The Group (48 page)

Kay tested him. “If I say no, will you take me home?” “Of course.” “All right, I’ll stay,” she decided. “Then I’d better go and have supper. You’ll come tomorrow, won’t you?” Harald promised. “In any event,” he remarked, “the psychiatrist will probably be wanting me.” “Wanting you?” Kay bridled. “They like to get other points of view on the patient. Incidentally, he’d like to talk to a few of your friends. Shall I have Norine come in the morning? She can drop in to see you afterward. And who else? Helena?” Kay stared at him. “If you tell my friends,” she said, “I’ll kill you.” Hearing what she had said, she clapped her hand to her mouth. “Of course I didn’t mean that,” she gasped. “But I beg you, Harald, don’t tell Norine. Don’t let her talk to the psychiatrist. I’ll do anything you want if you keep Norine away from here.” Heavy sobs began to shake her. “Oh, don’t be childish,” Harald said impatiently. “Save it for the psychiatrist.” The brutal tone, so soon after his apology, cut her to the heart. The nurse knocked again. “Are you coming to supper, Mrs. Petersen?” “She’s coming,” Harald answered for her. “Go wash your face. Goodbye. I’ll see you tomorrow.” The door shut.

Slowly Kay pinned the camellias to her dress. She reminded herself that she was free to leave. It was her own choice that she was staying. Unlike the other patients, she had never for a minute been out of her mind. But as she advanced to the dining room, a terrible doubt possessed her. They were using psychology on her: it was not her own choice, and she was not free, and Harald was not sorry—the psychiatrist had coached him, that was all.

Fourteen

P
RISS CROCKETT, WHO BROUGHT
Stephen to play in Central Park every morning, was surprised one June day, when she arrived pushing the stroller and followed by Stephen, to see a familiar figure seated on a bench with a baby carriage. It was Norine Schmittlapp, wearing a smart pair of slacks and black sunglasses. The hood of the carriage was down, and on the carriage mattress, which was covered with a rubber sheet, lay a naked infant, male. Priss halted; it was “her” bench Norine was occupying. She was uncertain whether Norine would recognize her; it must be five years since they had met. Norine had changed; she had put on weight and her hair was blondined. “Hi,” said Norine, looking up briefly. “Join us. This is Ichabod.” She joggled the baby carriage. Her tinted gaze sought out Stephen, who was pulling an educational toy along the walk. “Is that yours?” Priss presented her young. “Say how do you do, Stephen, to the lady.” She did not know how to introduce Norine, who evidently had remarried. Norine shook Stephen’s hand. “Norine Rogers. Glad to know you.” On her engagement finger was a huge diamond in a platinum setting, and the baby carriage was an English model with a monogram. “Do you come here every day?” she asked Priss.

They were neighbors, it seemed. She had just moved into a brownstone, between Park and Madison, that she and her husband had bought; Priss’s apartment was on Lexington and Seventy-second. “But you’re lucky,” said Priss enviously. “You must have a back yard. You don’t need to come to the Park.” She herself found it quite a chore, mornings, to push the stroller all the way from Lexington and get back in time to put Stephen’s baked potato in the oven for a twelve o’clock lunch. Norine said that her back yard was still full of glass bricks and cement-mixers. They were doing the house over, putting in a ramp where the stairs had been and a wall of glass bricks on the street side. Priss realized that Norine’s house must be the one the whole neighborhood was discussing; she wondered what Rogers Norine could have married. “My husband’s a Jew,” Norine threw out. “His people changed the name from Rosenberg. Do you mind Jews? I’m mad for them myself.” Before Priss could answer, she continued, talking in the rapid-fire way Priss remembered, as if she were dictating a letter. “Freddy’s whole tribe converted. When they changed their name. He’s a confirmed Episcopalian. I was hellbent to have him go back to the old Orthodox faith. With a prayer shawl and phylacteries. The real Mosaic law. The Reformed rite is just a nineteenth-century compromise. But an Orthodox Jew can’t marry a shiksah.” Priss was surprised to hear this. Norine nodded. “They frown on exogamy. Like the Papists. The Episcopalians have a taboo on divorce; Freddy’s minister wouldn’t marry a divorced woman. So we got a Lutheran pastor in Yorkville. Freddy’s parents expected to see a framed picture of Hitler in the dominie’s parlor.” She laughed. “Are you interested in religion?” Priss confessed that she was more interested in politics. “I’m burned out on politics,” said Norine. “Since Munich. My passion’s comparative religion. Society is finished if it can’t find its way back to God. The problem for people like us is to rediscover faith. It’s easy for the masses; they never lost it. But for the elite it’s another story.”

Her eyes fixed on Stephen. “This your only offspring?” Priss explained that she had had a series of miscarriages, but she still hoped to have more children, for it would be sad for Stephen to grow up as an only child. “Adopt some,” said Norine. “It’s the only way. If the elite can’t breed, it has to graft new stock or face extinction. Do you know that the Vassar graduate has only 2.2 children?” Priss was aware of this statistic, which had caused concern in alumnae circles—Vassar women were barely replacing themselves while the rest of the population was multiplying. “What does your husband do?” Norine demanded. “He’s a pediatrician.” “Oh,” said Norine. “What school?” Priss began to tell her where Sloan had been trained. Norine cut her off. “What school of thought. Behaviorist? Gestalt? Steiner? Klein? Anna Freud?” Priss was ashamed to say that she did not know. “He’s a medical doctor,” she said apologetically. Then she essayed a personal question of her own.

“What does
your
husband do, Norine?” Norine chuckled. “He’s a banker. With Kuhn, Loeb. He comes from old moneylending stock. From Frankfort originally. But they had a Diaspora and they’re scattered all over the place. The black sheep of the family became a Zionist and went to Palestine. They never mention his name. Freddy’s parents were trying to pass,” she went on somberly. “Like so many rich German Jews. They sent him to Choate and Princeton, where he had a searing experience with one of the clubs. When the club found out ‘Rogers’ was ‘Rosenberg,’ he was asked to resign.” Priss made a clucking sound, to which Norine replied with a short laugh. It was as if this incident gave her a peculiar kind of relish.

Priss glanced at little Ichabod, who, she observed, had been circumcised, and felt guiltily glad that Stephen did not have a Jewish father. It struck her, awful as it sounded, that if you wanted to give your child the best start in life, you would not marry a Jew. But Norine, she supposed, was dauntless on his behalf; Priss felt in awe of a person who could fasten a name like that on a baby. “Aren’t you afraid he’ll be called ‘Icky’ in school?” she said impulsively. “He’ll have to learn to fight his battles early,” philosophized Norine. “Ichabod the Inglorious. That’s what the name means in Hebrew. ‘No glory.’” She rocked the carriage.

“How old is he?” “Three months.” Priss wished Norine would raise the hood of the carriage; she feared the mid-morning sun was too strong for his little head, which had scarcely any hair yet. “Isn’t he awfully young for a sun bath?” Norine scouted the thought; she had been exposing him to the sun daily since she had brought him home from Mount Sinai. Nevertheless, she slightly raised the hood, so that his face was in the shade. “It’s O.K. here,” she observed contentedly. “No nursemaids or English nannies. The place I was yesterday, they made an awful stink because he was nude. They were afraid their starchy girls would get ideas from his little prick—weren’t they, Ichabod?” Her big hand patted his penis, which stiffened. Priss swallowed several times; she glanced uneasily in the direction of Stephen, who, happily, was chasing his ball in the grass. She was always terrified of arousing Stephen; she hated retracting his foreskin when washing him, though Sloan said she should, for hygienic reasons. But she would almost rather he was dirty than have him get an Oedipus complex from her handling him. Lately, without telling Sloan, she had been omitting this step from his bath.

“Have you got a watch?” Norine asked, yawning. Priss told her the time. “Are you nursing?” she asked, stealing an envious look at Norine’s massive breasts. “My milk ran out,” said Norine. “So did mine!” cried Priss. “As soon as I left the hospital. How long did
you
nurse?” “Four weeks. Then Freddy slept with the girl we had looking after Ichabod, and my milk went on strike.” Priss gulped; the story she had been about to relate, of how her milk had run out as soon as they gave Stephen a supplementary bottle, was hastily vetoed on her lips. “I ought to have seen it coming,” Norine went on, lighting a cigarette. “We hadn’t had real sex together for a coon’s age. You know how it is. At the end of your pregnancy it’s
verboten
and it’s
verboten
for a month after the kid’s born. Freddy got very randy. And he felt he had a rival in Ichabod. Then we hired this Irish slut. Straight off the boat. She was a cousin of Freddy’s mother’s waitress. A real Mick. Eyes put in with a sooty finger and no sexual morals. In the old sod, she’d been sleeping with her uncle; she told me that. Naturally Freddy couldn’t keep his hands off her. She had a room next to the nursery, where Freddy slept on a cot; I kept Ichabod in bed with me at night—it bushed me to get up for those 2:00
A.M.
feedings—and Freddy said he disturbed him.” Priss was sorely tempted to put in a word of guidance—did Norine not know that under no circumstances, not even in a crowded slum home, should a baby be permitted to sleep with an adult? But her shyness and fear of stammering impeded her. “Freddy,” Norine continued, “was sneaking into her room. I found out when I was making her bed. There was Freddy’s semen on the sheet. What got me was that she hadn’t had the grace to use a towel. I pulled the sheet off the bed and confronted Freddy with it while he was eating his breakfast and reading the
Wall Street Journal
. He said it was partly my fault. Instead of treating her like a servant, I’d waited on her hand and foot, so that she felt she had a right to sleep with the master: she was just as good as me. Making her bed, for instance. It was up to her to make her own bed. He’s right; I’m no good with labor. He had to put her out of the house himself. While he did, I washed the sheet in the washing machine; he said I should have left it for the laundress. We quarreled, and it affected my milk.”

“They say a shock can do that,” said Priss. “But at least Ichabod got his immunities.” Norine agreed; the damage, she said absently, would be psychic. She reached into the carriage and found a rubber pacifier, which she thrust into his mouth. Priss gazed at this article, nonplused. “Is that to keep him from sucking his thumb?” she asked. “You know, Norine, pediatricians today think it’s better to let them suck their thumbs than try to break them of the habit. What I did with Stephen was distract him gently every time he put his thumb in his mouth. But that p-p-pacifier”—the word seemed to stick in her throat—“is awfully unsanitary. And it can change the shape of his mouth. You really ought to throw it away. Sloan would be shocked if he saw it. It can be just as habit-forming as thumb-sucking.” She spoke earnestly, amazed to see a girl of Norine’s education so ignorant. Norine listened patiently. “If a kid sucks his thumb,” she said, “it’s because he’s been deprived of oral gratification. He needs his daily quota of sucking time, and he can’t get it from the bottle. So you give him a rubber tit. Don’t you, Ichabod?” She smiled tenderly at Ichabod, who indeed wore a look of bliss as he drew on the rubber teat. Priss tried to avert her eyes from the spectacle. For a child to find heaven in a dummy breast was the worst thing she could think of—worse than self-abuse. She felt there ought to be a law against the manufacture of such devices.

Stephen approached the carriage. “Wass sat?” he asked curiously. His hand went out to touch the pacifier in the baby’s mouth. Priss snatched his hand away. He continued to stare eagerly, evidently interested by the noises of content Ichabod was making. “Wass sat?” he repeated. Norine removed the pacifier from the baby’s mouth. “You want to try it?” she said kindly. She wiped it with a clean diaper and offered it to Stephen. Priss swiftly intervened. She reached into the stroller and drew out a lollipop wrapped in waxed paper. “Here!” she said. “That ‘pop’ belongs to the baby. Give it back to Mrs. Rogers. This is yours.” Stephen accepted the lollipop. Priss had discovered that a system of exchange worked very well with him; he would docilely trade a “bad” thing, like a safety pin, for a “good” thing, like a picture book, and often seemed to be unaware that a substitution had taken place.

Norine observed this little drama. “You’ve got him trained,” she said finally, with a laconic smile. “I suppose he’s trained to the toilet too.” “I’m afraid not,” said Priss, embarrassed. She lowered her voice. “I’m at my wits’ end, honestly. Of course, I’ve never punished him, the way our mothers and nurses did, when he has an ‘accident.’ But I almost wish I could spank him. Instead, I’ve done
everything
you’re supposed to. You know. ‘Observe the time of day when he has his movement and then gently put him on the toidey-seat at that time every morning. If he doesn’t do it, take him off, without any sign of displeasure. If he does do it, smile and clap your hands.’”

Norine had touched on her most sensitive point. As the wife of a pediatrician, she was bitterly ashamed that Stephen, at the age of two and a half, was not able to control his bowels. He not only made evil-smelling messes in his bed, at naptime, but he sometimes soiled his pants here in the Park, which was why she sought out this isolated bench, rather than take him to the playground. Or he did it—like last weekend—in his bathing trunks on the beach at the Oyster Bay clubhouse, in front of the whole summer colony, who were sunning and having cocktails. Sloan, even though he was a doctor, was extremely annoyed whenever Stephen did it in public, but he would never help Priss clean Stephen up or do anything to relieve her embarrassment. Last weekend, for instance, it was her young sister Linda who had come to her rescue when Stephen had got away from her and capered down the beach with his full bathing trunks. Linda had captured him and carried him into the clubhouse, where she helped Priss by washing out his pants while Priss washed him. Meanwhile Sloan had sat under an umbrella ignoring the whole episode.