The Group (7 page)

Now that Lakey was on the high seas and
she
was in bed with Dick warm beside her, Dottie ventured to try out a new theory. Could it be, she asked herself, that Dick was attracted to Lakey platonically and that with herself it was more a physical thing? Lakey was awfully intelligent and knew a lot but she was cold, most people thought. Maybe Dick only admired her beauty as an artist and liked Dottie better the other way. The idea was not very convincing, in spite of what he had said about her body surprising her and all that. Kay said that sophisticated men cared more about the woman’s pleasure than they did about their own, but Dick (Dottie coughed gently) had not seemed to be carried away by passion, even when he was exciting her terribly. A wanness crept over her as she thought of Kay. Kay would tell her bluntly that she did not have Lakey’s “candle power,” and that Dick obviously was using her as a substitute for Lakey, because Lakey was too much of a challenge,
too
beautiful and rich and fascinating for him to cope with in this bleak furnished room. “Dick wouldn’t want a girl who would involve his feelings”—she could hear Kay saying it in her loud, opinionated, Western voice—“as Lakey would be bound to do, Renfrew. You’re just an outlet for him, a one-night safety valve.” The assured words crushed Dottie like a steamroller, for she felt they were true. Kay would probably say also that Dottie had wanted to be “relieved” of her virginity and was using Dick simply as an instrument.

Was that true too—awful thought? Was that how Dick had seen her? Kay meant well, explaining things so clearly, and the terrible part was, she was usually right. Or at least she always
sounded
right, being so absolutely disinterested and unconscious of hurting your feelings. The moment Dottie let herself listen to Kay, even in imagination, she lost her own authority and became the person Kay decreed her to be: a Boston old maid with a “silver-cord” tie to her mother. It was the same with all the weaker members of the group. Kay used to take their love affairs, as Lakey once said, away from them and returned them shrunk and labeled, like the laundry. That was what had happened to Polly Andrews’ engagement. The boy she was supposed to marry had insanity in his family, and Kay had shown Polly so many charts about heredity that Polly had broken off with him and collapsed and had to go to the infirmary. And of course Kay was right; anybody would agree that Mr. Andrews was enough of a liability without marrying into another family with melancholia in the background. Kay’s advice was for Polly to live with him, since she loved him, and marry someone else later, when she wanted to have children. But Polly did not have the courage, although she wanted to terribly. The whole group, except Lakey, had thought what Kay did, at least about not marrying, but none of them had had the heart to say it, straight out, to Polly. That was usually the case: Kay came right out and said to the person what the others whispered among themselves.

Dottie sighed. She wished that Kay would not have to find out about her and Dick. But it was probably pretty inevitable, Dick being Harald’s friend. Not that Dick would tell, being a gentleman and considerate; more likely, Dottie would tell herself, for Kay was very good at getting things out of you. In the end, you told Kay, wanting to hear her opinion more than you did
not
want to hear it. You were afraid of being afraid of the truth. Besides, Dottie saw, she could not really tell Mother or not for a long time, for Mother, being a different generation, would never see it as Dottie did, no matter how hard she tried, and the difference would just make her worried and unhappy. She would want to meet Dick, and then Daddy would meet him too and start wondering about marriage, which was utterly out of the question. Dottie sighed again. She knew she would have to tell someone—not the most intimate details, of course, but just the amazing fact that she had lost her virginity—and that someone was bound to be Kay.

Then Kay would discuss her with Dick. This was the thing Dottie shrank from most; she could not bear the idea of Kay dissecting and analyzing her and explaining her medical history and Mother’s clubs and Daddy’s business connections and their exact social position in Boston, which Kay greatly overestimated—they were not “Brahmins,” horrid word, at all. A gleam of amusement appeared in Dottie’s eye; Kay was such an innocent, for all her know-it-all airs about clubs and society. Someone ought to tell her that only tiresome people or, to be frank, outsiders were concerned about such things nowadays. Poor honest Kay: five times, Dottie recalled drowsily, before she was penetrated and so much blood and pain. Didn’t Lakey say she had a hide like a buffalo? Sex, Dottie opined, was just a matter of following the man, as in dancing—Kay was a frightful dancer and always tried to lead. Mother was quite right, she said to herself comfily, as she drifted off to sleep: it was a
great
mistake to let girls dance together as they did in so many of the boarding schools of the second rank.

Three

“G
ET YOURSELF A PESSARY
.” Dick’s muttered
envoi
, as he propelled her firmly to the door the next morning, fell on Dottie’s ears with the effect of a stunning blow. Bewildered, she understood him to be saying “Get yourself a peccary,” and a vision of a coarse piglike mammal they had studied in Zoology passed across her dazed consciousness, like a slide on a screen, followed by awful memories of Krafft-Ebing and the girl who had kept a goat at Vassar. Was this some variant she ought to know about, probably, of the old-maid joke? Tears dampened her eyes, though she tried to wink them back. Evidently, Dick hated her for what had taken place between them in the night; some men were like that, Kay said, after they had yielded to their passions: “an expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” They had had the most dismal breakfast, which he had fixed, not letting her help him, on a grill in the clothes closet—scrambled eggs and coffee and the remains of a coffee ring from the bakery; no fruit or fruit juice. While they ate, he had hardly spoken; he had passed her the first section of the paper and then sat there, with his coffee, reading the sports news and the classified ads. When she had tried to give him the news section, he had impatiently pushed it back to her. Yet up to this very moment she had been telling herself that he might have just got up “on the wrong side of the bed,” as Mother said; Daddy was cross too, sometimes, in the morning. Now she saw, though, that there was no use pretending any more; she had lost him. In his dressing gown, with his hair disordered and his cruel biting smile and bitter taunts, he reminded her of someone. Hamlet—of course—putting Ophelia away from him. “Get thee to a nunnery.” “I loved you not.” But she could not say, like Ophelia, “I was the more deceived” (which was the most pathetic moment in the whole play, the class had decided), because Dick had not deceived her; it was she who had been fooling herself. She stared at him, swallowing hard; a tear slid out of one eye. “A female contraceptive, a plug,” Dick threw out impatiently. “You get it from a lady doctor. Ask your friend Kay.”

Understanding dawned; her heart did a handspring. In a person like Dick, her feminine instinct caroled, this was surely the language of love. But it was a mistake to show a man that you had been unsure of him even for a second. “Yes, Dick,” she whispered, her hand twisting the doorknob, while she let her eyes tell him softly what a deep, reverent moment this was, a sort of pledge between them. Luckily, he could never imagine the thing she had been thinking about the peccary! The happiness in her face caused him to raise an eyebrow and frown. “I don’t love you, you know, Boston,” he said warningly. “Yes, Dick,” she replied. “And you must promise me you won’t fall in love with me.” “Yes, Dick,” she repeated, more faintly. “My wife says I’m a bastard, but she still likes me in the hay. You’ll have to accept that. If you want that, you can have it.” “I want it, Dick,” said Dottie in a feeble but staunch voice. Dick shrugged. “I don’t believe you, Boston. But we can give it a try.” A meditative smile appeared on his lips. “Most women don’t take me seriously when I state my terms. Then they get hurt. In the back of their heads, they have a plan to make me fall in love with them. I don’t fall in love.” Dottie’s warm eyes were teasing. “What about Betty?” He cocked his head at the photograph. “You think I love her?” Dottie nodded. He looked very serious. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I like Betty better than I’ve liked any woman. I’ve still got hot pants for her, if you want to call that love.” Dottie lowered her eyes and shook her head. “But I won’t change my life for her, and so Betty lit out. I don’t blame her; I’d have done the same if I were made like Betty. Betty is all woman. She likes money, change, excitement, things, clothes, possessions.” He rubbed his strong jaw line with a thumb, as though he were studying a puzzle. “I hate possessions. It’s a funny thing, because you’d think I hated them because they meant stability, wouldn’t you?” Dottie nodded. “But I
like
stability; that’s just the rub!” He had become quite tense and excited; his hands flexed nervously as he spoke. To Dottie’s eyes, he suddenly appeared boyish, like the worried young lifeguards in their drifting boats at Cape Ann who sometimes dropped in at the cottage to discuss their futures with Mother. But of course that was what he must have been, once, growing up in Marblehead in the middle of the summer people; he was built like a swimmer, and she could picture him, brooding, in the lifesaving boat in one of those red jackets they wore—Mother said those boys were often marked for life by the experience of being betwixt and between,
with
the summer people but not
of
them.

“I like a man’s life,” he said. “A bar. The outdoors. Fishing and hunting. I like men’s talk, that’s never driving to get anywhere but just circles and circles. That’s why I drink. Paris suited me—the crowd of painters and newspapermen and photographers. I’m a natural exile; if I have a few dollars or francs, I’m satisfied. I’ll never pass third base as a painter, but I can draw and do nice clean work—an honest job. But I hate change, Boston, and I don’t change myself. That’s where I come a cropper with women. Women expect an affair to get better and better, and if it doesn’t they think it’s getting worse. They think if I sleep with them longer I’m going to get fonder of them, and if I don’t get fonder that I’m tiring of them. But for me it’s all the same. If I like it the first time, I know I’m going to keep on liking it. I liked you last night and I’ll keep on liking you as long as you want to come here. But don’t harbor the idea that I’m going to like you more.” A truculent, threatening note had come into his voice with the last words; he stood, staring down at her harshly and teetering a little on his slippered feet. Dottie fingered the frayed tassel of his dressing-gown sash. “All right, Dick,” she whispered.

“When you get yourself fixed up, you can bring your things here and I’ll keep them for you. Just give me a call after you’ve been to the doctor.” A breath of last night’s liquor wafted into her face; she fell back a step and averted her head. She had been hoping to know Dick better, but now, all at once, his strange philosophy of life gave her a sinking feeling. How could she fit him in this summer, for instance? He did not seem to realize that she would have to go up to Gloucester, the way she always did. If they were engaged, he could come up to visit, but of course they weren’t and never could be; that was what he was telling her. To her horror, now that he had said he wanted her on
his
terms, Dottie found herself having second thoughts: what if she had lost her virginity with a man who scared her and who sounded, from his own description, like a pretty bad hat? For a moment, Dottie felt cornered, but her training had instilled the principle that it was a mark of low breeding to consider that you might have been wrong in a person. “I can’t take you out,” he said more gently, as if he read her thoughts. “I can only ask you to come here whenever you’re in town. The welcome mat will be out. I’ve nothing but my bed to offer you. I don’t go to theatres or night clubs and very seldom to restaurants.” Dottie opened her mouth, but Dick shook his head. “I don’t like ladies who want to pay my check. What I make with my posters and commissions take care of my simple wants: my carfare, my bar bill, and a few frugal canned goods.” Dottie’s clasped hands made a gesture of pity and remorse; she had been forgetting he was poor, which was why, of course, he was so short and gruff about seeing her—it was his pride that made him talk that way. “Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “There’s an aunt up in Marblehead who comes through with a check now and then. Some day, if I live long enough, I’ll be her heir. But I hate possessions, Boston—forgive me if I think of you generically. I hate the itch to acquire. I don’t care for this kinetic society.” Dottie felt the time had come to interpose a gentle remonstrance; she thought Dick’s aunt would not altogether approve of his point of view. “But Dick,” she said quietly, “there are false possessions and true possessions. If everybody thought like you, the human race would never have got anywhere. We’d still be living in caves. Why, the wheel wouldn’t even have been invented! People need an incentive, maybe not a money incentive …” Dick laughed. “You must be the fiftieth woman who has said that to me. It’s a credit to universal education that whenever a girl meets Dick Brown she begins to talk about the wheel and the lever. I’ve even had a French prostitute tell me about the fulcrum.” “Good-bye, Dick,” Dottie said quickly. “I mustn’t keep you from your work.” “Aren’t you going to take the phone number?” he demanded, shaking his head in mock reproach. She handed him her little blue leather address book, and he wrote down his name and his landlady’s telephone number in heavy drawing pencil with a flourish; he had very striking handwriting. “Good-bye, Boston.” He took her long chin between his thumb and forefinger and waggled it back and forth, absently. “Remember: no monkey business; no falling in love. Honor bright.”

Notwithstanding this agreement, Dottie’s heart was humming happily as she sat, three days later, beside Kay Petersen, in the woman doctor’s office suite. Actions spoke louder than words, and whatever Dick might say, the fact remained that he had sent her here, to be wedded, as it were, by proxy, with the “ring” or diaphragm pessary that the woman doctor dispensed. With her hair freshly waved and her complexion glowing from a facial, she wore a look of quiet assurance, the look of a contented matron, almost like Mother and her friends. Knowledge was responsible for her composure. Kay would hardly believe it, but Dottie, all by herself, had visited a birth-control bureau and received a doctor’s name and a sheaf of pamphlets that described a myriad of devices—tampons, sponges, collar-button, wishbone, and butterfly pessaries, thimbles, silk rings, and coils—and the virtues and drawbacks of each. The new device recommended to Dottie by the bureau had the backing of the whole U.S. medical profession; it had been found by Margaret Sanger in Holland and was now for the first time being imported in quantity into the U.S.A., where our own manufacturers could copy it. It combined the maximum of protection with the minimum of inconvenience and could be used by any woman of average or better intelligence, following the instructions of a qualified physician.