Jack Dodd was standing on the yellow graveled walk almost in the center of the garden. There was something puzzling about his expression when Tom first saw him. You could not tell whether he approved or disapproved or whether he was simply making a mental financial estimate. His shoulders were bent forward and his face had a tanned, outdoor look. The pockets of his blue serge suit bulged with a Dodd catalogue and order blanks and there was a smear of lime dust on his left shoulder.
“Hello, Jack,” Tom Harrow said.
“Hello, Tom,” Jack Dodd said. “You’re looking good.”
There must have been some sort of reverse explanation of why he was pleased that Jack Dodd should call him Tom. It struck Tom Harrow that morning, as it had before, how curious it was that he could never be wholly at ease with Jack Dodd or with other of his contemporaries there in town, when he could deal with people in any other place in the world adroitly, affably, and without the slightest sense of strain. He had once tried to get things down to an easier basis by asking Jack Dodd into the house for a drink. He should have known that Jack would not have fitted into the setting, and Alfred, carrying a Georgian tray, had not helped. When Jack Dodd had asked for a shot of rye and some water as a chaser, Alfred had been obliged to go back for another glass suitable for a shot. There had been no rapprochement and no new basis.
Ironically, Tom Harrow could hear himself saying at dinner parties in the neighborhood of Park Avenue that the most useful thing that had ever befallen him was a public school education in a small New England town. And why was it he was grateful for this benefit? He was grateful because he could rub shoulders with people in every echelon of life, understand their problems and speak their language. And basically perhaps this concept was still true, except that the echelons had been changing since he was a schoolboy. What, he wondered that morning, did Jack Dodd actually think of him? There was a type of friendliness in Jack’s glance, and curiosity, but also a broad indifference. Undoubtedly Jack Dodd was thinking that this Tom Harrow had picked up a lot of slick tricks and bad habits since the old days, and you had to watch things you did not understand.
“Well, it certainly is good to see you, Jack,” Tom Harrow said. “How have things been all winter?”
“I can’t complain, Tom,” Jack Dodd said. “The snow hung on longer than usual, but it made up for the dry spring.”
“I hope Malvina got through the winter all right,” Tom Harrow said. He had nearly forgotten that expression, “getting through the winter,” but its meaning had come back to him. Malvina was Jack Dodd’s wife, and there was no reason whatsoever why he should not refer to her as Malvina, although when he did so to her face she very often became embarrassed and called him “Mr. Harrow.”
“Malvina is all right, except for that hip of hers,” Jack Dodd said. “It used to be called rheumatism, but now it’s arthritis. It’s getting so it’s hard to keep up with these new names for diseases and flowers. Isn’t that so, Tom?”
It seemed to Tom Harrow that Jack Dodd had stuck out his neck slightly more than usual by ending his speech with a question.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Jack,” he said. “I was talking to a doctor in New York only the other day about arthritis and I understand they’re coming up now with one of these new wonder drugs that’s better than cortisone. I’ll let you know when I hear some more about it.”
“Thanks, Tom,” Jack Dodd said, “I’d appreciate hearing. You look as though you’d come through the winter all right yourself. You didn’t get that coat of tan sitting around New York.”
“That’s right,” Tom Harrow said. “As a matter of fact, Emily and I took off for a while to the West Indies in March.”
“Is that so?” Jack Dodd said. “The West Indies.”
Sooner or later they would get down to business, but it would not look well to be brusque and, besides, at any cost Tom Harrow did not want to appear patronizing.
“How’s that pretty daughter of yours getting along, Jack?” he asked. “What’s her name? I’m getting worse and worse with names … Irene?”
There was a change in Jack Dodd’s expression. You could not tell whether it was paternal pride or amusement, but the change was appreciable.
“Reenie’s doing fine,” Jack Dodd said. “You know, she started in at Mount Holyoke College.”
“Is that so?” Tom Harrow said. “Well, that’s fine.”
He tried to evoke a mental picture of Irene, but she was only a name to him.
“But she’s like her old man,” Jack Dodd said, “no good at books, and she’s back home now. Maybe Harold told you.”
“Harold?” Tom Harrow said, and he was ashamed that his voice sounded sharp.
“He was over to the house last night,” Jack Dodd said, “taking Irene to the pictures.”
“I guess he came back late,” Tom Harrow said, “after my bedtime, anyway. But that doesn’t mean much. I always get sleepy here.”
“The garden looks good, doesn’t it?” Jack Dodd said. “Seems as if everything came through except a couple of the azaleas.”
“That’s right,” Tom Harrow said. “I hope you’re well enough fixed for help so you can take it over again this season, Jack. Aside from your knowing a lot more about it than I do, it would be nice seeing you around.”
He was disturbed when the business talk was over. He could not understand, when Jack Dodd continued on the subject of Irene, whether Jack was amused or worried. He could not understand how Harold had met Irene Dodd. It was a piece of information, but he wished that he knew whether Jack Dodd had intended it as such.… At any rate, Dodd’s Arborists and Landscaping Service agreed to take care of the garden.
The house stood on the town’s main residential street on a ridge of high ground sloping gradually down to the river. It was one of a row of houses which had been built in the best McIntire tradition by the town’s local shipwrights for the more prominent shipowners, in the days when the town had been a seaport. There was a marked similarity in the architecture of those houses, in cupola and cornice and in the arch of the doorways, and their interior plans were the same—the broad hall that stretched from the front door to the back, the two front parlors, the back parlor, and the dining room, the broad staircases and landings leading to the bedchambers on the second and third stories—but the finish of no two was alike. They had been built pretentiously for large families. The plots of land on which they stood with their shade trees and gardens had run back to the stables and coach houses that represented a mode of living which no longer existed. There were very few people left in town who could afford any longer to keep up the houses on Johnson Street. In Tom Harrow’s memory, several of them had fallen into a state of hideous disrepair, but their owners had clung to them so tenaciously that it was still difficult to buy a house in the row and it still meant something, even in a changing world, to live on this main street. In spite of increasing motor traffic, the row had a conspicuousness which must have been brash and arrogant when the houses were new, but which had been mellowed by time, without wholly disappearing. Johnson Street might become a thoroughfare of funeral and tourist homes eventually, but even then it would retain its dignity, and perhaps, it occurred to Tom Harrow, dignity in the end was all that mattered—and he wished very much that this fact had registered with him a number of years ago. Unfortunately, you seldom think of dignity at the appropriate period of life.
When the Saebury house on Johnson Streét had come on the market, he had not hesitated to buy it at the asking price, even though he knew the decision was not practical. He knew he was indulging in a sort of pretentiousness which he should have outgrown after he had become inured to Broadway openings. He knew he was not fooling anyone when he came back and bought the Saebury house on Johnson Street. He did not belong there, but still he had not hesitated. It had been a gesture that was entirely personal. When Emily asked him why he had done it, he had produced the quotation about the weariest river winding somewhere safe to sea—but this was a
superficial explanation. He had bought the house on Johnson Street because, instinctively, he had not wished to see it fall to pieces. He had bought it and restored it out of a sense of obligation; but if anyone had asked him obligation to what, he would not have been able to answer. The obligation was still upon him at the moment. He should not have left New York in late May—but there he was, because he had wanted to see the garden. He had no regrets for the impulse when he walked from the garden around the house to the front door and saw the restored wood fence and the brick sidewalks of Johnson Street. He had no regrets, but he wished that he could fully understand his motivation. He was always accurate about the motivation of characters in a play, but he was seldom as successful in recognizing his own, and perhaps no one was ever wholly successful along these lines.
It was getting to be time to call New York but there was still a margin of leisure since nothing around him synchronized with New York. Ed Beechley was customarily in the office at 10:30, but it was safer to wait until eleven because Ed Beechley was one of those people who always believed that being late to the office and unavailable, indicated position, and Ed, like other people who had come up the hard way, was careful of position. Tom knew also that it would not be a good day for work, with Walter Price in the house. If he was to put finishing touches on the last act of the play on which he was working, he needed an interval of time unbroken by interruptions. It had always seemed to him that he could manage such a schedule after he had bought and renovated the house, and he was still sure that he would get things started, particularly if Emily should leave to visit someone, as she was very apt to do after a week or ten days of quiet. In the meanwhile, before calling up the Beechley office, he might walk downtown for the mail—not that he could not have sent someone—but he enjoyed the walk.
His hat and the key to the mailbox were both on the front-hall table and the shortest way to reach them was to walk up the steps of the front portico with its graceful Corinthian columns and push down the heavy brass latch of the Saebury front door. The door with its eight panels was fashioned from Santo Domingo mahogany that might have been carried north on one of the Saebury ships. It had been painted at some period but now the paint was off and the door had been rubbed and oiled. There had been no settling of sill or foundation in the Saebury house. The mahogany door swung inward as easily and quietly as it had for more than a hundred years, revealing the hall and stairway with its beautifully turned balusters. No amount of investigation had been able to tell him who the designer of the house had been. He was certain it had not been McIntire. The stairs and the proportion of the hall did not have the McIntire touch. They were lighter and more spare, indicating as surely as print that the town had once been famous for its shipyards.
The unknown designer had no doubt been an artisan who had taken time off from the yards to draw the Saebury plans, but the instinct for space and proportion was the reflection of a definite personality. He had obviously been plagued by a series of intolerances, traces of which still remained in the Saebury hall. He had been intolerant of waste or clumsiness, and his honesty or his professional pride had made him intolerant of careless work. Beyond his conscientiousness had lain an appreciation of beauty, and with it, perhaps, a sense of revolt against his own environment—because the town must have been grim and cold in the days when the Saebury house had been conceived. The whole hall was a revolt and a craving for luxury which its builder had never known. It was easy to make these deductions, but something unspecified in the Saebury house showed that its builder’s mind was a dawn-of-the-nineteenth-century mind, attuned to past difficulties which social historians might attempt to analyze but could not resurrect. Tom Harrow realized that if it were possible to meet the builder face to face they would not have understood each other. What one would have thought was remarkable, the other would have thought was natural. The creation of taste was based upon such obvious momentary desires that a simple mind did not have to analyze them. The builders of the new split-level ranch types that were sprouting up along the new highways doubtless were all obeying a modern impetus without being bothered by thought. The builder of the Saebury house would have been an unrewarding social contact, but there was no doubt that he had known his trade. Beneath the angle of the staircase, so much of which was waste space but all of which added to the sense of the hallway’s ease and depth, came the dining room door, and the dining room door stood open. As Tom Harrow closed the front door, he could hear Emily’s voice raised to its confidential, earnest note—a tone which indicated, even before he overheard the words, that she was trying to tell her side of a difficulty to Walter Price, and trying also to enlist his support.
“He never told me a thing about it, Walter darling,” she was saying. “He simply presented it as an accomplished fact; and now, here we are, uprooted merely because of a whim, and now after two years of building-up and tearing-down and living in a sort of madhouse, not really knowing where we were living, I honestly believe he’s getting restless again. I honestly do believe so, Walter. It isn’t as though he really had roots here. He only came here when he was fifteen, and just stayed awhile with his mother’s sister, who must have been a very poky old spinster, according to her photographs. You know how sentimental Tom is. You can see her picture in the library. I do not believe that Tom was deliberately thoughtless when he moved me here without a by-your-leave. As a matter of fact, Tom has always been very sweet to me, right from the beginning. He was so desperately lonely, Walter, when we first met. He was so appealing—just like a little boy, and I think you, like everyone else, will say that his work has improved enormously. I will only say that Tom is forgetful, and of course he is enormously sensitive, Walter, actually to the point of emotional instability. But what I cannot understand is why, with his sensitivity, this place shouldn’t give him the creeps in exactly the way it does me. I know the guest room is charming and everything’s like the American Wing in the Metropolitan, but it still is creepy. It’s all been cleaned and everything. It doesn’t smell or anything, but I can’t get over the feeling that lots of people have lived here and have had babies and everything. Somehow you don’t have a sense of privacy—not nearly as much as you get in any apartment on Park Avenue, or even, say, in a cottage at Easthampton. Walter, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there really isn’t any room for bathrooms …”
The only reason he was eavesdropping was because it would have been needlessly embarrassing if they had heard him in the hall. There was nothing novel in any of Emily’s remarks, all of which moved in the pattern of an old sequence. Her mind had a retentive quality that never permitted her to forget her obvious observations. In time, these formed tape-recordings that could be rewound and replayed by a chance word or observation; and he was quite sure that Emily did not know how frequently she repeated herself, and was unaware of her growing loquacity. It was not her fault that the old recording would start as soon as a particular thought struck her, and now she was on the subject of bathrooms.
“Of course there was plumbing in the house before Tom bought it,” she was saying. “There was a zinc-lined bathtub in the servants’ ell, and a family bathroom at the end of the upstairs hall that even Tom said was more interesting than that all-copper bathroom that was once exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art. Well, there just wasn’t any space for more bathrooms, and Tom and the architect just had to dream up places so that the proportions of the bedrooms would not be disturbed. Now, I’ve always liked a good bathroom, and I don’t like to be a contortionist getting in and out of a tub.”
She paused and laughed in the informal tone she used when she was asking someone to share her little joke. He could remember that he had once been intrigued by Emily’s laughter. Standing there detachedly in the hall, he could still recognize that it was attractive—but Emily was going on.
“Do you know where Tom’s bathroom is?” she asked. “It’s in a little niche called a prayer-closet! They thought more about prayer than about keeping clean, in F
ederalist America. That’s only a joke, Walter. I’ve had my nose rubbed in Federalist America by now and I know that plumbing was not invented then, although they used to have it in Roman villas or what have you, and maybe Tom is right when I take up what he calls my Bath Routine, and when he says that the world might be better off if there were more praying and less plumbing. But when you come to think of it, Walter, India doesn’t seem to be very well off, does it, where they have no plumbing at all and millions of prayer wheels and what have you?”
He had never heard the one about the prayer wheels before, but in any play that had a long run actors kept adding to their routine. He was wrong in fearing that Emily was moving off at a tangent. The prayer wheels were only a brief diversion.
“Tom is forever talking about motivation,” she was saying, “and I suppose there was some motivation when he put this show on the road. But what do you suppose it was, Walter—to move here, when we had that lovely house on the dunes at Easthampton? I think in some ways he’s full of free guilt because he didn’t consult me the way he does about everything else. Do you suppose he was trying to escape from something? And if so—what? I really don’t think he’s looked at another woman since we were married, not that they don’t keep looking at Tom—and they should, because he gets more and more attractive all the time; and that reducing and massage man who worked on him in the apartment three mornings a week all through the winter has honestly done wonders. I have had a thought that it is my predecessor that he was trying to escape from—Laura Hopedale, I mean. I don’t blame his feeling bitter about her after the way she literally took him to the cleaners and then never offered to change the agreement, when I understand her Mr. Number 4 is worth literally trillions. Of course I didn’t understand about these things, having only just come from Indiana—only a starry-eyed Hoosier girl, darling—when I first met Tom at dear old Arthur’s. Tom was truly desperate, and you know, though he’s miles older than I am, he does have that little-boy quality.… I don’t see how so many men retain it after middle age—especially American men. I’ve never seen Frenchmen with wistful little-boy qualities, have you? Nor Englishmen, except young transplanted poet ones, who don’t really count for any number of reasons.… Oh, dear me, where was I?”
Women and Thomas Harrow Page 3
