“GET YOURSELF A PESSARY.” Dick’s muttered envoi, as he propelled her firmly to the door the next morning, fell on Dottie’s ears with the effect of a stunning blow. Bewildered, she understood him to be saying “Get yourself a peccary,” and a vision of a coarse piglike mammal they had studied in Zoology passed across her dazed consciousness, like a slide on a screen, followed by awful memories of Krafft-Ebing and the girl who had kept a goat at Vassar. Was this some variant she ought to know about, probably, of the old-maid joke? Tears dampened her eyes, though she tried to wink them back. Evidently, Dick hated her for what had taken place between them in the night; some men were like that, Kay said, after they had yielded to their passions: “an expense of spirit in a waste of shame.” They had had the most dismal breakfast, which he had fixed, not letting her help him, on a grill in the clothes closet—scrambled eggs and coffee and the remains of a coffee ring from the bakery; no fruit or fruit juice. While they ate, he had hardly spoken; he had passed her the first section of the paper and then sat there, with his coffee, reading the sports news and the classified ads. When she had tried to give him the news section, he had impatiently pushed it back to her. Yet up to this very moment she had been telling herself that he might have just got up “on the wrong side of the bed,” as Mother said; Daddy was cross too, sometimes, in the morning. Now she saw, though, that there was no use pretending any more; she had lost him. In his dressing gown, with his hair disordered and his cruel biting smile and bitter taunts, he reminded her of someone. Hamlet—of course—putting Ophelia away from him. “Get thee to a nunnery.” “I loved you not.” But she could not say, like Ophelia, “I was the more deceived” (which was the most pathetic moment in the whole play, the class had decided), because Dick had not deceived her; it was she who had been fooling herself. She stared at him, swallowing hard; a tear slid out of one eye. “A female contraceptive, a plug,” Dick threw out impatiently. “You get it from a lady doctor. Ask your friend Kay.”
Understanding dawned; her heart did a handspring. In a person like Dick, her feminine instinct caroled, this was surely the language of love. But it was a mistake to show a man that you had been unsure of him even for a second. “Yes, Dick,” she whispered, her hand twisting the doorknob, while she let her eyes tell him softly what a deep, reverent moment this was, a sort of pledge between them. Luckily, he could never imagine the thing she had been thinking about the peccary! The happiness in her face caused him to raise an eyebrow and frown. “I don’t love you, you know, Boston,” he said warningly. “Yes, Dick,” she replied. “And you must promise me you won’t fall in love with me.” “Yes, Dick,” she repeated, more faintly. “My wife says I’m a bastard, but she still likes me in the hay. You’ll have to accept that. If you want that, you can have it.” “I want it, Dick,” said Dottie in a feeble but staunch voice. Dick shrugged. “I don’t believe you, Boston. But we can give it a try.” A meditative smile appeared on his lips. “Most women don’t take me seriously when I state my terms. Then they get hurt. In the back of their heads, they have a plan to make me fall in love with them. I don’t fall in love.” Dottie’s warm eyes were teasing. “What about Betty?” He cocked his head at the photograph. “You think I love her?” Dottie nodded. He looked very serious. “I’ll tell you,” he said. “I like Betty better than I’ve liked any woman. I’ve still got hot pants for her, if you want to call that love.” Dottie lowered her eyes and shook her head. “But I won’t change my life for her, and so Betty lit out. I don’t blame her; I’d have done the same if I were made like Betty. Betty is all woman. She likes money, change, excitement, things, clothes, possessions.” He rubbed his strong jaw line with a thumb, as though he were studying a puzzle. “I hate possessions. It’s a funny thing, because you’d think I hated them because they meant stability, wouldn’t you?” Dottie nodded. “But I like stability; that’s just the rub!” He had become quite tense and excited; his hands flexed nervously as he spoke. To Dottie’s eyes, he suddenly appeared boyish, like the worried young lifeguards in their drifting boats at Cape Ann who sometimes dropped in at the cottage to discuss their futures with Mother. But of course that was what he must have been, once, growing up in Marblehead in the middle of the summer people; he was built like a swimmer, and she could picture him, brooding, in the lifesaving boat in one of those red jackets they wore—Mother said those boys were often marked for life by the experience of being betwixt and between, with the summer people but not of them.
“I like a man’s life,” he said. “A bar. The outdoors. Fishing and hunting. I like men’s talk, that’s never driving to get anywhere but just circles and circles. That’s why I drink. Paris suited me—the crowd of painters and newspapermen and photographers. I’m a natural exile; if I have a few dollars or francs, I’m satisfied. I’ll never pass third base as a painter, but I can draw and do nice clean work—an honest job. But I hate change, Boston, and I don’t change myself. That’s where I come a cropper with women. Women expect an affair to get better and better, and if it doesn’t they think it’s getting worse. They think if I sleep with them longer I’m going to get fonder of them, and if I don’t get fonder that I’m tiring of them. But for me it’s all the same. If I like it the first time, I know I’m going to keep on liking it. I liked you last night and I’ll keep on liking you as long as you want to come here. But don’t harbor the idea that I’m going to like you more.” A truculent, threatening note had come into his voice with the last words; he stood, staring down at her harshly and teetering a little on his slippered feet. Dottie fingered the frayed tassel of his dressing-gown sash. “All right, Dick,” she whispered.
“When you get yourself fixed up, you can bring your things here and I’ll keep them for you. Just give me a call after you’ve been to the doctor.” A breath of last night’s liquor wafted into her face; she fell back a step and averted her head. She had been hoping to know Dick better, but now, all at once, his strange philosophy of life gave her a sinking feeling. How could she fit him in this summer, for instance? He did not seem to realize that she would have to go up to Gloucester, the way she always did. If they were engaged, he could come up to visit, but of course they weren’t and never could be; that was what he was telling her. To her horror, now that he had said he wanted her on his terms, Dottie found herself having second thoughts: what if she had lost her virginity with a man who scared her and who sounded, from his own description, like a pretty bad hat? For a moment, Dottie felt cornered, but her training had instilled the principle that it was a mark of low breeding to consider that you might have been wrong in a person. “I can’t take you out,” he said more gently, as if he read her thoughts. “I can only ask you to come here whenever you’re in town. The welcome mat will be out. I’ve nothing but my bed to offer you. I don’t go to theatres or night clubs and very seldom to restaurants.” Dottie opened her mouth, but Dick shook his head. “I don’t like ladies who want to pay my check. What I make with my posters and commissions take care of my simple wants: my carfare, my bar bill, and a few frugal canned goods.” Dottie’s clasped hands made a gesture of pity and remorse; she had been forgetting he was poor, which was why, of course, he was so short and gruff about seeing her—it was his pride that made him talk that way. “Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “There’s an aunt up in Marblehead who comes through with a check now and then. Some day, if I live long enough, I’ll be her heir. But I hate possessions, Boston—forgive me if I think of you generically. I hate the itch to acquire. I don’t care for this kinetic society.” Dottie felt the time had come to interpose a gentle remonstrance; she thought Dick’s aunt would not altogether approve of his point of view. “But Dick,” she said quietly, “there are false possessions and true possessions. If everybody thought like you, the human race would never have got anywhere. We’d still be living in caves. Why, the wheel wouldn’t even have been invented! People need an incentive, maybe not a money incentive …” Dick laughed. “You must be the fiftieth woman who has said that to me. It’s a credit to universal education that whenever a girl meets Dick Brown she begins to talk about the wheel and the lever. I’ve even had a French prostitute tell me about the fulcrum.” “Good-bye, Dick,” Dottie said quickly. “I mustn’t keep you from your work.” “Aren’t you going to take the phone number?” he demanded, shaking his head in mock reproach. She handed him her little blue leather address book, and he wrote down his name and his landlady’s telephone number in heavy drawing pencil with a flourish; he had very striking handwriting. “Good-bye, Boston.” He took her long chin between his thumb and forefinger and waggled it back and forth, absently. “Remember: no monkey business; no falling in love. Honor bright.”
Notwithstanding this agreement, Dottie’s heart was humming happily as she sat, three days later, beside Kay Petersen, in the woman doctor’s office suite. Actions spoke louder than words, and whatever Dick might say, the fact remained that he had sent her here, to be wedded, as it were, by proxy, with the “ring” or diaphragm pessary that the woman doctor dispensed. With her hair freshly waved and her complexion glowing from a facial, she wore a look of quiet assurance, the look of a contented matron, almost like Mother and her friends. Knowledge was responsible for her composure. Kay would hardly believe it, but Dottie, all by herself, had visited a birth-control bureau and received a doctor’s name and a sheaf of pamphlets that described a myriad of devices—tampons, sponges, collar-button, wishbone, and butterfly pessaries, thimbles, silk rings, and coils—and the virtues and drawbacks of each. The new device recommended to Dottie by the bureau had the backing of the whole U.S. medical profession; it had been found by Margaret Sanger in Holland and was now for the first time being imported in quantity into the U.S.A., where our own manufacturers could copy it. It combined the maximum of protection with the minimum of inconvenience and could be used by any woman of average or better intelligence, following the instructions of a qualified physician.
This article, a rubber cap mounted on a coiled spring, came in a ranges of sizes and would be tried out in Dottie’s vagina, for fit, wearing comfort, and so on, in the same way that various lenses were tried out for the eyes. The woman doctor would insert it, and having made sure of the proper size, she would teach Dottie how to put it in, how to smear it with contraceptive jelly and put a dab in the middle, how to crouch in a squatting position, fold the pessary between thumb and forefinger of the right hand, while parting the labia majora with the left hand, and edge the pessary in, so that it would snap into place, shielding the cervix, and finally how to follow it with the right middle finger, locate the cervix or soft neck of the uterus and make certain it was covered by the rubber. When this process had been rehearsed several times, to the watching doctor’s satisfaction, Dottie would be taught how and when to douche, how much water to use, the proper height for the douche bag, and how to hold the labia firmly around the lubricated nozzle in order to get the best results. As she was leaving the office, the nurse would present her with a Manila envelope containing a tube of vaginal jelly and a small flat box with Dottie’s personalized contraceptive in it. The nurse would instruct her how to care for the pessary: to wash it after each use, dry it carefully, and dust it with talcum before returning it to its box.
Kay and Harald had just about fainted when they heard what Dottie had been up to, behind their back. She came to see them in their apartment, bringing a Georgian silver creamer for a wedding present, just the sort of thing an old aunt would have inflicted on you, and a bunch of white peonies; Kay could not have been more disappointed when she thought that for the same money they could have had something plain and modern from Jensen’s Danish shop. Then, when Harald went to the kitchen to start their supper (minced sea clams, the new canned kind, on toast), Dottie had quietly told Kay, who wanted to know what she had been doing, that she had taken Dick Brown for her lover. Coming from Dottie, that imperial phrase was simply perfect; Kay immediately saved it to tell Harald. It had happened only the night before, it seemed, in that studio room of Dick’s, and already, today, Dottie had scurried around to the birth-control bureau and got all this literature, which she had with her in her pocketbook. Kay did not know what to say, but her face must have shown how appalled she was. She thought Dottie must be insane. Underneath that virile mask, which was what Harald called it, Dick Brown was a very warped personality, a dipsomaniac and a violent misogynist, with a terrible inferiority complex because of what had happened with his socialite wife. His motives were plain enough; he was using Dottie to pay back society for the wound it had inflicted on his ego—Kay could hardly wait till she could hear how Harald would analyze it, when they were alone. But in spite of her impatience, she asked Dottie to stay for supper with them, greatly to Harald’s surprise, when he came in with the tray of drinks: after Harald had gone to the theatre, Dottie would be bound to tell more. “I had to ask her,” she apologized to Harald, in a quick exchange in the kitchen. She put her lips to his ear. “An awful thing has happened, and we’re responsible! Dick Brown has seduced her.”
Yet every time she looked at Dottie, sitting in their living room, so serene and conventional in her pearls and dressmaker suit, with white touches, and smart navy-blue sailor, sipping her Clover Club cocktail out of the Russel Wright cup and wiping a mustache of egg white from her long upper lip with a cocktail napkin, she just could not picture her in bed with a man. Afterward, Harald said that she seemed quite an appetizing piece, in her chipmunk style, with her brown friendly eyes gleaming with quiet fun and her lashes aflutter whenever she looked at him. What he did not see was that a lot of it was clothes, for, thanks to a clever mother, Dottie dressed to perfection: she was the only one of the Boston contingent at Vassar who knew better than to wear tweeds and plaid mufflers, which made the poor things look like gaunt, elderly governesses out for a Sunday hike. But, according to Harald, her deep-bosomed figure, as revealed by her bias-cut blouse, gave promise of sensuality. Probably it meant something, Kay could not deny it, that it was Dick himself, on his own initiative, it seemed, who had told her to go and get fitted with a pessary!
“He said to consult me?” Kay repeated, wondering and somewhat flattered, after Harald had gone and they were washing the dishes. She had always thought Dick did not like her. The fact was that, though she knew about pessaries, she herself did not possess one. She had always used suppositories with Harald, and it embarrassed her a little now to have to confess this to Dottie, who seemed to have forged ahead of her so surprisingly and after only one night. …She envied Dottie’s enterprise in going to the birth-control bureau; until she was married, she herself would never have had the nerve. Dottie wanted to know whether Kay thought it was a good sign, Dick’s saying that to her, and Kay had to admit that on the surface it was; it could only mean that Dick was expecting to sleep with her regularly, if you thought that was good. Examining her own emotions, Kay found she was piqued; it nettled her to guess that Dottie might have been better than she was in bed. Still, truth compelled her to tell Dottie that if it were only a halfhearted affair, Dick would just use condoms (the way Harald had at first) or practice coitus interruptus. “He must like you, Renfrew,” she declared, shaking out the dish mop. “Or like you enough anyway.”
That was Harald’s verdict too. Riding on the top of a Fifth Avenue bus, on the way to the doctor’s office, Kay repeated to Dottie what Harald had said of the etiquette of contraception, which, as he explained it, was like any other etiquette—the code of manners rising out of social realities. You had to look at it in terms of economics. No man of honor (which Dick, in Harald’s opinion, was) would expect a girl to put up the doctor’s fee, plus the price of the pessary and the jelly and the douche bag unless he planned to sleep with her long enough for her to recover her investment. Of that, Dottie could rest assured. A man out for a casual affair found it simpler to buy Trojans by the dozen, even though it decreased his own pleasure; that way, he was not tied to the girl. The lower classes, for instance, almost never transferred the burden of contraception to the woman; this was a discovery of the middle class. A workingman was either indifferent to the danger of conception or he mistrusted the girl too much to leave the matter in her hands.
This mistrust, Harald said, which was deep in the male nature, made even middle-class and professional men wary of sending a girl for a pessary; too many shotgun weddings had resulted from a man’s relying on a woman’s assurance that the contraceptive was in. Then there was the problem of the apparatus. The unmarried girl who lived with her family required a place to keep her pessary and her douche bag where her mother was not likely to find them while doing out the bureau drawers. This meant that the man, unless he was married, had to keep them for her, in his bureau drawer or his bathroom. The custodianship of these articles (Harald was so entertaining in his slow-spoken, careful, dry way) assumed the character of a sacred trust. If their guardian was a man of any delicacy, they precluded the visits of other women to the apartment, who might open drawers or rummage in the medicine cabinet or even feel themselves entitled to use the douche bag hallowed to “Her.”
With a married woman, if the affair were serious, the situation was the same: she brought a second pessary and a douche bag, which she kept in her lover’s apartment, where they exercised a restraining influence if he felt tempted to betray her. A man entrusted with this important equipment was bonded, so to speak, Harald said, like a bank employee; when he did stray with another woman, he was likely to do it in her place or in a hotel room or even a taxi—some spot not consecrated by the sacral reminders. In the same way, a married woman pledged her devotion by committing her second pessary to her lover’s care; only a married woman of very coarse fiber would use the same pessary for both husband and lover. So long as the lover had charge of the pessary, like a medieval knight with the key to his lady’s chastity belt, he could feel that she was true to him. Though this could be a mistake. One adventurous wife Harald described was said to have pessaries all over town, like a sailor with a wife in every port, while her husband, a busy stage director, assured himself of her good behavior by a daily inspection of the little box in her medicine cabinet, where the conjugal pessary lay in its dusting of talcum powder.
“Harald has made quite a study of it, hasn’t he?” commented Dottie with a demure twinkle. “I’m spoiling it,” replied Kay seriously. “The way Harald tells it, you can see the whole thing in terms of property values. The fetishism of property. I told him he ought to write it up for Esquire; they publish some quite good things. Don’t you think he should?” Dottie did not know what to answer; Harald’s approach, she felt, was rather “unpleasant,” so cold and cerebral, though perhaps he knew what he was talking about. It was certainly a different angle from what you got in the birth-control pamphlets.
Furthermore, Kay quoted, the disposal of the pessary and the douche bag presented a problem when a love affair was breaking up. What was the man to do with these “hygienic relics” after he or the woman tired? They could not be returned through the mail, like love letters or an engagement ring, though crude lads, Harald said, had been known to do this; on the other hand, they could not be put in the trash basket for the janitor or the landlady to find; they would not burn in the fireplace without giving off an awful smell, and to keep them for another woman, given our bourgeois prejudices, was unthinkable. A man could carry them, stuffed into a paper bag, to one of the city’s wastebaskets late at night or dump them into the river, but friends of Harald’s who had done this had actually been halted by the police. Probably because they acted so furtive. Trying to get rid of a woman’s pessary and fountain syringe, the corpus delicti of a love affair, was exactly, as Harald put it, like trying to get rid of a body. “I said, you could do the way murderers do in detective stories: check them into the Grand Central parcel room and then throw away the check.” Kay gave her rollicking laugh, but Dottie shivered. She saw that it would not be funny if the problem came up for her and Dick; every time she thought of the future, of the terrible complications a secret affair got you into, she almost wanted to give up and go home. And all Kay’s conversation, though doubtless well meant, seemed calculated to dismay her with its offhand boldness and cynicism.
The upshot, continued Kay, was that no bachelor in his right mind would send a girl to the doctor to be fitted if he did not feel pretty serious about her. The difficulties only arose, of course, with respectable married women or nice girls who lived with their parents or with other girls. There were women of the looser sort, divorcées and unattached secretaries and office workers living in their own apartments, who equipped themselves independently and kept their douche bags hanging on the back of their bathroom door for anybody to see who wandered in to pee during a cocktail party. One friend of Harald’s, a veteran stage manager, always made it a point to look over a girl’s bathroom before starting anything; if the bag was on the door, it was nine to one he would make her on the first try.
They descended from the bus on lower Fifth Avenue; Dottie’s complexion had come out in blotches like hives or shingles—a sure sign that she was nervous. Kay was sympathetic. This was a big step for Dottie; she had been trying to give Dottie an inkling of just how big a step it was, much more than losing your virginity. For a married woman, naturally, it was different; Harald had agreed immediately that it would be a good idea for her to make an appointment and go along with Dottie to be fitted too. She and Harald both loathed children and had no intention of having any; Kay had seen in her own family how offspring could take the joy out of marriage. Her tribe of brothers and sisters had kept her Dads’ nose to the grindstone; if he had not had so many children, he might have been a famous specialist, instead of a hard-worked G.P. with only a wing in the hospital to commemorate the work he had done in orthopedics and on serums for meningitis. Poor Dads had quite a kick out of sending her east to Vassar; she was the oldest and the brightest, and she had the feeling that he wanted her to have the life he might have had himself, out in the big world, where he would have got the homage he deserved. He still had invitations to come and do research in the big eastern laboratories, but now he was too old to learn, he said; the cerebral arteries were hardening. He had just crashed through nobly with a check; she and Harald had been moved almost to tears by the size of it—far more than he and Mums would have spent on trains and hotels if they had come on for the wedding. It was a declaration of faith, said Harald. And she and Harald did not intend to betray that faith by breeding children, when Harald had his name to make in the theatre. The theatre—strange coincidence!—was one of Dads’ big passions; he and Mums went to see all the touring companies in Salt Lake City and had tickets every night, nearly, when they came to New York for medical meetings. Not leg shows, either; Dads’ favorite playwright, after Shakespeare, was Bernard Shaw. Harald thought it would be a nice idea for Kay to keep the programs of the worthwhile plays he and she saw and send them on to Dads; that way, he would feel in touch.
Dads, like all modern doctors, believed in birth control and was for sterilizing criminals and the unfit. He would certainly approve of what Kay was doing. What he would think about Dottie was another question. Kay herself had been horrified to hear that Dottie had made the appointment in her real name: “Dorothy Renfrew,” not even “Mrs.” As though she were living in Russia or Sweden, instead of the old U.S.A. A lot of people who would not be shocked at her for sleeping with Dick (that could happen to anybody) would look at her askance if they could see what she was up to this minute. The things you did in private were your own business, but this was practically public! Kay ran an apprehensive eye up and down Fifth Avenue; you could never tell who might be watching them from a passing bus or a taxi. She had begun to be nervous herself, on Dottie’s behalf, and to be crosser and crosser with Dick. Harald would never have exposed her to an ordeal like this. After the first few times, he had gone to the drugstore himself and bought her suppositories and a bulb type of douche and Zonite, so that she would not have to face the druggist herself. Kay gripped Dottie’s arm, to steady her as they crossed the street with the traffic light; she rued the day she had invited Dick to her wedding, knowing what he was. Why, the office might be raided and the doctor’s records impounded and published in the papers, which would kill Dottie’s family, who would probably turn around and blame Kay, as the pathfinder of the college group. She felt she was making quite a sacrifice in coming with Dottie today, to lend moral support, though Dottie insisted that birth control was perfectly legal and above-board, thanks to a court decision that allowed doctors to prescribe contraceptives for the prevention or cure of disease. As they rang the doctor’s bell Kay had to laugh, suddenly, at Dottie’s expression: you could almost see Mrs. Pankhurst in her resolute eye.
And indeed Dottie’s zealotry was reflected in the furnishings of the woman doctor’s office, which had a sort of militant plainness, like the headquarters of a missionary sect. There was a single upholstered couch, with two antimacassars aligned on its back; against the tan walls was a series of straight chairs. The magazine rack held copies of Hygeia, Parents, Consumers’ Research Bulletin, a current issue of the Nation, and a back number of Harper’s. On the walls were etchings showing overcrowded slums teeming with rickety children and a lithograph of an early hospital ward in which untended young women, with babies at their side, were dying—of puerperal fever, Dottie whispered. There was a pious hush in the atmosphere which was emphasized by the absence of any smoking equipment and by the solemn whirring of a fan. Kay and Dottie, who had automatically taken cigarettes out of their cases, replaced them after a survey of the room. There were two other patients waiting, reading Hygeia and Consumers’ Research Bulletin. One, a sallow thin woman of about thirty, with a pair of cotton gloves on her lap, wore no wedding ring, a fact which Dottie silently called to Kay’s attention. The second patient, in rimless glasses and worn Oxfords, was almost middle-aged. The sight of these two women, far from well-to-do, and of the prints on the walls had a sobering effect on the girls. Kay, made to reflect on “how much good the doctor was doing,” a thing often said of her father by the elite of Salt Lake City, felt ashamed of the brittle, smart way she had talked about birth control on the bus, though she had only been quoting Harald. “Extend your antennae, girls,” was a favorite apothegm of the teacher she had respected most, and Kay, reminded of her father’s nonpaying patients, saw, to her discomfiture, that she and Dottie were just the frills on the doctor’s practice.
What she could not remember, though Harald kept drilling it into her, was that she and her friends did not count any more, except as individuals, in the wider picture of American society, exemplified by these two women, right here in this office. Last night, after the theatre, when the three of them had gone to have a beer in a speak-easy, Harald had been explaining just that to Dottie. The transfer of financial power, he showed, from Threadneedle Street to Wall Street was an event in world history comparable to the defeat of the Spanish Armada, which had ushered in the era of capitalism. When Roosevelt, just now, had gone off the gold standard, it was a declaration of independence from Europe and an announcement of a new, flexible epoch. The N.R.A. and the eagle were symbols of the arrival of a new class to power. Their class, the upper middle, he told the two girls, was finished politically and economically; its best elements would merge with the rising class of workers and farmers and technicians, of which he, as a stage technician, was one. Take the theatre as an example. In the days of Belasco, the director used to be king; today, the director was dependent, first of all on his backers, who might be a combine, and second, and even more important, on his master electrician, who could make or break a play by the way he handled the lighting—behind every name director, like Jed Harris, for instance, there was a genius electrician, just as there was a genius camera-man behind every name movie director. The same in radio; it was the engineers, the men in the control room, who really counted. A doctor today was dependent on his technicians, on the men in the lab and the X-ray room. “They’re the boys who can make or break a diagnosis.”
Last night, it had thrilled Kay to imagine the future he predicted, of mass abundance through the machine. She had enjoyed watching him impress Dottie, who had not suspected he was such a social thinker since he did not put that side of himself in his letters. “As individuals,” he said, “you girls have something to pass on to individuals in the rising class, just as old Europe still has something to pass on to America.” It relieved her to hear him say this, with his arm clasping her waist and Dottie looking on, wide-eyed, for Kay did not want to be left behind by history and at the same time she was not really strong for the idea of equality; she liked, she had to confess, to be superior. Harald, when he was in a good mood, as he was last night, seemed to think this would still be possible, though with a difference, in the new age.
Last night, he had explained technocracy to Dottie, to show her there was nothing to fear from the future, if it was managed with scientific intelligence. In an economy of plenty and leisure, which the machine had already made feasible, everybody would only have to work a few hours a day. It was through such an economy that his class, the class of artists and technicians, would come naturally to the top; the homage people paid to money today would be paid in the future to the engineers and contrivers of leisure-time activities. More leisure meant more time for art and culture. Dottie wanted to know what would happen to the capitalists (her father was in the import business), and Kay looked inquiringly at Harald. “Capital will blend into government,” said Harald. “After a brief struggle. That’s what we’re witnessing now. The administrator, who’s just a big-scale technician, will replace the big capitalist in industry. Individual ownership is becoming obsolete; the administrators are running the show.” “Take Robert Moses,” put in Kay. “He’s transforming the whole face of New York with his wonderful new parkways and playgrounds.” And she urged Dottie to go to Jones Beach, which was an inspiring example, she really felt this herself, of planning on a large scale for leisure. “Everybody from Oyster Bay,” she added, “drives over there now to swim. It’s quite the thing to do, instead of swimming at a club.” Private enterprise, suggested Harald, still had a part to play, if it had breadth of vision. Radio City, where he had worked for a while as a stage manager’s assistant, was an example of civic planning, undertaken by enlightened capitalists, the Rockefellers. Kay brought in the Modern Museum, which had Rockefeller backing too. New York, she honestly thought, was experiencing a new Renaissance, with the new Medicis competing with public ownership to create a modern Florence. You could see it even in Macy’s, agreed Harald, where enlightened merchant-Jews, the Strauses, were training a corps of upper-middle-class technicians, like Kay, to make the store into something more than a business, something closer to a civic center or permanent fairgrounds, with educational exhibits, like the old Crystal Palace. Then Kay talked about the smart new renovated tenements in the Fifties and Eighties, along the East River, black with white trim and white Venetian blinds; they were still another example of intelligent planning by capital! Vincent Astor had done them. Of course, the rents were rather high, but look what you got: views of the river just as good as from Sutton Place mansions, sometimes a garden, the Venetian blinds, like the old jalousies but modernized, and completely up-to-date kitchens. When you thought that they had just been eyesores, probably full of vermin and unsanitary hall toilets, till the Astor interests fixed them up! And other landlords were following their example, turning old blocks of barracky tenements into compact apartment buildings four and five stories high, with central courts planted with grass and shrubs and two- and three-room apartments for young people—some with fireplaces and built-in bookcases and all with brand-new plumbing and stove and refrigerator. A lot of waste space was being eliminated in these buildings—no more foyers or dining rooms, which were obsolete conventions. Harald, Kay explained, was a perfect fanatic about waste space. A house, he thought, should be a machine for living. When they found a permanent apartment, they were going to have everything built in: bookcases, bureaus, chests. The beds were going to be mattresses and springs, supported by four low pegs, and they were thinking about having a table to eat on that would fold up into the wall like a Murphy bed—a single leaf of wood shaped like an ironing board but broader.
Kay had seldom been happier than she was just then, outlining these plans to Dottie, while Harald listened with one quizzically raised eyebrow, correcting her whenever she made a mistake. It was Dottie who slightly spoiled things by asking, in those gently rumbling tones, what happened to the poor people who had lived in those tenements before. Where did they go? This was a question Kay had never thought to ask herself, and Harald did not know the answer, which at once put him in a darker mood. “Cui bono?” he said. “‘Who profits?’ Eh?” And he signaled the waiter for another round of beer. This alarmed Kay, who knew he had an understudy rehearsal at ten in the morning. “Your question is at once simple and profound,” he went on, to Dottie. “‘What happens to the poor?’” He stared gloomily ahead of him, as if into empty space. “Do they go to Mr. Moses’ big clean white antiseptic beach that Kay finds so inspiring and ‘civic-minded’? No; they don’t, my girls; they lack the price of admission and the car to transport them. Instead, it becomes the perquisite of the Oyster Bay set—damnable profiteers and grabbers, with their pretty powdered noses sniffing at the public trough.” Kay saw that he was sinking into a Slough of Despond (they had coined this name for his sudden, Scandinavian fits of bitter depression), but she managed to steer the conversation into safer channels by getting him to talk to Dottie about recipes and cooking, one of his favorite themes, so that they were home and in bed by one-thirty. Harald was very paradoxical; he would whirl around and attack the very things he believed in most. As she sat in the doctor’s waiting room and covertly examined the other patients, she could easily imagine him saying that she and Dottie were “profiteering” on the birth-control crusade, whose real aim was to limit the families of the poor. Mentally, she began to defend herself. Birth control, she argued, was for those who knew how to use it and value it—the educated classes. Just like those renovated tenements; if poor people were allowed to move into them, they would wreck them right away, through lack of education.
Dottie’s thoughts too were running on the night before. She was fascinated by the way Kay and Harald had their whole life planned. When Kay started at Macy’s in September, Harald would get their breakfast every morning and then sweep and clean and do the marketing, so that everything would be ready for Kay to get the dinner when she came home from work; over the weekend, they would map out the meals for the week. Right now, Harald was teaching her to cook. His specialties were Italian spaghetti, which any beginner could learn, and those minced sea clams—terribly good—they had the other night, and meat balls cooked in salt in a hot skillet (no fat), and a quick-and-easy meat loaf his mother had taught him: one part beef, one part pork, one part veal; add sliced onions, pour over it a can of Campbell’s tomato soup and bake in the oven. Then there was his chile con carne, made with canned kidney beans and tomato soup again and onions and half a pound of hamburger; you served it over rice, and it stretched for six people. That was his mother’s too. Kay, not to be outdone—she said, laughing—had written her mother for some of the family recipes, the cheaper ones: veal kidneys done with cooking sherry and mushrooms, and a marvelous jellied salad called Green Goddess, made with lime gelatin, shrimps, mayonnaise, and alligator pear, which could be fixed the night before in ramekins and then unmolded on lettuce cups. Kay had found a new cookbook that had a whole section on casserole dishes and another on foreign recipes—so much more adventurous than Fannie Farmer and that old Boston Cooking School. On Sundays, they planned to entertain, either at a late breakfast of chipped beef or corned-beef hash or at a casserole supper. The trouble with American cooking, Harald said, was the dearth of imagination in it and the terrible fear of innards and garlic. He put garlic in everything and was accounted quite a cook. What made a dish, Kay said, was the seasonings. “Listen to how Harald fixes chipped beef. He puts in mustard and Worcestershire sauce and grated cheese—is that right?—and green pepper and an egg; you’d never think it bore any relation to that old milky chipped beef we got at college.” Her happy laugh rang out in the speakeasy. If Dottie wanted to learn, she should study the recipes in the Tribune. “I love the Tribune,” she said. “Harald converted me from the Times.” “The Tribune’s typography has it all over the Times’s,” observed Harald. “How lucky you are, Kay,” Dottie said warmly, “to have found a husband who’s interested in cooking and who’s not afraid of experiment. Most men, you know, have awfully set tastes. Like Daddy, who won’t hear of ‘made’ dishes, except the good old beans on Saturday.” There was a twinkle in her eye, but she really did mean it that Kay was awfully lucky. Kay leaned forward. “You ought to get your cook to try the new way of fixing canned beans. You just add catsup and mustard and Worcestershire sauce and sprinkle them with plenty of brown sugar, cover them with bacon, and put them in the oven in a Pyrex dish.” “It sounds terribly good,” said Dottie, “but Daddy would die.” Harald nodded. He began to talk, very learnedly, about the prejudice that existed in conservative circles against canned goods; it went back, he said, to an old fear of poisoning that derived from home canning, where spoilage was common. Modern machinery and factory processes, of course, had eliminated all danger of bacteria, and yet the prejudice lingered, which was a pity since many canned products, like vegetables picked at their peak and some of the Campbell soups, were better than anything the home cook could achieve. “Have you tasted the new Corn Niblets?” asked Kay. Dottie shook her head. “You ought to tell your mother about them. It’s the whole-kernel corn. Delicious. Almost like corn on the cob. Harald discovered them.” She considered. “Does your mother know about iceberg lettuce? It’s a new variety, very crisp, with wonderful keeping powers. After you’ve tried it, you’ll never want to see the old Boston lettuce again. Simpson lettuce, they call it.” Dottie sighed. Did Kay realize, she wondered, that she had just passed the death sentence on Boston lettuce, Boston baked beans, and the Boston School cookbook?
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.