by John O'Hara
There was hardly anything that could be said against a child that was not yet a year old. But Harry was present when Charlotte made the mistake of blaming the child for her own weariness. It was shortly after Ben’s funeral. Charlotte’s visitor was Bess McHenry, who in all her niceness and stupidity had been telling Charlotte how well she had stood up through her ordeal.
“I mustn’t let you believe that, Bess,” said Charlotte. “You mustn’t go on believing that. These past months, if I could have gotten away from an invalid husband and a screaming baby, I’d have gone.”
“Oh, no, Charlotte. Not you,” said Bess.
Charlotte ignored her; now she was talking to herself: “I don’t need much sleep, but I must have what I do need, and I don’t know when I’ll ever get it. I just don’t know. Do girl babies cry more than boys? It seems that way to me. Oh, here’s Harry to drive you home, Bess. You can’t walk in this rain. How I envy you being able to go for a quiet stroll. I envy you.”
Harry was one of the McHenrys’ friends’ servants who were always remembered with a $2.50 gold piece at Christmas, and he liked Bess McHenry, but on the drive to her house he made sure she was set straight on Ann Chapin. “I overheard you talking about the baby,” he said, pretending not to have heard everything. “Ah, that’s the bright spot at that house, that baby. The best in the land, an angel from heaven. A real comfort in every way.”
“I imagine she must be,” said Bess McHenry.
“A real princess, you might say,” said Harry. “If all babies were as good as her . . . Well, here we are, ma’am.”
He returned to the house satisfied that he had corrected any wrong impression left by Charlotte, and rather pleased that he might even have created a new impression of Charlotte herself. At least, he felt, he had planted a doubt in Mrs. McHenry’s mind. But Charlotte was not going to be let off so lightly. She had made her mistake and Harry never gave anyone a second chance. He became aggressively protective of the child against her grandmother.
After Ben’s death the nursing staff was cut down to one member, Miss McIlhenny. She was a trained nurse, not a baby nurse, and she was being paid one hundred dollars a month and room and board, but Joe decided it was worth the expense to keep her on; she gave Edith a sense of security and Joe himself said he felt better about his mother with Miss McIlhenny in the house. Her presence meant extra work for Marian; she ate her dinner and supper off a tray, since her position in the household was, in Marian’s words, “too good to eat in the kitchen and not good enough to eat with The Family.” There was no resentment against her, backstairs. She did add slightly to Marian’s chores; at the same time she took care of the baby work and she became a combination companion and personal maid to Mrs. Ben. And she had sense enough not to try to lord it over Marian and Harry, who could have made her life so miserable that she would not have stayed. She was obviously more at home having a cup of tea in the kitchen than watching Charlotte having her cup of tea in the sewing room.
“It looks to me like it’ll only be a question of time before we get another visit from Wagner Brothers,” said Harry, one afternoon after Bess McHenry’s call.
“The old lady?” said Miss McIlhenny.
“There may be nothing the matter with her, nothing for the doctors to find, but if you want to know what I think . . .”
“What?”
“Well, her and the recently departed, I never heard them say a civil word to one another,” said Harry.
“That’s wrong,” said Marian. “There you’re wrong.”
“Am I? All right, then. They never said anything excepting a civil word to one another.”
“Now you’re right,” said Marian. “All politeness and none of the milk of human kindness.”
“Exactly,” said Harry. “Exactly, Marian. They hated one another! By Jesus—”
“Not the name of the Lord, please, Harry,” said Miss McIlhenny.
“Excuse me.”
“I don’t mind a little cursing and swearing, but not J. C.,” said Miss McIlhenny. “But go on with what you were saying. I find it interesting.”
“Well, what kept her alive, the old lady, was she hated him so much that it give her something to occupy her mind. Now she don’t have nobody to hate and I swear to you, I notice it taking effect on her. The daughter-in-law, she never mustered up a good hate for the daughter-in-law because the daughter-in-law’s just too anxious to please, she wants to have everything right. As long as it don’t cost her too much effort. She’s a lazy one, isn’t she, Marian?”
“Not lazy, exactly. I never said she was lazy,” said Marian. “She’ll do what she has to do, but she’ll never go out of her way. You know how some of them are?”
“Oh, do I indeed!” said Miss McIlhenny. “They’ll make their own bed, but they won’t put on fresh sheets for fear they’ll have to reach up on the top shelf of the closet. I could give you dozens of examples, but I know what you mean. But Harry, I don’t understand why you think we’ll be getting another visit from Wagner Brothers. She’s only a young woman compared to her husband. Still, I guess that puts her in her late sixties.”
“The poison, Miss Mac,” said Harry. “The poison. The poison she cooks up inside herself, now she don’t get the opportunity to rid her physique of it, it runs through her system till her whole system is saturated with it like she was a sponge in a bottle of iodine. You two, you see her more oftener than I do, so you don’t have my advantage of noticing how she’s changed since the old man passed away. I took notice the other day when I was in the sewing room. This old lady, I said to myself, she don’t have long.”
“Well, she don’t complain of anything,” said Miss McIlhenny. “So I can’t call the doctor.”
“If I was you I’d tell you one thing I’d do,” said Harry.
“What?”
“Don’t let her handle the baby. In her present weakened condition she’s liable to drop little Ann—”
“Oh, now,” said Miss McIlhenny.
“Yes, oh now,” said Harry. “And if that happened—”
“If that happened,” said Marian. “Harry’d strangle you with his own two hands. Maybe you wouldn’t have anything to fear from the baby’s father, but Mr. Harry here—oh, my.”
“You shut up,” said Harry. “I was talking to Miss Mac, not you.”
“Be careful who you’re telling to shut up. I’ll have none of your impoliteness to me,” said Marian.
“Now, the two of you,” said Miss McIlhenny.
Harry’s warning, where it concerned the baby, took effect, although it was no cruel or unusual punishment for Charlotte to be deprived of the hefting of her granddaughter. Insofar as the warning was a prediction of Charlotte’s early end, it had little effect. Miss McIlhenny was not receiving any medical information from unqualified diagnosticians, for she was in fact frequently skeptical of the diagnoses of the qualified. Consequently Harry was the only member of the household who was able to say I-told-you-so when Miss Mac one morning came out of Charlotte’s bedroom with the news that Charlotte was dead. It could have been said of her, in the words of one poet, that she died of nothing but a rage to live; her passing was otherwise described in the Gibbsville press: she passed away peacefully in her sleep.
• • •
By the very nature of things the lives of young married couples are likely to become complicated and simplified by the death of a couple’s four parents, as well as by the birth of their own children. In less than two years Joe Chapin’s parents and Edith’s father died, leaving Edith’s mother as the sole grandparent of Ann Chapin. The death of Edith’s father had remarkably little effect on Edith’s life. It made her no richer; Carter Stokes Senior, left all his money to his wife. Emotionally, it caused no void. As to responsibility, Edith turned that over to her brother Carter, who was the kind of young man who almost seems to have been born to take care of a wi
dowed mother. Mrs. Stokes was an old bore, a bore before she was old and a worse bore as she aged. It is possible to take a second, more penetrating look at people who have the reputation for villainy and evil, and sometimes the second look makes for a reappraisal of the naughty ones. But the public judgment on bores is seldom to be appealed. In the first decade of the Twentieth Century the word “bore” was still a Society word, borrowed from the English and not in general conversational use in the United States of America. For that reason Mrs. Stokes was not often called a bore, but her qualifications to the dubious distinction were known to her friends and acquaintances. She was never quite well, she was never quite ill. She was without distinction in appearance, without prettiness even in young womanhood, with a bosom that was almost flat but not firmly flat, with ankles that were not noticeably heavy or trim, and no one ever remembered or argued over the color of her eyes. She was conventionally addicted to cleanliness but at the Assemblies she exuded the odor of perspiration without having to waltz. This woman had had some participation in the act of copulation and had given birth to two children; had cooked edible meals, knitted shawls, gone to church, discharged servants, attended the opera, read the newspapers, cashed checks, purchased hats, skinned her kneecap, stayed at the Bellevue-Stratford, written letters, trimmed her toenails and lit a fire. And yet she was a bore. No experience and no total of experiences had excited her or made her the least bit exciting. She was a denial of the meaning to men of the word “woman.” The tone of her voice was ladylike and her enunciation was correct, but in all her life she never had said anything memorable or memorably. When Edith got away from her, she stayed away from her, and Mrs. Stokes even caused a strain on Joe’s unfailing politeness.
What her father’s death did do was to fix Edith firmly on North Frederick Street. With Ben Chapin dead and Charlotte Chapin dead, and her own mother waiting out her time in the South Main Street house and looked after by Carter, Edith became the lady of the house at 10 North Frederick. Now she no longer had any sense of impermanency; there was no old woman upstairs who could give and rescind the orders; when Edith gave her address as 10 North Frederick Street, in the shops of Philadelphia and New York, she gave it with conviction, assurance, where in earlier months she often was afraid that the salesgirl doubted her right to say that that was where she lived. To Edith the house was a symbol of her improved station in life, and for that reason she was more than content to leave it as it had been. It pleased Joe that she did so, but that was no more than a happy accident. It never occurred to her to repaint, to redecorate, to refurnish. The house and its contents intact were the symbol, and any big change would have altered its symbolic value. Another woman might have waited impatiently for the moment when she could begin to replace the lighting fixtures and the stair runners and the purely decorative objects. Not so Edith. The only changes she made were in the den, and they were changes to gladden Joe’s heart: his school and college pictures, his diplomas, his fraternity and club shields, his other youthful souvenirs were brought down from the bedroom and given space in the little room. The transfer was, of course, a subtle announcement of the new fact that it was Edith’s husband who was now head of the house, but hardly anyone thought of it that way, and even if anyone had, was it not the truth?
Joe, with the death of his parents, was a rich man, much better fixed than many Gibbsville men who had retired, and for a time Edith considered Joe’s retirement as a possibility. The world beyond the borough limits of Gibbsville was not too well known to Joe, and known barely at all to Edith. On Joe’s income they could have traveled to the far places and seen the strange things, the lands and people that they knew through Stoddard’s Lectures. But who in Shanghai, China, would know that in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, U.S.A., Joseph B. Chapin was an aristocrat of unassailable standing? If a Chinese prince were to come to Gibbsville, he would be entertained by the Chapins, but if the Chapins were visiting in Peking, would the reverse be true? Closer to home, to take up residence in Philadelphia or New York was not a prospect that attracted Edith. It would require much, much greater wealth than Joe possessed to get established in the big American cities. Joe could, of course, continue his legal career, but that was not to live as a retired gentleman. He could work anywhere.
Thus Edith came around to the basic question of retirement itself. She knew precious little about the law, and not much more than that about Joe’s ability as a lawyer. But she did know that he was a member of a firm that was bound to be successful if only because of the business that would come its way through connections. From her brother Carter, who was no fool, she learned that a great deal of the work performed by a firm like McHenry & Chapin was simply a matter of looking it up in a book. Arthur McHenry and Joe Chapin were not likely to save a man from the hangman’s noose through a dramatic courtroom strategy; that kind of performance was in the Montgomery tradition, which was being maintained by Jerry Montgomery. The very fact that the brilliance, the fireworks were not a McHenry & Chapin specialty was an invitation to the less spectacular but continuingly profitable kind of law business. Until her conversation with her brother, Edith had had the conventional idea of a corporation, the cartoonists’ fat man in the silk hat and with the dollar sign in his ascot necktie. Carter pointed out to her that the small meat-packing firm of Schneider & Zimmermann, the local planing mills, the brass foundry, and most of the Main Street stores were, technically, corporations, requiring legal services that were completely unrelated to murder and rape. McHenry & Chapin not only attracted that kind of business: they were in a position to accept or reject clients. For the first time Edith understood that law was not all lawsuits, that the McHenry & Chapin kind of firm preferred to stay out of courtrooms. Moreover, by keeping out of courtrooms, McHenry & Chapin acquired a kind of prestige that they carried into a courtroom when circumstances forced them into one. They almost never took a criminal case; if for one reason or another they became counsel for the defense, they automatically conferred on the client a sanitary seal that put the plaintiff at an immediate disadvantage.
The law firm, then, gave Joe something to do, and he seemed to like it. If he had had an interest in book collecting, or polo, or even if he had been the kind of young man who could go to his club every day and while away the time in card playing and modulated drinking, Joe would have had Edith’s encouragement. Her own father had been a quiet souse, which did not interfere with his functioning as an owner of timber lands and a vestryman in Trinity. But her father was not a handsome man, and Joe was handsome; her father was not a rich man, and Joe was rich. And her father was not her husband. She did not own her father. She had never been able to direct her father by order or by guidance, subtle or overt. She did not consider herself lucky to have Stokes as a father; she never had had ambitions for him; he never had been an instrument of her pleasure. And she was quite sure, without being bitter, that her father had not loved her; as sure as that she never had loved him.
Edith did love Joe, as an adjunct, as a part of herself and a mechanism in her life. That Joe loved her she never for two seconds doubted. In her alone, she was sure, reposed the power to awaken and continually reawaken whatever of lust there was in Joe. Sometimes it was as though she had been present with Joe every minute of his life from birth, and when the time came—on the night of their wedding—he was at last ready, and she was, as always, there to share this new experience. Before their marriage she had so finally convinced herself of Joe’s virginity, and on their wedding night she had been so much more convinced by his awkwardness—that she suffered no curiosity about his relations with other girls. Accordingly, she never inquired; consequently, the lie he might have told her did not come up for a test.
Her appraisal of his love for her, in those early years of their marriage, was no more complicated than such a simple emotion and such simple circumstances demanded. There was, for instance (she believed), the fact that he told her he loved her. Then if that had not been enough, the fact that
he depended on her completely for sexual pleasure. They were living in a time when it was popularly remarked that “he never looked at another woman.” Joe did look at other women, handsomer women—but never strayed from her. There was a point in politeness beyond which Joe did not go, and that was mild flirtatiousness. If, indeed, he ever reached that point. He was a gentleman, and the art of the fan was being practiced by the women they knew, which meant that some of the women appeared to be flirtatious; but Joe would participate only to the extent that nonparticipation would have been loutish. Aside from such politenesses, Joe gave Edith not the slightest reason to have the minutest doubt of his love for her.
In a town that was populated—at least in their set—by happy couples and only happy couples, they stood out as a happy couple for other happy couples to use as a model. There was some slight uneasiness among the other happy couples that was caused by the Chapins’ failure, deliberate or otherwise, to produce a second child. But the worries were set at rest when, along about the time the Germans were invading Belgium, it became known that Edith was going to have another baby.
The British and German propaganda machines went quickly to work, although the British efforts were not as a rule characterized or even recognized as propaganda. In Gibbsville, where propaganda was not needed, the old German families responded as any such group might be expected to respond. The nice people, exclusive of the German-descended, and regardless of origin, immediately went to the assistance of the Allies. The German-descended were put on the defensive and some of them said and did foolish things when provoked that provoked reprisals, and in several cases enmities originated that not only outlasted the first World War, but were easily recalled upon the outbreak of World War II. Edith’s pregnancy and the European hostilities postponed any further discussion of travel abroad—postponed it for more than ten years. The war in Europe did a curious thing: it provided a topic of conversation (except when the German-descended were present) which was dotted with European place names such as Louvain and Metz and the Argonne woodland; the men, at least, were talking about places they never had talked about in their lives (Metz had occasionally been in their conversations because there was a motorcar by that name); but the conversations were only “for show”; the European war was not understood and the reporting of it was meager, so that the question, “Can we stay out of it?,” was not being asked during the months that saw so much death in Europe while Edith was transfusing life to her child. Two, then three, then more of Joe’s Yale friends or acquaintances were reported to have joined the British and the French, but in conversations with Arthur McHenry the war remained a European affair, not brought any closer to home by the volunteering of their friends. One of the volunteers had earlier gone on big-game-hunting expeditions in Africa, and to Joe and Arthur his signing on with the British was precisely of a piece with his firing rifles at lions. It was a chance for adventure and no more. When another classmate was killed in the first battle of Ypres he was conceded not to have been a big-game hunter or a mere adventurer; but an explanation for his being with the British was not hard to find; he was working for the London branch of an American bank and probably had a great many English friends. In every way the war was such a distant thing that Joe and Edith could hope for a son without any thought of his ever becoming cannon fodder.
