The Group by Mary McCarthy

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