Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  “I don’t quite follow you on that one,” Dick said. “There’s some connection in the sequence I must have missed.”

  It was a difference in conditioning. Arthur Higgins would have understood, but not Dick Bramhall, and after all, why should he?

  If it had not been for Dick, the best friend he had ever had, as Rhoda had reminded him on several occasions, the royalties from Hero’s Return and the motion-picture money, too, flowing to his bank in a constant stream, would have gone, as Rhoda put it, “down the drain”—a phrase which she had picked up in the big parade. But there was always some return for money or effort, no matter how it might be squandered, in experience and memory. And these might have paid some sort of dividend, and accrued some sort of interest, that would have surprised the Bramhalls and the Hertimes.

  When they got back from that Palm Beach visit, Arthur had given him a room in the office where he could work on Littte Liar and they moved from the Bulwer to a small suite in the Plaza while they were looking for an apartment; and the secret was out now about Rhoda and the baby. Little Liar was what had taken most of his time, and there were problems newer and different from any at Palm Beach: problems of flatterers, of importuning parasites, of friends and enemies. The rewards of literary success were vastly greater, then. Ever afterwards he had always felt deep sympathy for new figures in the American drama. He could wince at adulation, for there was nothing easier and nothing worse than believing you were better than you were. There was nothing more enervatingly consuming than the poison of conceit, and he could still thank his Providence that he had got Little Liar to the condition of an acting script before he had ever become a literary figure. No wonder he was busy; no wonder he had no time to worry about money or about where they were going to live.

  It was Rhoda and Dick Bramhall who fixed the budget and piped the tune. He might have been a fool not to notice. He had never worried greatly why it was that, no matter how busy he and Rhoda were, there was always time to see the Bramhalls. They had always been great friends and, as far as he knew, there had never been any talk; and there had been no reason for any, because Bramhall was not that kind of man. Actors, playwrights, and promoters, and sometimes lawyers, could afford to be—but no good investment banker. But why else had Dick Bramhall been so kind and patient, if he had not been in love with Rhoda? He could see the picture now, and his respect for Dick Bramhall grew as he saw it. If Dick had loved, he had loved from a distance, or he would not now be Chairman of the Board. Then there was Rhoda. Rhoda would not have had it any other way because Rhoda had loved him then, not Bramhall.

  He was already growing used to the mutations of Rhoda’s voice, so that he could quite accurately fit those alterations from the norm with her moods.

  “Darling,” she said, “I know you’re busy, but do you miss me?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I always do.”

  “Oh,” she said, “half the time you’re more in love with that play of yours than you are with me.”

  It was what any wife might say, and he was already experienced enough to feel a twinge of guilt.

  “That isn’t so,” he said. “I forget about it as soon as I see you.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” she said. “You’re in love with that man’s conscience. It makes me nervous when I think that you can think of things like that.”

  “You shouldn’t be,” he said. “That whole idea came to me before I ever saw you.”

  Obviously she was leading up to something or she would not have called him at the Higgins office.

  “Darling,” she said, “I’ve been house hunting, and finally I’ve found a most wonderful apartment.”

  “You mean,” he asked, “you’re settling for one on Beekman Place?”

  “Oh no, dear,” she said, “not with elevators and men with gloves. This is informal and perfectly beautiful, and something that all our friends will feel at home in, even your queer new friends. It has a back yard and we can plant a garden.”

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  “It’s on Lexington Avenue in the Thirties,” she said. “Now please don’t ask questions until I see you. It’s two stories in the dearest old brownstone-and-brick house, and it looks just like something built out of a box of blocks.”

  “Oh no,” he said, “not out of blocks.”

  “Wait until you see it, dear,” she said. “It’s just the way New York ought to look. Dick says so.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Dick Bramhall,” she said. “What other Dick is there?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m on a first-name basis with a lot of Dicks these days.”

  “He’s been awfully sweet,” she said. “When I called him at the bank about this place, he came right around to see it. Marion’s at her Parliamentary Law Club.”

  “What sort of club?” he asked.

  She laughed, not because it was amusing, but because she was impatient. He could already identify the laugh.

  “I know it’s a queer name,” she said. “But anyway, that’s what it is, and they talk about things. You know how Marion likes to talk.”

  “You’re damn well right I do,” he said. “She must be wonderful at the club. Do you think she’s filibustering?”

  She laughed again.

  “Well anyway,” she said, “Dick knows you’re going to be crazy about it, and we’re here at the Plaza now. Dick thinks it would be nice if you came up if you could. He has some figures and things to show you. He says we ought to be on a budget.”

  Then he began to laugh, himself.

  “Yes, I’ll come right over,” he said, “and if it makes you happy, we’ll go right on a budget.”

  The banks, the custodians, the contracts, the lawyers, the agreements, the investment portfolios with their neat blue covers and their rustling pages—and God only knew how the covers had started being blue—he was accustomed to those things now. He had learned to sign docilely where he was told—“not here, Mr. Harrow, but there on the other line that has the red seal on it.” If he could not face figures, he had learned to make a good attempt at facing facts, but it was different then. The lease that Rhoda and Dick presented to him at the Plaza was the first one he had ever signed and the account of his income from the Custody Department was the first of its sort that he had ever seen.

  “Just sit down and look it over, Tom,” Dick said up there in the Plaza. “I’m afraid Rhoda’s tired after all that house hunting. Sit down and read it and then see if you can tell me that you don’t believe that figures talk.”

  When it came to figures, Tom had always implicitly believed everything Dick told him and he had never regretted it. He was new at numbers, but the sound of Dick’s voice gave him a feeling of being able to put a bundle he was so clumsily carrying upon shoulders trained to bear burdens—and after all, that was what trust departments of banks were for. Why blister your thumbs cutting coupons when people like Dick Bramhall could get people to do it for you?

  “A lot of money does seem to be coming in,” he said.

  It was approximately the right thing to have said for Dick would have paid a clever remark no heed.

  “The account is coming on nicely,” Dick said, “and a few acquaintances who know about theatrical properties tell me that the earnings will be the same for a very appreciable length of time. It isn’t so very much money, but it’s new money—and new money is always interesting.”

  “I suppose you mean there are all sorts of things you can do with new money,” Tom said.

  “Tom, I wish you wouldn’t interrupt,” Rhoda said. “Dick’s given this a lot of thought.”

  He felt no resentment. He only felt, as he felt afterward, poignant and humble gratitude for the skill and patience Dick displayed.

  “We are in a position now,” Dick said, “where we can begin to make a tentative budget, and I’ve made a vague sort of breakdown—not on that sheet, the other sheet.”

  “Tom,” Rhoda said, “you’re holding it u
pside-down. Dick, I told you he was hopeless about numbers.”

  He was not annoyed. Rhoda and Dick together never had annoyed him.

  “I’ll be awfully glad to take your combined word for it,” he said. “It will be all right with me if I earn it and you two budget.”

  “You’re missing a good deal,” Dick said. “It’s fun budgeting with Rhoda.”

  It was not intended as a joke. He could not remember that Dick Bramhall had ever cracked a single joke about money.

  “Well, just so long as you don’t carry the budgeting to bundling, it will be all right with me,” he said.

  A blush suffused Dick’s Palm Beach tan.

  “Now, Tom,” he said, “you know I didn’t mean it that way.”

  It was time to laugh loud enough to permit Dick to join in the general merriment.

  Somehow those budgets had always followed the same uninspiring pattern.

  “There seems to be a whale of a lot for Miscellaneous, Dick,” he said.

  “I know,” Dick said, “but I think we can afford to be generous, Tom. The insurance comes first and then I’m assuming you’re going to write lots more darn good plays.”

  “Well,” he said, “the goose can keep on trying if you don’t squeeze him.”

  “That’s exactly the point and picture I’m presenting,” he said. “In a few years the hope is that your savings backlog will have reached a point where there won’t be too much squeeze.”

  “But there ought to be some squeeze,” Rhoda said. “Remember what I told you about his being lazy, Dick.”

  “All right,” he said, “just a little squeeze.”

  “Please listen, Tom,” Rhoda said. “Now tell him about the apartment, Dick. It’s a darling place, Tom, and I told the man we’d take it.”

  “You told him we’d take it without my seeing it?” he asked.

  Rhoda had already moved a long way from Niagara Falls.

  “Dick wanted you to see it,” she said, “but I decided we ought to take it before someone else could snap it up. Tom, it’s going to be wonderful—an enormous living room, big enough to dance in—and it’s going to look like you.”

  “I thought you said it looked like a house built out of blocks,” he said. “Do I look like something built out of blocks?”

  “Darling,” she said, “the rent’s ridiculous for two floors in that big house, and our own stairs. Dick, isn’t the rent ridiculous?”

  “The bank only wants to break even,” Dick Bramhall said. “It’s being held for the land—and I was surprised, personally, at the plumbing.”

  “In a nice way, I hope,” Tom said.

  “It’s—er—noisy,” Dick Bramhall said, “but in wonderful condition for one of those old brick-and-brownstones. It was the Rossiter house, and old Mr. Rossiter must have gone all the way on the plumbing.”

  “Who were they,” Tom asked, “the railroad or the steamship Rossiters?”

  He said it as a joke, but Dick weighed the question.

  “The old gentleman, from what I’ve heard, was in railroads mostly,” he said, “but partly in copper.”

  “That explains it,” Tom said, “copper piping.”

  “As a matter of fact, the hot water is all piped in copper,” Dick said.

  “Darling,” Rhoda said, “you’re just going to go crazy over it when you see it.”

  “All right,” he said, “maybe I’d better sign the lease while I’m still sane.”

  “Right there,” Dick Bramhall said, “on the line with the red seal at the end of it.”

  Everyone who lived in New York for an appreciable period of time had developed the impression that the place had been steadily going to the dogs since the first time he saw it, and, in Tom Harrow’s estimation, everyone sharing this conviction was correct. New York was not what it had been when he first remembered it in the days before World War I. It had been almost the New York of O. Henry in those days, but later it had lost its geniality and graciousness. Its taste for spaciousness and food and comfortable living had been dissipated. It had digested too many disparate and desperate people. It had contorted itself too often while struggling with its perpetual growing pains. Its manners, never good, had steadily deteriorated, along with its traffic and rapid transit. The newer, brighter civic efforts, like Rockefeller Center, were more brash than beautiful. The marks of the old graciousness, the occasional residential street of brown-stone houses with their stoops and basement entrances, now filled him only with malaise. Those places were mere faint memories of yesterday; and, when he thought of it, the old house on Lexington Avenue, whose first two floors and back yard he and Rhoda had occupied, had been exactly this. Yes there had been a difference, and he feared he knew what the difference was. It was the gap between youth and age. New York had always been a town of youth, no place for valetudinarians.

  During the Roosevelt era, a rash of histories of Ameriica had been published coping with the economic and social wrongs practiced by capitalists (notably Mr. Jay Gould, who never, in these volumes, seemed to have done right) upon the exploited masses. Not so long ago, while turning over one of these newer interpretations, he had come upon an illustration of a parlor of a well-to-do family in the 1880s. It had immediately reminded him of that strange house on Lexington Avenue. The house had been bought by the bank, along with the other houses on the block, to become in the next few years the site of an apartment building. But the house itself had never given hints of its eventual dissolution. Although its gutters leaked and water made stains on its brownstone façade, it had the complacency of the picture in the history book.

  Its hot-water heating system, doubtless the latest word in comfort when Mr. Rossiter had installed it, was almost a parallel to the heating systems of the Palace of Knossos at Crete, or to the ruined Roman villas on the Palatine. The plumbing, too, was truly surprising; the toilet bowls had floral designs. The parquet floors could not be imitated today, because no carpenter protected by a zealous union would take the pains to lay such floors in New York, where the lifetime of a building seldom exceeds twenty years. Its sliding doors, its walnut finish, were reminiscent of an early Gothic novel.

  “Darling,” Rhoda said, “it’s going to cost us almost nothing, and, do you see what I mean?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I can see exactly what you mean.”

  “And there’s a little man and his family who lives in the basement,” Rhoda said, “who will look out for the furnace and the fireplaces for almost nothing. His name is Balsamo. Dick spoke to him and made the arrangements.”

  “Balsamo?” he said.

  “I think that’s what it was,” she said. “He’s very friendly.”

  “That will help,” he said, “if he’s friendly.”

  “You see,” she said, “this is something that your friends and my friends both will understand.”

  It was the first time that she had mentioned that difference between her friends and his friends. The break had been more intuitive than actual, but she had understood the Hertimes and the Bramhalls better than he.

  “You see,” she said, “it’s both theatrical and practical—and wait till you see upstairs. There’s a huge bedroom for us and a room for two maids and one for Harold.”

  “Who’s Harold?” he asked.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “If it’s a boy, I told you I want to call him Harold.”

  “All right, if he’s a boy,” he said, and she kissed him.

  “Dick says there are auction rooms,” she said, “where you can buy things very cheaply if you wait.”

  “All right,” he said, “I want a four-post bed and a clock to go over there, and I suppose we ought to have a crib or a cradle.”

  “Not a cradle,” she said. “Harold wouldn’t like it. We’re not coming over in the Mayflower.” And she kissed him again.

  “There’ll be lots of things,” she said, “rugs, curtains, all sorts of things. I’ll do most of it, but I want you to like it all.”

&nbs
p; “Why, Rhoda,” he said, “I’m going to love it all.”

  She looked again at the large, high-ceilinged rooms.

  “To think that you and I should end up in a place like this,” she said.

  “Don’t put it that way,” he told her, “this is only a beginning.”

  It was queer to think that they both could be right, with such conflicting statements, because, now he looked back on it, it was a beginning and also the beginning of the end. The same thing doubtless happened in other marriages and would happen in more to come; the worst of it was, that most of mankind (excepting always those who were helped by psychoanalysts, either of the Freudian or the Jungian school) never knew where they were going until they had got there; and when you were there, you could never find a backward turn.

  He was amazed now at the obtuseness that had been around him like a fog in those first years in New York, for it was the one time in his life when he did have everything; but he could remember thinking then that there would be more, lots more, that he and Rhoda were only barely moving toward a broader firm foundation of marital contentment. There would be the child and more plays, better plays. There would be more friends, trips abroad, more times when he and Rhoda could get away together, more ways that he could make her happy. Now he could wonder if he did not have some faint premonition then. Happiness seemed always to have been in the retrospect or in the future, and this might have been true with Rhoda, too.

  “Wait,” she was always saying, “until we get the heavy curtains up.”

  “Wait,” she was always saying, “until we get Harold’s nursery fixed.”

  “Wait,” she was always saying, “until we have our first big party and use the Sheffield candelabra, and wait until we get the right sort of worktable for your room upstairs. Everything is going to be marvelous when everything is done.”

  It was going to be, and of course they had been happiest while they were waiting.

  If the living room in the apartment did not look like the picture in that American history book, it always had the dignity that belonged to its generation. There was a colored maid named Myra, a very good cook-waitress who came by the day from Harlem, and also there was a cleaning woman for two days a week; and then, of course, when Hal arrived, there was a baby’s nurse and someone else. He could not recall their names and faces any longer, but Rhoda had learned to run a household as readily as she had learned everything else, and they always were able to save money. He wished now that he had been more interested in these details, but he could only remember, now, his contentment whenever he reached Lexington Avenue and his delight at having Rhoda there to meet him, while all the little things he should have treasured had slipped through the meshes of his memory.