The Group (50 page)

“Do you ever hear from her?” asked Norine. “Not for a long time,” said Priss. “Not since she went out West. It must be over a year.” Mutely, Priss reproached herself for not having written. “I see Harald sometimes,” Norine volunteered in her uninflected tones. “Oh. What is he doing?” “The same. He’s back on his feet again. He took Kay’s breakdown and their separation pretty hard. God, how that man suffered!”

Priss hesitated. “But was it really a breakdown? Polly Ridgeley—Polly Andrews; you remember her—always says it wasn’t. That she got worse in the hospital.” “Did you see her there?” asked Norine somberly. Priss had not. “I did,” said Norine. “The doctors sent for me right away. To get a line on her. I was supposed to be her best friend. When I went to her room, she was completely withdrawn. Told me to go away. She had persecution delusions that focused on me. The doctors felt there was some Lesbian attachment. It’s a funny thing about paranoids; they always feel they’re being persecuted by a member of their own sex. Who’s really their love-object. When I finally got her to talk, it turned out she felt I’d betrayed her by discussing her with the psychiatrists. She didn’t seem to bear any grudge against Harald, though he went there practically every day for an interview. He was lacerated with guilt because he’d treated her like hell toward the end, not understanding that her aberrations were clinical. The layman never realizes that about a person he’s close to.”

“But what was really the matter?” said Priss. “
I
understood that she went there through some sort of mix-up and stayed because it was a rest home where she could work things out, away from Harald. I gathered he was pretty much at fault.” “That was the cover story,” said Norine. “They never settled on a final diagnosis. But a lot of basic things were the matter. Sex. Competitiveness with men. An underlying Lesbian drive that was too firmly repressed. Thwarted social strivings. She made it at Vassar with you people in the South Tower. But she never could make it again. So she transferred all her ambitions to Harald, and the insensate pressure of that was too much for him. She was killing the goose that ought to have laid the golden eggs. And all the time she was driving him to make money, she was ruthlessly undercutting him because of her penis-envy. Plus a determination to punish him for not giving her a vicarious success. Harald saw it all better himself after a couple of sessions with the doctors. I cleared up a few points for them and I got Put, my ex-husband, to go around and talk to them too. He was brilliant on the subject of Kay’s spending money. He gave an unforgettable picture of her delusions of wealth. Comparing the way she lived with the way we lived, though Put was working and Harald was practically on the dole.”

“Don’t you think,” said Priss, “that the depression had something to do with it? If she’d married Harald when the economy was normal, he would have had work, and their standard of living would have corresponded with their income. Kay’s false p-p-premise was assuming that Harald would have full employment. So she contracted debts. But that was a common pattern. And the theatre was slow to feel the effects of Recovery. If they’d married a little later, there would have been the Federal Theatre. But the idea of a works program for the arts didn’t come till ’35, unfortunately. Roosevelt was very late recognizing the need for job security for artists and performers.”

“So you see it as an economic tragedy.” “Yes. The high divorce rate in our class—” “With the New Deal as the
deus ex machina
,” interrupted Norine. “Arriving too late to supply the happy ending.” She chuckled. “You may have a point. As a matter of fact, Harald’s working with the Federal Theatre now. If Congress doesn’t kill it. Just when he’s got his chance as a director.” Priss’s brow wrinkled. “I’m afraid Congress
will
kill it, Norine. Poor Harald! He does have bad luck. It’s uncanny.” She shivered in her seersucker frock. Norine agreed. “Potentially, he’s a great man, Harald.” They had reached the corner of Seventy-second and Park. “Poor Kay!” sighed Priss again, resolved to write to her this afternoon while Stephen was napping. “It was medieval of Macy’s to fire her because she’d had a breakdown. It ought to have been treated as ordinary sick leave. And then to be dispossessed from their apartment, on top of that.” “Macy’s gave her severance pay,” observed Norine. Priss shook her head sorrowfully, putting herself in Kay’s place. No wonder, she thought, Kay had yielded and gone back to Utah when her father came to get her; everything in the East had failed her. “Her whole house of cards …” she muttered, staring down Park Avenue.

“Why don’t you come home with me?” Norine suddenly proposed. “We’ll have some coffee.” “I have to get Stephen’s lunch,” explained Priss. “We’ll feed him,” said Norine hospitably. “We’ve got a lamb chop around somewhere and some lettuce. Can he eat that?” Priss was tempted. At home she too had a lamb chop and fresh spinach and his potato waiting to be cooked, and she had made him tapioca this morning with fluffy egg white. But she was flattered to discover that she had not bored Norine and a little tired of the monotony of her life. Since she had given up her job, before Stephen was born, she seldom saw anyone “different.” “We have three cats,” Norine said to Stephen. “And a basket full of kittens.” This decided Priss; animals, she felt, were important to a child, and Sloan would not let them keep one in the apartment because of allergies.

Norine’s house had a red door. Workmen were still finishing the wall of glass brick. Inside, a ramp, freshly painted, ran up to the upper floors. A gaunt manservant in shirt sleeves appeared to wheel the carriage, with Ichabod in it, upstairs. This arrangement seemed to Priss very practical: bumping a carriage up and down stairs was a nuisance and to leave it blocking the entry was a nuisance too; then too when Ichabod was bigger he could not fall down a ramp. She was impressed by the house, which struck her as comfortable; it only looked strange from the street, and you could say that the other houses were out of step, not Norine’s. The thing that surprised her was that Norine could have a house like this and be against progress at the same time. But Norine explained that it was “classical modern.”

In the living room, which was on the second floor, two walls were painted dark red; the glass bricks from the street let in a filtered light, and a short inside wall of glass bricks half shut off a bar, which was trimmed with chromium. There were round glass tables with chromium trim and big cream-colored fleecy sofas. Great glass bowls were filled with dogwood, which proved, on closer examination, to have paper flowers stuck on the branches. In the library there was a big phonograph, a set of drums, and a white piano, like in a night club. Large balloon brandy glasses, containing the dregs of brandy, still stood on the piano. The rooms were lit by indirect lighting, hidden in troughs, and the floors were covered from wall to wall with very thick cream-colored carpeting. Everything was expensive and in what Priss recognized as “good taste.” It was only that to Priss, who was small, all the furniture seemed very large—giants’ furniture. When Norine settled her at one end of a deep sofa in the living room, she felt like Goldilocks in the biggest of the three bears’ beds.

Stephen had been led away by the manservant, to see the kittens, who lived in the laundry on the ground floor. “Coffee will be here in a minute,” said Norine, planting herself at the opposite end of the sofa. “Unless you can’t stand it reheated.” She placed a big glass ashtray, like a tub, between them, opened a cigarette box, took off her sunglasses and shoes. “They’ll keep Stephen downstairs,” she said. “Now we can talk.” She crossed her legs under her in the black linen slacks. “Maybe you’ll be surprised to hear that I was madly in love with Harald. For four years. I never let it interfere with my relation with Kay. I married Freddy when I saw it was hopeless. It had always been hopeless, but I kidded myself.” She spoke in a dry voice, smoking rapidly, and rocking herself back and forth on her haunches; her lethargy had vanished. “We had a few rolls in the hay years ago—nothing much. Then for him it was over: Harald is like that. But he kept coming around, as a friend; he made me his confidante, told me all about his other women. Did you know he had other women?” Priss nodded. “Did he ever make a pass at you?” “No. But he did at Dottie. After she was married. He tried to make an assignation with her.” “Women were necessary to him,” Norine said. “But I thought I was special. I figured he was laying off me because of Kay, because he respected our relationship. Every now and then, he used to undress me and study my body. Then he’d slap my flank and go home. Or off to some other woman. Afterward, he’d tell me about it. Whenever he slept with a woman, he told me. What he didn’t tell me, though, was about the women he didn’t sleep with. I wasn’t the only one, I found out. He went around town undressing his old flames and then leaving them. Just to know they were available. Like somebody checking stock. And all his old mistresses were in love with him. At least all the ones I knew. Harald has great charisma. He could have been a monk.”

The gaunt butler came in with a tray on which were two outsized coffee cups, a tarnished silver pot, and a cream and sugar service. The sugar was wrapped in paper marked “Schrafft’s.” “I can’t get used to being rich,” Norine sighed. “I always take the sugar they give you home with me when I have a cup of coffee at Schrafft’s counter. But the help can’t be bothered to unwrap them. Freddy is mortified.” The butler withdrew. “Perkins!” Norine called after him. “Empty this ashtray, will you?” He took the big tub and brought a fresh one. “I have to keep after him about that,” Norine said. “Freddy’s hell on emptying ashtrays. It’s funny, anything he’s touched he wants to have taken away and washed.”

Priss had become conscious, during this conversation, that the back of her skirt was damp and getting damper. She moved from one buttock to the other, shifting her weight. Then she touched the cream-colored cushion. It was distinctly wet. At the same moment Norine explored the seat of her linen slacks. “Oh, God!” she said. “They’ve done it again. They must have washed these cushions with soapsuds while I was out. Freddy’s giving everybody here a washing complex.” She laughed. “Freddy’s father got an attack of rheumatism the other night from the damp slip cover he sat on in the dining room.” Priss stood up; her skirt had a great wet stain. “Perkins!” Norine went to the door and called downstairs. “Bring us a couple of bath towels, will you?” The butler came in with two huge monogrammed towels and spread them at either end of the sofa for the two young women to sit down on. “Thanks,” said Norine. Perkins left. “Tell me”—she turned to Priss—“do you say ‘thank you’ to a servant? Freddy says you’re not supposed to thank them; waiting on you is their duty.” “You don’t thank them when they serve you at table,” said Priss. “But if they do some special errand for you, like bringing those towels, you do. And you usually say ‘please,’” she added discreetly, “if you ask them for something special. I mean, you might say, ‘Will you serve Mr. Rogers the roast again?’ But if you asked a maid to bring you a handkerchief or your pocketbook, you’d say ‘please.’” “That’s what I thought,” said Norine. “Freddy’s wrong. I guess I’ll have to get
Emily Post
. At my grandmother’s, I remember, we always said ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ but they were German—my father’s people. The help was like part of the family. I don’t know the rules of New York society like you.”

Priss was embarrassed; she was sure that Freddy knew as much as she did. It was just that Norine had failed to understand the fine points. The butler reappeared. He murmured something in Norine’s ear. “Oh, O.K.,” she said, glancing in Priss’s direction. “Do something about it. Please.” “What did he say?” asked Priss, feeling that it had to do with her. Perkins waited. “Stephen shat,” Norine said casually. Priss leapt to her feet, turning all the colors. “I’m coming,” she said to the butler. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” “Perkins can tend to it,” said Norine, firmly reseating Priss on the sofa. “Or Ichabod’s nurse’ll do it. Just have his pants washed out and put a diaper on him,” she said to the man. Too willingly, Priss gave in. Stephen’s disgrace and the strange past tense of that word, which she had never heard used before in regular conversation, even in the present (let alone by a woman and before a servant!), had left her giddy. Could that be the right form, she asked herself curiously. It sounded like “begat” in the Bible—archaic. Her mind, blushing for itself, tried out other possible past forms.

“Where was I?” said Norine. “Oh, Harald. Well, I was mad about him. But he was fixated on Kay. I never could grasp that, exactly. All the psychiatrists at the hospital would say was that was a ‘certain bond.’ ‘Mutual dependency.’ Harald always talked about her vitality. He thought her aggressive drives were connected with the Life Force—he’s never outgrown Shaw. Do you think she’s more vital than I am?” Priss did not want to answer this question. “Kay has a great deal of energy,” she said. “And she had a great belief in Harald. Don’t you think that was the principal thing? And then—I don’t want to be unkind, but Kay was the family breadwinner.” “Harald could have had a dozen rich women,” declared Norine. “And I would have scrubbed floors for him myself. Or worked as a waitress or a taxi-dance girl. It was no sacrifice for Kay to punch the time clock at Macy’s. She liked it. While I was ready to sacrifice everything.”

Tears came into her tawny eyes. “Oh, don’t say that, Norine!” begged Priss, touched by these tears almost to the point of confidence herself. She did not recommend sacrifice, having meekly given up her job and her social ideals for Sloan’s sake. It was now too late, because of Stephen, but she was convinced she had made a mistake. Sloan would be far happier himself if she were where she longed to be—in Washington, as a humble cog in the New Deal, which he hated—and he could boast of “my Bolshevik wife.” He had been proud of her when she was with the N.R.A., because she had had gumption, and now even that was gone.

“Yes!” said Norine, with conviction. “And I’d still sacrifice everything. All Freddy’s shekels.” She looked bleakly around at her possessions. “You don’t mean everything,” said Priss firmly. “What about Ichabod?” Norine lit a cigarette. “Christ, I’d forgotten Ichabod. No. You’re right. I’ve given hostages to fortune.
A
hostage. Harald would never take on another man’s kid.” She gave a hoarse cough. “And he’s not partial to the Chosen People. To him, Ichabod is a little Yid.” Priss was shocked by Norine’s language; perhaps it was different when you were married to a Jew; perhaps that gave you a sort of license, the way Negroes could call each other “nigger.” But it made Priss highly uncomfortable. She set her coffee cup down. Norine smoked in silence, evidently despondent. Priss regretted having come home with her; the invitation, she now recognized, had just been a pretext to talk about Harald. Like all acts of self-indulgence, it had left Norine now, probably, wishing she hadn’t. Responsively, Priss’s own conscience stirred; she felt she ought not to have brought Stephen to this strange house. Sloan would disapprove. The Lord knew what they would be giving Stephen to eat downstairs—something bad for him, no doubt. And he would be late getting home for his rest.