Leave Her to Heaven

by Ben Ames Williams

  In March another letter, this time from Hong Kong, and longer than the last, brought her real content. He wrote:

  ‘I’ve reached the stage of appraising and understanding myself as I used to be. Do you mind if I put it on paper — if only to get my own thoughts clear. My diagnosis of my case is that I made some success — a substantial success — much too easily. When Father died, and we were left hard up, I felt cheated and abused; and other things happened to make me feel that I was suffering more than my share of the slings and arrows etc., etc. A girl — I thought at the time — broke my heart; and my first book came out of that experience. That and succeeding books caught on, and I began to think of myself as an Olympian figure, sitting aloof from struggling little human beings, excessively aware of their frailties and only mildly approving their virtues. I thought myself, if not a Holier-than-thou, at least a Wiser-than-thou; and the world was just a sketchily interesting drama to which for fiction purposes I gave an occasional comprehensive and frankly condescending glance.

  ‘I’ve never been a religious man — and I’m not now — but I can see today a certain attraction in religion. Yet I’ve a stubborn reluctance to allow myself to fall into the “Devil was sick; the Devil a saint would be” category. I’ve taken my licking, but I’m not yet ready to admit that it has reformed me.

  ‘Yet I can see that I needed a lesson. I had reached the point where I had no affectionate or friendly relationship — except in the most casual fashion — with anyone except Danny. I think I always loved him; but perhaps it was merely that his devotion to me was flattering enough so that I treasured and cultivated it. He was the weak spot in my self-sufficiency; so “for my soul’s sake,” as they say, I was chastised through him. I mean, his illness staggered me. But I still had some of the Olympian in me. When I knew that Ellen was in love with me, I decided quite cold-bloodedly not to marry her. Perhaps, without realizing it, I reached that decision because Danny’s illness had showed me that to allow myself to love anyone was to make myself vulnerable to worry and to pain and to tears — like other men.

  ‘So I determined to keep myself free. If it had not been for the fact that she and I shared a common peril in the canyon, which for an hour drew us close together, I’d never have married her. I suspect that in such moments, when death seems a possibility, life’s instinct to perpetuate itself becomes infinitely stronger than normal. Probably no man and woman were ever shipwrecked on a desert island for very long without — as we say — falling in love. They surrender to the biological insistence of the life in them that it be perpetuated. Probably imminent and mortal danger is bound to throw two people of opposite sexes into each other’s arms.

  ‘Certainly that happened to us — or at least to me. Back at the ranch next morning I might have sought escape, but I was still under the spell of those hours in the canyon.

  ‘So we were married, and I was well content, and pretty complacent about it. Ellen always let me have my own way. She might try little maneuvers, but she never flatly opposed me. It seemed to me that to be happily married was no trick at all. Danny’s poor legs, always under my eyes, might have warned me that I was still vulnerable; but I was blind to that warning, sure of myself and of my opinions, arrogant without knowing it, completely self-satisfied.

  ‘And then the lightning struck! Danny, then our baby, then Ellen. Crack, crack, crack, and each blow right on the jaw! Who was it boasted that his head was bloody but unbowed? I was not only bloody, but bowed too; and yet in me there was still a stubborn feeling that I was a pretty fine fellow, wiser than most, cleverer than most, stronger than most! I was ready to whine that I’d been unlucky, but that was as far toward humility as I ever progressed.

  ‘Even now I don’t claim to be a reformed character; but in these months I’ve met many people, and some of them, men and women too, have been in real ways great. By knowing them, some of the arrogance has been drilled out of me. Not all, but some. I’ve even realized that I’ve a lot to learn about writing ! Nothing till now had warned me that I wasn’t a literary genius; but now, either because I have lost the old facility, or because I’ve become more critical, I find writing a slow and fretful and a not particularly satisfying business. Maybe I’m growing up. Certainly it’s high time!’

  Ruth read this letter over and over, and she found herself defending him against his own criticisms. She went back to his novels, already familiar, and decided that he wrote as Kipling had written in his earlier years, with complete assurance and complete confidence in his own infallibility, and with an amused eye for human weaknesses. It was as though he felt himself set apart upon a pinnacle from which he surveyed the human race with tolerant understanding.

  But after all, Kipling had never written as well in the years after he lost his juvenile assurance. Let Harland — whether rightly or wrongly — keep some of his self-confidence. Did any man ever achieve any great thing without being first sure that it was a great thing, and without being in the second place sure that he could achieve it? And she wanted Harland to achieve. More than anything else in the world she wanted him to become a great, good man.

  She wished to write him, but she could not till, eight months after his departure, another letter came, this time from Beverly Hills. He had met in Honolulu a director of moving pictures who persuaded him to come back to Hollywood and sign a contract — ‘It runs to seventeen pages, closely typed,’ he wrote in amusement, ‘but all it says is that I will and that they will’ — to do an original story for the screen.

  ‘So I’ll be here two or three months at least,’ he told her, and gave her his address. ‘In case you have time to drop me a line.’

  She wrote at once, and thereafter their letters were frequent. His were at first full of interest in his work, of real enthusiasm. He had outlined the story he meant to write, and the studio chief had approved it. ‘Now we go into conference,’ he told her. ‘With the director, the star, the producer, and the scenarist whose job it is to put my stuff into the technically proper shape. There’s a strange and ludicrous conviction out here that if one man can write a story, two or three men can write it better. It’s as though an aeroplane had three pilots, each with his own ideas. The result, as you can imagine, is that the plane’s flight is erratic, and its eventual landing place uncertain.’

  Later, he began to be fretted by lack of progress. She went to Bar Harbor in June. The big house had not been rented, so she lived there and supervised the remodelling of Professor Berent’s study and workshop into a smaller cottage which she herself could use. During the summer, Harland’s letters reflected his increasing sense of frustration, and in August he surrendered. ‘I’m licked,’ he wrote. ‘The producer has talked my story to death. He’s as full of words as a hen salmon of eggs. There’s nothing left of the original tale but rags and tatters. So I’ve resigned. They didn’t protest! I’ll be home in a week or ten days.’

  She had meant to stay in Bar Harbor till September, but she cut her summer short and returned to Boston to be ready to bid him welcome there.

  – IV –

  When Harland went away, Ruth at his suggestion had offered Mrs. Huston a place with her; but the old woman declined. ‘I’ll work for him when he wants me, as long as I can get around,’ she said. ‘But with him away, I’ll take a rest while I can.’ She had at first gone to live with her daughter; but Ruth kept in touch with her, and she knew that this spring Mrs. Huston had returned to Harland’s house to dwell there alone, preferring independence and the routine of caring for familiar things to idleness in her daughter’s home. So when Ruth returned to Boston now she telephoned Mrs. Huston, and offered to help, if any help were needed, in making the house ready for Harland’s coming; but Mrs. Huston said proudly: ‘There hasn’t been a day for months that he couldn’t walk in the front door any time he had a mind and find things the way he likes them!’

  With his return imminent, Ruth was increasingly happy at the prospect of seeing him again. It was as though during this ye
ar of his absence she had been merely marking time. When the day came, she waited for his call, and in late afternoon her telephone rang and she sped to answer.

  ‘Ruth?’ His voice, she thought instantly, was at once stronger and more youthful.

  ‘Yes, Dick. You sound so well!’

  ‘“Richard is himself again,”’ he assured her. ‘I got in an hour ago. How shall we celebrate?’

  ‘Come to dinner.’

  ‘No, we’ve a lot to talk about, and I don’t want any interruptions. I don’t want to share you with your kitchenette. Let’s make it the Copley. Seven?’

  ‘Seven, then,’ she agreed.

  ‘I’ll pick you up,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk for twenty-four hours without a break.’

  When she had hung up she was astonished to find her eyes wet with grateful tears, and happiness shook her and made her tremble. By the clock on her mantel, he would not be here for almost three hours, yet she felt that she must hurry, that there were so many things she must do before he came. Her hair, she decided, needed shampooing, so she was happily busy for a while. She used another half-hour in manicuring her nails, and then began to consider what she would wear — not that he would notice what she wore. She assured herself of this, yet hesitated painfully. She did not even know whether he would be in dinner clothes, and wished to telephone to ask him, and could not bring herself to do so, and compromised at last — since the evening was warm — on a print which seemed to her attractive and not unsuitable.

  When she was ready, tremulously happy, she laughed at her own reflection in the mirror. ‘You idiot!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’re as excited as a girl going to her first dance — and you look it!’ And then, with a toss of her head, ‘Well, why shouldn’t you be glad to see him? And why pretend you’re not?’

  Then the bell rang and she ran to click the latch for him; and when the elevator stopped at her floor she hurried to open the door. He came in with a cry of pleasure.

  ‘Well!’ he exclaimed, and caught her hand and said: ‘My, but I’m glad to see you.’ He kissed her cheeks, one and then the other; and she felt her eyes fill again.

  ‘Heavens!’ she laughed. ‘Why should I be crying? You look so well, Dick!’

  He was in fact brown from much sun and wind, his eyes bright. He seemed a little heavier than he had been, and she said so.

  ‘So do you!’ he assured her. ‘Golly! I didn’t realize how anxious I was to see you till I left Chicago on the last lap.’ And he asked: ‘All ready?’

  She laughed, remembering her hours of preparation. ‘Yes. Yes, I’m ready, Dick,’ she agreed. Absurd, absurd, absurd, this torrent of happiness that filled her now!

  – V –

  That evening they were gay, interrupting their rapid fire of talk only when the orchestra played something that led them to the dance floor; and Harland said approvingly: ‘I’d forgotten what a swell dancer you are. Remember Sea Island?’

  ‘I seldom dance,’ she confessed.

  ‘Nor I,’ he agreed. ‘But I’m in a dancing mood tonight. If I’d known what fun it would be to come home I’d have done it long ago.’

  They stayed till the tables all around them were empty; and afterward they walked toward the Esplanade, and since the night was pleasantly warm, they clung to these first hours together. The eastern sky was paling before at last he left her at her door.

  They saw each other frequently that fall. Sometimes these encounters were prearranged, with a football game or the like as a pretext; but occasionally, without forewarning, he rang her bell and demanded a cocktail, and she always welcomed him. They wished to celebrate Thanksgiving together, so they drove into the country and dined at the Wayside Inn by an open fire, and sat late before the embers there. Christmas too, they shared. She had declined an invitation or two and so had he.

  ‘Christmas is a family time,’ he reminded her. ‘And we’re the only family either of us has, so we’ll get together and be as merry as any of them.’ But on Christmas Eve, at her suggestion, they joined a group and went singing carols around the hill, stopping here and there for a hospitable eggnog.

  In January he departed for a week of skiing and she missed him astonishingly. Ruth had never learned to ski, but he volunteered to teach her; and thereafter they sometimes drove into the wintry countryside and sought an easy slope and he labored with her through the short afternoons, and they were apt to stop somewhere for dinner on the homeward way. They found in this steady comradeship their greatest pleasure. Ruth was happy because she saw the mounting happiness in him, and since he so often came to her without forewarning she kept herself free and was always ready to do what he proposed. He had kissed her, that first evening, as naturally as in the past, in frank brotherly affection; and this straightforward liking — and nothing more — lay on the surface of their hours together. Yet Ruth presently understood that beneath this friendly surface there were depths, and she confessed this to herself and wondered if he knew. She believed he did not, guessing that if he suspected the truth it might destroy this pleasant companionship which she found so contenting.

  He was working, once more rewriting that novel begun so long ago. ‘I started it before Danny was taken sick,’ he told her. ‘And I rewrote it after Ellen and I were married, but now it seems to me thin stuff with no meat in it, like a woman who has starved herself to get what she thinks is a good figure.’

  She listened while he read parts of it aloud to her; and if he asked, she offered comments. They were seldom favorable. ‘But my opinions are just — my opinions,’ she reminded him.

  ‘I know, I know,’ he assured her. ‘Don’t worry. If I don’t agree with what you say, that’s the end of it; but it helps me to talk the thing out with you.’ And he told her: ‘Argue with me! Fight for your ideas! That’s the most stimulating thing you can do.’

  To one point she came back again and again. Because he wrote with the derisive intolerance of immaturity, critics had called him a satirist; and accepting their label he had made this novel a catalogue of petty human follies. But she thought his thesis too severe. ‘You’re forever emphasizing the silly things people do, making fun of them in clever ways,’ she urged. ‘Of course it’s ever so easy to do that. Everyone is ridiculous in some special little fashion. But in other ways everyone is admirable too. It’s easy to make fun of people, but it’s not so easy to recognize the fine things in them. This just isn’t my kind of book, I’m afraid. You’re — jeering at the world, but I think most people are pretty nice!’

  He protested laughingly: ‘My God, woman, look at them!’

  She shook her head. ‘That’s what you do! You look at them! But instead of just looking, you ought to get inside them, see how many of the unattractive things they do are done because they’re shy, or embarrassed, or worried, or scared; see how often they’re really doing the best job they know how — and usually with not much capacity or ability to do any job at all.’ And she said earnestly: ‘Why, Dick, the world is full of men who never have an hour free from worry — about their jobs, their families, their homes, money, all sorts of things. But they go ahead, keep their chins up, keep telling their wives that everything is fine; and they make a home, and give their children a better start in the world than they had. Most men are pretty grand, Dick.’

  ‘How about women?’ he asked quizzically, and she colored and smiled and said:

  ‘You’re making fun of me; but I’m going to say my say! Women are fine too, most of them. Oh, I know we wear funny hats, and go to silly lectures, and play bridge like fiends, and talk and talk; but a lot of us — most of us — are doing our jobs, too. The trouble with you novelists is that you like to write about the unusual people, the extraordinary people. Or you write about the unusual, extraordinary things people do. Why not write about the ordinary everyday things all of us ordinary people do?’

  ‘Because if I did, you ordinary people wouldn’t read what I wrote,’ he assured her. ‘Novels, like newspapers, are built on the unusual, the ex
citing, the tragic, the dramatic. Such events make news. By your rule, papers would come out with big headlines: “No News Today. A Hundred Million Americans Yesterday Led Perfectly Normal Lives.”’

  ‘Well, they did,’ she reminded him, laughing, yet holding her ground. ‘And a really good novelist could write about them in such a way that they’d love to read it.’ She added with a strong sincerity: ‘Instead of ridiculing people’s ridiculous ways, I’d like to see you glorify the glorious things they do.’

  ‘The other’s a lot more fun.’

  ‘I know. Just as there are some critics who prefer to write about poor books, so they can say clever, cutting things. They’ll take pages to tell you how poor a book is, just so they can show off their own cleverness in doing so.’

  ‘But see here,’ he argued. ‘In this book of mine, the hero — he’s a good fellow, with sound ideas. At least he has the fundamental virtues.’

  ‘All except the big ones,’ she objected.

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Why — humility, I think, and tolerance, and to be steadfast and to be friendly. He’s too ready to — denounce someone!’

  ‘So was Christ,’ he suggested.

  ‘He denounced people for important things! Your young man doesn’t care what he denounces. Why should he waste his energies criticizing millinery, for instance?’

  ‘Didn’t Christ criticize someone for making broad his phylactery? Aren’t phylacteries millinery?’

  She felt a deep surprise. ‘I didn’t suppose you knew the Bible.’

  He confessed with a shy grin: ‘Oh, an author has to know a little about everything. As a matter of fact I read it through — or almost — while I was away. Started at the beginning and ploughed right along — till I got into the Acts and got bored and lost interest. I skipped through the rest, but the Old Testament’s grand.’

  ‘Why did you read it?’ she asked, watching him.