with their mysterious language; she was partial to extinct and extirpated species, like the passenger pigeon, on which she had done a paper for Zoology. Not since Bonnie Prince Charlie had she cared so much for a cause as she did now for the Loyalists in Spain. She and Gus were both very generous with contributions to the Republican war effort, though Gus gave for airplanes and Polly gave for ambulances and medical supplies. Normally, she said smiling—that is, in peacetime—she was a pacifist, but in Gus’s place she would have volunteered, and she was surprised he had listened to the analyst, who told him that he would be more useful to the Spanish cause in New York than in Madrid. This might be true, but Polly could not imagine consenting to weigh yourself in the balance like that, as though you were an ingot you were hoarding. It was this side of Communism that Polly did not cotton to.

But if Polly was surprised that Gus had listened to the analyst, she was more surprised that the analyst had talked to him. “I thought they weren’t supposed to give you advice,” she said frowning. The analyst, Gus had told her, was utterly neutral; he only listened to the patient and asked an occasional question. The patient was meant to interpret himself. “That’s the theory,” Gus answered. “But he’s a human being,” he explained. “If he sees a patient about to commit suicide, naturally he steps in, as a human being.” “I should think he would step in as a doctor,” Polly said mildly. Gus shook his head. “Unh-unh,” he said. “That’s what they have to watch out for. The patient’s always trying to involve the analyst, qua analyst, in an unorthodox situation. To coax him out from behind his barrier. But the analyst has to stay behind that barrier—Rule One. If he can’t, he has to terminate the analysis. But the patients are cunning as hell. Dr. Bijur might figure, for instance, that my signing up with the Lincoln Battalion was just a trap to get him interested in my personal decisions. A play for attention.” He wrung his eyebrows. “Christ, Polly, maybe it was. Maybe I was just playing soldier.” “But were you?” cried Polly. “I believed you. Weren’t you sincere, Gus?” “How do I know?” said Gus, spreading his hands. “Good Lord!” said Polly. There it was again, that curious thing, of treating yourself as if you were a dense, opaque object. Or as if you were not you but someone else, whose motives you could only guess at. Was this strange, flat objectivity what was the matter with Gus or was it an effect of the treatment?

She did not pursue the subject. Rule Two, she knew, was that the patient was not supposed to discuss his illness with his friends or family, and this was almost the longest conversation she and Gus had ever had about his analysis—since the very first one, when he had broken it to her, after they had already slept together several times, that he was going to Dr. Bijur. Polly was a conscientious girl and she would no more have tempted Gus to talk to her about his analysis than she would have pressed sugar on a diabetic, and the result was that she was totally in the dark about what to him, no doubt, was the most vital part of his life. For if it were not the most vital part of his life, why would he be going to talk for an hour a day about it to a stranger?

In retrospect, Polly sometimes wondered whether she would have let Gus come up to her room and make love to her if he had told her ahead of time he was “in analysis.” He had told her he was married and living apart from his wife (which she already knew anyway from Libby), but not a peep about the analyst. Polly could see why; at first he did not know her well enough to tell her, and when he did know her well enough it was because they had been to bed together and then it was too late for Polly to have any choice. The die was cast, for, having let him love her, she loved him. But
if
she had known beforehand, she doubted that she would have lost her virginity with an “analysand”; she would have been afraid to.

Polly had always known that sex would mean a great deal to her. That was why she had been leery of men. She could tell from conversations with other girls in college that necking did not shake them to their foundations the way it did her when she was engaged. Several times then, she had nearly gone the limit, as they used to call it, but something had always saved her—once a campus policeman but mostly the boy himself, who had scruples. When she had broken her engagement and had to go to the infirmary, it was sex principally that tortured her. After that, she had firmly suppressed her desires, to the point of avoiding movies with kissing in them; she did not want to be “aroused.” She decided she wanted a cool, starchy independent life, with ruffles of humor like window curtains. They told her she had a sweet nature, and she made friends easily, as she could get birds to eat from her hand. Having considered her own case carefully, as well as the hereditary “taint,” she concluded that she had best live for friendship, not for love or marriage. She saw herself in later years, large and soft, as an abbess, framed in a wimple, or as an Episcopal deaconess tending the altar, dusting the organ, and visiting the sick of a parish. As it happened, she was an unbeliever, but time, she supposed, might remedy that. Her immediate danger, she saw, was that she was on the verge of becoming a “character,” and she resisted being pasted, at twenty-six, which was not yet old, in an album. Already some of her friends were treating her as a “find” they had pounced on in a thrift shop—a slightly cracked piece of old china.