Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  “Yes,” he answered. “Uncle George must have been reading The Story of a Bad Boy by Thomas Bailey Aldrich.”

  His aunt shook her head. “No,” she said, “your Uncle George never did care for fiction. When he had time to read, it was always Beveridge’s Life of John Marshall.”

  It was time to go, and it was delightful to see that Rhoda had picked up her gloves and purse. The last speech made a good curtain for some sort of act, and indeed the whole conversation had its own dramatic proportion. It represented a part of his life that was over, far away and long ago. He owed no loyalty or duty to anyone in that act, except to his Aunt Edith Fowler.

  VI

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

  He was well along through fifteen, and fifteen was not one of his favorite ages, when the Model T Ford that used to meet the train in those days drove him with his suitcase to the Fowler house to spend two years of a small-town boyhood. He had been there only once before on a visit with his mother and he had been too young then to have retained a coherent picture. Now the ornately shingled, gingerbread building, with Japanese maples and umbrella trees in front of it, gave him a deep feeling of loneliness when he paid the driver and walked up the steps and pulled the doorbell. There was no electricity in the house. His Aunt Edith did not believe in it because electric wires might cause fires if rats should gnaw them. It was still the gaslight era, in the Fowler house, plus kerosene table lamps.

  His aunt Edith never believed in keeping people, even book agents, waiting at the door; she opened it at once and she kissed him in a dutiful manner. The uncompromising steel structure of her corset proved that there had always been something about her of iron women and wooden ships.

  Speaking of Thomas Bailey Aldrich and his Story of a Bad Boy—or speaking of Tom Sawyer for that matter, even though this work was based upon a different regionalism—what had become of the conventional spinster? Where was she now, indeed? Popular though she had been in Victorian and Edwardian literature, she was now swept away with other myths destroyed by two world wars. Where was the prototype of the kind Miss Nutter who used to feed her young relative hot drops in the family homestead in Portsmouth, New Hampshire? Where were the modern models of self-effacing, religiously inclined, unmarried sisters who appeared when needed to take care of their handsomer sisters’ offspring or who, when not so engaged, ministered to the querulous wants of aging fathers and mothers, and even great-aunts and uncles, and also of unemployed or maladjusted brothers? It was disturbing to discover, on mature reflection, that there were no modern models. They had disappeared with the sound of horses’ hoofs and the rattle of iron-rimmed wheels on cobblestones. They had vanished with the lamplighter and the hand-cranked telephone once impaled upon the wall of the side entry, with the kitchen coffee mill whose merry noise once aroused one in the morning, simultaneously with the ruder sounds of the chore man shaking down the coals of the furnace. There were plastic telephones now with colors to match every décor. There were heating units governed by electronic devices; and street lights, multiplied recently to combat juvenile delinquency, now turned themselves on and off by remote control; but there were no spinsters any longer—or if they did exist, they seldom admitted their condition. Society, effectively assisted by the late Sigmund Freud and the whole psychiatric profession, had no longer much respect for the once honorable guild of spinsterhood. The girls had been laughed off the stage long ago. Faced by pitiless pictures of the subconscious, they now made frantic and pathetic efforts to conceal the solitudes of their existence, lurking in beauty parlors, going on safari, becoming interior decorators or hard-boiled businesswomen, leading dedicated lives that were more useful and a whale of a lot more interesting than looking after a bunch of snot-nosed children as their sillier sisters had who were basically girls who could not say “No.” Middle-aged spinsters were not respectable any more, now that health and happiness magazines were on sale on every drugstore counter. Nice girls always got married young and there was something queer if they didn’t, and having an affair or a series of affairs was no honest solution of the problem but merely a further indication of emotional maladjustment. There was something wrong, in modern life, with any woman in her middle thirties who had not at least tried a year or two of marriage, and the poor girls knew it very well because they had been told so by friends, admirers and family physicians. If they weren’t married, they were frigid or, if not frigid, promiscuous in a nymphomaniacal manner; and it did no good, either, to stay at home and keep house for Mom and Pops, when modern medical science now knew very well what that meant. It meant that they had ugly and immature habits of dependency in the Oedipus region, or at the very best it meant that they did not have the courage to cut the umbilical cord and live.

  What, Tom Harrow often wondered, would his Aunt Edith have thought if she had known all the things that were wrong with her and had recognized the sinister motivations that had made her stay at home and look after her father until it was too late for any knights to come riding? What would she have said if she had been told that her deeds of sacrifice were as much a defense mechanism as were her impervious corsets reinforced with modern flexible steel which science had proven more reliable than whalebone? He was sure she would have been very angry, and her temper had not always been equable. He was also rather sure that she would have been right to be angry, because there had been such a thing as duty, once, in smaller fields than at present, and public opinion had once not so easily condoned evasions of sacrifice as it did today, particularly on the part of women. There were no Aunt Ediths any longer who consistently gave and asked for little back. She was a figure now in an album of family photographs. They had been beings apart, and yet he had depended on her presence even while he discounted it. There was no one like her any more. The only person, he sometimes thought, who remotely resembled his Aunt Edith at present was Miss Mulford, his secretary. It startled him occasionally to discover that in many ways their relationship was much the same as his had been with his Aunt Edith. Miss Mulford wished many of the same things of him, such as punctuality, industry and neatness. It was not wholly an impossible thought that the Aunt Ediths of yesterday had turned into the Miss Mulfords of today.

  His Aunt Edith, as far as he could recall, had kissed him only three times; first, on the morning she received him into the Fowler house; second, on the day he had left for college; and finally, on the day when he told her that he was engaged to Rhoda Browne. The embarrassed affection that had prompted these three lapses from normalcy made them unforgettable. Once she had revealed a partial explanation for her behavior—not complete, but interesting. It happened when he had given her a bowl of goldfish for Christmas, and tears had come into her eyes when she saw them in the snowy light of Christmas morning beneath the small tree on the Judge’s desk in the library. They were pale, plebeian goldfishes swimming around a submerged Norman castle decorated by a few leaden-weighted strands of aquatic flora.

  “Why, Thomas!” she said. “Why, Thomas!”

  He could tell more by her inflection than her expression that she was pleased.

  “They aren’t much,” he said. “I wish they had been fantails, Aunt Edith.”

  “The thought counts very much more than the animal,” she said, “and I’ve always wanted a goldfish, ever since I was a child; but pets made your grandfather very nervous, and I could not have bought one later because it would have been frivolous—I mean going into the five-and-ten-cent store and asking for a goldfish. It could not have helped causing talk.”

  “What sort of talk?” he asked.

  “Nothing unpleasant,” she said, “but it would have been peculiar when the word got around that I had bought a goldfish for no particular reason. But I always did want a goldfish.”

  This was what older people often said about Christmas presents, but he was sure she had meant what she said.

  “Hello,” she said to the goldfish. “Hello, my
pretty darlings.”

  It was more than she had ever said to the kitchen cat, called Bellamy. She always treated Bellamy correctly, but she always made Mike Gorman, the choreman, drown Bellamy’s kittens promptly, and she had never relented even when they had six toes and mittens.

  “We must be firm, Thomas,” she had told him once, “or one moment of weakness will lead to another. And the birds must be considered.”

  There were always all sorts of things to be balanced and watched about the house and grounds, constant crises that demanded judgment: an attic leak, or the sudden discovery of hornets’ nest on the window outside the laundry ell. She prided herself on being a good housekeeper, but she would never turn her hand to cooking. This was up to Marie, the French Canadian maid-of-all-work, but she could tell Marie exactly how everything must be done. She was hard on Bellamy, the cat, but she was sentimental about the goldfish.

  “We must do everything we possibly can to prevent Bellamy from eating them,” she said. “Look at the little darlings. I could almost kiss you for your thoughtfulness in giving them to me, Thomas,” she said, “but as you know very well, I do not believe in kissing, particularly young boys.”

  Sentiment as it existed for him in that late Victorian mansion, when it did not appear in a heavily framed engraving in the front hall entitled The Love Letter and another engraving in the parlor entitled The Sister’s Kiss, was derived from sources fully and hilariously treated by authors of the school of Fielding and Casanova. On thinking back—and there were always doubts and regrets when dealing with hindsight—he might have been much kinder to Marie. But it had not occurred to him at that time that sex had to start somewhere—and besides, he was involved in other problems of adjustment.

  “I think,” his Aunt Edith had once said at supper, “that Marie is spoiling you.” At suppertime the golden oak dining room possessed a spurious, baronial quality. The gas chandelier above the table was lighted at suppertime by a long instrument that both held a lighted wax taper and turned on the gas. The gaslight was dim and cold against the imitation Cordova leather wallpaper. The mirrors built into the massive sideboard reflected back the fan-shaped gas flames as though they came from a very long distance. The heavy plush portières that had suffered from use since the Judge’s time absorbed such an enormous portion of the light that the moosehead above the sideboard—the Judge had shot this trophy in his early days in Maine—assumed a weird sort of liveliness. Tom always associated the dining room with coolness in summer and draftiness in winter. No matter how much Marie might heat the blue-and-white Canton plates, they were always as cold as the pressed-glass water pitcher.

  Years later in a comedy he had written, called Give Back the Time, he had attempted to reconstruct that room as a set for the second act, and he was surprised at his capacity for almost total recall. But the set never had the proper atmosphere. The truth was you could not reconstruct the past.

  “How do you mean she’s spoiling me?” he asked.

  His aunt smiled. At supper she always wore one of her handsome evening dresses that Miss Mayhew, the dressmaker, made over each year directly after the spring cleaning, and often her garnet necklace and her garnet brooch, but never the earrings from her mother’s jewelry.

  “I always used to have great difficulty in getting Marie to bake a pie,” she said, “and now she bakes them continually so that you may have a piece of pie when you get home from school.”

  “I’m glad she does,” he said. “She makes fine pies.”

  He could use his age and his preoccupations as an excuse, but he should have known what was coming; and the confrontation was still one of those incidents in life that one struggled to put behind one, with no success at all because they were too close to the mainspring of motivation to be entirely forgotten. He was awakened, and he never knew what time it was, except that the light of the waning moon was coming through the windows of the back spare room that his aunt had given him. What must have awakened him first was some intuition that made him aware before he opened his eyes that he was not alone in the spare room, and he had been absolutely right. There was moonlight enough to see that someone was standing beside his bed and he knew it was Marie even before she spoke. She was a heavy girl and he could recognize her build and posture although he had never seen her in a cotton nightgown.

  “Hey,” he said, “what goes on?”

  He was a long way from Casanova. In fact, he was a long way from any Kinsey report up there in the back spare room.

  “Don’t talk so loud,” Marie said. “Are you crazy?”

  There was no reason not to talk in an ordinary tone, since his Aunt Edith slept in the corner front room of the house with a large number of closed doors between them.

  “Is that so?” he said. “Who says I’m crazy?”

  “Well, don’t talk so crazy, then,” Marie said. “It’s only me, Tommy, and I thought maybe you was lonely, because I was feeling lonely—the moon and all.”

  “Well, it’s a funny time to be lonely,” he said, “right in the middle of the night.”

  “It ain’t so funny, Tommy,” she said, “with the moon and all. I bet you was lonely laying here thinking about girls.”

  She put her hand on his head and rumpled his hair.

  “Hey,” he said, “quit mussing me up.”

  “Say,” she said, “you’re funny. I think you’re funny.”

  “Cut it out,” he said. “What’s there so funny?”

  “You ain’t very polite, Tommy,” she said. “You ain’t even asked me to get into bed with you. That’s no way for a boy to behave.”

  “Listen, Marie,” he said, “stop kidding me. I want to go to sleep.”

  “Ain’t you ever had anything to do with girls?” Marie asked. “Say, I bet you ain’t.”

  Even though she was absolutely right, it was not a time for truth.

  “Oh, you go on, Marie,” he said. “I’ve had a lot to do with girls.”

  “Then don’t you like me, Tommy?” she said. “Come on, I can show you a lot more about girls than those stuck-up high-school kids who don’t know nothing about nothing. It’s time you was getting wise to yourself, dearie.”

  It must have been only at that moment that he realized that he was face to face with the unknown. It was true, he suddenly realized, that time was marching on, and it was time for him to get wise to a lot of things, but he did not want to get wise to them with Marie, and, thinking of it in retrospect, this was her fault, not his. He could never blame himself for repulsing her.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’m wise to everything, Marie. I know all about girls.”

  “Well, say,” Marie said, and she giggled, “I won’t believe that until you show me. Come on and show me, Tommy.”

  He was glad that he had been tactful. He had always been fond of Marie, and she had been the first woman in his life.

  “Well, thanks, Marie,” he said, “but how about some other time? I’ve got a lot of schoolwork tomorrow. Thanks, Marie.”

  There was one thing he had to say for Marie. She was not angry. In fact, she laughed, and not at him exactly; she was only laughing.

  “Well, good night,” she said. “You’re a nice kid, Tom,” and she kissed him and that was all there was, except his glimpse behind the curtain of things. Somehow, although there had been nothing more, that superficial scene had taught him a lot about Marie, and about life, by indirection. He had always had the gift of seeing behind the curtain. He had often wished that there were more women like Marie.

  Sometimes when there was nothing better to do in the night, when he and Rhoda could not sleep, they occasionaly talked in the dark about the town where they had each lived briefly. It was interesting how their points of view would differ. He was the one who could remember people best and who could tell anecdotes, including that one about Marie, and what he had heard about older days and older manners. He was the one who had total recall, though time had mellowed the rough parts of his memory. He wanted to
remember those days and they had been valuable to him, whereas Rhoda had wanted to forget. She had not seen the appeal of the place, but only its limitations. She had never wholly recovered from the fear which she had as a young girl that she might be compelled to stay there forever. She invariably spoke with gratitude of her escape, which she owed entirely to him. She had been restless and impatient with the town, and she had never got on well with his Aunt Edith, but he could never blame Rhoda for this. His Aunt Edith was an acquired habit—and she had never approved of Rhoda. This had not been Rhoda’s fault entirely, because Aunt Edith was instinctively disapproving and she had always blamed Rhoda for the precipitous way in which everything had occurred.

  “I daresay she’s a very sweet girl,” she told him once, “although I know nothing whatsoever of her parents, because, quite frankly, the Brownes are not the sort of people who would be apt to cross my path. I daresay Rhoda is sweet, and I will admit cheerfully that she exhibits towards you an extreme sort of possessive devotion, but try though I may, Thomas, I never can quite allay suspicion that she threw herself at you in a manner which would not have been tolerated in my time. Also I understand what I am speaking of, having once had an admirer myself. The courtship was protracted, nor was it disagreeable because of its long duration. It was many months before he reached the point of having an interview with my father, the Judge—a privilege which I did not think I had the right to deny him after taking into account his attentiveness over such a long period. I admit that when the occasion of the interview was reached time had solved many problems, because I had come to know him so well that I no longer had any ardent desire to become his partner for life. This, I think, is one of the advantages of the protracted courtships which were conventional in my young girlhood. The World War, I admit, has of course changed matters, and the hysteria which surrounded those trying days has projected itself unpleasantly into present manners. I hope you will excuse this digression, Thomas, for I have never approved of reminiscing over affairs of the heart. I only bring up my own experience to explain why I cannot help feeling your courtship with Rhoda was precipitated unduly, as indeed was your father’s of your mother. I can only wish that you had allowed time to be somewhat more the arbiter than either of you did permit, although I have no reason whatsoever to believe that Rhoda is not a sweet girl, and will not become, in time, a better housekeeper and a more experienced mother.” There had been no reason, ever, to expect that Rhoda and Aunt Edith would understand each other.