Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  “Only smiling,” he said. “There are smiles that make me happy. I never thought you’d propose to me in quite this way. All right, I’ll take a chance if you will.”

  “All right,” she said. “You’d better tell Mother and Pa tonight, even if we have to wake them up, and we’ll go to Niagara Falls.”

  “Niagara Falls?” he repeated. “Why Niagara Falls?”

  “Because it’s where people go to get used to each other.”

  “Not necessarily,” he said.

  “Well, anyway,” she told him, “I’ve always dreamed of going to Niagara Falls. Is it expensive at Niagara Falls?”

  He never had occasion to go to Niagara Falls again, nor had he afterwards any desire because he knew that he would suffer disappointment if anything had changed, and doubtless everything had, including the Falls themselves. He did not care to be introduced to the new Niagara Falls. He wanted the old Niagara of September 1928, where he and Rhoda spent those fleeting days, after their single night at the Wellington Manor House—before it became necessary to go back to New York in order to sit in the Higgins office listening to people reading parts for Hero’s Return. The Falls of that vintage had been packed long ago among the flatcars of the great caravan of change, and now were locked forever in time’s warehouse.

  Was the Romanesque red brick depot still standing, he wondered, with its colored porters grown kindly from consistent encounters with happy young couples who had all of life ahead of them and who seldom cared about the cost of things? Were the souvenir shops still carrying on, that had once made Rhoda gasp with wonder at their machine-made moccasins and tomahawks? He still could not understand why Rhoda had immediately wanted him to purchase a pair of moccasins with a picture of the Falls upon them, American side. And what about the Canadian side, that swift transition from American to foreign soil, with customs and immigration inspectors?

  “Do you know what I think?” Rhoda had said. “I don’t believe that customs man thought we are married.”

  “He was only looking for liquor,” he told her, “not making a moral research.”

  “Well, it’s lucky he wasn’t making an immoral research,” Rhoda said, “or he might have found the pint.”

  “No, he wouldn’t have, he said. “American officials seldom molest American women.”

  “There might have been a matron,” she said. “They have them in the movies.”

  “Not for a pint of Scotch,” he said. “Only to break up rings of diamond smugglers.”

  “Will you get me some diamonds that I can smuggle sometime?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “of course. It wouldn’t look right if I didn’t.”

  “That’s one nice thing about being married,” she said. “All sorts of things all at once look right,” and she laughed. “All the things I’ve always been told a nice girl shouldn’t do suddenly look right—I mean, as long as people know we’re married—as long as I have a wedding ring. It’s a whole new sort of life.”

  “Maybe anyone’s life is,” he said, “when he’s suffering from euphoria.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t use long words,” she said, “and you mustn’t use up all your father’s money, and maybe we ought not to keep walking across that bridge so you can have a drink.”

  “It’s like marriage,” he said. “It’s all right to drink in Canada.”

  Was Goat Island still there, with the swirling eddies of water and the conclusive roar of the Falls behind it? He had heard of second honeymoons, but he would never have dreamed of returning there for such a purpose. He never thought as he stood by Rhoda, watching in a stupefied way that constant swirl of water, that they were both about to go over the falls of change.

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep tipping the headwaiter a dollar,” Rhoda said, “every time we have dinner in the main dining room. There’s no use our acting richer than we are.”

  Could you still hear the Falls at night from the third-floor suite of the Iroquois—which he had insisted on taking because he had never previously occupied a hotel suite—always provided the Iroquois House still existed? Doubtless the sound of the Falls was there, but it would be drumming a different tune from the one he and Rhoda had heard in the middle of the night.

  “It makes me feel as though I had never paid attention to anything before,” she told him once, “and the noise is trying to tell us something, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said, “it’s trying.”

  “But we don’t know what.” She shivered when she said it. “I hate not knowing. I always hate to guess.”

  “Everything’s trying to tell you something, and no one ever quite understands what,” he said. “That’s why no one can ever be sure of anything.”

  “Well, I’m sure of one thing,” she said. “I’m happy right now. I never dreamed I could be so happy.”

  “Well,” he said, “that’s something, and the same goes with me, in case you want to know.”

  “You’re happy in a different way,” she said. “You can’t be as happy as I am because everything isn’t so new.”

  “You’re new,” he said. “You always will be.”

  He had never made a truer remark. Every time he had ever seen her, there had never been the repetitions that threw most human relationships into lines of boredom. There was always something different with her in the same way that the month of May was different every year, in spite of how well you thought you knew it.

  “There’s another thing I’m sure of,” he said. “I love you. Do you love me? You’re like a water nymph,” he said. “I keep thinking if I chase you, you may turn into a tree.”

  “You do think of the dumbest things,” she said, “and don’t you worry, I’m not going to turn into a tree or anything and I don’t think water nymphs ever do. I’m going to be right around where you can take care of me. Of course I love you. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “All right,” he said, “why should you?”

  “Don’t be dumb,” she said. “Look at yourself in the mirror. Cinderella was grateful to the Prince when he chased after her with a slipper, and you’re a prince—in a nice way. I mean. There’s only one thing I worry about. I don’t want to go back to mice and pumpkins. Please don’t do something so that I have to go back. Please don’t let the clock strike twelve.”

  “All right, I won’t,” he said.

  “Maybe you can’t stop it,” she said. “Maybe you won’t be able to think up ideas all the time. Please keep trying to think up good ideas.”

  “How do you know they’re good when you say you can’t understand them?” he asked her.

  “When I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, “I know you’re being a genius. Whenever I get to understand what you’re saying without thinking it over twice, it shows you’re losing your grip.”

  “Well,” he said, “I love you. There’s nothing subtle about that, is there?”

  “Of course there is,” she said. “I don’t see how I was lucky enough to find you. Gosh, I’m a lucky girl.”

  “At the moment,” he said.

  “Don’t start saying things like that,” she said. “It’s got to be a permanent moment.”

  “It sounded permanent when I said those things in church, and I meant them, Rhoda.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, “you’ve got me and I’ve got you, and now what? You never seem to want to keep your mind on the now what.”

  “But I’ve told you, I don’t know what,” he said, “so I can’t put my mind on it.”

  “I don’t mean the big what,” she said, “I mean the little whats. What are we going to do when we get to New York? That’s what I mean. Where are we going to live?”

  “In a hotel, I guess,” he said, “some low-priced one.”

  “Just a cheap hotel,” she said, “and not go apartment hunting, the way they do in books? I want an apartment with a very soft, gray carpet in the bedroom and a chaise longue, and a dressing table with flounces.”

  “But
we don’t know what kind of apartment,” he said, “or what I can afford. I won’t know until we see what happens to the play.”

  She was silent and their thought were lost in the roar of Niagara.

  “All right,” she said, “maybe I was crazy to marry you, but I still think I was right.”

  “That’s nice to know,” he said.

  “Oh, darling, I didn’t mean it in that way at all,” she said. “Being right has nothing to do with loving someone, and I fell in love with you right away, and being in love and common sense don’t mix; but a girl has to make them go together. It’s difficult being a girl, darling. I’ve told you and I’ve told you, she has to take a chance on something, and she doesn’t have too many chances.”

  “All right, you put your bet down,” he said.

  “I know the way it must sound to you,” she said, “but please don’t forget I’m in love with you.”

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll hold that thought.”

  “Darling, I do really love you, but I’ll tell you one thing, I won’t have a baby in a hotel.”

  “People don’t as a rule,” he said, “they usually have them in hospitals.”

  “Don’t laugh,” she said, “please, because I’d like to have a baby, and it could happen, couldn’t it?”

  “It might very well,” he said. “I shouldn’t want to bet on its not.”

  “Well, then, I know what I’ll do,” she said. “When we get to New York, I’ll start looking at all the very best apartments, duplexes with swimming pools and things like that, just in case we might be able to afford one.”

  “All right,” he said, “it wouldn’t hurt to look.”

  The time had not yet arrived when Arthur Higgins was customarily called old-fashioned by a younger Broadway generation, and he doubtless did end by being overcareful and conventional; but up to his last days, when he had attempted to the utmost of his ability to turn Emily into an actress, Tom had still looked on Arthur Higgins as the best producer he had ever known. Customarily, authors quarreled with producers, accusing them of rapaciousness and of cutting corners, and at the best of times there were misunderstandings over contracts, but Tom had seldom been through such difficulties with Arthur Higgins. After all, producers had to come from somewhere; they had to have capital or to know where to find it. Some producers had risen from the ranks of vaudeville managers; others had started as stock promoters. Others had been actors who had saved their earnings; others had started as stage-struck playboys. They had only one thing in common—what they liked to call “love of the theatre.” You could take your pick of managers; some of them were stupid with a gambler’s flair for hits; some were ruthless; a lot were maladjusted; and most, like actors, were obliged to be egocentric.

  Arthur Higgins, as far as Tom Harrow could remember, fell into none of these categories. It was true that he liked to hear the sound of his own voice and in later years he was garrulous, but he always had discerning taste, intelligence, a good education, and impeccable manners. He was a graduate of the Harvard Law School, and had been a junior partner in a large downtown firm, and had been commissioned a major in World War I. He had become interested in the theatre when he had married an English actress named Helen Adair, who had come to New York with a Shakespeare company; but he had not fallen in love with Miss Adair in a theatrical way. He had met her at a house party on Long Island, and had not discovered for several weeks that she was on the stage, and when he did, as he himself had said, he had never held it against her. Helen was one of the few actresses he had ever known who did not try to act, and he would sometimes add over the champagne at dinner, all Helen needed was to be herself. She made a convincing Ophelia without making the slightest effort to go crazy, and no one had a better speaking voice or a better judgment for a play script.

  After marrying Helen Adair, his interest in the theatre had grown, but he was comfortably established in the law. He would doubtless have ended as a senior law partner if he had not acquired a client who was a playwright, Burton Millis, who had just finished The Last Long Walk, and had been unable to interest anyone in it. As Arthur had said once, himself, he had not cared much for the Millis play, which began with a meeting of a millionaire’s son with a taxi driver on the curb outside a nightclub. Helen had seen the lure of its improbabilities, and Arthur’s aunt, who had died at just that time, had left him a considerable legacy. It was Helen who got him interested in The Last Long Walk, and there must have always been another side to Arthur Higgins which he had never known existed until his wife brought it out.

  “It was,” as Helen Adair used to say at the Higgins Sunday-night suppers, “right there in Arthur all the time, and he never knew it—his love of the theatre.”

  When Tom called at the Higgins office one afternoon around the first of September, Arthur Higgins was easily one of the leading producers in New York, although there was a rumor that Mrs. Higgins made the decisions—but there were always such rumors. He had visited the outer office often in the past as an employee of the Sullivan agency, but this was different. The people seated in the waiting room, all trying to look happy and all assuming a nervous watchfulness only apparent in people applying for a theatre job, were waiting to try out for the play he had written; and the knowledge gave him a feeling of responsibility more than elation. He saw them wondering who he was, examining his clothes and his walk, and before he was halfway across the waiting room he knew they had already recognized that he was not a competitor. You were an actor or you weren’t, but neither did they know he was the author. This was the only time he had ever been able to wear the cloak of anonymity. The curious thing about the recollection was that he was piqued by the waiting room’s lack of recognition when he should have been grateful.

  When the girl at the reception desk looked up, he saw that her eyes were coldly gray and her face and figure were coolly beautiful. She had been cast exactly for the part a girl must play at that reception desk, and she did not know who he was, either, because she was a new reception girl.

  “I have an appointment with Mr. Higgins at three o’clock,” he said.

  She looked at him studiously, as she had to when anyone tried to see Mr. Higgins.

  “Oh,” she said, “then you must be Mr. Harrow. Do you know your way to Mr. Higgins’s office?”

  “I’m afraid not,” he answered.

  “I’ll show you,” she said. “I’m rather new here myself.”

  She was trimly, freshly beautiful, but his interest was entirely impersonal. There had seldom been so much on his mind. It was only a great many years later that he could occasionally wonder what might have happened if he had not been married to Rhoda and in love with Rhoda—probably nothing, and any such afterthought was immature.

  “I read a copy of Hero’s Return yesterday,” she said. Her voice had changed now that she had left the waiting room. “I thought it was swell, Mr. Harrow, not that everybody hasn’t told you that.”

  “Why, thanks,” he said, “too many people can’t tell me that.”

  “I never thought you’d be so young,” she said. “You look as young as photographs of Scott Fitzgerald.”

  “Now you mention it,” he said, “I’ve seldom felt as juvenile as I do this afternoon. Is this the maestro’s office?”

  “Yes,” she said, “it’s Mr. Higgins’s office.”

  Her voice was formal again; she was turning the bronze knob of a dark oak door. That was the first time he had seen Nancy Mulford, which only went to show that it was futile to make an intelligent guess about futures. He never guessed that he would end by being more dependent on Nancy Mulford than on any woman he had ever known. He knew only years later that another preview of his life had been shown him, if he had had the sense or the interest to perceive its outlines.

  “I’ll keep your hat if you’d like,” she said.

  It was thoughtful of her and it reminded him that he was entering a great man’s presence.

  “Thanks,” he said, “and
my gloves.”

  The gray gloves he was holding even in September had been partly a Broadway affectation and partly an imitation of his Uncle George.

  “Mr. Higgins,” Nancy Mulford said, “this is Mr. Harrow.”

  The office was Jacobean. Its heavy tables, tapestry-backed chairs, dark oak woodwork and some tapestries—generally bad ones depicting the rape of Europa or some less dramatic scene in ancient mythology—were considered appropriate then for an office in which the dramatic arts were discussed. If the setting ceased to impress him in later years, even to the point of appearing to him like a contrived arrogance, he was impressed that afternoon; and in memory he could never evade the feeling that he had been face to face with greatness. Arthur Higgins behind his dark oak table was always impressive, with his thin, patrician head, lighted by a diamond-leaded window to his left; and Miss Helen Adair—she had an actress’s reluctance to adopt her husband’s name—seated at one end of the table, gracious, beautiful in a Shakespearean satin gown, added to the impressiveness. As he crossed the length of the long room to clasp Arthur Higgins’s genially extended hand, he could imagine he was a squire in a castle about to pay his devoir to the lord and the chatelaine.

  “Well, my boy,” Arthur Higgins said, “well met, if I may use part of a great quotation. Tom, I don’t believe you’ve met my wife, who is especially here for this happy occasion.”

  “How do you do, sir,” he said. “It’s a great pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Higgins.”

  “Indeed yes,” she said. “Dear boy, call me Miss Adair and later Helen, when we come to know and love each other as I’m sure we shall.”

  “Indeed yes, Miss Adair,” he said. He had not meant to say “indeed yes” but it was always a temptation to deal in resounding phrases in the Higgins office.

  “The play, …” Miss Adair said. “I adored every word of it, and all its crisp perfection; and so did my lord and master, didn’t you, Arthur?”

  Arthur Higgins gazed blandly through the Jacobean twilight, and then there was a faint flicker on his face, but not a smile.