The Group by Mary McCarthy

Author:Mary McCarthy [McCarthy, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780451025012
Publisher: Signet
Published: 2013-07-09T23:44:00+00:00

Nine

GUS LEROY MET POLLY Andrews at a party given by Libby in May the following year. It was 1936, and half the group were married. Of the old crowd, Libby had invited only Priss, who couldn’t come, and Polly and Kay; the others, she had rather lost sight of. She was serving a May bowle, made of Liebfraumilch and fresh strawberries and sweet woodruff. There was a special store where you could get the woodruff, dried and imported from Germany; it was over on Second Avenue, under the El, a dusty old German firm with apothecary jars and old apothecaries’ scales and mortars and pestles in the window. Polly could not possibly miss it, Libby said on the phone; it was right around the corner from where she lived, and she could stop and get the woodruff for Libby any day on her way home from work. If she brought it the day before the party, that would be in plenty of time; it only had to steep overnight. Polly worked as a technician at Cornell Medical Center, giving basal metabolism tests chiefly, which meant that she had to be at the hospital the first thing in the morning, when the patients woke up. But she got off early in the afternoons, which Libby didn’t, and took the Second Avenue El home quite often—she lived on Tenth Street, near St. Mark’s Place, almost catercorner from St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie, where the rector, Dr. Guthrie, had such beautiful liturgy, though Polly never took advantage of it and slept Sunday mornings.

The herbal firm was nine blocks from Polly’s place; trust Polly, who could be prickly in her mild, smiling, obstinate way, to let that transpire when she appeared with the woodruff at Libby’s apartment. But they were nine short blocks, dear, Libby retorted, and Polly could use the fresh air and exercise. When she heard Polly’s description of the shop’s display of pharmacopoeia—all the old herbs and simples and materia medica in big stoppered glass jars with the Latin names written in crabbed Gothic lettering—she was sorry she had not gone herself, in a taxi. But to reward Polly for her pains, Libby had taken them both out to dinner at a new place in the Village, and afterward they had come back to the apartment and got the bowle started and everything organized for the party. Polly had a passion for flowers (she did wonders that evening with Libby’s mountain dogwood), and she was efficient in the kitchen. Libby had persuaded her to make Mr. Andrews’ famous chicken-liver pâté, a receipt he had brought back from France, and, having splurged on chicken livers at the market, she stood by watching Polly sauter them and laboriously push them through a sieve. “Aren’t you doing them too rare?” she suggested. “Kay says she always cooks everything fifteen minutes longer than the recipe calls for.” Libby was scandalized by the amount of fresh print butter Polly mixed in afterward, plus brandy and sherry—no wonder the Andrews family was insolvent.

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