“Come and kiss Mummy, dear,” she used to say, “before Daddy gets you drunk on his Martini.”
Harold always did well in that interlude while his nurse stood in the doorway. He ran into the parlor and rolled over on the rug, limbering himself like a member of a college football team. He could shake hands very nicely with Rhoda’s friends and answer questions nicely and then he could change right over and adapt himself to the people from a less settled but possibly merrier world.
Hal understood Duneen, for instance, who always loved to come around, not out of gratitude, but because she loved the family, until she and Rhoda had some sort of quarrel. Harold did not mind when Duneen knelt on the floor and held out her arms and said in her very best voice, “Come here and kissums auntie, sweetums.”
He could remember the disturbed wrinkle on Rhoda’s forehead when Duneen got off that one; he should have written her a better speech and rehearsed her in it, just as he had rehearsed Rhoda at the tea table. Harold, on the other hand, had needed no rehearsing whatsoever. Harold had enjoyed being kissed by Duneen, and after all, why not? He had even enjoyed playing bear with Walter Price and listening to Mort Sullivan recite A. A. Milne. Harold was more of a trouper than Rhoda had ever been, and he was an extrovert right from the beginning.
“Do you think he loves me too much?” Rhoda asked once. “I don’t want to get too emotionally involved with him to the exclusion of you, darling.”
Rhoda should never have read so many books on child psychology; they had not been necessary when it came to Hal, but she never had been a fool about Hal, because she had lots of other things to worry about.
Rhoda had also begun to read books on love and marriage when they had everything, almost before the everything was imperceptibly growing less. The frank discussion of the marital state, of sexual difficulties and of day-to-day adjustments to male and female philosophies was fashionable when they were on Lexington Avenue and he could only hope that the fad had now become so tiresome that it was running itself into the ground. However, perhaps this increasing bibliography did fill a long-felt need, since obviously the institution of marriage was not working as well as it had in a previous generation, or in times when women understood less about their manifest destiny than they did at present. At any rate, it now seemed to Tom that all through his life women—that is, good women—took themselves more seriously each year and studied more and more carefully how to integrate themselves and their husbands and children into the Home. Naturally those books were a great help, being all clearly if dully written largely by disciples of what would now be called the do-it-yourself school. Out of curiosity, and also to please Rhoda, he, too, had dipped into enough sections of this literature to realize that there were authorities in the medical and university worlds who could tell you exactly what to do in bed and out of bed, how to be patient, how to overcome frigidity, how to combat impotence, and, in fact, how to understand that sex could be fun as well as beautiful. After his first encounter with this five-foot between-the-sheets library, he had not enjoyed it, and he could remember that once he had taken the matter up with Rhoda.
“Rhoda,” he said, “if it’s all the same to you, couldn’t you keep that book on married love off the bedside table, or put it in plain paper wrappers so whoever makes the bed doesn’t have to see it?”
“That’s an awfully self-conscious remark,” Rhoda said. “You take such a liberal view about most things, but you’re puritanical about sex.”
“That isn’t fair,” he said. “My position is only that I don’t need a psychologist from the University of Mexico Medical School to tell me. Maybe I know as much about sex as he does.”
“That’s awfully conceited of you,” she said. “You haven’t made a study of it like the man who wrote this book.”
“All right,” he said, “do you want me to make a study of it?”
“No,” she said, “don’t be ridiculous, but it wouldn’t do you any harm to read it so we can talk about it together.”
“Rhoda,” he said, “there are a lot of other things I’d rather talk to you about when we go to bed besides that book.”
“I don’t know why you should be so sensitive,” she said. “Men are so ridiculous in some ways, especially American men, as it says in the book. Don’t you want to be a good lover?”
“Now wait a minute,” he said. “Now that we’re getting personal, books on how to do it aside, do you have a good time in bed with me, or don’t you?”
“I think that’s a vulgar way to put it,” she said.
“Well, what about Chapter Three in the professor’s book?” he said. “That’s personal enough, isn’t it, and who’s being a puritan now?”
“Darling,” she said, “he’s personal, but I wouldn’t say he’s vulgar.”
“And I’m not vulgar, either,” he said. “I’m asking a straight question. Now give me a straight answer, do you or don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” she said. “But there may be more to it than we know about. Haven’t you any curiosity? Don’t you want to know?”
“How can there be any more to it?” he said. “And it’s only between you and me, and we don’t need the professor.”
“Darling,” she said, “it’s queer when you’re so sophisticated in some ways, that you’re so narrow-minded and almost prudish in others.”
“I wouldn’t say I was prudish,” he said. “I just don’t need the professor. And you don’t, either; or, if you do, read D. H. Lawrence, or Burton’s Arabian Nights.”
“Darling,” she said, “they aren’t scientific and besides, they don’t relate it to other parts of marriage.”
“How about just letting it go,” he said, “and letting it relate itself?”
“Darling,” she said, “you may not know it, but that’s the basic trouble with most American marriages. Listen, let me read you this one sentence in Chapter Two.”
“Don’t,” he said. “For God’s sake, don’t.”
“Just this one sentence,” Rhoda said. “‘The indifference of the married couple or their ignorance of the integration of the marital sex relationship with the daily round of nonsexual marital activities lies at the root of the misunderstandings that eventually cause two thirds of marriage shipwrecks.’ What do you think of that?”
The probity of the printed word always influenced women more than men. He could quote that awkward sentence word for word, but its meaning was clouded and its facts were still disputable.
“I think it’s terrible,” he said. “Now don’t read any more. I don’t want the professor with us in bed.”
“Just one more sentence,” Rhoda said. “Another one out of Chapter Two. ‘The husband, more particularly the American husband, is more reticent regarding the sex relationship than the awakened American wife. It should be the duty of the wife to encourage and, in fact, insist on frank and fearless discussions regarding sexual compatability.’”
“God damn,” he said, “it sounds like a bridge hand. North led out his ace when he should have led the two of clubs.”
“There’s no reason to swear or be vulgar,” Rhoda said. “Now, here’s a sentence out of Chapter Four. ‘It may seem to some that the subject of sexual afterplay may not merit a full chapter by itself.’”
“Here,” he said, “give me that book for just a minute, will you, Rhoda?”
“Darling,” she said, and she laughed, “I knew you couldn’t help being fascinated once I started reading. Oh, Tom, what are you doing? Stop it.”
He had tossed the book out of the window before she had finished, and he had never regretted the act. He had been wrong in his idea that there were no sharply dramatic moments in the humdrum hours of living. It was one of the few times he had ever seen her lividly angry.
“Get right into your clothes,” she said, “and go out and get that book!”
“The hell I will,” he said. “It didn’t hit anybody.”
“Don’t be mid-Victorian,” she said. “Go out and ge
t that book! What will people say if they find it on the sidewalk? And what are you laughing at now?”
As another of those manuals on marriage had said—this one by a more whimsical, genial professor—little husband-and-wife jokes lubricated marriage wheels, and this turned out to be one of them. Even Rhoda eventually began to laugh at her reaction about the book on the sidewalk and its presence on the bedroom table. There were lots of things to laugh about when Rhoda was around.
In fact, as he could see their story now, it fitted into no compendium of marriage. It may have had the dreary outlines of case histories, since there was nothing new under the sun and strains in all relationships could be classified, but it had its own values, since nothing with Rhoda in it could be like anything else. That was the difficulty with generalizations; there could be no set rules for any two people, and when blame was dished out, everyone had to take some of it. If he had worried more about Rhoda’s worries, if he had not been in such revolt against the crowd at Antibes, if he had taken Rhoda more seriously, if he had lived more in reality and less in imagination … But then, it was always possible to go on indefinitely with such conditions, and what was the end result? Invariably one began to have the suspicion that the end was in one’s stars and that human will and wish were not what they were cracked up to be.
There was nothing ominous about the individual digits of the column that made everything add to nothing. He had sometimes wondered whether, if Rhoda and he had ever talked things over carefully, anything could have been achieved, but he doubted it. No one off the stage or out of the pages of a book could ever tell the exact circumstances that caused personal decision. One thing was sure: it was not argument or logic, it was something more basic and threatening because it was usually unknown. It must have been that way with Rhoda—a summation of things she could never explain, a balance and a conflict of desire. He could understand it and he could never blame her. He could only watch again the drops of circumstance escape him between his fingers as he had watched them long ago, and the process was inevitable since it was all a part of life and living.
Drop … and there was the crash in October, ’29. They had not suffered from it measurably. The Hero, in spite of a year on Broadway, ran through the winter to good houses, and he had previously sold the picture rights for a very large sum. Then Little Liar was a hit, and, even with business doing badly, the royalties had been substantial and the picture rights were large again. There was enough money in the account to buy a long list of common stocks at bottom prices in the summer of ’32. Rhoda was the one who was always going to the bank and discussing investments, just as Rhoda was the one who got him to go into temporary partnership with Arthur Higgins and later induced him to produce and direct a play, himself, in ’34 before he had finished Flagpole for Two. They had not suffered from the depression; on the contrary, they were growing rich when the New Deal pump priming started. Drop … and Hal was starting to go to school. Drop … and there was Antibes and the season when the Hero played in London. Drop … and there was a summer in France, but he would much rather go back to Lexington Avenue and to the September party they had given there not long after Hal was born.
“I know there’s no one much around,” Rhoda had said, “but Dick and Marion are in town, and the Hertimes are staying at the Ritz. And there are all your theatre people rehearsing. Don’t you think we ought to have a party? If we don’t have too many people, we could have the drinks out in the garden.”
Anyone involved with the theatre as he and Rhoda were, was always giving a party of one sort or another to celebrate something. Those things were part of a convention, a social tax demanded of anyone successful, a gesture of kindliness or simple generosity. He and Rhoda gave many other parties, usually on Sunday nights, the freest time in show business, and Rhoda learned quickly that no one was any better than she at giving an evening party, at arranging the table, the salad and the Virginia ham or at telling the maids for the evening, or the man who came in from the club, exactly what to do. Entertainment had become a routine, as graceful and as beautiful as one of Rhoda’s evening gowns, by the time they reached Park Avenue, but Tom was the one who had first set the scene. He was the one who had first directed her, back in September of ’29 when Rhoda was still recovering from Hal and still had to pretend that she knew more than she did. Impossible as it might have seemed subsequently, Rhoda was still shy and apprehensive then.
“Tom,” she said, “don’t laugh. I know you’re going to be derisive, but I think we might feel more sure about things if we bought a book of etiquette and read it out loud.”
“Where?” he asked. “In bed?”
“I knew you’d make a joke of it,” she said. “You always laugh, but everything’s so new.”
“That’s right,” he said, “and everything is better when it’s new.”
He could think now of all the new things: the emerald, the dresses, the gold slippers, the runabout, and presents for Hal. They all of them wore out in time, or were turned in for something else, but the first sight was what he still remembered and the last sight seldom mattered.
“I’ll show you how to run the party,” he told her.
“But I don’t see how you know,” she said.
She never understood that different people had different capacities for observation. Without ever doing so consciously, he stored details in his mind and he had been to enough parties already to know the accepted routine. All that was necessary was to get the caterer that Arthur Higgins used and then to add a few touches—the Chinese lanterns in the garden, the extra candelabra, and champagne, plenty of good champagne. There was no reason to bother about the works of Emily Post if you had a suitable dry vintage and some light, good food. There was no need to worry about throwing the right people together, for everyone was always congenial if there was champagne and if the flow was judiciously controlled by someone like Marcel, who ran the Higgins parties. Marcel and his two waiters could estimate the saturation point of everyone. There was never too much or too little when Marcel was on the job.…
It was time to light the candles and the lanterns in the garden. Marcel and two assistants were there and, even without candlelight, the table was an achievement.
“I wonder whether anybody’s coming,” Rhoda said. “Do you think we told them the wrong day or anything?” She had not yet lost her uncertainties, so that every party was still like an opening night. He never worried whether anyone would come or not. The show was the thing: the table, the glasses, the lanterns.
“You won’t care if we have some champagne,” he said.
“But we ought to care,” Rhoda said, “and not use champagne like a crutch.”
“Why,” he said, “that’s what champagne’s for. That’s why they spoil good wine by charging it with gas. Marcel, will you open us a bottle, please?”
“Yes, Mr. Harrow,” Marcel said. “Certainly, Mr. Harrow.”
Marcel was a snob, like other people who worked in the radius of the theatre. Tom was conscious of the exact balance of Marcel’s respectful tone, but he was already accustomed to respect and its intoxication had evaporated.
“It is good champagne, isn’t it?” she said. “Tom, you’re awfully clever about these things. You’re so much more at home than I am. How many people do you think are coming?”
“It’s hard to tell,” he said, “because a lot of them will bring friends at the last moment, but we have enough of everything, haven’t we, Marcel?”
“Oh yes,” Marcel said; “indeed yes, Mr. Harrow.”
It showed that Marcel had learned a great deal from the Higginses.
“You’ll stay with me, won’t you, Tom?” she asked. “Because I can’t remember names and faces the way you can. Don’t go off in a corner and talk with anyone.”
“I’ll be right with you,” he said. “There won’t be any corners.”
“Maybe I ought to go up and see if Hal’s all right,” she said.
“He’s all right,”
he told her. “I looked at him before I came down. He’s sound asleep, but his Nanny’s wide awake. Marcel, could you remember to sneak her up a glass of champagne?”
“Oh yes,” Marcel said. “Indeed yes, Mr. Harrow—but none as yet for Master Harold.”
The room was growing dusky but still the gleam of Marcel’s teeth was bright and Marcel did not joke with everybody, or remember the name of everybody’s son—not that this sort of thing mattered any longer.
“I hope everyone’s going to get on together, Tom,” she said. “There are so many different people. Maybe we should have had two parties and not mixed them up.”
“They’ll get on,” he said. “Your people are always crazy to meet my people. It’s the great adventure.”
“But they never understand each other,” she said.
“That’s right,” he said. “Your people think my people are basically amoral and my people think your people are basically stupid, but they both know that money helps. They are like you. They sense solidity.”
“Oh, Tom,” she said, “please don’t start making fun of me.”
“I didn’t mean to, dear,” he said, “and anyway, a backlog is no joke—according to insurance companies.”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep calling them my people,” she said. “But you like them, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, “but I wish they wouldn’t keep treating me as though I were a foreigner.”
“It’s because you’re getting to be famous, Tom,” she said. “It makes them nervous. It makes the Hertimes nervous. But you like the Bramhalls, don’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, “I like everybody now I’ve had a drink. And you like my people, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I like them better all the time. I love Mort Sullivan, and I don’t mind Walter Price, and I love the Higginses. And I’m even getting so I think I like Duneen.”
“Well, well,” he said, “that’s wonderful.”
“But I don’t like that new one who’s going to be the man’s conscience, that Laura Hopedale,” she said.
Women and Thomas Harrow Page 41
