The Group (10 page)

Nevertheless, Dottie did intend, when she got up to the cottage, to pass some of Kay’s tips on to Mother. She had had Mother terribly on her conscience ever since she had got back to the Vassar Club that fatal morning (was it only two days ago?) and found a message that Gloucester had been calling the night before and again at 9.00
A.M.
Telling her mother her first real lie—that she had spent the night with Polly in Polly’s aunt’s apartment—was one of the hardest things she had ever done. It still cut her heart to think that she could not tell Mother about her visit to the birth-control bureau and now to this doctor’s office, all of which would have interested Mother so tremendously as a Vassar woman with Lucy Stoners and women’s-rights fighters in her own college class. The cruel sense of withholding something had made Dottie more than usually alert to the small items of interest she could bring back to Gloucester in compensation—like Kay and Harald’s menus and housekeeping arrangements, which would vastly amuse Mother. Perhaps she could even tell her that
Kay
had been to birth-control headquarters and been sent on here to get this new device?

“Miss Renfrew,” called the nurse softly, and Dottie started and got up. Her eyes met Kay’s in a last desperate look, like a boarding-school girl summoned to the headmistress’ office, and she advanced slowly into the doctor’s consulting room, her knees shaking and knocking so that they would hardly hold her. At the desk sat a white-coated, olive-skinned woman with a big bun of black hair. The doctor was very handsome, about forty years old; her large black brilliant eyes rested on Dottie briefly like electric rays, while one broad hand with tapering fingers motioned Dottie to a chair. She began to take the medical history, just as if it were an ordinary consultation; her pencil matter-of-factly wrote down Dottie’s answers about measles and whooping cough, eczema and asthma. Yet Dottie became aware of a mesmeric, warm charm that emanated from her and that seemed to tell Dottie not to be afraid. It occurred to Dottie, almost with surprise, that they were both women. The doctor’s femininity was a reassuring part of her professional aspect, like her white coat; on her hand shone a broad gold wedding ring, which seemed to Dottie serene and ample, like the doctor herself.

“Have you ever had intercourse, Dorothy?” The question appeared to flow so naturally from the sequence of operations and previous diseases that Dottie’s answer was given before she had time to gulp. “Good!” exclaimed the doctor, and when Dottie glanced up, wonderingly, the doctor gave an encouraging smile. “That makes it easier for us to fit you,” she said, commending, as though Dottie had been a good child. Her skill astonished Dottie, who sat with wondering eyes, anesthetized by the doctor’s personality, while a series of questions, like a delicately maneuvering forceps, extracted information that ought to have hurt but didn’t. This painless interrogation revealed no more curiosity about the why and the who of Dottie’s defloration than if Dick had been a surgical instrument: had Dottie been completely penetrated, had there been much bleeding, much pain? What method of contraception had been used, had the act been repeated? “Withdrawal,” murmured the doctor, writing it down on a separate pad. “We like to know,” she explained, with a quick, personal smile, “what methods our patients have used before coming to us. When was this intercourse had?” “Three nights ago,” said Dottie, coloring and feeling that now, at last, they were going to touch the biographical. “And the date of your last period?” Dottie supplied it, and the doctor glanced at her desk calendar. “Very good,” she said. “Go into the bathroom, empty your bladder, and take off your girdle and step-ins; you may leave your slip on, but unfasten your brassiere, please.”

Dottie did not mind the pelvic examination or the fitting. Her bad moment came when she was learning how to insert the pessary by herself. Though she was usually good with her hands and well coordinated, she felt suddenly unnerved by the scrutiny of the doctor and the nurse, so exploratory and impersonal, like the doctor’s rubber glove. As she was trying to fold the pessary, the slippery thing, all covered with jelly, jumped out of her grasp and shot across the room and hit the sterilizer. Dottie could have died. But apparently this was nothing new to the doctor and the nurse. “Try again, Dorothy,” said the doctor calmly, selecting another diaphragm of the correct size from the drawer. And, as though to provide a distraction, she went on to give a little lecture on the history of the pessary, while watching Dottie’s struggles out of the corner of her eye: how a medicated plug had been known to the ancient Greeks and Jews and Egyptians, how Margaret Sanger had found the present diaphragm in Holland, how the long fight had been waged through the courts here. …Dottie had read all this, but she did not like to say so to this dark, stately woman, moving among her instruments like a priestess in the temple. As everybody knew from the newspapers, the doctor herself had been arrested only a few years before, in a raid on a birth-control clinic, and then been freed by the court. To hear her talk on the subject of her lifelong mission was an honor, like touching the mantle of a prophet, and Dottie felt awed.

“Private practice must be rather a letdown,” she suggested, sympathetically. To a dynamic person like the doctor, fitting girls like herself could not be much of a challenge. “There’s still a great work to be done,” sighed the doctor, removing the diaphragm with a short nod of approval. She motioned Dottie down from the table. “So many of our clinic patients won’t use the pessary when we’ve fitted them or won’t use it regularly.” The nurse bobbed her white-capped head and made a clucking noise. “And those are the ones, aren’t they, doctor, who need to limit their families most? With our private patients, Miss Renfrew, we can be surer that our instructions are being followed.” She gave a little smirk. “I won’t need you now, Miss Brimmer,” said the doctor, washing her hands at the sink. The nurse went out, and Dottie started to follow her, feeling herself a rather foolish figure, with her stockings rolled down around her ankles and her brassiere loose. “Just a minute, Dorothy,” said the doctor, turning, and fixing her with her brilliant gaze. “Are there any questions?” Dottie hesitated; she wanted awfully, now that the ice was broken, to tell the doctor about Dick. But to Dottie’s sympathetic eye, the doctor’s lightly lined face looked tired. Moreover, she had other patients; there was still Kay waiting outside. And supposing the doctor, when she heard, should tell her to go back to the Vassar Club and pack and take the six o’clock train home and never see Dick again? Then the pessary would be wasted, and all would have been for nothing.

“Medical instruction,” said the doctor kindly, with a thoughtful look at Dottie, “can often help the patient to the fullest sexual enjoyment. The young women who come to me, Dorothy, have the right to expect the deepest satisfaction from the sexual act.” Dottie scratched her jaw; the skin on her upper chest mottled. What she especially wanted to ask was something a doctor might know, above all, a married doctor. She had of course not confided in Kay the thing that was still troubling her: what did it mean if a man made love to you and didn’t kiss you once, not even at the most thrilling moment? This was something not mentioned in the sex books, so far as Dottie knew, and perhaps it was too ordinary an occurrence for scientists to catalogue or perhaps there was some natural explanation, as she had thought before, like hali or trench mouth. Or maybe he had taken a vow, like some people vowing never to shave or never to wash till a certain thing they wanted came about. But she could not get it out of her mind, and whenever she recalled it, not meaning to, she would flush all over, just as she was doing now. She was afraid, down in her heart, that Dick was probably what Daddy called a “wrong un.” And here was her chance to find out. But she could not, in this gleaming surgery, choose the words to ask. How would you put it in technical language? “If the man fails to osculate?” Her dimple ruefully flashed; not even Kay could say such a thing. “Is there anything abnormal …?” she began and then stared helplessly at the tall, impassible woman. “If prior to the sexual act …” “Yes?” encouraged the doctor. Dottie gave her throaty, scrupulous cough. “It’s terribly simple,” she apologized, “but I can’t seem to say it.” The doctor waited. “Perhaps I can help you, Dorothy. Any techniques,” she began impressively, “that give both partners pleasure are perfectly allowable and natural. There are no practices, oral or manual, that are wrong in love-making, as long as both partners enjoy them.” Goose flesh rose on Dottie; she knew, pretty well, what the doctor meant, and could not help wondering, with horror, if the doctor, as a married woman, practiced what she preached. Her whole nature recoiled. “Thank you, doctor,” she said quietly, cutting the topic off.

In her gloved hand, when she was dressed and powdered, she took the Manila envelope the nurse in the anteroom handed her and paid out new bills from her billfold. She did not wait for Kay. Across the street was a drugstore, with hot-water bottles in the window. She went in and managed to choose a fountain syringe. Then she seated herself in the phone booth and rang Dick’s number. After a long time, a voice answered. Dick was out. This possibility had never occurred to her. She had assumed without thinking that he would be there waiting for her, when she had carried out her mission. “Just give me a call.” Now she walked slowly across Eighth Street and into Washington Square, where she sat down on a park bench, with her two parcels beside her. When she had sat there nearly an hour, watching the children play and listening to some young Jewish men argue, she went back to the drugstore and tried Dick’s number again. He was still out. She returned to her park bench, but someone had taken her place. She walked about a bit till she found another seat; this time, because the bench was crowded, she held the packages on her lap. The syringe, in its box, was bulky and kept slipping off her lap every time she moved or crossed her legs; then she would have to bend down to pick it up. Her underwear felt sticky from the lubricants the doctor had used, and this nasty soiled sensation made her fear she had got the curse. Soon the children began leaving the park; she heard the church bells ringing for Evensong. She would have liked to go in to pray, which she often did at vesper time (and to take a hurried look, with no one watching, at the back of her skirt), but she could not, because of the packages, which would not be decent in a church. Nor could she face going back to the Vassar Club with them; she was sharing a room with Helena Davidson, who might ask what she had been buying. It was getting late, long past six o’clock, but the park was still light, and everyone, she thought, now noticed her. The next time, she tried Dick from the phone in the Brevoort Hotel lobby, after going first to the ladies’ room. She left a message: “Miss Renfrew is waiting in Washington Square, on a bench.” She was afraid to wait in the hotel lobby, where someone she knew might come in. Going back to the square, she was sorry she had left the message, because, after that, she did not dare annoy the landlady by calling back again. It now seemed to her strange that Dick had not rung her up at the Vassar Club, just to say hello, in the two and a half days that had passed since she left him. She considered calling there, to ask if there were any messages for her, but she dreaded getting Helena. And anyway, she could not leave the square, in case Dick should come. The park was getting dark, and the benches were filling up with pairs of lovers. It was after nine o’clock when she resolved to leave because men had started to accost her and a policeman had stared at her curiously. She remembered Kay’s remarks on the bus about the “corpus delicti” of a love affair. How true!

It did not prove anything, she told herself, that Dick was not at home. There could be a thousand reasons; perhaps he had been called out of town. Yet it did prove something, and she knew it. It was a sign. In the dark, she began quietly to cry and decided to count to a hundred before going. She had reached a hundred for the fifth time when she recognized that it was no use; even if he got her message, he would never come tonight. There seemed to be only one thing left to do. Hoping that she was unobserved, she slipped the contraceptive equipment under the bench she was sitting on and began to walk as swiftly as she could, without attracting attention, to Fifth Avenue. A cruising taxi picked her up at the corner and drove her, quietly sobbing, to the Vassar Club. The next morning early, before the town was stirring, she took the train to Boston.

Four

O
NE AFTERNOON IN SEPTEMBER
, Harald lost his new job. When he told the director, softly, where to get off, the nance gave him notice. If Kay could only write, she could have sold the story of it to the
New Yorker
, she thought. She was just back from work that day and tying on her apron when she heard his step on the stairs and wondered—they did not usually break for dinner till six-thirty or seven. He had a pint of gin from the cordial shop with him, and there was a glitter in his hollow, dark eyes. The minute she saw him, she guessed what had happened. “I’m aware,” he said to her stiffly, “of the bitter irony behind this. You seem to have picked a lemon.” “Why do you say that?” protested Kay, starting to cry because that was not at all what she was thinking. And yet it
was
ironical, you had to admit. October 1, their summer sublet was up, and they were due to move into an apartment of their own, in a new smart building made over from some old tenements, with a landscaped court and an inside doorman in a little booth, like a concierge. They had signed the lease and paid the first month’s rent—$102.50, including gas and electricity. This was more than Harald had ever
dreamed
of paying, but Kay had argued that economists said you were supposed to count one-fourth of your income for rent; she made $25 a week at Macy’s, and he would be making $75 when the show opened. This allowed them to pay $100 (or would have till this afternoon!), and they would really be paying less, when you subtracted the utilities. Manwise, Harald had pointed out that you weren’t
obliged
to pay a quarter of your income—a mere factual observation, he insisted, when Kay wanted to quote it to their friends to show how witty he could be. She loved Harald’s
risus sardonicus
, as Helena Davison’s mother called it.