She Had Been Registered for Vassar at Birth

Carl Landauer

Sidney Lumet’s The Group (1966) after

Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963)

There in the very first sentence

Kay Leiland Strong, Vassar ‘33

as McCarthy’s voice

in alumnae newsletter chattiness

cleaves to the group voice.

Lumet in his turn will turn

to gossipy lunches and phone calls

and Helena’s newsletter typing words

across the screen

letter by letter

ending in exclamation points

On to bigger things, Priss!

We almost forget

there’s a Depression going on,

sure, there are occasional references

and money challenges,

but Lumet’s credit sequence

starting with saddle shoes

in military or dance precision

suggests a vague time just past,

not Depression’s depth.

Despite their obvious obliviousness,

their cattiness,

we’re drawn mainly to their

own tragedies,

the fine white Renaissance nostril

was dinted with a mark of pain.

to the men who are horrors—

Kay’s philandering, alcoholic failed playwright,

Priss’s overbearing pediatrician husband

pushing breast-feeding beyond exhaustion,

Libby’s near rape,

Kay’s husband committing her,

institutionalizing her in rage,

a page, it turns out,

from McCarthy’s own life.

But it’s not a matter of finding

the key to some roman à clef

but laughing at McCarthy’s

layers of inside jokes.

There among the few books

on a shelf is Axel’s Castle,

the famous book by her husband.

And for Kay’s funeral,

Lakey knows just where to go,

straight off to Fortuny’s

to buy her

an off-white silk pleated gown—

the kind the Duchess of Guermantes used to receive in

and we know that Mary

expects us to know

the fuss Proust made

of the Duchess and Fortuny,

but now, decades later,

we must be missing

untold bottled messages.