by John O'Hara
“Why?”
“‘Notables,’” said Edith. “Be so much better if they’d just said ‘Funeral of Joseph B. Chapin,’ without putting that word in the heading. And the article itself starts right out with ‘Prominent figures in government, legal and business affairs attended the funeral of—’ and so forth.”
“But how else would you say it?” said Ann.
“Oh, I suppose it’s all right,” said Edith. “I’m rather weary, we all are, after these past few days. Now there’s a letdown. You and Joby and everybody, you’ve all been a great help to me, and now that the excitement’s over, naturally I can expect a letdown.”
“Thank you, Mother,” said Ann.
Edith acknowledged the thanks with a nod. “I’ve been wondering what to do, where to start,” she said.
“With what?”
“Everything, everything,” said Edith. “I’ll keep this house. I always intend to live here, the rest of my life, and you and Joby will always have this as your home to come back to. There won’t be as much money as with Father alive and earning—substantial fees. But I’ll have enough to run this household pretty much the way I have. You know how we’ve always lived. Well within our income except for the money Father—uh—disbursed while he was active in politics. That was costly. Very costly. But it was Father’s money, he earned it or inherited it, and I knew he’d never do anything that would jeopardize our welfare, you children’s and mine. Twice he dipped into capital, entirely with my approval and consent. And I don’t think it would be fair for me to tell you how much, because as it turned out, Father’s investments became more valuable during the war, so in the end the, uh, increase in value just about made up for what he spent on politics. Possibly a little more than he made up. He had some very good advice from Paul Donaldson and also from Dave Harrison. And I think Alec Weeks, but not as much from Alec.”
She looked up and at a distant, imaginary point. “I never liked Alec Weeks,” she went on. “I was very much surprised when he said he’d be a pallbearer.”
“Why didn’t you like him? I thought you did.”
“Ah, you thought I did because I wanted you to. Your father never knew I didn’t trust Alec either.”
“You didn’t trust him?” said Ann.
“That’s it. I didn’t trust him. He always seemed to me to be one of Father’s college friends that—oh, a link with the past, bright college years, but they really had very little in common. Wolf’s Head. I’ve never been able to understand why two years together in a college club should continue to mean so much after a man has grown up. Those dinners in New York, year after year, taking too much to drink and singing those ridiculous songs, and I suppose a lot of toasts to the men who died since the last get-together. I suppose Alec Weeks will propose the toast to your father, next time, and Alec will be looked upon as the true brother who ventured into the wilds of Pennsylvania.”
“Well, he can’t, because what about Mr. Harrison and Paul Donaldson?”
“They were not in Wolf’s Head. I think they were both in Skull & Bones. Anyway, Dave Harrison was, I know. Maybe Paul Donaldson was in the other one, Scroll & Keys.”
“Key. Scroll & Key,” said Ann. “Why don’t you trust Alec Weeks?”
“All that charm, that superficial charm. I’d never met him before our wedding, so there was no reason for him to pretend I was any great belle. I wasn’t, and knew it. And when a girl knows that about herself and a man makes a great to-do over her, it’s really insulting. Unless the girl is a fool.”
“But he might have been sincere.”
“No, he wasn’t. I knew all about him. Chorus girls and all sorts of women. He left Oxford because he was having an affair with an Italian countess, much older than he was.”
“Alec Weeks,” said Ann. “You never know.”
“Yes, you do. You might not see it now, when he’s sixty-three, but anyone with any sense could have told then.”
“Do you think I could have, Mother?” said Ann.
“Your—difficulties weren’t caused by your not having any sense. You simply allowed your heart to rule your head.”
“My head couldn’t have been very strong.”
“Don’t disparage yourself,” said Edith Chapin. “Your life hasn’t been lived yet, and I’m sure that a lot of good things are in store for you.”
“I hope you are right.”
“You’ll have to help, of course. They won’t just happen to you. You’ve learned, for instance, you’ve learned that love can be very deceptive. We often use that word when we mean something else. A warm-hearted girl like yourself can talk about love, about being in love, before she knows the meaning of the word. She has no other word to express some deep feeling, so she uses the word love, when actually it isn’t love at all. Sometimes it can be pity.”
“You still think I pitied Charley.”
“Well, at least I don’t think you loved him. If you had, your father and I would have known it. We’d have known it from you.”
“I tried to tell you.”
“And failed, and you wouldn’t have failed if it had really been love, Ann. Charley felt passionately toward you and you felt pity for him, his helplessness. Men can be helpless under those circumstances, and a nice girl thinks it’s her responsibility, or even her fault. A girl who isn’t what we mean by a nice girl wouldn’t feel that responsibility. She’d let him suffer, helpless. But that’s exactly what you didn’t do, and your kindness very nearly ruined your life.”
“Very nearly.”
“I know. I understand the irony in your voice. You still think we ruined your life, or you like to think that. But you must know when you’re being honest with yourself that a marriage with an Italian boy in a jazz band wouldn’t have lasted a year.”
“If you had let me have the baby, if you and Father had given the marriage a chance. Done half as much to help it as you did to stop it.”
“The baby was out of the question, Ann. A baby five months after you were married? How would the child itself explain that in later life? On legal documents, where you have to put down the date of your parents’ marriage? To say nothing of your own friends, and for that matter, the father’s friends. You know, people of that—class—are just as conservative as the more well-to-do, if not more so.”
Ann got up and went to the window. “The last time we talked about this we ended up having a very stormy scene.”
“Yes, and you went away and didn’t write to me for months.”
“I don’t want to do that again,” said Ann.
“And I hope you don’t.”
“Then let’s stop talking about it now. There isn’t a single detail of it I haven’t gone over a hundred times.—Oh, not only with you. Stuart never stopped talking about it.”
“I’m sorry about that. But it was part of—”
Ann turned quickly and looked at her mother. “Shall we stop now?”
“Why, yes. Of course. I was going to.”
“No, the minute you said that a lot of good things were in store for me, I knew what else was in store for me first. A rehash of my first marriage.”
Edith Chapin was silent. She waited until her silence became the most noticeable thing in the room, the dominant thing that would have been apparent to a person newly entering the room. When the silence reached that magnitude Edith Chapin ended it. In a higher tone that indicated a new topic of conversation she spoke again to her daughter. “Did we have a cablegram from Cousin Frank Hofman?”
“Not that I know of,” said Ann. “Where is he?”
“He’s in Buenos Aires. Whit Hofman sent him a cablegram. He was always so fond of Father, and Whit thought he’d want to know.”
“I’ve completely forgotten about him. What does he do?”
“I forget. It must be at least fifteen years since I’ve seen him.”
“I don’t even remember what he looks like,” said Ann.
“He’s very different from the rest of the Hofmans. He’s short, and when I last saw him he was quite stout. And I suppose living abroad all these years, someone who has a tendency to put on weight and cares a lot about food and wine—I imagine he’s quite portly now. Although that’s just a guess on my part.”
“Is he married?”
“Not that I know of,” said Edith Chapin. “Isn’t Whit a dear?”
“Yes, he is.”
“It’s so seldom you see anyone with all that money who can be so utterly un-self-conscious. He’s one of the people I want to have for dinner later on, when things get settled. Next fall. When the summer’s over I’m going to start having people in for dinner, once a week. Not more than four or five people at a time.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Sometimes I’ll have to deal in the black market, but I don’t see that it’s worse to deal in the black market than to take your friends to the club or the hotel. Father didn’t agree with that point of view, but he was more or less in politics and that made a lot of difference.”
“Everybody buys in the black market,” said Ann. “And gas rationing’s a joke. Where did that roast beef come from at lunch today? And all those cars.”
“The roast beef was perfectly legitimate. The club has always had a catering service.”
“Now, Mother,” said Ann.
“But it’s true. You know that. Whenever we’ve had a big party we always had Otto, as long as I can remember. He asked me what to serve and I told him I’d leave that entirely up to him. And as far as the cars were concerned, weren’t they mostly the undertaker’s?”
“Not at our house.”
“Well, I thought they were,” said Edith Chapin. “But I agree with you. However, what else can you expect from the people in Washington? The waste and extravagance and dishonesty. Your father said it would happen, and it has. And it will continue as long as Roosevelt keeps his power.”
“And that will be forever.”
“Well, at least until the war’s over.”
“Five years from now,” said Ann.
“At least. Unofficially, the admiral thinks it may be ten years before we finally win in the Pacific.”
“Well, I hope he’s wrong,” said Ann. “Joby thinks five, and even that’s too long.”
The small talk had not been a complete success and they both were conscious of it. They had been able to agree that Whit Hofman was a dear. The choice of Frank Hofman as a conversational topic had seemed inspired at the moment, but certain aspects of Frank Hofman made him something of a misfit, an irregular, like Ann herself and her brother Joby. The talk of black marketing and the war allowed them to release their bad humor on a nonpersonal subject, but guesses as to the duration of the war took them into another undesirable area. In a war the men are away, and that postpones the chances of courtship and marriage; traditional, conventional courtship and marriage, which meant more to Edith than they did to Ann.
“Much too long,” said Edith. “I wonder if I ought to lie down for a few minutes. I’m not tired, but I’m afraid I will be this evening.”
“Who’s going to be here this evening?” said Ann.
“Uncle Arthur and Aunt Rose McHenry, and Uncle Cartie and you and Joby. That’s all. I think I’ll just stretch out for a few minutes. I may not sleep, but I’ll relax.”
“Don’t you want to take off your dress?”
“Yes, but I think I’ll go down to my bedroom.”
“I’ll turn down the bed,” said Ann.
“Thank you, and then will you tell Mary to come up?” said Edith. “Why don’t you have a nap too?”
“I might try,” said Ann.
“Then don’t bother to come down. Call down to Mary and tell her to come to my room.”
“All right, Mother,” said Ann. She whistled into the speaking tube and at Mary’s “Yes, ma’am,” she said, “Mary, will you go to Mother’s bedroom, please?”
“I will,” said Mary.
Ann saw her mother to the stairs, then went to Joby’s room. He was asleep on the counterpane, breathing deeply two notes in a minor key. She put a comforter over him and he did not stir.
• • •
W. Carl Johnson, new Superintendent of Schools, had no trouble walking home from the post-funeral lunch. His house was only a block—a “square,” it was called in Gibbsville—from the Chapin residence, and some indication of the intimacy existing between the Chapin and Johnson families was the fact that Edith’s note inviting W. Carl Johnson to be a pallbearer was sent to the superintendent’s office in the Gibbsville High School building. From Number 10 North Frederick Street to the Johnsons’ rented house at Number 107 was actually less than a block, but Edith Chapin had first known Number 107 as the Lawrence property, then as the Reifsnyders’, and after that it had been occupied by a succession of clergymen, educators, and engineers who brought their families to Gibbsville during some extended construction work. The house was the property of the Lutheran church, which made for a continuing respectability of tenancy.
The 100-block in North Frederick Street (there were no dwellings on South Frederick, which was only a block long) was abruptly steep after the flat of the block in which the Chapins lived. Cars parked on upper North Frederick were turned toward the curb. An advantage of upper North Frederick Street was that it provided children with a fine hill for coasting during the rather long Gibbsville winter, but that could be said of many Gibbsville streets. In the whole town there was not a street that was level for more than a single block. The Johnsons’ neighbors in the 100-block were a railroad engineer, two railroad firemen, a young chiropractor, a Civil War veteran and his maiden nieces, a pharmacist, two salesmen for clothing stores, an insurance adjuster, the manager of an absentee-owned bakery, a state forestry official, a freight clerk for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and a newspaper man. Most of the neighbors were married and took in roomers, who were usually carefully screened. The rooms were rented to men, never to women, and the relationship between landlord and roomer was kept businesslike. Some of the landladies referred to the paying guests as boarders, but meals were not provided, no cooking was permitted in the rooms, and specific arrangements were always made in the case of men who wanted the privilege of getting their own coffee in the early morning. Sometimes the boarder, or roomer, would go for two or three weeks without encountering his landlord or landlady. So long as he left his weekly payment (always in cash) in an envelope on the hall table he was not disturbed, and two weeks was the outside limit for delinquency in rent payment. A testimonial to the screening of roomers was the record of North Frederick Street: fewer than a dozen men had been locked out in thirty years. There had been two suicides, three deaths from natural causes, and one arrest for embezzling, but only nine or ten men had lost their rooms through nonpayment of the modest rates. The record likewise testified to the character of the householders of North Frederick Street.
W. Carl Johnson and his wife Amy had not yet taken in roomers. Johnson’s job paid well—$9,000 per annum—and since Amy was quite pretty, without her glasses, and only thirty-seven years of age, extra care would have to be taken in the screening. It was not that Amy was fearful of rape; but appearances still counted for a great deal in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, and the school superintendent’s wife was expected to be so high above reproach that the sex question never must come up. The ideal roomer for the Johnson establishment would have been old and ugly, but there the Johnson daughters became a consideration. Carlotta, eleven, and Ingrid, nine, were pretty children, and as experienced schoolteachers the Johnsons were acquainted with the problem of elderly degenerates.
Amy Johnson was not cognizant of the distinction she had attained as she and her husband made their departure from the Chapin house. It would be days or weeks before she f
ully realized that there were Gibbsville women—and men—who had wanted all their lives to see the inside of the Chapin home, and she had eaten a meal there in her first year. She took her husband’s arm as they walked northward.
“Who was the little man that talked to everybody? He must have been some relation.”
“Her brother. Mrs. Chapin’s brother,” said Carl Johnson.
“The younger man. That was her son.”
“Yes. Joseph B. Chapin Junior,” said Carl.
“And the daughter, she never came downstairs, or at least I never saw her.”
“I was surprised that Mrs. Chapin herself came down,” said Carl.
“Oh, she was a tower of strength, I thought.”
“Yes.”
“There must have been at least a hundred people there, and she spoke to every one of them. She even remembered my name.”
“Well, don’t forget she knew most of the people there. We were practically strangers.”
“But she didn’t make me feel like a stranger. Very friendly. Nice.”
“It’s an art. I’ve always said so. I guess I haven’t got it.”
“Why not?”
“Well, I knew I was out of it in that group, the pallbearers, but I’m as important as Jenkins, or Hooker, or even Judge Williams. At least my job is. I’m the only superintendent of schools. Hooker isn’t the only newspaper editor, and Judge Williams isn’t the only judge. And yet when one of those men said a kind word to me I was like a kid being patted on the head.”
“They ought to see you with a bunch of teachers.”
“Do you know something? Most of those men would seem just as important among a bunch of teachers. That Donaldson. Did you ever hear of him before? No, and neither did I. But I don’t know whether you noticed the Governor. When Donaldson said something, the Governor hung on every word. When you get a group like that together they take one look at each other and they know right away who belongs and who doesn’t. Maybe they never saw each other before and don’t even know what the other does, but there’s an American type, or maybe fifty American types, and they’re all used to having authority.”
