The Group (41 page)

Eventually, of course, he learned about Gus (“That Stalinist,” he called him), from Mr. Schneider or Mr. Scherbatyeff or the landlady—Polly never knew exactly. The people in the house believed that Polly had sent Gus away when she knew her father was coming, but Polly was too honest to let her father think that she had sacrificed love to family duty, and one night she told him the true story. The fact that Gus had been unequal to getting a divorce increased Mr. Andrews’ contempt for him. “Are you still pining for that Stalinist publisher?” he asked, if Polly was quiet.

Polly no longer pined, but she felt that her fate was sealed the night she got her father’s letter. Fate had sent her father as a sign that it would be kind to her so long as she did not think of men or marriage. Gus had called her, as he promised, at the end of that first week; when the buzzer had rung, Mr. Andrews had gone to the telephone. “A man wants to talk to you,” he reported, and Polly, feeling weak, went to the phone on the landing. “Who was that?” said Gus. “That was my father,” said Polly. “He’s come to stay with me.” There was a long silence. “Does he know?” said Gus. “No.” “Oh, good. Then I guess I’d better stay away.” Polly said nothing. “I’ll call you again next week,” he said. He called, to say that he was moving back to his apartment. “Is your father still there?” “Yes.” “I’d like to meet him some time.” “Yes,” said Polly. “Later.” After he had hung up, she remembered that she ought to have asked him if he had “unblocked.”

Once he had moved, she lost hope of running into him on the street some morning or evening; his own apartment was on the other side of town, in Greenwich Village. Yet she wondered about this hope, for she remembered, quite clearly, the thrill of fear that had gone through her when her father had called her to the telephone.
She had been afraid that Gus would tell her he wanted her back.
If he had, what would she have done? At the same time, paradoxically, she still felt their love affair had not quite finished: it lived somewhere underground, between them, growing in the dark as people’s hair and fingernails grew after their death. She was sure she would meet him again somewhere, some day. This presentiment too was tainted with dread.

When her father became a Trotskyite, she took a defiant pleasure in the thought that the two might meet—on opposite sides of a picket line. And her father’s side would be the
right
side. She imagined her father trying to sell him a copy of the
Socialist Appeal
outside some rally for Spain. Gus would shake his head brusquely, and he would be
wrong
, because he was afraid to read what the other side said, and Mr. Schneider was not afraid to read the
Daily Worker
from cover to cover every day. If it came to the picket lines, she was a Trotskyite too.

But when the two did meet, it was not in the political arena. It was in the ping-pong bar one Saturday afternoon. Polly, luckily, had stayed home to listen to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. “I met that Stalinist,” Mr. Andrews said, coming home with a shopping basket full of groceries. “LeRoy. Beat him two sets out of three.” Polly was pleased; she would have hated it if Gus had beaten her father. “What was he doing there?” “He came in with a chap called Jacoby, another Stalinist. A book designer. Your friend has taken up ping-pong to lose weight, he says. They’re probably infiltrating that bar.” “How did you know he was he?” said Polly. “I didn’t. He knew I was I.” He laughed gently. “I’m well known there. Eccentric Henry Andrews. Decayed gentleman. Used to play tennis with Borotra. Now lives with his beautiful daughter, Polly, on East Tenth Street. Trotskyist agent and saboteur.” “Oh, Father!” said Polly impatiently. “You think they came there because of you?” “Of course.” “Did you talk about politics?” “No. We talked about you.” “You didn’t—?” Mr. Andrews shook his head. “
He
brought you up. He asked if I had a daughter Polly. Then a great many other tiresome questions. How were you? What were you doing? Did you still have the same job? Were you still living in the same place? I told him your mother and I were divorced.” “What did he say?” “That it must have been a shock for you.” “What did you think of him?” “Ordinary,” said Mr. Andrews. “Sadly ordinary. A dull dog. Not a bad fellow, though, Polly. He took losing well, at any rate. I think he was in love with you. That makes him worse, of course. If he dropped you because he was tired of you or wasn’t really attracted, I could sympathize. But this poor chap is a dangerous neurotic.”

Polly laughed. “So you saw that, Father. I never could. He always seemed so normal.” “It’s the same thing,” said her father, putting the groceries away. “All neurotics are petty bourgeois. And vice versa. Madness is too revolutionary for them. They can’t go the whole hog. We madmen are the aristocrats of mental illness. You could never marry that fellow, my dear. He probably knew that himself.”

“I can never marry,” said Polly. “Nonsense,” said Mr. Andrews. “I intend to find you a husband. For purely selfish reasons. I need a son-in-law to support me in my old age. I don’t want to crawl back to Kate.” “You’ll stay with me. I’ll take care of you.” “No, thank you, my dear. I don’t want to be the companion of an embittered old maid.” Polly was hurt. “If you sacrifice your youth to me, you’ll be embittered,” said Mr. Andrews. “Or you ought to be. But if I find you a nice husband, you’ll be grateful. Both of you. You’ll keep a spare room for me and take me as a tax deduction.”

Polly bit her lip. When her father used the word “selfish,” he was speaking the truth. He was selfish; both her parents were selfish. Loving him, she did not mind. Selfish people, she felt, were more fun to be with than unselfish people. If her father had been mild and self-effacing, she would have hated living with him. Instead, he was mild and self-willed. He liked contriving little surprises for her and doing her little courtesies, but it was he who planned their life, like a child playing house. He was hard to circumvent, once he had an idea in his head, and he was quite capable of gently forcing her to marry to provide a home for his old age. And in fact he had a point; she did not know how else she would be able to support him. She could not give him back to her mother—the divorce had taken care of that. It was not that she felt “saddled” with him; only she did not see how her salary would keep both of them in the style her father liked or how she would ever earn a great deal more than she did. Mrs. Andrews helped by sending eggs and poultry from the farm—“my alimony payments,” her father called them. Aunt Julia helped; she had given them bed linen and blankets and, as usual, she gave Polly clothes, which Polly and Ross fixed over. But with her father on the scene, Polly had less time for dressmaking and moreover she needed more dresses; if people were coming, he would not let her appear in just a blouse and skirt—“Put on something pretty,” he would say. That he was thinking of her and not of himself made his thoughtlessness harder to bear.

It was the same with the household money. Every week Polly gave him an allowance, and every week he overspent it and had to ask her for more. And again it was not for himself, but for treats for her and their friends. Knowing him, as the autumn days passed, Polly grew afraid of Christmas. She had decreed that all their presents had to be homemade, and by that she meant little things like penwipers. During her vacation, on the farm, she had made jellies out of crabapples and mint and thyme and rosemary, which she intended as presents for their friends and relations, and she was going to make her pomander balls again; at work, she was knitting a muffler for her father and for her mother she had bought a length of cerise jersey, on which she was sewing bows of colored velvet ribbon for an evening scarf—she had got the idea from
Vogue
. But to her father “homemade” meant that greenhouse, which he declared he was going to putty together with his own hands; he claimed at first that the sun would heat it, but lately he had been deep in conference with a plumber about how to maintain a temperature of fifty degrees, night and day. And of course he justified it all as an economy: Polly would have flowering plants from cuttings all winter long for the house, and they could force hyacinths and crocuses for Easter to give their friends. In the long run, it would “pay for itself,” an expression he had grown attached to.

Polly did not want that greenhouse, much as she loved flowers, any more than her mother would have wanted peacocks, and she was trying to divert Mr. Andrews’ inventive powers to making simply some glass shelves that he could run across the window like a plant cupboard. Mr. Andrews said that was a commonplace of modern design, and in the end, Polly supposed, she would have to ask the landlady to put her foot down. She hated to go behind her father’s back, but that was what young Dr. Ridgeley said she must do when it came to money matters.

They had talked again about her father, after Jim Ridgeley had come to lunch one Sunday, and he had asked her, straight off, whether Mr. Andrews had become very openhanded lately. This, it seemed, was one of the signs of the onset of a manic attack. It would be wise, he suggested, to close her charge accounts and to warn tradespeople against giving her father credit. Polly did not have any charge accounts—only a D.A. at Macy’s, and besides, she felt Jim Ridgeley was looking at her father too clinically. He did not understand that a person who had had an independent income for most of his life could not grasp, really, what being poor meant. Polly grasped it, because she was “a child of the depression,” but her father still felt that prosperity was just around the corner. That was why, to him, the “economies” he made were a kind of play—an adventure, like when the power failed in the country and you used candles and oil lamps and drew your water from the well. Her father, in financial matters, always expected the power to come on again. This was a delusion, but a delusion shared by many people, including, Polly noted, quite a few of her classmates.

As for the delusion that spending was saving, this too, Polly observed, was quite widespread; all the advertisements tried to make you feel that. Many people too, as they grew older, became obsessed, like her father, with bargains. No matter how much money they had. Aunt Julia had reached that stage and was always buying useless articles because she had seen them at a sale. Every January, for example, she “replenished” her linen closet at the white sales, even though the sheets and towels and pillow cases she had bought the previous January had never been used. Yet Aunt Julia was perfectly sane.

Except for a big item like the greenhouse, Polly excused her father. It was not his fault that two could not live as cheaply as one. Their problem, she decided, was to find another source of income. Last week, she had gone to the Morris Plan and borrowed some money on her salary, and the experience had frightened her. She felt as if she were taking the first step downward into vice or ruin. The interest rate shocked her and confirmed her instinct that there was something actually immoral about the transaction—a kind of blackmail; the interest, she sensed, was hush money. No questions asked. And in fact it was to avoid questions that she had gone to the Morris Plan people, whose ad she had seen on the bus. She could have asked Aunt Julia, but Aunt Julia would have exacted “a serious talk” from her, wanted to see her budget—where was the money going?—and would at once have started blaming her father. And supposing his carelessness about money
were
a part of his illness, he ought not to be reproached for it, Polly felt—only protected. She did not mention the loan to him.

But how was she going to pay it back? To pay it back, they would have to spend even less than they had been doing, but the reason for the loan was that already they were spending more than their income. Aunt Julia’s Christmas check would not make up the difference. There were so many little things that added up: when they had calculated the rent on the apartment, they had forgotten that, with an apartment, they would have to pay the gas and electricity too.

Polly had been casting about in her mind for ways of supplementing her pay. She thought of needlework or of marketing her herbal jellies and pomander balls through the Woman’s Exchange. She and her father could make plum puddings or fruit cakes. But when she figured out one day at lunch the profit on a jar of rosemary jelly that would retail, say, at twenty cents a jar, she saw that with the cost of the jars, the sugar, the labels, and the shipping, she would have to make five hundred jars to earn $25, and this on the assumption that the fruit and herbs and cooking gas were free. She tried the pomander balls. What could they retail for? Fifty cents? That was too high, but it took her an evening to make six of them, and there was the cost of the oranges and the orris root and the cloves and the ribbons, not to mention the sore thumb she got from pushing in the cloves. It would be the same with needlework. For the first time, she understood the charms of mass production. Her conclusion was that it was idle to think that a person could make money by using her hands in her spare time: you would have to be an invalid or blind to show a profit. She had a vision of herself and her father, both blind or bedridden, supported by a charity, happily weaving baskets and embroidering tablecloths. Useful members of society.

For weeks she had been preoccupied with money-making schemes. She sent in solutions to the contests in the
Post
. She asked her father whether he would like to dictate a cookbook to her, giving his favorite French recipes; Libby could market it for them. But the notion of sharing his receipts did not appeal to her father, and he did not like Libby. She wondered whether, if someone gave them the capital, she and her father could open a small restaurant. Or whether she could make a cucumber skin cream and sell the formula to Elizabeth Arden. She glanced through the alumnae notes of the Vassar magazine for inspiration, but most alumnae described themselves as happy with their “volunteer work” or heading a Girl Scout group; a few were doing part-time teaching, one was a cowgirl, and one was walking dogs. It occurred to her that her father might be called to do jury duty, which made her smile; he would be such an unusual juror. This led to the picture of him as a professional mourner—but did they have them in America?—or a member of an opera claque. He could sit in the evenings with children, for he was a very good storyteller: why had no one thought of that as an occupation? She could quit her job, and he and she could hire out as cook and chambermaid.