The Group

by Mary McCarthy

  Helena felt herself color, remembering very well the quarrel with Norine over Cézanne’s still lifes of apples in the new Museum of Modern Art. “The smoking room of Cushing,” she admitted with a grimace. “When was that? Freshman year?” “Sophomore,” said Norine. “You and Kay had come to dinner with somebody. And Lakey was there. You two were playing bridge. And Lakey was playing solitaire, as usual, and smoking ivory-tipped cigarettes. It was the first time she ever spoke to me.” “Us too,” said Helena. “And it was the first time I remember seeing you, Norine.” “I was a mess,” said Norine. “I weighed a hundred and sixty, stripped. All soft blubber. And you stuck your harpoons into me, the three of you.” Helena raised her candid eyes from her coffee cup. “The ‘spirit of the apples,’” she quoted, “versus ‘significant form.’” She could not remember, exactly, what mushy thoughts Norine, sprawled on a sofa, had been expressing about the Cézannes to the smoking room at large, but she could see Lakey now, on whom she and Kay had had a distant crush, look up suddenly from her solitaire as she said coldly and distinctly that the point of the Cézannes was the formal arrangement of shapes. Norine had begun repeating that it was “the spirit of the apples” that counted; whereupon Kay, laying down her bridge hand and glancing toward Lakey for approval, had charged in with “significant form,” which she had learned about in Freshman English with Miss Kitchel, who had had them read Clive Bell and Croce and Tolstoy’s What is Art?. “You’re denying the spirit of the apples,” Norine had insisted, and Helena, laying down her bridge hand, had mildly cited T. S. Eliot: “The spirit killeth, and the letter giveth life.” With everybody watching, Norine had started to cry, and Lakey, who had no pity for weakness, had called her a “bovine sentimentalist.” Norine, yielding the field, had lumbered out of the smoking room, sobbing, and Lakey, uttering the single word “oaf,” had gone back to her solitaire. The bridge game had broken up. On the way home to their own dormitory, Helena had said that she thought that three against one had been a bit hard on poor Miss Schmittlapp, but Kay said that Schmittlapp was usually in the majority. “Do you think she’ll remember that we came to her rescue?” she demanded, meaning Lakey. “I doubt it,” said Helena, having sat next to Miss Eastlake (Davison being just ahead of her in the alphabet) for a full half-term in an art-history course without evoking a sign of notice. But Lakey had remembered Kay, when they were on the Daisy Chain together that spring, and talked to her about Clive Bell and Roger Fry, so that you might say, Helena reflected, that the argument with Norine had pointed the way that had led, in the end, to their grouping with Lakey and the others in the South Tower. Helena, who was as immune to social snobbery as she was to the “fond passion,” had not felt the charm of the South Tower group to the same extent as Kay, but she had raised no objections to the alliance, even though her teachers and her parents had worried a little, thinking, like Norine, that an “exclusive elite” was a dangerous set to play in, for a girl who had real stuff in her. Mrs. Davison’s comment, on first meeting the group, was that she hoped Helena was not going to become a “clothes rack.”

  “I reacted against Lakey’s empty formalism,” Norine was saying. “I went up to my room that night and spewed out the window. That was Armageddon for me, though I didn’t see it yet. I didn’t discover socialism till junior year. All I knew that night was that I believed in something and couldn’t express it, while your team believed in nothing but knew how to say it—in other men’s words. Of course, I envied you that too. Let me show you something.” She rose from her chair, motioning Helena to follow, and flung open a door, disclosing the bedroom. Over the bed, which was made, hung a reproduction of a Cézanne still life of apples. “Well, well, the apples of discord!” remarked Helena in the doorway, striving for a sprightly note; she had stumbled over a dog’s bone in the matted fur of the polar bear; her ankle hurt; and she could not imagine what the apples were expected to prove. “Put had them in his college room,” Norine said. “He’d made them the basis for his credo too. For him, they stood for a radical simplification.” “Ummm,” said Helena, glancing about the room, which was clearly Putnam’s sphere. It contained steel filing cabinets, a Williams College pennant, an African mask, and a typewriter on a card table. It struck her that Norine’s apartment was all too populous with “significant form.” Every item in it seemed to be saying something, asserting something, pontificating; Norine and Put were surrounded by articles of belief, down to the last can of evaporated milk and the single, monastic pillow on the double bed. It was different from Kay’s apartment, where the furniture was only asking to be admired or talked about. But here, in this dogmatic lair, nothing had been admitted that did not make a “relevant statement,” though what the polar bear was saying Helena could not make out. The two girls returned to their seats. Norine lit a fresh cigarette. She stared meditatively at Helena. “Put is impotent,” she said. “Oh,” said Helena, slowly. “Oh, Norine, I’m sorry.” “It’s not your fault,” said Norine hoarsely. Helena did not know what to say next. She could still smell Put’s tobacco and see his pipe in an unemptied ashtray. Despite the fact that she had had no sexual experience, she had a very clear idea of the male member, and she could not help forming a picture of Put’s as pale and lifeless, in the coffin of his trousers, a veritable nature morte. She was sorry that Norine, to excuse herself for last night, had felt it necessary to make her this confidence; she did not want to be privy to the poor man’s private parts. “We got married in June,” Norine enlarged. “A couple of weeks after Commencement. I was a raw virgin. I never had a date till I knew Put. So when we went to this hotel, in the Pennsylvania coal fields, I didn’t catch on right away. Especially since my mother, who hates sex like all her generation, told me that a gentleman never penetrated his bride on the first night. I thought that for once Mother must be right. We’d neck till we were both pretty excited, and then everything would stop, and he’d turn over and go to sleep.” “What were you doing in the coal fields?” inquired Helena, in hopes of a change of subject. “Put had a case he was working on—an organizer who’d been beaten up and jailed. In the daytime, I interviewed the women, the miners’ wives. Background stuff. Put said it was very useful. That way, he could write off our whole honeymoon on office expenses. And at night we were both pretty bushed. But when we came back to New York, it was the same thing. We’d neck in our pajamas and then go to sleep.” “What possessed him to want to get married?” “He didn’t know,” said Norine.

  “Finally,” she continued hoarsely, “I faced the truth. I went to the Public Library. They’ve got a Viennese woman there in Information—very gemütlich. She drew me up a reading list on impotence, a lot of it in German; quite a bibliography. There are different types: organic and functional. Put’s is functional. He’s got a mother-tie; his mother’s a widow. Some men are incapable of erection altogether, and some are incapable except in certain circumstances. Put’s capable of full erection, but only with whores and fallen women.” She gave her short laugh. “But you didn’t find all that out in the library,” objected Helena; she had heard her mother declare that it was possible to get a “university education in our great public-library system,” but there was a limit to everything. “No,” said Norine. “Only the over-all picture. After I’d read up on the subject, Put and I were able to talk. He’d had all his early sex experience with whores and factory girls in Pittsfield, it turned out. They’d pull up their skirts, in an alley or a doorway, and he’d ejaculate, sometimes at the first contact, before he got his penis all the way in. He’d never made love to a good woman and never seen a woman naked. I’m a good woman; that’s why he can’t make it with me. He feels he’s fornicating with his mother. That’s what the Freudians think; the Behaviorists would claim that it was a conditioned reflex. But of course he couldn’t know any of that ahead of time. It’s been an awful blow to him. I excite him but I can’t satisfy him. His penis just wilts at the approach to intercourse. Lately, I’ve been bunking in the living room”—a jerk of her
head indicated the couch—“because he has a horror of contact with a good woman’s crotch in his sleep. Though we both wore pajamas, he had insomnia. Now at least I can sleep raw.” She stretched.

  “Have you tried a doctor?” Norine laughed darkly. “Two. Put wouldn’t go, so I went. The first one asked me whether I wanted to have children. He was an old-fashioned neurologist that my mother knew about. When I said no, I didn’t, he practically booted me out of the office. He told me I should consider myself lucky that my husband didn’t want intercourse. Sex wasn’t necessary for a woman, he said.” “Good Heavens!” said Helena. “Yes!” nodded Norine. “The second one was a G.P. with a few more modern ideas. Put’s partner, Bill Nickum, sent me to him. He was pretty much of a Behaviorist. When I explained Put’s sexual history, he advised me to buy some black chiffon underwear and long black silk stockings and some cheap perfume. So that Put would associate me with a whore. And to try to get him to take me that way, with all my clothes on, in the afternoon, when he got home from work.” “Mercy!” said Helena. “What happened?” “It was almost a success. I went to Bloomingdale’s and got the underwear and the stockings.” She pulled up her sweat shirt, and Helena had a glimpse of a black chiffon “shimmy” with lace inserts. “Then I thought of that polar-bear rug. My mother had it in storage; it used to belong to my grandmother Schmittlapp, who was a rich old aristocrat. ‘Venus in Furs’—Sacher-Masoch. I arranged so that Put would find me on the rug when he got home from the office.” Helena smiled and made a noise like a whistle. “Put ejaculated prematurely,” said Norine somberly. “Then we had a fight about how much I’d spent at Bloomingdale’s. Put’s an ascetic about money. That’s why he won’t consider psychoanalysis, though Bill Nickum thinks he should.” Helena’s eyebrows arched; she decided not to ask how “Bill Nickum” came to know of Put’s “trouble.” Instead, she put another question. “Are you very broke, Norine?” Norine shook her head. “Put has a trust fund, and my father gives me an allowance. But we put that into household expenses. Put and Bill sink most of their own dough in Common Causes.” “‘Common Causes’?” repeated Helena, mystified. “That’s the name of their outfit. Of course, they draw salaries, and the rest of the staff is volunteer. But their mailing and printing costs are pretty staggering. And then we have to entertain labor people and celebrities and rich do-gooders and some of the working press. We use this place as sort of a cross between a salon and a café.” Helena looked around her and said nothing.

  “Bill says it would take the strain off our marriage if Put could go to a brothel. Or find a taxi-dance girl. Though they’re likely to be infected. But he could learn to use a prophylactic kit. Have you ever seen one? It’s as simple as brushing your teeth. Put’s offered me a divorce, but I don’t want that. That’s what the older generation would have done. The generation that ran away from everything. My mother and father are divorced. If Put were a drunkard or beat me up, that would be different. But sex isn’t the only thing in marriage. Take the average couple. They have intercourse once a week, on Saturday night. Let’s say that’s five minutes a week, not counting the preliminaries. Five minutes out of 10,080. I figured it out in percentages—less than .05 of one per cent. Supposing Put were to spend five minutes a week with a whore—the time it takes him to shave? Why should I mind? Especially when I knew it didn’t mean anything to him emotionally?” A dismayed expression had come over Helena’s face as Norine jerked out these figures; she was fighting off the certainty that she had to go to the toilet. She had traveled all over Europe scoffing at a fear of germs, drinking the water, making use of a Spanish peasant’s outhouse or of the simple drain in the floor provided as a urinal by an Italian osteria, but she shrank from the thought of Norine’s bathroom. The need to relieve her bladder heightened the sense of unreality produced by Norine’s statistical calculations and by the steady barking of the dog outside and the drip-drip of water in the sink; she felt she had slipped into eternity. Yet when she finally did ask for the john, it was a long time before she could urinate, though she put paper down on the toilet seat, which Put had left flipped up, like a morbid reminder of himself; in the end, she had to run the water in the basin to prime the pump.

  When she returned to the living room, Norine suddenly came to the point. “I guess Harald had become a sort of male potency symbol for me,” she said in her uninflected voice, blowing smoke with a careless air, but behind the smoke screen her narrowed topaz eyes were watching Helena as if to measure her reaction. As Norine went on talking, in her rapid-fire, memo-pad style, Helena lit a cigarette herself and settled down to listen critically, taking mental notes and arranging them under headings, just as though she were at a lecture or a meeting.

  The reasons, she noted, for Harald’s becoming “a male potency symbol” to the deprived Norine were as follows: (A) The Group. Norine had always envied them their “sexual superiority.” (B) Kay’s role as a neutral, “passing between both camps.” I.e., Norine had sat next to Kay senior year in Miss Washburn’s Abnormal Psychology and found her “a good scout.” (C) Envy of Kay for “having the best of both worlds.” I.e., she had lost her virginity and stayed at Harald’s place weekends without becoming “déclassée.” Norine’s situation was the obverse. (D) Proximity. Norine had met Kay on the street the day she and Put came back from their honeymoon. They found they were neighbors and the two couples had started playing bridge together in the evenings. (E) Harald was a better bridge player than Put. Ergo, Harald had come to figure in Norine’s mind as an “erect phallus” just out of her reach, like the Tower group. Which was why Helena had found the two of them kissing in the kitchen and why it did not “mean anything.”

  Helena wrinkled her forehead. It seemed to her on the contrary that, if you accepted Norine’s chain of reasoning, it meant a great deal. If Harald was to be treated as a phallic symbol, instead of as Kay’s husband, it made their kisses “meaningful” in just the sense that would appeal to Norine. She had been yielding to the Force of Logic, which poor Kay herself had set in motion.

  “If it didn’t mean anything, why dwell on it?” said Helena. “To make you understand,” replied Norine. “We both know you’re intelligent and we don’t want you to feel you have to tell Kay.” Something in Helena sat up at the sound of those “we”s, but she puffed at her cigarette nonchalantly. What made them think she would tell Kay? That embrace, in her books, did not amount to a row of pins, so long as things stopped there; Harald, after all, had been drinking, as Norine ought to know for herself.

  “I wouldn’t want to wreck her marriage,” mused Norine. “Then don’t,” said Helena, in a voice that sounded like her father’s. “Forget about Harald. There’re other fish in the sea. Don’t feel you have to finish something just because you’ve started it.” She grinned candidly at her hostess, believing she had read her psychology.

  Norine hesitated. Idly, she picked up the curling iron. “It’s not that simple,” she threw out. “Harald and I have been lovers quite a while.” Helena bit her lip; this was what, underneath, she had been afraid of hearing. She made a grimace. The simple word “lovers” had a terrible and unexpected effect on her.

  Put was out all day, Norine went on to explain, and Kay was out all day too. “It undercuts Harald that she works to support him. He has to assert his masculinity. You saw what happened last night—when he burned his play. That was a sort of immolation rite, to propitiate her; he was making a burnt offering of his seed, the offspring of his mind and balls. …” At these words Helena’s normal droll self assumed command again. “Oh, Norine!” she protested. “Do come down to brass tacks.” “‘The Brass Tack,’” Norine said, frowning. “Wasn’t that your name for a literary magazine at college?” Helena agreed that it was. Norine flicked on the curling iron. “What is it,” she wondered, eying Helena, “that makes you want to puke at the imponderables? Do you mind if I curl my hair?” As the curling iron heated, she continued with her narrative. Harald, it seemed, left alone all day, had started droppi
ng in, afternoons, for a cup of tea or a bottle of beer at Norine’s place. Sometimes, he brought a book and read aloud to her; his favorite poet was Robinson Jeffers. “Roan Stallion,” supplied Helena. Norine nodded. “How did you know?” “I guessed,” said Helena. She well remembered the fatal weekend that Harald had read Roan Stallion to Kay. “One day,” Norine said, “I told him about Put. …” “Enough said,” dryly remarked Helena. Norine flushed. “My first affaire—before Harald—started the same way,” she admitted. “It was a man I met in the Public Library, a progressive-school teacher with a wife and six children.” She gave an unwilling laugh. “He was curious about the stuff I was reading. We used to sit in Bryant Park, and I told him about Put. He took me to a hotel and deflowered me. But he was afraid his wife would find out.” “And Harald?” asked Helena. “Underneath his bravado, I guess he’s afraid too. Married men are funny; they all draw a line between the wife and the concubine.” She commenced to curl her hair. Soon the smell of singed hair was added to the smell of cigarette smoke, of dog, pipe tobacco, and of a soured dishcloth in the sink. Watching her, Helena granted Norine a certain animal vitality, and “earthiness” that was underscored, as if deliberately, by the dirt and squalor of the apartment. Bedding with her, Helena imagined, must be like rolling in a rich moldy compost of autumn leaves, crackling on the surface, like her voice, and underneath warm and sultry from the chemical processes of decay. It came back to her that Norine had written a famous rubbishy paper for Miss Beckwith’s Folk Lore, on Ge, the Earth Mother, and the steamy chthonian cults, that had been turned down by the Journal of Undergraduate Studies, on the ground of “fuzzy thinking,” a favorite faculty phrase. Helena chuckled inwardly. She felt she could write a fine paper herself this morning, in the manner of Miss Caroline Spurgeon, on the chthonic imagery of Norine’s apartment, which, if not exactly a cellar, as Kay insisted on calling it, was black as a coalhole and heated by the furnace of the hostess’ unslaked desires, burning like quicklime and giving off, Helena said to herself sharply, a good deal of hot air. Drolly, she considered the “bitch in heat upstairs,” surely a totem or familiar, the Fallopian tubes of the landlady (a root system?), the Cerberus in the back yard. “Oh queen of hell,” she said to herself, “where does your Corn Mother mourn?” On lower Park Avenue, she discovered, somewhat later in the conversation. Norine’s mother lived on alimony from her father, who had remarried; Norine went to dinner with her at Schrafft’s every other Wednesday.