The Group (8 page)

This article, a rubber cap mounted on a coiled spring, came in a ranges of sizes and would be tried out in Dottie’s vagina, for fit, wearing comfort, and so on, in the same way that various lenses were tried out for the eyes. The woman doctor would insert it, and having made sure of the proper size, she would teach Dottie how to put it in, how to smear it with contraceptive jelly and put a dab in the middle, how to crouch in a squatting position, fold the pessary between thumb and forefinger of the right hand, while parting the
labia majora
with the left hand, and edge the pessary in, so that it would snap into place, shielding the cervix, and finally how to follow it with the right middle finger, locate the cervix or soft neck of the uterus and make certain it was covered by the rubber. When this process had been rehearsed several times, to the watching doctor’s satisfaction, Dottie would be taught how and when to douche, how much water to use, the proper height for the douche bag, and how to hold the labia firmly around the lubricated nozzle in order to get the best results. As she was leaving the office, the nurse would present her with a Manila envelope containing a tube of vaginal jelly and a small flat box with Dottie’s personalized contraceptive in it. The nurse would instruct her how to care for the pessary: to wash it after each use, dry it carefully, and dust it with talcum before returning it to its box.

Kay and Harald had just about fainted when they heard what Dottie had been up to, behind their back. She came to see them in their apartment, bringing a Georgian silver creamer for a wedding present, just the sort of thing an old aunt would have inflicted on you, and a bunch of white peonies; Kay could not have been more disappointed when she thought that for the same money they could have had something plain and modern from Jensen’s Danish shop. Then, when Harald went to the kitchen to start their supper (minced sea clams, the new canned kind, on toast), Dottie had quietly told Kay, who wanted to know what she had been doing, that she had taken Dick Brown for her lover. Coming from Dottie, that imperial phrase was simply perfect; Kay immediately saved it to tell Harald. It had happened only the night before, it seemed, in that studio room of Dick’s, and already, today, Dottie had scurried around to the birth-control bureau and got all this literature, which she had with her in her pocketbook. Kay did not know what to say, but her face must have shown how appalled she was. She thought Dottie must be insane. Underneath that virile mask, which was what Harald called it, Dick Brown was a very warped personality, a dipsomaniac and a violent misogynist, with a terrible inferiority complex because of what had happened with his socialite wife.
His
motives were plain enough; he was using Dottie to pay back society for the wound it had inflicted on his ego—Kay could hardly wait till she could hear how Harald would analyze it, when they were alone. But in spite of her impatience, she asked Dottie to stay for supper with them, greatly to Harald’s surprise, when he came in with the tray of drinks: after Harald had gone to the theatre, Dottie would be bound to tell more. “I
had
to ask her,” she apologized to Harald, in a quick exchange in the kitchen. She put her lips to his ear. “An awful thing has happened, and we’re responsible! Dick Brown has seduced her.”

Yet every time she looked at Dottie, sitting in their living room, so serene and conventional in her pearls and dressmaker suit, with white touches, and smart navy-blue sailor, sipping her Clover Club cocktail out of the Russel Wright cup and wiping a mustache of egg white from her long upper lip with a cocktail napkin, she just could not picture her in bed with a man. Afterward, Harald said that she seemed quite an appetizing piece, in her chipmunk style, with her brown friendly eyes gleaming with quiet fun and her lashes aflutter whenever she looked at him. What he did not see was that a lot of it was clothes, for, thanks to a clever mother, Dottie dressed to perfection: she was the only one of the Boston contingent at Vassar who knew better than to wear tweeds and plaid mufflers, which made the poor things look like gaunt, elderly governesses out for a Sunday hike. But, according to Harald, her deep-bosomed figure, as revealed by her bias-cut blouse, gave promise of sensuality. Probably it meant something, Kay could not deny it, that it was Dick himself, on his own initiative, it seemed, who had told her to go and get fitted with a pessary!

“He said to consult
me
?” Kay repeated, wondering and somewhat flattered, after Harald had gone and they were washing the dishes. She had always thought Dick did not like her. The fact was that, though she knew about pessaries, she herself did not possess one. She had always used suppositories with Harald, and it embarrassed her a little now to have to confess this to Dottie, who seemed to have forged ahead of her so surprisingly and after only one night. …She envied Dottie’s enterprise in going to the birth-control bureau; until she was married, she herself would never have had the nerve. Dottie wanted to know whether Kay thought it was a good sign, Dick’s saying that to her, and Kay had to admit that on the surface it was; it could only mean that Dick was expecting to sleep with her regularly, if you thought
that
was good. Examining her own emotions, Kay found she was piqued; it nettled her to guess that Dottie might have been better than
she
was in bed. Still, truth compelled her to tell Dottie that if it were only a halfhearted affair, Dick would just use condoms (the way Harald had at first) or practice
coitus interruptus
. “He must like you, Renfrew,” she declared, shaking out the dish mop. “Or like you enough anyway.”

That was Harald’s verdict too. Riding on the top of a Fifth Avenue bus, on the way to the doctor’s office, Kay repeated to Dottie what Harald had said of the etiquette of contraception, which, as he explained it, was like any other etiquette—the code of manners rising out of social realities. You had to look at it in terms of economics. No man of honor (which Dick, in Harald’s opinion, was) would expect a girl to put up the doctor’s fee, plus the price of the pessary and the jelly and the douche bag unless he planned to sleep with her long enough for her to recover her investment. Of that, Dottie could rest assured. A man out for a casual affair found it simpler to buy Trojans by the dozen, even though it decreased his own pleasure; that way, he was not tied to the girl. The lower classes, for instance, almost never transferred the burden of contraception to the woman; this was a discovery of the middle class. A workingman was either indifferent to the danger of conception or he mistrusted the girl too much to leave the matter in her hands.

This mistrust, Harald said, which was deep in the male nature, made even middle-class and professional men wary of sending a girl for a pessary; too many shotgun weddings had resulted from a man’s relying on a woman’s assurance that the contraceptive was in. Then there was the problem of the apparatus. The unmarried girl who lived with her family required a place to keep her pessary and her douche bag where her mother was not likely to find them while doing out the bureau drawers. This meant that the man, unless
he
was married, had to keep them for her, in his bureau drawer or his bathroom. The custodianship of these articles (Harald was so entertaining in his slow-spoken, careful, dry way) assumed the character of a sacred trust. If their guardian was a man of any delicacy, they precluded the visits of other women to the apartment, who might open drawers or rummage in the medicine cabinet or even feel themselves entitled to use the douche bag hallowed to “Her.”

With a married woman, if the affair were serious, the situation was the same: she brought a second pessary and a douche bag, which she kept in her lover’s apartment, where they exercised a restraining influence if he felt tempted to betray her. A man entrusted with this important equipment was bonded, so to speak, Harald said, like a bank employee; when he did stray with another woman, he was likely to do it in her place or in a hotel room or even a taxi—some spot not consecrated by the sacral reminders. In the same way, a married woman pledged her devotion by committing her second pessary to her lover’s care; only a married woman of very coarse fiber would use the same pessary for both husband and lover. So long as the lover had charge of the pessary, like a medieval knight with the key to his lady’s chastity belt, he could feel that she was true to him. Though this could be a mistake. One adventurous wife Harald described was said to have pessaries all over town, like a sailor with a wife in every port, while her husband, a busy stage director, assured himself of her good behavior by a daily inspection of the little box in her medicine cabinet, where the conjugal pessary lay in its dusting of talcum powder.

“Harald has made quite a study of it, hasn’t he?” commented Dottie with a demure twinkle. “I’m spoiling it,” replied Kay seriously. “The way Harald tells it, you can see the whole thing in terms of property values. The fetishism of property. I told him he ought to write it up for
Esquire
; they publish some quite good things. Don’t you think he should?” Dottie did not know what to answer; Harald’s approach, she felt, was rather “unpleasant,” so cold and cerebral, though perhaps he knew what he was talking about. It was certainly a different angle from what you got in the birth-control pamphlets.

Furthermore, Kay quoted, the disposal of the pessary and the douche bag presented a problem when a love affair was breaking up. What was the man to do with these “hygienic relics” after he or the woman tired? They could not be returned through the mail, like love letters or an engagement ring, though crude lads, Harald said, had been known to do this; on the other hand, they could not be put in the trash basket for the janitor or the landlady to find; they would not burn in the fireplace without giving off an awful smell, and to keep them for another woman, given our bourgeois prejudices, was unthinkable. A man could carry them, stuffed into a paper bag, to one of the city’s wastebaskets late at night or dump them into the river, but friends of Harald’s who had done this had actually been halted by the police. Probably because they acted so furtive. Trying to get rid of a woman’s pessary and fountain syringe, the corpus delicti of a love affair, was exactly, as Harald put it, like trying to get rid of a body. “
I
said, you could do the way murderers do in detective stories: check them into the Grand Central parcel room and then throw away the check.” Kay gave her rollicking laugh, but Dottie shivered. She saw that it would not be funny if the problem came up for her and Dick; every time she thought of the future, of the terrible complications a secret affair got you into, she almost wanted to give up and go home. And all Kay’s conversation, though doubtless well meant, seemed calculated to dismay her with its offhand boldness and cynicism.

The upshot, continued Kay, was that no bachelor in his right mind would send a girl to the doctor to be fitted if he did not feel pretty serious about her. The difficulties only arose, of course, with respectable married women or nice girls who lived with their parents or with other girls. There were women of the looser sort, divorcées and unattached secretaries and office workers living in their own apartments, who equipped themselves independently and kept their douche bags hanging on the back of their bathroom door for anybody to see who wandered in to pee during a cocktail party. One friend of Harald’s, a veteran stage manager, always made it a point to look over a girl’s bathroom before starting anything; if the bag was on the door, it was nine to one he would make her on the first try.

They descended from the bus on lower Fifth Avenue; Dottie’s complexion had come out in blotches like hives or shingles—a sure sign that she was nervous. Kay was sympathetic. This was a big step for Dottie; she had been trying to give Dottie an inkling of just how big a step it was, much more than losing your virginity. For a married woman, naturally, it was different; Harald had agreed immediately that it would be a good idea for her to make an appointment and go along with Dottie to be fitted too. She and Harald both loathed children and had no intention of having any; Kay had seen in her own family how offspring could take the joy out of marriage. Her tribe of brothers and sisters had kept her Dads’ nose to the grindstone; if he had not had so many children, he might have been a famous specialist, instead of a hard-worked G.P. with only a wing in the hospital to commemorate the work he had done in orthopedics and on serums for meningitis. Poor Dads had quite a kick out of sending her east to Vassar; she was the oldest and the brightest, and she had the feeling that he wanted her to have the life he might have had himself, out in the big world, where he would have got the homage he deserved. He still had invitations to come and do research in the big eastern laboratories, but now he was too old to learn, he said; the cerebral arteries were hardening. He had just crashed through nobly with a check; she and Harald had been moved almost to tears by the size of it—far more than he and Mums would have spent on trains and hotels if they had come on for the wedding. It was a declaration of faith, said Harald. And she and Harald did not intend to betray that faith by breeding children, when Harald had his name to make in the theatre. The theatre—strange coincidence!—was one of Dads’ big passions; he and Mums went to see all the touring companies in Salt Lake City and had tickets every night, nearly, when they came to New York for medical meetings. Not leg shows, either; Dads’ favorite playwright, after Shakespeare, was Bernard Shaw. Harald thought it would be a nice idea for Kay to keep the programs of the worthwhile plays he and she saw and send them on to Dads; that way, he would feel in touch.

Dads, like all modern doctors, believed in birth control and was for sterilizing criminals and the unfit. He would certainly approve of what Kay was doing. What he would think about Dottie was another question. Kay herself had been horrified to hear that Dottie had made the appointment in her real name: “Dorothy Renfrew,” not even “Mrs.” As though she were living in Russia or Sweden, instead of the old U.S.A. A lot of people who would not be shocked at her for sleeping with Dick (that could happen to anybody) would look at her askance if they could see what she was up to this minute. The things you did in private were your own business, but this was practically public! Kay ran an apprehensive eye up and down Fifth Avenue; you could never tell who might be watching them from a passing bus or a taxi. She had begun to be nervous herself, on Dottie’s behalf, and to be crosser and crosser with Dick. Harald would never have exposed
her
to an ordeal like this. After the first few times, he had gone to the drugstore himself and bought her suppositories and a bulb type of douche and Zonite, so that she would not have to face the druggist herself. Kay gripped Dottie’s arm, to steady her as they crossed the street with the traffic light; she rued the day she had invited Dick to her wedding, knowing what he was. Why, the office might be raided and the doctor’s records impounded and published in the papers, which would
kill
Dottie’s family, who would probably turn around and blame Kay, as the pathfinder of the college group. She felt she was making quite a sacrifice in coming with Dottie today, to lend moral support, though Dottie insisted that birth control was perfectly legal and above-board, thanks to a court decision that allowed doctors to prescribe contraceptives for the prevention or cure of disease. As they rang the doctor’s bell Kay had to laugh, suddenly, at Dottie’s expression: you could almost see Mrs. Pankhurst in her resolute eye.