The Group (4 page)

She and Mother had talked it over and agreed that if you were in love and engaged to a nice young man you perhaps ought to have relations once to make sure of a happy adjustment. Mother, who was very youthful and modern, knew of some very sad cases within her own circle of friends where the man and the woman just didn’t fit down there and ought never to have been married. Not believing in divorce, Dottie thought it very important to arrange that side of marriage properly; defloration, which the girls were always joking about in the smoking room, frightened her. Kay had had an awful time with Harald; five times, she insisted, before she was penetrated, and this in spite of basketball and a great deal of riding out West. Mother said you could have the hymen removed surgically, if you wanted, as royal families abroad were said to do; but perhaps a very gentle lover could manage to make it painless; hence it might be better to marry an older man, with experience.

The best man was proposing a toast; looking up, Dottie found Dick Brown’s (that was his name) bright grey eyes on her again. He raised his glass and drank to her, ceremoniously. Dottie drank in return. “Isn’t this fun?” cried Libby MacAusland, arching her long neck and weaving her head about and laughing in her exhausted style. “
So
much nicer,” purred the voices. “No receiving line, no formality, no older people.” “It’s just what I want for myself,” announced Libby. “A young people’s wedding!” She uttered a blissful scream as a Baked Alaska came in, the meringue faintly smoking. “Baked Alaska!” she cried and fell back, as if in a heap, on her chair. “Girls!” she said solemnly, pointing to the big ice-cream cake with slightly scorched peaks of meringue that was being lowered into position before Kay. “Look at it. Childhood dreams come true! It’s every children’s party in the whole blessed United States. It’s patent-leather slippers and organdy and a shy little boy in an Eton collar asking you to dance. I don’t know when I’ve been so excited. I haven’t seen one since I was twelve years old. It’s Mount Whitney; it’s Fujiyama.” The girls smiled forbearingly at each other; Libby “wrote.” But in fact they had shared her delight until she began talking about it, and a sigh of anticipation went up as they watched the hot meringue slump under Kay’s knife. Standing against the wall, the two waiters watched rather dourly. The dessert was not all that good. The meringue had browned unevenly; it was white in some places and burned black in others, which gave it a disagreeable taste. Underneath the slab of ice cream, the sponge cake was stale and damp. But fealty to Kay sent plates back for seconds. The Baked Alaska was the
kind
of thing that in Kay’s place the group hoped
they
would have thought of—terribly original for a wedding and yet just right when you considered it. They were all tremendously interested in cooking and quite out of patience with the unimaginative roasts and chops followed by molds from the caterer that Mother served; they were going to try new combinations and foreign recipes and puffy omelets and soufflés and interesting aspics and just one hot dish in a Pyrex, no soup, and a fresh green salad.

“It’s a hotel trick,” explained the radio man’s wife, speaking across the table to Priss Hartshorn, who was going to be married herself in September. “They have the ice cream frozen hard as a rock and then, whoosh, into the oven. That way they take no chances, but between you and me it’s not what Mamma used to make.” Priss nodded worriedly; she was a solemn, ashy-haired little girl who looked like a gopher and who felt it her duty to absorb every bit of word-of-mouth information that pertained to consumer problems. Economics had been her major, and she was going to work in the consumer division of N.R.A. “Working conditions,” she declared, with her slight nervous stammer, “in some of our best hotel kitchens are way substandard, you know.” She had begun to feel her liquor; the punch
was
rather treacherous, even though applejack, being a natural product, was one of the purest things you could drink these days. In her haze, she saw the radio man stand up. “To the Class of Thirty-three,” he toasted. The others drank to the Vassar girls. “Bottoms up!” cried the man’s wife. From the silent best man came a cackling laugh. Tiddly as she was, Priss could tell that she and her friends, through no fault of their own, had awakened economic antagonism. Vassar girls, in general, were not liked, she knew, by the world at large; they had come to be a sort of symbol of superiority. She would have to see a good deal less of some of them after she was married if she wanted Sloan to keep in with his colleagues on the staff of the hospital. She stared sadly at Pokey Prothero, her best friend, who was sitting sprawled out, across the table, putting ashes into her plate of melting ice cream and soggy cake with the very bad table manners that only the very rich could afford. There was a long spill down the front of her beautiful Lavin suit. Mentally, Priss applied Energine; her neat little soul scrubbed away. She did not know how Pokey would ever get along in life without a personal maid to take care of her. Ever since Chapin, she herself had been picking up after Pokey, making her use an ashtray in the smoking room, collecting her laundry and mailing it home for her, creeping into the common bathroom to wash the ring off the tub so that the others would not complain again. Poor Pokey, when she was married, would be doomed to a conventional establishment and a retinue of servants and governesses; she would miss all the fun and the alarums, as Mother called them, of starting on your own from scratch, with just a tweeny to help with the dishwashing and the heavy work.

Great wealth was a frightful handicap; it insulated you from living. The depression, whatever else you could say about it, had been a truly wonderful thing for the propertied classes; it had waked a lot of them up to the things that really counted. There wasn’t a family Priss knew that wasn’t happier and saner for having to scale down its expenditures; sacrifices had drawn the members together. Look at Polly Andrews’ family: Mr. Andrews had been in Riggs Clinic when the depression hit and all his investments went blotto; whereupon, instead of sinking deeper into melancholia and being put into a state hospital (grim thought!), he had come home and made himself useful as the family cook. He did every bit of the cooking and the marketing and served the most scrumptious meals, having learned about
haute cuisine
when they had their chateau in France; Mrs. Andrews did the scullery work and the vacuuming; everybody made his own bed; and the children, when they were home, washed up. They were the
gayest
family to visit, on the little farm they had managed to save near Stockbridge; Lakey went there last Thanksgiving and never had a better time—she only wished, she said, that
her
father would lose his money, like Mr. Andrews. She meant it quite seriously. Of course, it made a difference that the Andrews had always been rather highbrow; they had inner resources to fall back on.

Priss herself was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal; it ran in the blood. Her mother was a Vassar trustee, and her grandfather had been reform mayor of New York. Last year, when she had had to be a bridesmaid in a big social wedding at St. James’, with the carpet and the awning and so on, she had not been able to get over the sight of the unemployed crowding round the church entrance, with the police holding them back. It was not that Priss felt she had to change the world singlehanded, as her brother, who went to Yale, was always jeering, and she did not blame the class she was born into for wanting to hold onto its privileges—that was part of their conditioning. She was not in the least bit a socialist or a rebel, though even Sloan liked to tease her about being one. To be a socialist, she thought, was a sort of luxury, when the world itself was changing so fast and there was so much that had to be done here and now. You could not sit down and wait for the millennium, any more than you could turn the clock back. The group used to play the game of when in history you would like to have lived if you could choose, and Priss was the only one who stuck up for the present; Kay picked the year 2000 (
A.D.
, of course) and Lakey was for the
quattrocento
—which showed, incidentally, what a varied group they were. But seriously Priss could not imagine a more exciting time to come of age in than right now in America, and she felt awfully sorry for a person like Dick Brown, on her right, with his restless, bitter face and white unsteady hands; having talked with him quite a while (probably boring him stiff!), she could see that he was typical of that earlier generation of expatriates and bohemian rebels they had been studying about in Miss Lockwood’s course who were coming back now to try to find their roots again.

The gabble of voices slowly died down. The girls, confused by alcohol, cast inquiring looks at each other. What was to happen now? At an ordinary wedding, Kay and Harald would slip off to change to traveling costume, and Kay would throw her bouquet. But there was to be no honeymoon, they recalled. Kay and Harald, evidently, had nowhere to go but back to the sublet apartment they had just left this morning. Probably, if the group knew Kay, the bed was not even made. The funny, uneasy feeling that had come over them all in the chapel affected them again. They looked at their watches; it was only one-fifteen. How many hours till it was time for Harald to go to work? Doubtless, lots of couples got married and just went home again, but somehow it did not seem right to let that happen. “Should I ask them to Aunt Julia’s for coffee?” whispered Polly Andrews to Dottie, across the table. “It makes rather a lot,” murmured Dottie. “I don’t know what Ross would say.” Ross was Aunt Julia’s maid and quite a character. “Bother Ross!” said Polly. The two girls’ eyes went up and down the table, counting, and then met, grave and startled. There were thirteen—eight of the group and five outsiders. How like Kay! Or was it an accident? Had someone dropped out at the last minute? Meanwhile, the radio man’s wife had been exchanging signals with her husband; she turned to Dottie and spoke
sotto voce
. “How would some of you gals like to drop around to my place for some Java? I’ll give Kay and Harald the high sign.” Dottie hesitated; perhaps this would really be more suitable, but she did not like to decide for Kay, who might prefer Aunt Julia’s. A sense that everything was getting too involved, wheels within wheels, depressed her.

Pokey Prothero’s voice, like a querulous grackle, intervened. “You two are supposed to go away,” she suddenly complained, crushing out her cigarette and looking through her
lorgnon
with an air of surprised injury from the bride to the groom. Trust Pokey, thought the girls, with a joint sigh. “Where should we go, Pokey?” answered Kay, smiling. “Yes, Pokey, where should we go?” agreed the bridegroom. Pokey considered. “Go to Coney Island,” she said. Her tone of irrefutable, self-evident logic, like that of an old man or a child, took everyone aback for a second. “What a splendid idea!” cried Kay. “On the subway?” “Brighton Express, via Flatbush Avenue,” intoned Harald. “Change at Fulton Street.” “Pokey, you’re a genius,” said everyone, in voices of immense relief. Harald paid the bill and launched into a discussion of roller coasters, comparing the relative merits of the Cyclone and the Thunderbolt. Compacts came out; fur pieces were clipped together; daily remembrancers of dark-blue English leather were consulted. The room was full of movement and laughter. “How did Pokey ever think of it?,” “The perfect end to a perfect wedding,” “Just right,” the voices reiterated, as gloves were pulled on.

The party moved out to the street; the radio man, who had left his camera in the check room, took pictures on the sidewalk, in the bright June sunlight. Then they all walked along Eighth Street to the subway at Astor Place, while passers-by turned to stare at them, and right down to the turnstiles. “Kay must throw her bouquet!” shrieked Libby MacAusland, stretching on her long legs, like a basketball center, as a crowd of people massed to watch them. “My girl’s from Vassar; none can surpass ’er,” the radio man struck up. Harald produced two nickels and the newlyweds passed through the turnstile; Kay, who, all agreed, had never looked prettier, turned and threw her bouquet, high in the air, back over the turnstiles to the waiting girls. Libby jumped and caught it, though it had really been aimed at Priss just behind her. And at that moment Lakey gave them all a surprise; the brown-paper parcels she had checked in the hotel proved to contain rice. “
That
was what you stopped for!” exclaimed Dottie, full of wonder, as the wedding party seized handfuls and pelted them after the bride and the groom; the platform was showered with white grains when the local train finally came in. “That’s banal! That’s not like you, Eastlake!” Kay turned and shouted as the train doors were closing, and everyone, dispersing, agreed that it was not like Lakey at all, but that, banal or not, it was just the little touch that had been needed to found off an unforgettable occasion.

Two

J
UST AT FIRST, IN
the dark hallway, it had given Dottie rather a funny feeling to be tiptoeing up the stairs only two nights after Kay’s wedding to a room right across from Harald’s old room, where the same thing had happened to Kay. An awesome feeling, really, like when the group all got the curse at the same time; it filled you with strange ideas about being a woman, with the moon compelling you like the tides. All sorts of weird, irrelevant ideas floated through Dottie’s head as the key turned in the lock and she found herself, for the first time, alone with a man in his flat. Tonight was midsummer’s night, the summer solstice, when maids had given up their treasure to fructify the crops; she had that in background reading for
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. Her Shakespeare teacher had been awfully keen on anthropology and had had them study in Frazer about the ancient fertility rites and how the peasants in Europe, till quite recent times, had lit big bonfires in honor of the Corn Maiden and then lain together in the fields. College, reflected Dottie as the lamp clicked on, had been almost
too
rich an experience. She felt stuffed with interesting thoughts that she could only confide in Mother, not in a man, certainly, who would probably suppose you were barmy if you started telling him about the Corn Maiden when you were just about to lose your virginity. Even the group would laugh if Dottie confessed that she was exactly in the mood for a long, comfy discussion with Dick, who was so frightfully attractive and unhappy and had so much to give.