Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

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  Women and Thomas Harrow

  A Novel

  John P. Marquand

  This book is gratefully dedicated

  to my secretary, Dorothy Brisson,

  because without her loyalty and interest

  I would doubtless still be splitting infinitives

  in the vicinity of Chapter Three.

  Contents

  I The Name Was Spelled P-h-r-y-c-e When They Wove the Bayeux Tapestry

  II It’s Always Fair Weather, Even without a Stein, When Good Fellows Get Together

  III It’s Always Old Home Week in Any Old Home Town

  IV He Meant It When He Said, “God Bless and Keep You, Thomas”

  V And Some Day the Nation May Honor You, Too—Just like Your Dear Old Pop

  VI There’s an Awful Lot of Knowledge One Never Learns in College—or in a Judge’s Library

  VII After All, He Couldn’t Take It with Him

  VIII Don’t Change a Barrel on Niagara Fall

  IX I’m Glad You Asked That Question

  X If Change Would Not Keep Changing

  XI There’s Something I Ought to Tell You, Emily

  XII Bread upon the Girls

  XIII The Play Might Get to Broadway—and Never Mind the Girls

  XIV Good Night, Monte Cristo

  XV It Lingers Still, Thy Infinite Variety

  XVI Life and Love Moved Faster Then

  XVII There Was Enough to Take Her Shopping

  XVIII He Heard about Hal in Wilmington

  XIX Don’t Look at All of It Just Yet

  XX To Put It Very Frankly, He Was Feeling Fine

  XXI King Midas Would Have Understood Palm Beach

  XXII Happiness Was Just around the Corner

  XXIII It Was Foreshadowed on Lexington Avenue

  XXIV Too Dark Downstairs for Sleeping

  XXV The Army Had a Name for Them

  XXVI You Always Fell Down Somewhere When Running Through a Script

  XXVII Emily Wasn’t Feeling Very Well That Morning

  XXVIII Mr. Harrow Would Much Rather Not Wait for Half an Hour

  XXIX Once One, Always a Bread Thrower

  XXX The Right Thing Done and Over, and Night Was Drawing Nigh

  About the Author

  I

  The Name Was Spelled P-h-r-y-c-e When They Wove the Bayeux Tapestry

  Walter Price was talking about himself again, discoursing in detail on the distinguished and ancient history of the Price family. Tom Harrow had often heard Walter indulge himself before in egocentric reminiscence. Breakfast was almost over, and Tom Harrow was listening without being bored. In fact, he was not sure, because of his age and the erosion of time, whether or not he had ever before heard Walter on the subject of his very early forebears. This was not strange, because he had heard Walter on a great number of others, and for many years had only half listened. Given an adequate space of time, one could discount a number of things about Walter, but Tom Harrow still could not discount him personally. He knew that Walter had ability and he invariably respected Walter’s powers of imagination. It was a pleasure to sit over a late breakfast and listen to Walter talk, because it was no longer necessary to give Walter full attention. He could think, as Walter’s discourse progressed, that Walter must have overindulged in his old bad morning habit of sitting in a bathtub filled with cold water and drinking a jigger of straight gin.

  Tom Harrow could recall distinctly the first time he had ever known Walter to indulge in this practice. This had been when Tom was living in an apartment on Lexington Avenue. It was summer and his wife, Rhoda, had gone to Watch Hill with their son, Hal; but it had been necessary for Tom to stay in town in order to pick the cast for a play, the name of which he could not recollect at the moment. It was a great many years ago, although even then his friendship with Walter Price had already burgeoned, but the whole scene was accurately dated because the gin which Walter had been drinking was still known as “bathtub gin.” Walter had occupied Hal’s tub, and Walter had not fitted into it accurately.

  “Tom,” he had heard Walter calling—and whenever Walter wanted anything his voice had the appeal of melodramatic urgency—“will you please come here quickly?”

  He could remember the first thought that had run through his mind. Walter in those days frequently told of a crisis which he had faced while staying at the Hotel Biltmore in New York when he was working in an advisory capacity with the author of the play known as Getting Gertie’s Garter. Walter had been very sure that the play was Getting Gertie’s Garter, although it could have been Up in Mabel’s Room, and Tom Harrow had already observed back in the bathtub gin days that Walter was becoming less and less accurate about plays and facts. Indeed, as of the present, Walter was beginning to move his early play-doctoring days to London, where he had helped Mr. Shaw with Major Barbara—a difficult move, since Walter’s life span did not fit well with Major Barbara.

  Back at the Biltmore, Walter had felt exhausted after hours of what he chose to call “close intellectual collision,” and he had retired to the room supplied for him by the producer of Up in Mabel’s Room or Getting Gertie’s Garter, or whatever the confection might have been on which he had been working. The title did not really matter. The point was that Walter had plunged himself into a hot tub for purposes of relaxation, and there were fine large bathtubs in the Biltmore then, as perhaps there were still, but Walter only recollected the Biltmore as it had existed in the days contemporaneous with F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom Walter always oddly referred to as Fitzy.

  Plunging into a hot bath for purposes of relaxation was a practice, he often explained, that had been taught him by his old colored mammy on the family plantation near Columbia, South Carolina—a lovely place, which General Sherman had spared after Walter’s grandmother, then a mere slip of a girl, had interceded personally with the general. The plantation period had occurred long before Walter had begun moving himself and the whole Price family to their holdings at Halliday Hall in Hampshire, England—not that any of this concerned the bathtub. The point was that Walter in his warm bath had developed a habit of plunging almost beneath the water and then pushing himself upward against the back of the tub. Even in the twenties he had started putting on weight, because suddenly a suction developed between his shoulder blades so severe that any motion he made to extricate himself caused excruciating agony and his cries for assistance went unheeded, but finally nature asserted herself by abhorring the vacuum and thus he was released.

  When Walter called on that distant day at Lexington Avenue, Tom hurried to Hal’s bathroom fearing that Walter had been caught again, but it was morning and Walter was in cold water. It was Walter’s old Scottish tutor, a direct descendant of Boswell, who had taught Walter to indulge in the rigors of a cold pre-prandial bath. The pain, as the tutor had said, was worth the buttered scones, or words to that effect.

  “Tom,” Walter had said, “would you mind playing the good host and bringing me a bottle of gin to counter the chill? Gin and cold water of a morning give me my best thoughts. It was a trick I learned from my grandfather, Colonel Lamar, who served with Hood’s Brigade before he acquired his large holdings in Nicaragua.” That was certainly long before Walter had moved the Price family to Hampshire, but Walter had never given up a cold morning tub and gin. The practice set the wheels of the mind revolving, not that the wheels had ever needed lubrication, and ever afterwards Tom had seen to it personally that a fifth of gin was always placed in Walter’s bathroom whenever Walter came to stay with him, profe
ssionally or socially.

  Today at the breakfast table Walter’s discourse on the early history of the Price family was not a bad topic for the late morning. Over the centuries, it seemed, the name Price, originally early Norman, had undergone considerable alteration.

  “This fact first occurred to me when I was in the fifth form at Harrow,” Walter Price said. “Those dear Edwardian days! I wish you might have been able, Tom, to share with me the privilege of having attended Harrow.”

  Reluctantly Tom pulled his rambling thoughts together. A glance at his Spode coffeecup, at the mahogany of the breakfast table, and at the hot plates on the hunting board reminded him that he also had been occasionally to England.

  “Now wait a minute,” he said. “I thought you had gone to the Taliaferro School for Boys outside Columbia, South Carolina. You used to walk there barefoot from the old plantation, didn’t you? The school was run by Colonel Taliaferro, a great Latinist, who had served with your grandfather Lamar under General Hood—or was I thinking of somebody else?”

  Walter Price sighed patiently.

  “That was considerably earlier, Tom,” he said, “before my Uncle Roderick sent for me in South Africa. Uncle Roderick was one of Rhodes’s protégés, you may remember. He started as Rhodes’s office boy when he was eleven and a half. I’ll have to tell you about Uncle Roderick sometime, Tom. He’s a story himself—a true product of the old unregenerate days when England was Old England. May I have another cup of coffee? It’s a beautiful George the Third coffeepot, Tom.”

  “Actually it’s George the Second,” Tom Harrow said.

  “Of course it is,” Walter Price answered. “And I remember now. You bought it after Hero’s Return, didn’t you? No wonder you could afford the piece, Tom. But I’m amazed that Rhoda didn’t want it.”

  “She would have, if she’d remembered it,” Tom Harrow said. “But she had switched by then to Early American silver. Go and call on her someday and let her show you the Reveres and Hurds I bought her.”

  “Dear me,” Walter Price said, “I’ve seen them, Tom. I thought they were Presley’s old family pieces.”

  There was no use pursuing the subject. Perhaps everything, even history, ceased being factually accurate after a term of years.

  “Let’s get back to your school days at Harrow,” Tom said. “You must have been pretty old for Harrow, judging from what you told me about that Taliaferro School in Columbia.”

  “I’ve always admired your memory, Tom,” Walter Price said, “but still you fall down sometimes on small details. What was it I ever told you about Taliaferro School in Columbia?”

  “I don’t suppose I’m as accurate as I used to be,” Tom Harrow said, “but it seems to me that you told me once that in your first year in Taliaferro’s School in Columbia, South Carolina, you got a young girl into trouble. I think you said that she had something to do with the Temperance Drink Bottling Company.”

  Walter blinked his eyes twice. There was no doubt that he had put on weight. In fact, his features hardly resembled those of the earlier Price that Tom Harrow had known once, but personality still persisted.

  “We’re getting off the subject,” Walter said. “When was it I told you about Colonel Taliaferro’s School?”

  Although Walter Price had ceased to be useful long ago, if indeed he ever had been, Tom still enjoyed his company because neither seriously expected anything from the other—except that Walter would probably ask for a loan before his visit terminated.

  “I’m glad you asked me that one,” Tom Harrow said, “because I can remember the occasion exactly. It was in that apartment that Rhoda and I had on Lexington Avenue. You were sitting in Hal’s bathtub drinking gin when you told about the Temperance Drink girl.”

  “I remember, now that you bring up the point,” Walter said. “But please recollect that Southerners are more sexually precocious than Northerners, as a rule. Look what goes on in the West Indies, according to all accounts.”

  “Whose accounts?” Tom Harrow asked.

  “Anyone’s accounts,” Walter Price said. “Frankly, I don’t recall at the moment ever having got any girl in Columbia into trouble; and if I had, I do not think I would have mentioned it in Harold’s bathtub because I would have remembered that Rhoda would not have liked it.”

  “Rhoda was at Watch Hill at the time,” Tom said. “You had no reason to worry about Rhoda.”

  “If Rhoda had been less at Watch Hill,” Walter Price said, “and more often in that dear old place of yours on Lexington Avenue, and later on Park, Rhoda might be here this minute, mightn’t she?”

  Tom Harrow picked up the George the Second coffeepot. It had been with him on Lexington Avenue, but time was beginning to make it a less and less tangible object. He was only lately beginning to discover that one could reach an age when possessions could assume impermanence and lose intrinsic value as they mingled with associations.

  “I don’t think any trip to Watch Hill had much to do with anything,” Tom Harrow said, “But let’s get back to our primary subject.”

  “What subject?” Walter Price asked.

  “The Price family,” Tom Harrow said. “You were talking about the Price family, weren’t you?”

  “Was I being so egocentric?” Walter said.

  “You were being informative,” Tom Harrow said, “not egocentric, Walter.”

  Their glances met for a moment across the table.

  “You grow increasingly dramatically constructive, Tom,” Walter Price said. “I’m sure I don’t know how I ever got on the subject of the Prices, but it is, quite impersonally, interesting. A Price came over from Normandy with William the Conqueror. I am told, although I cannot confirm it momentarily, that he is depicted riding at the rear of the Duke in the Bayeux tapestry.”

  “Did he wear a nose guard?” Tom Harrow asked.

  “Strange you should mention that,” Walter Price said. “I had almost forgotten nose guards, but I wore one when I played left half at Groton, just before I went to Yale.”

  “I thought you went to Harrow after your Uncle Roderick made money in the DeBeers Syndicate,” Tom Harrow said.

  Neither of them smiled since each was sufficiently considerate of the other to understand that revealed inaccuracy was not a laughing matter.

  “I was popping in and out of several schools,” Walter Price said, “directly before I went to Yale. It’s hard to keep them straight, but I did wear one of those rubber nose guards at Groton. I distinctly remember the taste of it.”

  “How could you taste it if it was on your nose?” Tom Harrow asked.

  “Part of it was in my mouth,” Walter Price said. “You must be nearly old enough to have worn a nose guard yourself, even if you didn’t go to Groton.”

  “Well, let’s skip it,” Tom said, “and tell me about the Price that came over with William the Conqueror.”

  Walter sipped his coffee.

  “His name was Sieur Monsarratt de Phryce. P-h-r-y-c-e. They spelt it that way in those days. Phryce.”

  “Why did they stop spelling it that way?” Tom asked.

  “The Phryce branch in England at the time of Charles the First changed it to Price after the beheading,” Walter said, “but my own direct ancestors accompanied the young prince to France. The de Phryce château was only a few kilometers northwest of Versailles. I was entertained there when I was a young lieutenant in World War I. Did I ever tell you about the Château de Phryce?”

  “Not that I remember at the moment,” Tom Harrow said. “But then, you’ve had a full life, Walter.”

  “I very seldom mention the Château de Phryce to anyone,” Walter said. “It is painful to think about it, but General Pershing stopped there.”

  “Oh,” Tom Harrow said, “if it’s painful, don’t feel you have to bring it up.”

  “It’s quite all right, Tom,” Walter Price said. “All that is painful was the ending of the chateau. It was completely destroyed with my dear cousins in it by the first shot of
the Big Bertha, when the Germans were endeavoring to get the range of Paris. It isn’t sensible, of course, that I should be so moved, after the obliteration of so many monuments; but none were so personal to me in quite the same way, Tom. After all, when one comes to think of it, the course of any life is marked by its series of small ruins, at least in the region of human relationships. But then, one must create ruin in order to develop. One can’t stand still, can one?”

  There was no doubt that occasionally Walter could exhibit a flash of wisdom. It was true, what he had said about ruins of human relationships. People grew away from each other, tastes changed, and nothing was ever static.

  “A good case in point might be my friendship with the Duke of Windsor,” Walter Price said. “David was Prince of Wales at the time. We saw quite a lot of each other during World War I.”

  Walter was off again. It was impossible that Walter should feel that anything he said could be believed—or was it? Tom Harrow could not be sure because Walter was the only psycopathic liar he had ever known over a long period of time. It might be possible that Walter could contrive to believe the figments of his own imagination, since they all started on some small platform of fact—and no one was wholly accurate when he talked about himself. It might even be that the palpable falsehoods of Walter Price contained their own peculiar currencies of truth. They indicated a divine sort of discontent. When you thought of it this way, there was a magnificent element in Walter’s battle against reality, and his prevarications became part of literary tradition.

  Walter Price, when you came to think of it, was only doing to himself what the great Dumas had done to the real D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers, but Walter Price was no Dumas. He was an agent who kept losing clients—a fat man in his sixties, with high blood pressure, traveling down to Ogunquit, Maine, to discuss the possible use of a client’s play by a summer theatre; but he was doing the best he could and there was something heart-warming, almost gallant in the effort. The chances were a thousand to one that he had never met the Duke of Windsor, let alone the younger Prince of Wales, but there was still that thousandth chance. You might start to write off the Château de Phryce, but then there had been a Big Bertha.