Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  Tom laughed. His uncle, as Tom had heard elder people say in his childhood, possessed the Harrow charm, and Tom knew that he possessed it, too.

  “I won’t guess to what you are referring,” he said, “and don’t tell me because I want to be surprised, but I hope you’re feeling all right, Uncle George.”

  “Oh, yes,” his uncle said, “it’s only fatigue, the doctor says, and we’ve been busy in the office lately. This rising market is worrying when the responsibility of clients rests on your shoulders. And Tom, you’re one of my favorite clients, and my dear nephew.”

  Uncle George had personal appeal, but after all, what was appeal? Something that concealed inadequacy, and it was startling to think perhaps that was why he himself had it. He was at a crossing of the ways that day with a guilty feeling that his problems should have worried him more.

  “It’s awfully kind of you to ask me up here to lunch, Uncle George,” he said, “and to give me so much of your time. And you’ve always been very kind to me.”

  He was glad that his uncle had looked pleased and had slapped him on the shoulder.

  “Tom,” he said, “you’ve always been my favorite nephew.”

  Tom laughed again.

  “I’ve got to be,” he said, “as long as I’m the only one.”

  “Even if you weren’t,” his Uncle George said, “you would be. Patrick, two glasses of my medicine. This is my brother’s, Mr. Roger Harrow’s, son. You remember Mr. Roger, don’t you, Patrick?”

  “God bless me, yes,” the old barkeeper said. “A fine gentleman, Mr. Roger.”

  There was a silence as they both listened to the echoes of that obituary, and then his uncle raised his glass.

  “Tom,” he said, “your good health.”

  “And yours, sir,” Tom said, and he thought again that Uncle George’s color was bad.

  “Patrick,” his uncle said, “if you have the luncheon card, we might order. Would you like clams, Tom? Clams are always in season. And then for me, eggs Benedict, Patrick, and please get the order up to the dining room right away. You see, the doctor has another suggestion, Tom. I have a nap upstairs here just after lunch.”

  “I hope you’re feeling all right, sir,” Tom Harrow said again.

  “Oh, yes,” his Uncle George said, “it’s merely a matter of hypertension, which everyone must face given time, Tom, given time.”

  “I hope Alvin got through his year at law school all right,” Tom said.

  “Yes,” his uncle said, “not brilliantly, but Alvin hasn’t your quickness, Tom.”

  Then as Patrick left the bar to give his order to the dining room, his uncle’s voice changed.

  “I suppose you’re still in that queer office, Tom,” he said. “You know I’ve always disapproved of this theatre business. I wouldn’t mind so much if there weren’t a streak of instability in the family, and there’s nothing stable about this theatre business.”

  “Well, I had to do something,” Tom said. “The money’s running out.”

  His uncle nodded and took a delicate sip from his glass of bonded rye whiskey.

  “I don’t mean for a moment that I don’t respect your spirit of initiative and independence, but not in a theatrical agency. I don’t mean to say I’m narrow-minded about a theatrical agency, but there’s no future. You should have come to me, three years ago, instead of going to work there. You should be working at the Guaranty or the Chase, or some investment house downtown. It isn’t stable, Tom.”

  Uncle George always spoke about stability, but Tom was feeling fine.

  “You see, Tom,” he said, “there’s a factor that most young fellows your age don’t perceive. Your father never did, and I don’t suppose I did very clearly once myself. A young fellow thinks there’s plenty of time for everything because, with his lack of experience with time, he thinks that it moves slowly. This isn’t so. It moves just as fast for you as it does for an old man like me. You may not know it, but you’re in what are called the critical years, Tom, the years when you get your feet on the road which will lead you to success or failure. I suppose we all start wanting to be firemen or policemen, and without meaning to be personal, your summer theatre experience and then this theatrical agency is somewhat like that.”

  “Yes,” Tom said, “I suppose it is.” He was already able to perceive that work in any part of the theatre depended on a public whose probable reactions it was impossible to gauge, and you could measure thousands of failures against one success. This knowledge made him very reluctant to tell his uncle what had happened, but this was the time to tell him, before Patrick was back behind the bar. Tom was surprised that his uncle did not react to the news in the way he had believed he would.

  “Well,” he said, “so they gave you a thousand dollars? Well, I think that’s very enterprising of you, Tom. I daresay they won’t do anything about the play, but that’s their problem. The main thing is that you have severed this agency connection and that is a step in the right direction. I tell you what I am going to do. I’m going to give you a letter to Matt Harris over at the Chase. The main thing is that you’ve got this theatre business out of your system and you’ve made a thousand dollars doing it. That’s wonderful, Tom, and I think this calls for another small libation.”

  He was glad to have another and he could see his uncle’s point, although it was exactly as though each of them addressed the other in a different language; and it was seldom worthwhile arguing about anything because arguments seldom changed a point of view.

  “Another thing, Tom,” Uncle George said, “Louise tells us that she hasn’t seen you around anywhere lately, and that disturbs me a little. You’ve got to keep up with the right people, Tom.”

  “It’s a little tough to do that and work at the same time, Uncle George,” he said.

  “I know, I know,” his uncle answered, “I’ve found it so myself, long dinners and that sort of thing, and then the office in the morning. But, Tom, when you have a chance to see people, you ought to see them, and Louise and Alvin both say that lots of nice girls are trying to get hold of you all the time.”

  “That’s so,” Tom said, “they chase me all around town, Uncle George.”

  His uncle smiled and shook his head.

  “Seriously, Tom,” he said, “I wish you’d play around more with your own crowd.”

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll try to, Uncle George.”

  “That’s right,” his uncle said. “We’ve got to keep our feet on the ground, Tom.”

  “I agree, sir,” Tom said. “Yes, I’ll really try.”

  He knew by his uncle’s expression that the words of advice were over and that they would discuss general topics during lunch, but Patrick was still not back and there was time for a summing-up.

  “You see, Tom,” his uncle said, “I wouldn’t worry about you if I weren’t fond of you. In case you haven’t been told, you’re very brilliant and very attractive, but don’t let this make you lazy. Tom, if Louise hasn’t seen you around, does that mean you’ve been seeing a lot of just one person?”

  Tom felt his face grow warm and he realized that Louise and her mother had been talking.

  “Well, perhaps,” he said, “in a rather minor way. Well, yes, I’ve been seeing a good deal of Betty Howland lately.”

  Now that the name was out, he was amused by his uncle’s respectful expression.

  “Well, you know how to pick them, as they say,” his uncle said.

  “Well, I don’t know,” he answered, “but I will say she has your point of view, Uncle George. She wants to see me get ahead.”

  He stopped because Patrick was back and their luncheon was ready in the dining room. It did not occur to him then that it would be the last luncheon he would ever have with his Uncle George, or that after five that afternoon he would not see Betty Howland again for a long, long time.

  Ever since high school, there had always been some girl on his mind, and, now that it was too late to profit by the knowledge, he c
ould face the truth that he had never been made for celibacy. He must have always needed what the psychiatrists now called a “love object,” and this was what Betty Howland had been once—a symbol in a relationship formula—ever since he had first danced with her at a coming-out party at the Hotel St. Regis. She was blond, tall and beautiful, and she was almost everything anyone could desire in a love object, always exquisite, with wealthy but kind and hospitable parents, and with an impression of untouchable aloofness with its own appeal because the impression was incorrect. It was also difficult to tell her exact degree of seriousness when she said she loved him, and it was fashionable then to talk lightly and philosophically about love.

  “Tommy, dear,” she said once, “do let’s try to get it clear between us that love is a variable.”

  It had been late in the evening and they had been sitting together on a sofa in the parlor of the Howlands’ Fifth Avenue apartment.

  “Right at the moment,” he said, “it seems pretty constant to me.”

  “Silly,” Betty said, “it’s a constant and at the same time it’s a variable. For example, you’re all over powder and lipstick, but that’s not a constant condition.”

  “I’d like to make it that way,” he said.

  “Tommy, dear, that’s sweet of you,” she said, “but I’m afraid neither of us is very constant, and please don’t try to prove anything right now, physically I mean, because I’m turning into a variable.”

  “I thought you flunked college mathematics,” he said. “Where did you pick up that word ‘variable’?”

  “Seriously, Tommy, and please let’s be serious for a minute. Seriously, I don’t know how much I love you, because it shifts around.”

  She sighed and she was as beautiful when she was serious as when she was merry. Her blue eyes grew darker and her lips formed themselves into tragic little curves.

  “Oh, Tommy,” she said, “it discourages me because basically most of the time I love you.”

  “Don’t be discouraged,” he said, “because I know I love you, Betty.” And he was almost positive he loved her. There was still a tragic sadness in the memory of their unsureness. It would have taken so little to have tipped the scales, but things either worked or they didn’t, and there was no way to change the destiny, no matter how one tried.

  “Sometimes when I love you most,” she said, “an awful thing happens. Sometimes it doesn’t seem real. It seems futile.”

  “How do you mean, futile?” he asked.

  “Oh, I can’t explain it,” she said, “except that sometimes it seems everything with you and me wasn’t ever meant to happen. Sometimes I get to thinking we’re like the Maeterlinck people in the land of the unborn babies, and then I know it can’t be real or serious.”

  “Why, that isn’t so,” he told her. “What you say makes it serious.”

  “Oh, Tommy, no,” she said. “You know you seriously don’t want to make money so that we could be married, and you said yourself you wouldn’t live on an allowance from Father.”

  He was sorry that he could feel the truth in what she said. He could hear a voice inside him saying that it wasn’t meant to be, but whenever the voice spoke, he wanted it to be.

  “Believe me, Betty,” he said, “I’m serious. What am I doing every night and week ends? I’m working on this play.”

  “I know, darling,” she said, “and you’re wonderful, but if you loved me, you’d go to work in Father’s office, the way he asked you.”

  “It might get to Broadway,” he said. “I might be good, you know.”

  “Oh, Tommy,” she said, “let’s not be dismal any more.”

  Betty was an expensive girl, which may have been what she was trying to say when she had spoken elliptically about unborn babies in Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird. She married Harvey Griscombe, who later was master of a hunt in New Jersey, and Tom had sent her a George the Second coffeepot just to show her that he could, but he did not see her until a number of years later, when they met at the Stork Club.

  “I meant to write you about the play,” she said, “but I couldn’t exactly get it down in words. I never dreamed it would come out the way it did. Maybe it’s my fault that we’re unborn babies, dear.”

  But that afternoon, after his luncheon with Uncle George, he had no idea of such an ending. It was pleasant, walking up Fifth Avenue just on the edge of a New York summer, and he thought of his Aunt Edith whom he had not seen for a long while. It would be possible to see her tomorrow if he wanted. In fact, anything was possible.

  The Howlands’ apartment faced the Central Park Reservoir where a light breeze was rippling the water. Axel, the Howlands’ Swedish butler, let him in and his manners were an improvement over those of the doorman at the Carleton Club.

  “Yes, Mr. Harrow,” he said. “Miss Elizabeth has asked you to wait for her in the library.”

  He had never had the slightest intention until that moment of proposing to Betty Howland, yet suddenly he knew that he was going to do so, if only to show her that he was occasionally serious. The library, done in heavy, fumed oak in a style that was popular during the World War I era, had a Gothic quality that had never previously impressed him. The sets of books in varicolored leathers, all oiled and dusted, showing no mark of wear, blended beautifully with the gold velveteen curtains and with the masculine leather upholstered furniture. Neat piles of cloth material were heaped high on two straight-backed Spanish chairs, covers that would go over the furniture when the Howlands moved to Long Island. They were an orderly harbinger of change, but they disturbed him as he stood there waiting. He must have realized before Betty Howland entered the library that the pulse of his life was beating a new measure, and that balances were changing.

  Yet when he saw her, he wanted her. One of the tragedies in his life had always been that he had wanted too many different things simultaneously. He had wanted to go to prize fights and to hear the handlers talking in the winner’s dressing room. He had wanted to go to speakeasies, and, at the same time, he had wanted to play bridge at his club and to go to the best restaurants, and to bet on the races and to meet the prettiest girls. What would have happened if he had not been possessed of the restiveness of which Rhoda had always complained?

  “Darling,” Betty said, “kiss me. I was so surprised when you called up after lunch. Tom, has anything dreadful happened?”

  He had never proposed to a girl before, not that he had not wanted to, but he had never before been in a position of having anything to offer. It was amusing to recall how many similar scenes he had later dealt with professionally. There were always proposals and avowals somewhere and he had always felt artistically that they should be simple, just as the result of any chain of circumstances possessed its own simplicity.

  “Yes, something’s happened,” he said, “but I hope you won’t think it’s bad. I even hope you’re going to like it.”

  “Why, Tom,” she said, “you look so queer. What happened?”

  “For one thing, I love you,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, “I know. We’ve been all over that before.”

  “Well,” he said, “another thing. I want to ask you if you want to marry me, not hypothetically, but seriously.”

  He could sympathize with people’s not wanting to face up to things because he had observed the same reluctance in himself, but he had seldom been so conscious of evasion as when he saw Betty’s face.

  “But why at five in the afternoon?” she said.

  There was no trick to writing comedy if you had lived through enough of it.

  “Well, dear,” he said, “it’s got to be at some time or other.”

  “Oh, Tommy,” she said. “Why didn’t you say it last night in a more informal way and when there would have been more of a background for fantasy? Darling, unfantastically—what could we get married on, for instance? You shouldn’t bring these things up in the afternoon, on daylight saving time.”

  She was talking rapidly and he knew that she
was worried about a lot of things and there was something highly poignant in her worry.

  “They’ve taken my play,” he said. “I didn’t know it until this morning.”

  “Oh, sweet,” she said, “how wonderful!” And she threw her arms around him. “Why didn’t you tell me in the first place, instead of being so formal and stuffy and proposing and everything? Oh, sweet, now you won’t have to worry about it any more.”

  “That’s true for the moment,” he said. “They’re not going to try it until autumn.”

  “Tommy,” she said, “it’s simply wonderful, but what are you going to do now it’s finished?”

  “I guess I’ll start another,” he said. “I’ve got a few ideas.”

  “Another?” she said. “You mean you’re going to keep doing them? You mean you’re not going to do anything else?”

  “Well,” he said, “I’ve got a few ideas.”

  “Well, then,” she said, “let’s stop being serious before sundown, and I’m going to ring for Axel to get us some Scotch. Oh, darling, I never dreamed I’d love anyone who wrote a play, even variably.”

  “Betty,” he said, “that isn’t kind. I’m not going to write plays variably.”

  “Tommy,” she said, “dear Tommy. I’m constant in certain ways, but Tommy, please, please let’s not talk about it now.”

  He often wondered if she realized that they would never discuss the subject again. He was never entirely sure, and besides, most women were always believing that there would be another day. In the end, all that was ever left to a vanished episode was a certain amount of retrospection, and retrospection was always dangerous to handle. He could not recall being angry or even being surprised, which must have proved that his love, like hers, was a variable. There was only one thing very definite that remained from the experience. Any girl, in making up her mind, had to view a man from every angle that she could and he was a bad financial risk. It was her assumed knowledge of him and her casualness that hurt him most, and she should have known that things could not go on the way they had. It was time to be leaving town for awhile, but he did not tell her he was leaving. On the contrary, he had stayed for about an hour just as though nothing had occurred, and he had kissed her good-by and told her that he loved her, which was still true in some academic sense. Yet a resolution was forming in him which would affect some later aspects of his life. He would never put himself in a position to be treated casually again.