Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  The door to Miss Mulford’s office was ajar and he could hear the sound of her typewriter. His desk was bare except for the writing he had done the day before on yellow copy paper. The typing stopped and he heard Miss Mulford push back her chair.

  “Good morning, Miss Mulford,” he said—and he was glad to see her, because like all the room, she was part of its continuity.

  Like the furnishings, it had been a long while since Miss Mulford had demanded his full attention. She wore one of her severely tailored suits of gray worsted with a trace of ruffled white showing at the open neck. He had never known her to wear a piece of jewelry in the office. Her nails were unpainted and she had on only a dash of lipstick. It was often difficult to realize that she had been with him for about twenty-five years. Although there was no visible gray in her hair, there was no obvious tinting in it, either, and it made no startling contrast with her regular features. In fact, one could not tell whether she was forty-five or not and in the end the question had no importance. She was still the neat, quiet girl whom he had met in the Higgins office when he had called in 1928 to discuss the casting of his play Hero’s Return, and, in spite of thirty years, her beauty was still apparent. The moment he had first seen her, he had known that she was a part of the theatre and that her aggressive simplicities were part of stage tradition. In the theatre, good secretaries drew an uncompromising line between themselves and actresses.

  “Good morning,” Miss Mulford said, and he saw that she was watching him with unusual care. “No one’s brought the morning mail yet.”

  “I know,” he said, “I thought I’d walk down and get it myself this morning, but the New York Times has been delivered, hasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Miss Mulford said, “but don’t you think it would be just as well if someone on the place called for the mail regularly?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I suppose you’ve got a point there, but I rather like to go down and get it myself. I won’t be away long.”

  “Don’t forget that Mr. Beechley is waiting for you to call him about Hollywood.”

  He looked at the clock on the mantel.

  “I’m not forgetting,” he said. “He’s probably not in the office yet.”

  “There are some more bills for you to look at.”

  “All right,” he said. “Is there enough money in the New York account?”

  “There isn’t,” she said. “There never has been, has there?”

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” he asked. “I keep putting money into that account, a little more each year, and yet there never is enough. But what about the housekeeping account?”

  “That’s down, too—so don’t forget to call Mr. Beechley.”

  “Maybe I’d better go to Hollywood if they want me there,” he said. “But then, there’d only be the income tax.”

  “Don’t go,” she said. “You’ve just got here.”

  “Yes,” he said, “and maybe things will just settle down now. Guess who came in last night?”

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Walter Price.”

  “Oh,” she said, “he isn’t going to stay long, is he?”

  “Only for a day or two,” he said.

  “Oh dear,” she said, “he always makes you restless.”

  “I wish you’d been at breakfast this morning,” he said. “He was telling about the Price Château, spelled with a Ph. Have you ever heard that one?”

  “No,” she said, “never about the Price Château.”

  “He met the Duke of Windsor there,” he said, “but the whole thing was blown up by the Big Bertha in World War I. The château had the old Norman spelling, Phryce. It did not belong to the Price branch that came over to England with William the Conqueror. It belonged to the other branch and they retained the old family spelling.”

  “Maybe you’d better go and get the mail,” she said, “if you’re going to work this morning.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but I’ve just got a new idea. When I was talking to that man Dodd—he was here this morning, you know—in the garden. Did I ever tell you that we used to go to school together?”

  “Yes,” she said, “and you always call him Jack.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “It’s pathetic, isn’t it, clinging to a thing like that? Frankly, I’m tired of being pathetic.”

  “You’re not pathetic, only restless,” she said, “and you’d better go down and get the mail.”

  “Just let me make my point,” he said. “The point is: once you get involved in the theatre, you can’t seem to project yourself out into the rest of the world.”

  “Yes,” she said, “I know.”

  “Oh,” he said, “you know, do you? Have you ever tried to get away from being involved?”

  “Yes,” she said, “several times.”

  She had a good speaking voice. It would have been hard for her not to have picked up enunciation after all the scripts she had held through rehearsals, but there was nothing contrived in her speech. Nevertheless, he could not remember that she had ever sounded just as she had at that moment. It occurred to him that he had very seldom inquired about her private problems, but she had a right to her own life.

  “I might have guessed at one or two,” he said, “but I didn’t know that there were several times.”

  “I’ll get the bills ready,” she said, “and there are still some letters you haven’t answered.”

  “All right,” he said. “I shouldn’t have made that remark, but I was only trying to make a point. My point is that all of us keep dealing in unrealities until they finally get more real than reality. It was that way out in the garden.”

  He stopped because nothing he was saying had much coherence.

  “I suppose everybody gets caught up in something sometime,” he said—“that is, if you live at all.” And he laughed. “First and last, I’ve certainly got myself caught up in a lot of things.”

  It was morning, but he was talking as he might have at the end of a long day. He was almost sure that the overheard conversation was what had cast a shadow over his thoughts. He felt uncertain, and uncertainty was a serious malady which invariably called up the fear that you were written out and finished. It did no good to tell himself that he had gone through the same mood often enough before. It was the penalty for creative talent, plus the knowledge that one only had oneself to thank for failure. He was facing loneliness again, and vanity—the worst of it all was vanity. He wanted reassurance, and he wondered what Miss Mulford was thinking. Was she thinking, too, that he was losing his grip?

  “Yes,” he said, “I’ve been in and out of a lot of things—and you always leave some of yourself behind. There used to be a time when I thought I could set the world on fire. I was under that impression the day I came into the Higgins office, do you remember?”

  “Yes,” she said, “you’ve got more sense now.”

  “Well, thanks a lot,” he said. “And now I’d better go and get the mail, and before going I’ll leave you with a quote from Ecclesiastes: ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher … all is vanity.’”

  He was pleased with his own voice, which spoke well for the rhythms of King Solomon.

  “Oh, Mr. Harrow,” Miss Mulford said, “there’s one thing …”

  He was half turned toward the door and he swung back sharply.

  “Tell Alfred to lay out a new tweed coat for you,” Miss Mulford said, “and do see that the one you’re wearing gets pressed. You’ve been wearing the same coat for the last three days.”

  Emily was right that he was not really connected with the town. He was, like so many of his contemporaries, almost rootless except for business or profession. He and the rest of his generation had never lived in permanence. They had lived in the suburbs or in apartments during the winter, and the country places they bought they knew very well would be instantly sold by their heirs. There were no Old Home Weeks or old homes any more. If he had an old home at all, it was obviously New York, and New York
itself had undergone such a metamorphosis that is was hard for him to reconstruct his old days there. The streets remained, but the buildings were evaporating. The Plaza was still there, and so was the entrance to the Central Park Zoo with the balloon men and the peanut men, but where was the Murray Hill? Where was the Belmont? Where was the Ritz? The truth was, his life afforded few sites for landmarks. You lived for decades in New York, but the time inevitably arrived when you retreated to a small area of it. You finally could not adjust yourself to its constant changes. You were more aware of impermanence there than anywhere else in the world.

  In everyone there was a lurking desire for permanence, and most of life was pursuit of it. He knew very well that his associations with the small town to which he had returned had been brief though poignant, and he knew very well that he did not seriously belong there. The town was changing, like everything else in the postwar world, but not hysterically. It still had elements of dignity. It still was a scene of his youth. Dock Street, which he had first remembered in the early days of the Model T Ford, was hideously crowded with arrogant, rainbowhued cars lining each curb of the old business thoroughfare. The trolley cars that had operated when he had first known the town had disappeared. Except for the Dock Street Savings Bank, the façades of the shops along the street had all been altered in an aggressive way that reminded him of television make-up on the faces of certain superannuated actresses. The new plastic façades on Dock Street were as blatant as the cars when the May sunlight struck them, justifying the remark, which he had heard somewhere, that we were living in a jukebox civilization. In fact, all of Dock Street seemed to be dancing that morning to a modern jukebox record, luxuriating in its materialism and in the pseudo-sophisticated displays in its shop-windows. In the show business one had necessarily to develop an eye for change, but he was forced to admit that the rising tide of new gadgets for sale on the old street was beginning to confuse him. All you coud perceive was that everything was on the verge of change which would eventually be reflected in every facet of life and thought. He wished to goodness that he could gauge the trend, which was vaguely reminiscent, of course, of the upsurge of 1929, but no trend was ever identical with another.

  Nevertheless, the town was still reassuring. The present was only a garish coat of paint over older buildings whose façades and shapes were scarcely altered by new blends of color. He wished that Dock Street could be translated to the stage, and in his thoughts he had occasionally attempted to do so, but he had never found a way to present its subtleties to an audience—that sense of being partly old and partly young. The youth that came with spring, for instance, was apparent in the elm trees that had survived hurricanes and disease, and yet the trees themselves were very old.

  Everyone knew about everyone else on Dock Street, and everyone knew where everyone else fitted in the elastic but undeviating social order. He knew very well that he did not belong in Clyde, but that knowledge in itself gave him a sense of identification. The gray slacks and the tweed coat that he wore that morning were things he would never have worn in New York. They were not the costume of the local citizenry, either, but they suited his category. He was the nephew of Miss Edith Fowler who had lived on Locust Street, the nephew whom she had taken in, the one who went through the last two years of high school here and who had been around town off and on later visiting his aunt, and who had married the Browne girl—Rhoda Browne; not one of the regular Brownes, but the daughter of the Browne who had once had the Ford agency. He was the Thomas Harrow who had written plays that had been produced on Broadway, and who had bought the Saebury house and fixed it up. He walked with his shoulders set exactly as he should have to maintain this part, in the military manner that he had picked up in his first week or so in the Pentagon during the last war. Emily had said that morning that he could have been good at anything. Generalities are never correct, but he had learned to walk and to talk like a soldier, and a little of it did not hurt on Dock Street.

  While thoughts like these moved through his mind aimlessly, he was still able to appreciate everything that went on around him. His interest in people and places had never lagged, and his instinct for caricature was as good as his memory for names and faces. Just in front of the Dock Street Savings Bank he recognized Mr. Everett Wilkins—not that this was a remarkable feat, because Mr. Wilkins was vice-president of the bank, waiting in quiet confidence for its president, Henry Baines, to retire; trustee of the Public Library; on the directors’ board of Smith, Hawley; president of the West End Burying Ground. These offices all had a local value which were incomprehensible beyond the town limits, but Tom Harrow understood them, and also knew that if he had lived in town all his life he would never have attained these positions.

  “Well, hello, Everett,” he said. “It’s nice to have this glimpse of you.”

  “Why, hello, Tom,” Mr. Wilkins said.

  Bankers of the Chase or the First National in New York made honest if clumsy efforts to be broad-gauged, but such efforts would not have been desirable on Dock Street. The clear, pinkish face of Everett Wilkins was cool and intelligent. He wore an old Leghorn straw hat and a blue serge suit, the trousers of which were more shiny than the coat because inside the bank he wore a black alpaca jacket.

  “You’ve come back early this spring, Tom,” Mr. Wilkins said.

  “Yes,” Tom Harrow said. “We did move up earlier this year, Everett, but it’s very impressive that you should remember my comings and goings.”

  Mr. Wilkins smiled with what a columnist might have called a cracker-barrel smile.

  “At the bank we keep track of customers,” he said. “As soon as I saw your last deposit, I said to myself: Tom Harrow is back in town and he’s going to make more improvements on the Saebury house, or else he’s moving his account from New York, and that couldn’t be possible, could it?”

  Tom Harrow smiled. He never had been able to understand why business at certain levels had to be conducted in terms of badinage, or why money, when the subject was first introduced, should be a joke.

  “No,” he said. “You might need some extra help if I increased my account that much. I hope you’ve had a good winter, and that Mrs. Wilkins is well.”

  He could not recollect the first name of Everett Wilkins’s wife, although she had once been a friend of Rhoda’s back there in the past; but on the whole it was better not to remember her first name because he did not want Everett Wilkins to think that he was overanxious to improve their relationship.

  “We had a very good winter, thanks,” Everett Wilkins said. “In fact, so good that Mrs. Wilkins and I were able to realize a dream we’ve always cherished—to take a two weeks’ winter cruise on a Grace Line boat in the Caribbean. I heard that you and Mrs. Harrow were down there yourselves. It’s quite a place, isn’t it, the Carribbean? As long as you were down there I guess you and Mrs. Harrow had a good winter, too.”

  “Oh, yes,” Tom Harrow said. “except that we were on the West Coast more than I like.”

  “Working on a new play, I guess, aren’t you?” Mr. Wilkins said.

  “Yes, in a mild way,” Tom Harrow said. “We can’t sit around and do nothing, can we, Everett?”

  “We certainly can’t,” Everett Wilkins said. “Well, I’ve got to be moving. Is there anything we can do for you at the bank?”

  “Not at the moment, thanks,” Tom Harrow said. “It’s nice to have seen you. How’s Mr. Baines?”

  There was a transient sharpness in Everett Wilkins’s eyes, but it faded very quickly.

  “Never better,” Mr. Wilkins said. “He’d appreciate it if you came in and shook hands with him sometime, Tom. He was looking over your account only the other day. He remembers all about you.”

  It was hard to tell whether or not there was an edge to Everett Wilkins’s voice. Small-town values were refined and difficult.

  “He doesn’t look a day older than he did when we were kids,” Tom Harrow said. “I certainly will come in and pay him my respects, Eve
rett.”

  He had just finished speaking when a strange thing happened, one of those irrational things that you always wonder about later, that move out of the sequence of events. He was just about to nod to Everett Wilkins and walk on when he saw a girl walking toward them up Dock Street, and for an instant he had the illusion that she was part of memory, because her figure and posture and her walk reminded him of another day on Dock Street. Very few women walked gracefully. Even on the stage they had to be taught how to put one foot in front of the other; but the stride of the girl moving toward them was natural, matching the folds of the inexpensive polo coat she was wearing and falling into perfect tune with her head and shoulders. Her head was bare, her hair was a copper-chestnut, and in spite of her still being some distance away from them, he saw that the bone structure of her face was not unlike the face of Kit Cornell.

  “What a very striking girl,” he said. “And she walks well, too, no hip sway, nothing. She just walks.”

  Everett Wilkins’s look of surprise made him realize that by evening everyone would know that he had come to Dock Street to look at girls.

  “What girl?” Everett Wilkins asked.