The Group (27 page)

Libby punched out her cigarette. She usually made it a policy to stay fifteen minutes, as if she were paying a call, but it was hard work, often, with Mr. LeRoy to stretch the visit that long. Now came the moment she dreaded. Some men in offices stood up to indicate that the interview was over, but Mr. LeRoy stayed seated at his desk or else he was pacing around restlessly anyway. He sometimes acted as if he had forgotten what she had come for, which was to get a fresh supply of manuscripts. He would let her put her coat and gloves on without seeming to notice that she was ready to make her adieux and without a single glance at the desk drawer where, she had discovered, the incoming manuscripts were kept. It was a big drawer, like a bin; lowering herself to pun, Libby called it the loony bin, because the suspense of waiting each time for him to open it drove her crazy. Sometimes she had to remind him, but generally she found that if she waited long enough he remembered. Each time, though, she felt her whole career hanging by a thread for what was probably only a minute by the clock but, measured by her heart’s beat, eternity. Finally he would fish out a couple of manuscripts and toss them on the desk. “Here, have a look at these.” Or, peering into the drawer, “There doesn’t seem to be much here this week, Miss MacAusland,” he would say, coughing. When Libby, arching her neck, could see that the drawer was practically full. Some day, she feared—and she used to tell it to herself as a story—the drawer would remain closed. She would put on her coat (simple navy blue with a velvet collar) and go out into the wintry streets with her empty briefcase; after that, she could never see Mr. LeRoy again—her pride would not let her.

In fact, Libby usually repaired to Schrafft’s for a malted after a session with Mr. LeRoy. On this day of evil omen, she tottered out of the office in a shaken condition, with one measly manuscript to show for her trouble. Total blackness; ice and desolation. “The function of the first reader is to save the second reader’s time.” Fanning her brow with the tea menu, she called on herself to face the truth: he had been letting her down gradually for months, preparing her for the final blow, hint by hint, like an author preparing the reader! How much kinder if he had simply said to her, “I’m afraid you haven’t worked out, Miss MacAusland. Sorry.” Nothing would have been simpler than that. She would have understood. After all, publishers could not farm out manuscripts as a charity. “Thank you, Mr. LeRoy, for your frankness,” she would have told him. “Do come and have tea with me some time. I shall always remember you as my friend.”

After a while, sucking at her malted, Libby began to realize what a solipsist she was: all that was in her own mind. The trouble was, she had been looking at their interviews from
her
point of view, which was one of secret, mad apprehension concentrated on that drawer. But from Mr. LeRoy’s point of view, it was all in the day’s work. She was one of many readers he had to distribute manuscripts among. And he could not
make
manuscripts out of thin air, if authors did not send them in. Moreover, he had to be fair; he could not favor her over older readers who probably depended on it for their livelihood. You could see he was fair from his eyebrows, which always looked so perplexed. When he talked to her today like a Dutch uncle, it was because he was trying to teach her the trade, curb her “instinct of craftsmanship,” which was too creative for the marts of commerce. He probably had not the faintest inkling of the tumults of hope and fear he stirred up in her girlish bosom. He took it for granted she was on the payroll. “When he said there wasn’t much this week, the emphasis in his mind was on “this week.” And what she had said to herself just now was perfectly true: nothing would have been easier for him than just to tell her that she had been found wanting—
if
he thought so. He must have to tell some poor soul that every day. Each time he rejected a manuscript. Why had she never considered that?

It struck her that it would be a fascinating exercise in narrative point of view to tell the story of their relation first from her standpoint and then from Mr. LeRoy’s. What would stand out, of course, would be the complete contrast. It would show how each of us is locked in his own private world. “The Fatal Drawer,” you could call it. Or “The Secret Drawer,” which would give the idea of secret, closed lives and would be an evocation of secret drawers in old desks, like Mother’s desk at home. Tapping on her glass, Libby summoned the Irish waitress and borrowed a pencil; she began scribbling notes on the back of the menu. She had an inspiration that she wanted to catch on the wing. What if the heroine (never mind her name) had been enthralled, all through her childhood, by a secret drawer in her mother’s (grandmother’s?) desk, which she had never succeeded in opening? That would give a sort to poetic depth to the story and help explain the heroine’s psychology: the granite Victorian house in the shadow of the mills, the tall hedges, the monkey tree in the garden, the summerhouse or pergola where the lonely child had tea, and the Queen Anne secretary in the dark hall at the top of the stairs, beyond the curving banisters. …Later, when the heroine met the publisher, you could have her imagine all sorts of grisly things, like making her suspect that his precious drawer was really bulging with manuscripts and that a not-so-bad-looking girl she had seen waiting outside with a cardboard briefcase was a rival for Mr. LeRoy’s favors. When really it would turn out that the girl was an author whose manuscript was going to be given to Libby to pass on. That would be clear when you got the story from Mr. LeRoy’s angle.

Libby was chock full of ideas for stories, which she generally wrote down in her diary. Every writer ought to keep a diary, Mrs. M.A.P. Smith said. Libby had been keeping hers faithfully for the last three years, noting her impressions and new words and her dreams. And titles for stories and poems. “‘The Drawer’!” she exclaimed now. That was it, of course—the first rule for good writing was to strike out adjectives. Libby signaled for the hostess. “You don’t mind if I take this?” she queried, showing her the menu and pointing to her briefcase. The hostess of course was delighted: all the world loves a writer, Libby had found. The old French waiters at the Lafayette Café had got so they gave her a regular table when she dropped in,
toute seule
, on Sunday afternoons, to read or take notes at the marble-topped table and watch the odd characters playing checkers or reading the newspapers, which were rolled up on wooden poles the way they were in France.

Libby was not all work and no play; she was managing to have a splendiferous time for herself without overspending her allowance. During the winter, she would go up to ski in the Berkshires on those weekend cut-rate excursions the New York Central ran; the trains were full of skiers, and she had made a lot of new friends that way. Most of them were flabbergasted when they heard she had broken into print. Last winter she had discovered a beauteous young man who taught English at one of the private schools and who knew, it turned out in the spring, a nifty picnic spot that could be reached for five cents on the subway: Pelham Bay Park; you took the Lexington Avenue Express to the end of the line and then got out and walked. Libby would pack a lunch of cucumber sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs, and big fat strawberries, and they would throw in a leather volume of poetry to read aloud after they had eaten and were lying on a steamer blanket in a sheltered spot overlooking the water. Libby was crazy about the Cavalier Poets, and he doted on the Elizabethans, especially Sidney and Drayton (“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part.—Nay I have done, you get no more of me …”). He told Libby she looked just the way he imagined Penelope Rich (Penelope Devereux that
was
, the sister of the Earl of Essex), the “Stella” of Sidney’s “Astrophel and Stella.” “Stella” had blond hair and dark eyes, from which came killing darts, like Libby’s. The combination of brown eyes and gold hair was the Elizabethan
ne plus ultra
of womanly beauty. This spring, Libby could hardly wait for the first pussy willows for those picnics to start again. He was full of the most intriguing comparisons, which sometimes introduced her to complete new realms of reading. For instance, when he came last spring to pick her up one Saturday morning at the Tudor City apartment for their picnic, wearing heavy shoes and carrying a student’s bookbag, she was in the kitchen buttering bread for their sandwiches. Whereupon he started reciting:

“Werther had a love for Charlotte

Such as words could never utter.

Would you know how first he met her?

She was cutting bread and butter.”

Her roommates nearly popped, they were so impressed, having only gone to Smith and Holyoke. That was a parody by Thackery of Goethe’s
Sorrows of Werther
, which Libby had promptly devoured in the library. She often demanded of herself, placing her index finger on her forehead dramatically to indicate deep thought, whether this delirious young man could be in love with her, though he didn’t have a bean, except his teacher’s salary. This Christmas he had taken her skating in Central Park twice, which was the only time he had put his arm around her, to hold her up on the ice, but unfortunately he had had a cold most of the winter and just taught his classes and afterward had a hot lemonade and went to bed.

Then she had other heavy beaux—a young actor she had met at Kay’s who took her to the theatre in cheap seats they got at Gray’s cut-rate ticket place in the bowels of the earth underneath the New York
Times
building; they always stopped outside to read the illuminated ribbon of news (the snappy comparison was Libby’s) that ran around the
Times
building. And a young man from the Yale Music School who took her to Harlem to hear jazz. And there was this Jewish boy she had met on the ski train, with a lisp and curly eyelashes (from a very nice family who had changed their name legally), who took her dancing at the Plaza; he was studying politics and had been a poll watcher for the Democratic party at the Congressional elections last fall. She knew some young lawyers downtown, former flames of Sister’s, who sometimes took her to the opera or a concert in Carnegie Hall. Or to the Little Carnegie Playhouse, where they showed foreign movies and you could get free demi-tasses and play ping-pong in the lounge. Libby was a whiz at ping-pong, as you might guess from her height and her long arms; Brother had taught her a wicked serve. On Sundays she sometimes went to church, with a Buchmanite boy she knew, to hear Sam Shoemaker, who was rector at Calvary; at college, she had been steamed up about the Oxford Group.

Right next to her apartment, practically, was the Fifth Avenue Cinema, where you could see foreign movies too and have a demi-tasse on the house; she went there mostly with other girls—Kay, when Harald was working, which he was again, Polly Andrews, Priss, when Sloan was at the hospital (so sad, she had lost her baby in the sixth month of pregnancy), and some of the old North Tower gang, whom she had rediscovered on the ski train. On her list too for manless evenings were two girls she had met in her career of crime as a book reviewer—the editorial secretary of the
Saturday Review of Literature
, Libby would have you know, and the editor’s assistant on the
Herald Tribune Books
. One of them had gone to Smith, Class of ’30, and the other had gone to Wellesley, ditto, and they both lived alone in the Village and had taken a big shine to Libby. The girl from the
Tribune
lived on Christopher Street, and she and Libby often forgathered for cocktails at Longchamps on Twelfth Street and then they might go on to Alice MacCollister’s on Eighth Street or to the Jumble Shop, where there were lots of artists and writers that this girl pointed out and Filipino waiters. Libby usually tried to stand treat to cocktails. “I asked
you
,” she would gaily insist. She had both girls to a mulled-wine party she gave in January, to which she also invited their bosses, who unfortunately couldn’t come. Kay said you should not invite the boss and her secretary to the same occasion; that cheapened your invitation. She also thought that Libby should have invited Mr. LeRoy, but Libby did not have the nerve. “He pictures me in a garret;” said Libby. “I don’t want to destroy his illusions. And besides, how do I know whether he’s married?” “A flimsy excuse, MacAusland,” replied Kay.

Libby was too much of a lady (she preferred the old word,
gentlewoman
) to presume on a business acquaintance. Why, when she was making friends with the
Trib
and the
Saturday Review
girls, she would just poke her head in their door and wave till she was sure of her welcome. Now, of course, she would sally right in for a chat and a peek at the new books, so that she would know, when it was her turn, what to ask the editor for; it paid to ask for a specific book. Some reviewers followed the
Publishers’ Weekly
religiously. There was a whole science to getting books for review; Libby honestly thought she could write an article on the subject. First, you had to know that the editors had “days,” like hostesses, when they were at home to reviewers. Tuesday was the “day” at the
Tribune
and Wednesday at the
Sunday Review
. The
Times
was Tuesday too, though, so far, Libby had just sat there, ignored, in the waiting room, till the office boy came and said there was nothing this week. The book-review editors were like kings (or queens), she always fancied, holding levees, surrounded by their courtiers, while petitioners waited eagerly in the anteroom and footmen (that is, office boys) trotted back and forth. And, like kings, they had the power of life and death in their hands. She had got to know the other reviewers or “clients,” as the Romans would have called them, quite well by sight—middle-aged bohemian women with glasses or too much rouge and dangly earrings and worn briefcases or satchels; pimply young men in suits that looked as if they were made of paper. And their shoes! Half-soled and with broken laces tied in frayed knots; it broke Libby’s heart to study their shoes and the red, raw ankles emerging from cheap imitation-lisle socks. It reminded her of going to the eye doctor (she had to wear reading glasses), where you waited for hours too, and seeing all the poor people with cataracts patiently camping there. Among the book reviewers, there was a great deal of jealousy and spite; the young men with acne and eroded teeth always looked her up and down contemptuously and then positively hissed when she got ushered in ahead of them. Yet a lot of these would-be reviewers were dishonest; instead of reviewing the book,
their
object was to walk off with an armful and sell them to some little second-hand man without even looking at them. Which was unfair to the honest reviewer and even more so to the author and the publisher; any book that got published deserved the courtesy of a review. These “raiders,” which was Libby’s name for them, were supposed to be much more prevalent at magazines like the
New Republic
and the
Nation
, where no attempt was made to “notice” every book that came out. At the
Nation
and the
New Republic
they said too that you had to run a gauntlet of Communists before getting in to see the book editor—all sorts of strange characters, tattooed sailors right off the docks and longshoremen and tramps and bearded cranks from the Village cafeterias, none of them having had a bath for weeks. This was the effect of “proletarian literature,” which was all the rage right now. Why, even up at Vassar, they were teaching it in courses; Miss Peebles gave it after “Multiplicity” in Contemporary Prose Fiction. Kay said that Libby ought to try the
Nation
and the
New Republic
, for they had a high standing among thinking people like her doctor father, but Libby said, “
Mon ange
, it’s the
sitting
that interests me; I don’t want to get fleas!”