The Group

by Mary McCarthy

  Polly smiled. She hoped her father was right, for if he was, she would be able to forget about Aunt Julia’s will. Counting on it was close to wishing for her death. Not that Polly had done that, but she feared she might if things got very bad. Or even if she did not, it was still wrong to see the good side of the loss of a relation.

  “No,” said her father. “I must find you a husband. Invest my hopes in grandchildren—not in the death of an old woman. Though I still trust that I can get her to leave a small legacy to the Trotskyites.” “You’re crazy,” said Polly, laughing. “You can’t seem to get it through your head that Aunt Julia’s a Republican.” “I know that, my dear,” said Mr. Andrews. “But Julia has been convinced by what she reads in the papers that we Trotskyites are counter-revolutionary agents bent on destroying the Soviet Union. Walter Duranty and those fellows, you know, have made her believe in the trials. If what they write wasn’t true, she says, it wouldn’t be in the New York Times, would it? And of course I’ve added my bit. The Trotskyites, I’ve assured her, are the only effective force fighting Stalin. Roosevelt is playing right into his hands. And Hitler has his own ax to grind.” “You’re a crook, Father,” said Polly, kissing him. “Not at all,” said her father. “It’s true. And I’ve saved Julia from being a fascist.”

  This conversation, by entertaining her, made Polly forget her worries for the moment. That was the trouble with her father. When she was with him, she could not remember to worry. And when she did remember, it was with a start of fear at the thought that she could have forgotten. At night she had terrible dreams about money, from which she would awake sweating. Once she dreamed that Christmas had come and the whole apartment had turned into a greenhouse as big as the Crystal Palace because she had forgotten to tell the landlady to countermand it. Another night she thought that she and her father had become nudists because he said they would economize that way on clothes, and an Irish policeman arrested them. But at the hospital one day she found a solution to their troubles. It was a solution she had never thought of because, like the purloined letter, it was staring her right in the face. She was taking blood for a transfusion from a professional donor, and the thought popped into her mind: “Why not I?” That week she sold a pint of her blood to the laboratory. The next week she did it again and the week after. She was sure it was not dangerous; professional donors did it all the time, and the internes sometimes did it. Besides, she was unusually healthy and well nourished this year because her father was an excellent dietitian—she was bursting with iron and vitamins, and if she looked anemic, it was only that she was naturally pale. Yet she told herself that it would be wiser, in the future, to make her donations at Bellevue or at another laboratory, where nobody knew her, so as not to cause talk among her colleagues. The next time, though, she was in a hurry, for it was the week before Christmas and she had used her lunch hour to buy candy canes and paper to make chains for Christmas-tree decorations—her mother had sent them a tree from the farm. So she went to her own laboratory as usual, saying that this would be the last time.

  That day, as luck would have it, she was discovered by Dr. Ridgeley, who had come in to look at a patient’s blood sample. “What are you doing?” he wanted to know, though he could see quite clearly from the apparatus, which still hung beside the couch where she was resting, as you were made to do after giving blood. “Christmas money,” said Polly, smiling nervously and letting her clenched fist relax. His eyes got quite big and he turned and went out of the room. In a minute, he came back. He had been consulting the records. “This is your fourth donation, Polly,” he said sharply. “What’s the trouble?” “Christmas,” she repeated. But he thought it was her father. “Did you do what I told you?” he said. “Shut down your charge accounts? See that he doesn’t get credit?” “I don’t have any charge accounts. He doesn’t use credit.”

  “That you know of,” said Dr. Ridgeley. “Look here, Polly. Allow me to put two and two together. If I see a manic patient and meet a member of his family selling her blood in a laboratory, I conclude that he’s been on a spending spree.” “No,” said Polly. “We’re just short of money over the holidays.” She got up. “Sit down,” he said. “Your father, my dear girl, is severely ill. Someone ought to see that he gets treatment.” “Goes to the hospital, you mean? No, Dr. Ridgeley.” She refused to call him “Jim” now. “He’s sane, I swear to you. His mind is completely clear. He’s just a little bit eccentric.” “These spending sprees, I told you,” he said impatiently, “are symptomatic. They indicate that the patient is way up on the manic curve. The next stage is often an outbreak of violence, with megalomania. Commonly with a sense of mission. Is your father interested in politics?” Polly paled; she was dizzy, which she tried to attribute to blood loss. “Everyone is interested in politics,” she muttered. “I’m not,” said Jim Ridgeley. “But I mean, does he have some special angle? Some pet formula to save the world? A discovery he’s made in recent months?” To Polly, this was magic. “He’s a Trotskyite,” she whispered. “What’s that?” he said. “Oh, don’t be so ignorant!” cried Polly. “Trotsky. Leon Trotsky. One of the makers of the Russian Revolution. Commander of the Red Army. Stalin’s arch-enemy. In exile in Mexico.” “I’ve heard of him, sure,” said Jim Ridgeley. “Didn’t he use to be a pants-presser in Brooklyn?” “No!” cried Polly. “That’s a legend!” A great gulf had opened between her and this young man, and she felt she was screaming across it. In fairness, she tried to remember that a year ago she too had probably thought that Trotsky had pressed pants in Brooklyn; a year ago, she had been almost as ignorant as this doctor. But this only made her realize how far she had traveled from her starting point, the normal educated center, where Jim Ridgeley doggedly stood in his white coat, and which now seemed to her subnormal and uneducated. Yet he had guessed her father was a Trotskyite without even knowing what one was. She began explaining to him that the Trotskyites were the only true Communists and that, right now, they were in the Socialist party. “You’ve heard of Norman Thomas, I hope.” “Sure thing,” replied the doctor. “He ran for President. I voted for him myself in ’32.” “Well,” said Polly, relieved, “the Trotskyites are part of his movement.” As she spoke, she was aware of a slight dishonesty. The Trotskyites, she knew from her father, had entered the Socialist party “as a tactic”; they were not really Socialists like Norman Thomas at all.

  He sat down on the leather couch beside her. “Be that as it may,” he said, a phrase Polly disliked, “they’re a small sect with a mission. Is that right?” “In a way,” said Polly. “They believe in permanent revolution.” And in spite of herself, she smiled. The doctor nodded. “In other words, you think they’re nuts.” She tried to be honest. Forgetting about her father, did she think Mr. Schneider was a nut? “On many points, I think they’re right. But on that one point—permanent revolution—I can’t help feeling that they’re a bit out of touch with reality. But that’s just my idea. I may lack vision.” He smiled at her quizzingly. “You have wonderful eyes,” he said. He leaned forward. For a startled moment, she thought he was going to kiss her. Then he jumped to his feet.

  “Polly, you ought to commit your father.” “Never.” He took her hand. “Maybe I feel strongly because I’m falling in love with you,” he said. Polly pulled her hand away. She was not as surprised as she ought to have been. In the back of her mind, she feared, she had been angling to make Dr. Ridgeley fall in love with her; that was why she had consulted him about her father! Just like other women, she had had her eye on him, having guessed that he liked her quite a bit. Sensing nothing but that about him (she now admitted), she had “thrown herself in his way.” But now that she had heard what she had been hoping to hear, she was scared. She wished he could have said something different; he sounded like the hero of a woman’s magazine story. The idea too that she had probably been using her poor father as a pawn to lure this young man forward made her smile disgustedly at herself. At the same time, inside her, an exultant voice was crowing
, “He loves me!” But then another voice said who was Jim Ridgeley after all, what did she know about him? Her father might say that he was sadly ordinary—another Gus. The proof of this was that he could talk of love and of putting her father in an asylum in one and the same breath. She gave him an icy look. “If you won’t do it,” he said in a different tone, “your mother should.” “She can’t,” Polly answered triumphantly. “You forget. They’re divorced.” “Then the nearest of kin.” “His sister,” said Polly. “My Aunt Julia.” He nodded. “She’s senile,” said Polly, in that same tone of childish triumph. She did not know what had got into her, some mischievous demon that was prompting her to lie. “And your brothers?” “They’d never do it. Any more than I would. You’ll have to give up, Dr. Ridgeley.” “Stop playing,” he said. “It’s a dangerous game.” “My father is not dangerous,” said Polly. “You leave him alone.” “He’s dangerous to you now,” he said gently. “You shouldn’t be giving your life blood for him.” “I suppose you think I have a father complex,” she answered coldly. He shook his head. “I’m not a Freudian. You feel protective toward him. As if he were your child. This may be because you haven’t yet had any children.”

  Suddenly Polly began to cry. He put his arms around her, and she pressed her wet cheek against his stiff white coat. She felt completely disconsolate. Nothing lasted. First, Gus, and then on top of that her father. She had been so happy with him and she would be still, if only they had some money or if he were just a little different. But it was true, he was like a child, and gradually she had got to know that, just as gradually she had got to know that Gus would never marry her. But she ought to have faced facts in both cases from the beginning. She had welcomed her father because she needed him and had deliberately not noticed his frailties, just as she had done with Gus. And with her father, there was probably a little element of trying to be superior to her mother: she could make him happy, if her mother couldn’t. This meant she had given in to him, where her mother had had the strength not to. They should never have taken the apartment, her mother could have told her that; that was the beginning of the folie de grandeur. She could not control her father; she was inert. The same with Gus. If she had given him a strong lead, he would have married her.

  “I had an awful love affair,” she said, still weeping. “The man threw me over. I wanted to die, and then my father came. I thought finally I had a purpose in life, that I could take care of him. And now I can’t seem to do it. It’s not his fault; I just don’t earn enough for the two of us. And I can’t ship him back to my mother. And I won’t put him in an asylum. He really and truly isn’t certifiable. You said yourself he might ‘spontaneously recover.’ Of course, I could go to my aunt. I guess that’s what I’d better do.”

  “Go to your aunt?” “Ask her for money. She isn’t senile. That was a lie. And she’s very rich, or used to be—nobody really knows how much she has left. But you know how funny rich people are about money.” “That might solve your problem temporarily,” he said, sounding like a psychiatrist. “But you must face the fact that your father may get worse. What will you do with him when you marry, Polly?” “I can’t marry,” she said. “You know that. At least, I can’t have children, with my heredity. I’ve come to terms with that finally. It would be selfish to have children—wicked.”

  “Was it wicked to have you?” he said smiling. Polly rushed to her parents’ defense. “They didn’t know, then, about my father’s melancholia. That happened later.” He still smiled, and Polly saw the point. Would she wish not to have been born? Unhappy as she was, she could not say that. Even when she had wished to die, she had not wished never to have been alive. Nobody alive could do that. “What strange set ideas you have!” he said. “And you a medical technician. It isn’t as if you had a family history of idiocy. Or hereditary syphilis.” “I always thought,” said Polly, “that from a scientific point of view I ought to be sterilized.” “Good God!” he replied. “What bunkum! Where did you learn that?” “At college,” said Polly. “I don’t mean the professors taught it in class, but it was sort of in the atmosphere. Eugenics. That certain people ought to be prevented from breeding. Not Vassar women of course”—she smiled—“but the others. I always felt like one of the others. There was a lot of inbreeding in my family—people marrying their cousins. The Andrews’ blood has run thin.” “‘The blood of the Andrews,’” he said, glancing at Polly’s arm, where a pad of cotton still lay at the point the vein had been opened. “I’ll prove to you that I have confidence in the blood of the Andrews. Will you marry me?” “But we’ve never even had a date,” protested Polly rather speciously. “You don’t know me. We’ve never—” She stopped herself. “Been to bed,” he finished.

  “All right, let’s go to a hotel. You call your father and tell him you won’t be home. I’ve got my car outside. We’ll have dinner first and a dance. Are you a good dancer?” Polly feared this was a “line” he used with all the young nurses and technicians, and yet if he asked them all to marry him, how did he edge out of it afterward? He was quite good-looking, tall and curly-haired, and that in itself suddenly made her suspicious. In real life, it was only homely men who fell in love with a bang and did not leave you to guess about their intentions. He had a breezy manner of talking that she was at a loss to interpret; it might come, she told herself, from dealing with sick people. “Are you always such a ‘fast worker’?” she asked teasingly, taking the tone she took with her father in his headstrong moments. “No,” he said. “Not with women. Believe it or not, I’ve never told a woman I loved her before. Or signed ‘Love’ to a letter, except to my folks. And I’m thirty years old. Naturally, now that it seems to have hit me, I don’t want to waste time.” Polly’s misgivings lessened. But she laughed gently. “‘Waste time,’” she chided. “How long do you imagine you’ve been in love with me?” He looked at his watch. “About half an hour,” he said matter-of-factly. “But I’ve always liked you. I picked you out when you first came to the hospital.” So she had been right, Polly said to herself. Her confidence increased. But she was frightened now in a new way. He was different from Gus, straightforward, and she liked that, yet she found herself wanting to parry his onslaught. He was all too eager to commit himself, which meant he was committing her. But at the same time his hurry made this whole conversation seem unreal to her, like a daydream. “But we have nothing in common,” she started to object, but this sounded rude, she decided. Instead she said, “Even if I were to marry, I could never marry a psychiatrist.” To her surprise, she discovered she meant this, from the bottom of her heart. Looking for what was wrong with Jim Ridgeley, she found it, alas. A psychiatrist would have a desk side even more wooden than Gus’s; indeed, she had already noticed signs of it. “Good,” Jim Ridgeley said promptly. “I’m going to get out. It was a mistake I made in medical school. I thought it was a science. It ain’t. I’m leaving here the first of the year.” “But what will you do then?” said Polly, thinking that if he left at the first of the year, she would miss him. One side of her was resolutely ignoring his intention of marrying her. “General medicine? But you’d have to start all over again, with your interneship.” “No. Research. There are discoveries to be made in treating mental illness, but they won’t be made in the consulting room. They’ll come from the laboratory. Brain chemistry. I have a job lined up with a research team; I share an apartment with one of them. You can work with us too—as a technician. There’s no future for you here.” “I know that,” said Polly. “But what attracts you about mental illness, Jim?” “The waste,” he said emphatically. “Of human resources. I’m impatient.” “I can see that,” she murmured. “Then I suppose I have a bit of the do-gooder in me. Came by it naturally. My father’s a minister. Presbyterian.” “Oh?” This news was pleasing to Polly; it would be nice, she reflected, to have a minister in the family. “If you like, he can marry us. Or we can go down to City Hall.”

  The more serious he sounded, the more Polly tried to joke. “And
what about my father?” she said lightly. “You can use him as a guinea pig, I suppose. To test out your brilliant discoveries. He could be my dowry.” He frowned. Already, she said to herself sadly, he was starting to disapprove of her. “He can live with us and keep house,” he said shortly. “Do you mean that?” “I wouldn’t say it otherwise,” he answered. “And after we’re married, I can keep an eye on him. To tell the truth, Polly, I think most of our patients would be better off at home. The Victorian system was better, with mad Auntie upstairs. More human. The fault lies mostly with the families. They want to get their mad relation out of the house and into what’s known as ‘the hands of competent professionals.’ I.e., sadistic nurses and orderlies. The same with old people; nobody wants old people around any more.” “Oh, I agree!” exclaimed Polly. “I like old people. It’s awful, the way they’re junked, like old cars. But if that’s the way you think, why did you say he should be committed?” “The difference between theory and practice. I didn’t like the idea of your being alone with him.” “He’s not dangerous,” repeated Polly. “They would never have sent him home from Riggs if he were dangerous.” “Nonsense,” he said. “Most homicidal lunatics who go berserk and murder ten people are found to have been just released from a mental hospital. Your father was let out of Riggs because you had no money to keep him there. If you had, he might be there still.” “You’re very cynical,” said Polly. “You get that way in psychiatry,” he answered. “But let’s grant that your father isn’t dangerous; you probably know more about it than a doctor. He may still be dangerous to himself. If he dips into a depressed phase. He was suicidal at one time, wasn’t he?” “I’m not sure. He talked about it, and Mother was afraid.” “Well.” He looked at her; his eyes were like him—a light brown, with surprising green flecks. “Maybe,” he said, “I told you to commit him partly to see what you’d say.” “Oh!” exclaimed Polly. “You were testing me! Like a fairy tale.” She was disillusioned. “Maybe,” he repeated. “It’s a habit you fall into as a doctor. Watching for the reflexes. But I already knew what you’d answer. I knew you’d say no. I think what I wanted to see was whether I could scare you.” “You did,” said Polly. “No, I didn’t. Not fundamentally. Nothing could persuade you to distrust your father. You’re not a distrustful girl.” “Oh, but I am!” said Polly, thinking of how she had been with Gus. “I know my father, that’s all.”