The Group (13 page)

Harald sat chewing in silence; finally, he laid down his fork. In the face of this coldness, Kay could not continue. “Go on, my dear,” he said, as her voice flagged and halted. “This is highly interesting. From what you say, I expect you’ll be valedictorian of your Macy class. You may even find me a job in the rug department or selling refrigerators—isn’t that considered a man’s sphere?” “Yes,” replied Kay, mechanically responding to a request for information. “Only they never start a man in those departments; you have to have other experience in selling first.” Then she dropped her fork and buried her curly head in her hands. “Oh, Harald! Why do you hate me?”

“Because you ask tedious questions like that,” he retorted. Kay’s face flamed; she did not want to cry, because the Blakes were coming. Harald must have thought of the same thing, for when he spoke again it was in a different tone. “I don’t blame you, dear Kay,” he said gravely, “for comparing yourself to me as a breadwinner. God knows you have a right to.” “But I
wasn’t
comparing myself to you!” Kay raised her head in outrage. “I was just making conversation.” Harald smiled sadly. “I was not blaming you,” he repeated. “Harald! Please believe me!” She seized his hand. “The thought of a comparison never entered my mind! It couldn’t. I know that you’re a genius and that I’m just a B-average person. That’s why I can coast along in life and you can’t. And I haven’t helped you enough; I know it. I shouldn’t have let you come home to dinner while you were rehearsing; I shouldn’t have made us have cocktails. I should have thought of the strain you were under. …” She felt his hand go flaccid in hers and realized she was blundering again; at least she had avoided naming his lateness at the theatre, which was the real thought that kept preying on her conscience.

He flung her hand aside. “Kay,” he said. “How many times have I pointed out to you that you’re an unconscionable egotist? Observe how you’ve shifted the center of the drama to yourself. It was I who was fired today, not you. You had nothing to do with it. Being late”—he smiled cruelly—“had nothing to do with it, despite what you’ve been insinuating in your clumsy way for the last two weeks. You’ve developed a time-clock mentality. Nobody takes that ‘hour for dinner’ seriously in the theatre—except you. You saw the night you were there; nothing started for half an hour after we pulled in. Everybody sits around playing pinochle. …” Kay nodded. “All right, Harald. Forgive me.” But he was still angry. “I’ll thank you,” he said, “for keeping your petty-bourgeois conscience out of my affairs. It’s your way of cutting me down to size. You pretend to accuse yourself, but it’s me you’re accusing.” Kay shook her head. “No, no,” she said. “Never.” Harald raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You protest too much,” he remarked, in a lighter tone; she could see that his mood was changing again. “In any case,” he continued, “all that had nothing to do with it. You are on the wrong track, my girl. The nance hates me; that’s all.” “Because you’re superior,” murmured Kay.

“That, yes,” said Harald. “Doubtless, there was that.” “‘Doubtless’?” cried Kay, affronted by the judicious, qualifying note in his voice. “Why, of course that was it.” It would be just like Harald to start hairsplitting now, when they were both agreed that the basic motivations were as clear as noonday. “What do you mean, ‘doubtless’?” He shook his head and smiled. “Oh, Harald, please tell me!” “Go and make us some coffee, like a good girl.” “No. Harald, tell me!” Harald lit his pipe. “Do you know the story of Hippolytus?” he said finally. “Why, naturally,” protested Kay. “Don’t you remember, we did it at college in Greek, with Prexy playing Theseus? I wrote you, I built the scenery—the big statues of Artemis and Aphrodite. Golly, that was fun. And Prexy forgot his lines and adlibbed ‘To be or not to be’ in Greek, and only old Miss MacCurdy, the head of the Greek department, knew the difference. She’s deaf but she spotted it even with her ear trumpet.” Harald waited, drumming his fingers. “Well?” said Kay. “Well,” said Harald, “if you change the sex of Phaedra …” “I don’t understand. What would happen if you changed the sex of Phaedra?” “You would have the inside story of my getting the ax. Now, make us the coffee.” Kay stared, nonplused. She could not see the connection.

“Buggery,” said Harald. “I, though not a virgin, am the chaste Hippolytus of the farce, which the play, incidentally, is. A male defending his virtue is always a farcical figure.” Kay’s jaw dropped. “You mean somebody wanted to bugger you? Who? The director?” she gasped. “The other way round, I believe. He assured me that he had a luscious ass.” “When? This afternoon?” Kay was torn between horror and curiosity. “Flits have always been attracted to me”—he had told her that last summer (there had been two who were like that in the company), and then it had made her excited and sort of envious. “No, no. Some weeks ago,” said Harald. “The first time, that is.” “Why didn’t you
tell
me?” The thought that he had kept such a thing from her cut her to the heart. “There was no reason for you to know.” “But how did it happen? What did he say to you? Where were you?” “In Shubert Alley,” he said. “I was a little liquored up that evening, and in my mood of geniality, I may have given him what he took for signs of encouragement. He suggested that we repair to his apartment later.” “Oh, God!” cried Kay. “Oh, Harald, you didn’t—?” “No, no,” he replied soothingly. “It was an uninviting prospect. The old fruit must be forty.” For a second, Kay was relieved and, at the same time (wasn’t that queer?), almost let down; then a fresh suspicion attacked her. “Harald! Do you mean you would have
done
it with someone younger? A chorus boy?” She felt sick thinking of the nights he had worked late, and yet there was this funny itch to know. “I can’t answer hypothetical questions,” Harald said, rather impatiently. “The problem hasn’t come up.” “Oh,” said Kay, dissatisfied. “But the director—did
he
try again?” Harald admitted that he had. One night late, he had reached for Harald’s crotch. “And what happened?” Harald shrugged. “Erection is fairly automatic in the normal male, you know.” Kay turned pale. “Oh, Harald! You encouraged him!” All at once, she was frenzied with jealousy; it took Harald some time to calm her. In her heart was the horrible certainty that erection would not have been so automatic if she had not always been asleep when Harald tiptoed into their bedroom. And how did she know he tiptoed? Because (did he ever suspect this?) she was not always really asleep. Tonight, she decided, they would have intercourse no matter how tired she was when the Blakes left.

Kay yawned and slipped off Harald’s lap, where he had taken her to comfort her (“I like your freckles,” he had whispered. “And your wild black gipsy hair”). “I’ll make the coffee,” she said. As she turned to go, he reached out and patted her behind, which made her think, distrustfully, of the director. What had got into her, recently, that prompted her to distrust Harald and to always think there was something more than he was telling her behind every little incident he related? To tell the truth, she had wondered sometimes if there could not be some other explanation of the director’s persecution, and now that she knew what it was (“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”), she still wondered whether there was not more to
that
than Harald said. How far had he let the “nance” go? She could not help remembering a story he had told her, while she was still in college, about undressing an older actress in her apartment and then just leaving her up in the air on her blue percale sheets with scalloped borders.

Kay believed in Harald completely; she had no doubt he was bound to be famous, sooner or later, in whatever field he chose. But believing in him was different from believing him. In fact, the more impressed she was by him intellectually (his I.Q. must be in the genius percentile), the more she noticed his little lapses. And why was it that, with all his talent, he was still a stage manager when other people of his own age, people not nearly as bright, had forged ahead of him? Was there something wrong with him that was evident to producers and directors and not to her? She wished he would let her give him the Binet and some of the personality tests she had tried on the group at Vassar.

Once, during exam week (and nobody knew this but her), he had tried to commit suicide by driving somebody’s car off a cliff. The car had rolled over without hurting him, and he had climbed out and walked back to the place where he was staying. The next day the couple he was visiting had sent for a tow truck to pull the car up and the only damage was that acid from the battery had dripped over the upholstery, making holes in it, and ruined Harald’s English hat, which had fallen off his head when the car turned over. This suicide attempt had impressed her terrifically, and she treasured the letter in which he described it; she could not imagine having the coolness to do such a thing herself and certainly not in someone else’s car. He had done it, he said, on a sudden impulse, because he saw his future laid out for him and he did not want to be a tame husband, not even hers. When the attempt failed so miraculously, he had taken it as a sign, he wrote her, that Heaven had decreed their union. Now, however, that she knew Harald better, she wondered whether he had not driven off the cliff by accident; admittedly, he had been drinking applejack at the time. She hated having these suspicions of Harald and she did not know which was worse: to be scared that your husband might kill himself if the slightest little thing went wrong or to be guessing that it was all a cover-up for something commonplace like driving-under-the-influence.

Harald was histrionic; Lakey had found the right word for him. Yet that was why, with his intellect and learning, he would make such a marvelous director. Kay had been giving a lot of thought to Harald’s problems during her lonely evenings while he was at the theatre, and she had decided that the main thing that acted as a drag on him was his strong identification with his father. He was still fighting his father’s battles; any psychologist could see that. No wonder, then, that Kay felt impatient with that relation. “Anders” and “Judith”!—she had come to loathe the very names of the old pair, if Harald only knew it. She would almost rather commit suicide herself than make Judith’s “quick-and-easy meat loaf.” The sight of her mother-in-law’s labored pencil recipes, enclosed in letters from “Anders,” made her cold and hard as nails. Ever since she had seen “Judith’s” handwriting, she could not abide Harald’s chile con carne, though it was still a big success with company, who did not know the source and thought it was something glamorous he had learned in the theatre. She had no doubt that “Judith” used oleomargarine; she could see a white slab of it on their humble oilcloth with a cheap plated-silver butter knife (the kind you sent in coupons for) lying by its moist side!

Turning off the coffee (Maxwell House), Kay made a face. She had a ruthless hatred of poor people, which not even Harald suspected and which sometimes scared her by its violence, as when she was waiting on some indigent in the store. Objectively, of course, she ought to pity old Anders, a poor Norwegian immigrant who had taught manual training in the Idaho public-school system and then had studied nights to become an algebra teacher and finally risen to be principal of a high school in Boise, where he made an enemy of the vice-principal, who brought about his dismissal. Harald’s play told the story of that. In the play, he had made his father a college president and put him at odds with the state legislature. To her mind, that was very unconvincing and accounted for the weakness of the play. If Harald wanted to write about his father, why glorify him? Why not simply tell the truth?

According to Harald, his father, in real life, had been framed and railroaded out of his position because (shades of Ibsen!) he had discovered some funny business about the high-school bookkeeping. But if he had really been as innocent as Harald claimed, it was peculiar that all through Harald’s adolescence he could not get reinstated in the school system and had to support the family doing odd jobs of carpentry, non-union, while Harald went to work as a newsboy. Harald said it was all part of a conspiracy in which some crooked city officials had been involved too, and that they had to crucify his father to keep the real facts from being known. But then a reform party got elected (Harald’s father was a sort of populist radical whose god was some man called Townley), and he was taken on again, as a substitute teacher; meanwhile, in high school Harald had made a big name for himself, being quarterback of the football team and star of the dramatic society and editor of the school paper. A group of Boise ladies had raised a scholarship fund to send him to Reed College, in Oregon, and then to Yale Drama School, and he could still have a job, any time he wanted, running their Little Theatre for them—you should see the silver water pitcher they had sent from Gump’s in San Francisco for a wedding present. But Harald would not go back to Boise till his father’s name had been vindicated. He meant till his play had been produced; he expected all of Boise to read about it in the papers and recognize poor old Anders, who was now a regular teacher again (half-time algebra and half-time manual training), in the wronged president of a big state university. The play was called
Sheepskin
, and Harald had merged in it the story of his father’s life with some of the story of Alexander Meiklejohn at Wisconsin, not admitting to himself that his father and Meiklejohn were horses of a different color.

What worried Kay most, though, was that Harald was identifying with failure. One of her first thoughts, when she heard the news this afternoon, was that Harald might be repeating his father’s pattern. She wondered how many people who knew Harald, besides herself, would think of this. This made it important to get the true facts into circulation, for it would hurt Harald’s career if he got the name of a troublemaker, of a person who went around
wanting
to be fired,
needing
to fail. She did not think Harald should be soft about telling what the director had tried to do to him; knowing the director’s proclivities, everyone would realize how he had been subtly provoking Harald to finally give him a piece of his mind; if it had not happened today, he would have goaded him till it did.