Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  XXIX

  Once One, Always a Bread Thrower

  He was tired of the timeworn maxims that in the end, if one lived long enough, turned out to be only half-truths. One of the worst of them was that obvious observation that there was always a first time for everything. There had to be a first time, just as there had to be a last time, and once he had been young enough to wonder why anyone should care whether there was a first or a last. Once he had been young enough not to indulge in the morbid interest of looking back to first times. At any rate, now that he did look back, first times were not necessarily the best times. The first time he had slept with a woman, for instance, had no golden halo of retrospect. In fact, he could still be embarrassed by his shyness and inadequacies. Nothing in that experience made him long now for the return of youth. He could only feel gratitude that the first time was over. But there were other first times that never lost their shock and novelty. The first time that he had seen death was an experience that repeated itself with an equal vividness. The first time that he had heard his own lines spoken on a stage was the same as all subsequent times because his amazement and interest had never lessened. But also there were first times that could never be repeated—ones, indeed, that could never be adequately re-enacted in the imagination—the first time one fell in love, or the first time one became aware of the blessedness of silence, or the beauty of the written word. The first time that he had driven with Rhoda to the Wellington Manor House was another of those unforgettable times, never to be repeated, never to be relived in thought. After all, one might marry again and again, but in the strictest sense one was only married once.

  The long road to the Wellington Manor House, with its landmarks gone or vastly changed, was not the same as the earlier road. He and Rhoda had driven there in his Ford. There was no comparison between one of those high-priced new cars that endowed their owners, according to the advertisements, with cachet, distinction, and discrimination and that distant Ford of his—except that both vehicles ran on gasoline. The road along the coast and through the country had been already, back in those late twenties, a tourist road with gas stations and tourist homes, and antique shops and fried-clam stands. But compared with the road on which he was now traveling, the one of his memory was like a quaint chromo that one would buy just for a laugh for the rumpus room. There were no bird baths for sale then, no statues of the Virgin Mary, no china ducks or quaint dwarfs to carry home to put upon the lawn. There had been no aquarium-like restaurants with carhops to bring you out a frappe (that now rhymed with wrap). But why torture oneself with comparisons? One could only go over that road to the Wellington Manor House once as he had with Rhoda. You could only do that sort of thing once, and maybe it was just as well that time could break some molds. It would have been like a second honeymoon if they had ever tried to do it again, and there was always sadness in even the best of second honeymoons. He could not understand why Rhoda had ever wanted to go back and see the place, except that Rhoda never did give up when it came to certain things, and women always reacted in a different, more sentimental way to the past.

  Their suitcases had been on the back seat, as tattletale as rice and ribbons. His, though worn, were of good quality, marked T.H. because even in those days before the money rolled in he had always liked good luggage. Rhoda’s two suitcases, on the other hand, had been purchased by Mrs. Browne at a local store. They had been covered with a patent-leather fabric, and on each and on the glossy black hatbox were Rhoda’s new initials in lacquer-red: R.B.H. Just Married would have been a superfluous subtitle. He had worn a plain gray suit. Rhoda was in what Mrs. Browne had called her “going-away dress,” also bought off a local rack, with the short skirt of the period and the waistline that came almost to the knees. But then, Rhoda had always looked well in anything, and at any rate, they were going away.

  “Isn’t the Wellington Manor House sort of awfully big,” Rhoda asked, “and full of all kinds of rich people, from everywhere?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but I hope you’re right.”

  He could remember the brightness of the day, and the clear, northern sunlight.

  “Well, I’ve got my evening dress,” she said, “but I wish you’d brought your tuxedo, in case there’s dancing after dinner.”

  “It will be all right,” he said, “if you want to dance. These things I have on will be all right. It’s toward the end of the season, anyway, and people go there to rest. They don’t go there to dress.”

  “You can’t tell,” Rhoda said. “You’ve never been there.”

  “No,” he said, “but my father used to stop there when he went up to Bar Harbor.”

  “Isn’t it funny?” she said. “We wouldn’t be going here at all, if he hadn’t wrecked his car. Are you sure it’s all right about the room?”

  She had asked the question several times before and he shared her anxiety.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, “I telegraphed a deposit, you know.”

  “And you’re sure it got there?”

  “Yes,” he said, “it got there.”

  “I suppose it’s silly of us,” she said, “if we’re going to Niagara Falls, to be going for one night in just the opposite direction. We should have taken the train and gone into Boston.”

  “We can drive back tomorrow and leave the car and take the train. It was too late today,” he said. “If we have to go to Niagara Falls, I’d rather start this way.”

  “It’s going to be awfully expensive, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Never mind,” he said. “You can only do this sort of thing once.”

  “Yes,” she said, “and maybe it’s just as well.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but I wouldn’t know.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I don’t know whether it’s going to be nice or not, or anything.”

  “There’s one thing about it,” he said. “It’s been done a great many times before.”

  “I don’t care how often it’s been done,” she said, “you and I have never done it.”

  “It isn’t because I haven’t wanted to,” he said.

  “All right,” she said. “But anyway, we’ve never done it. Will there be bellboys and everything at the Wellington Manor House?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I guess so.”

  “And will everybody be looking at us?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “But just remember, lots of people have been doing this sort of thing for years and years.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but not you and me. That’s what I can’t get over. It’s you and me, and it isn’t everybody else.”

  Time had given that remark a texture which had been lost on him back there.

  “Don’t make it sound as though we were going to the dentist, Rhoda,” he said.

  “I didn’t say that,” she said. “How can I tell, when I don’t know anything about it? Gosh, I wish I weren’t a virgin.”

  “Someone has to be a virgin at some point, sometime,” he said.

  “Even a man?” she asked.

  “Yes, even a man,” he said.

  “Well,” she said, “are you a virgin, too?”

  It annoyed him to feel that he was blushing, but then, Rhoda was always saying something unexpected.

  “You never asked me that before,” he said.

  “I know it,” she said. “It never occurred to me until now. Are you, or are you not?”

  “Not in the strictest sense of the word,” he said.

  She laughed and the music of it was still not lost.

  “Well,” she said. “At least one of us knows something. You don’t mind my bringing this up, do you?”

  “No,” he said, “anything you bring up is always all right, Rhoda.”

  Then there was a catch in her voice. It was hard to remember that Rhoda occasionally was not a realist.

  “It’s all right, anyway, because I love you,” she said. “Tom, do you love me?”

  “I wouldn’t be
here if I didn’t,” he said.

  “You don’t feel I threw myself at you, or anything like that?” she asked. “Because I suppose I did.”

  “No, Rhoda,” he said. “Things don’t work that way. We threw ourselves at each other.”

  “Tom, it’s going to be wonderful so long as it’s you,” she said. “But before we get there, stop a minute so that I can get my hair combed, and be sure I look all right, and you don’t mind me with lipstick, do you?”

  “No,” he said, “you always look all right.”

  She always had, even in that going-away dress and cloche hat. Fashions had never made any change in Rhoda. She had always looked all right.

  “And remind me to take off my left glove,” she said. “The wedding ring, you know.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Take off both gloves. It would look funny with one on and one off.”

  “Yes,” she said, “and it’s American plan, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said, “you can eat and eat.”

  “And there’ll be music, won’t there?” she said. “Are you sure there’ll be dancing after dinner?”

  The dialogue seemed strange in his memory. The Fords of that time were wonders of their species. They were moving among the spruce trees, and the country seemed more bright.

  “There must be dancing,” he said, “or my father wouldn’t have stopped there on his way to Bar Harbor.”

  “That was quite a while ago,” she said.

  “I know,” he told her, “but I’m sure there’ll still be dancing.”

  “Tom,” she said, “do you think your father was a virgin when he got married?”

  “I can’t answer that question, Rhoda,” he said, “because he never told me.”

  He had first read the Odyssey in the Judge’s library, but he had read it often since and had once thought of putting a portion of it into dramatic form—not the part about Calypso, but the homecoming, which had a Rip Van Winkle quality that was bound to make good drama. The rest of the Odyssey was as confused as life itself, though admittedly he did not know exactly how minds worked in the Bronze Age. He only knew that a return to old scenes or a wish to return had a universal appeal because it was a common, shared experience. He was Ulysses in his nearly self-thinking automobile, driving up the road through an Ithaca of his own contriving.

  The landmarks were faintly familiar, but the present was part of another day which gave the past impossibility, and this sense of unfamiliarity was most unpleasant because it made him feel that he was not identifiable with the new age. The small towns were still there, with their churches, and their houses grouped to express an older tradition. But the motor road was broader, and the main streets of the towns were cluttered with a conglomeration of parked cars with which he had no sympathy. The elm trees which lined the streets were dying from a new disease, and their dead limbs were like the bones of the past. Yet there was a note of hope. There was always a note of hope. The brave days of an age to come already formed a variegated carpet along the highway. Personally, he could call this carpet mediocrity, but doubtless he was wrong. Some people must have liked the hideous braided rugs dangling from lines to attract the motorist. Some people must have felt at home in the tangle of traffic, and in the cars, as sportive to his eyes as the ending of a new geological species. Some people must have liked the clusters of small new homes sown along the road like dragons’ teeth. Some people must have liked them, since the inhabitants of these new homes, judging from the play yards and the juvenile wash upon the lines, had been indulging very freely in procreation. Then there were the new flat schools to house the product; and kennels selling pups—everybody in that brave new world must have been a dog lover; and driving ranges where one could hit golf balls; and motels that looked like Washington’s Mount Vernon, or like a collection of Swiss chalets; and cocktail lounges, giant steaks and grand-slam cocktails. They expressed a part of a wish that was not always material, an aspiration that had always been a part of his country—Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. In the end he could sympathize with this appeal, since he and Rhoda had once pursued happiness there themselves.

  There had been a glow over that road when he and Rhoda had driven on it, sunlight and the scent of spruce and a feeling of country stretching on either side of them, in which anything might happen. At any rate, he and Rhoda had been happy enough so that there was no need to sort out impressions.

  “Tom,” she said, “we must come back sometime, a long time from now, so we can remember it all again.”

  It had not been a good idea. It was a game in which you threw the dice just once. Memory was better than fact. Memory had endowed the Wellington Manor House with the sentimentality and color that one encountered in a romantic pastel illustration in a book of legends. It had never looked that way, he was positive, when he and Rhoda had driven up to it. The velvet lawns, the rolling hills in back, with forests resembling Fontainebleau, the alluring gingerbread trimmings like those on the old United States Hotel in Saratoga he knew had never been there at all. They had sprouted from his imagination like exotic flowers in a seed catalogue. In spite of their reality, they had never existed. It had not been a rather forlorn survival then, when he and Rhoda had turned up the drive. It was a sanctuary—a place of tea and soft music, of rockers on the wide veranda, but the idea of sanctuary had somehow gone out of fashion. It may have been that the disturbances of his generation had proved the futility of ever trying to get away from anything. No one except the very old, who knew no better, wanted rest any longer. Only the very old maintained the error that they could get away from it all by staying in one place. The Wellington Manor House had its clientèle and its waiting list in older days, but it was different now. It hurt him to see signs saying that the Wellington Manor House was only ten miles away, completely renovated, under new management, tennis, boating, bathing, fishing, a cocktail lounge, free parking, championship golf course. The Wellington Manor House was just around the corner, but why the fanfare? A glance at the parking lot was enough to show that there was room in the Wellington Manor House, room for everyone, discriminating or not, and room on the championship golf course.

  He wished that the Wellington Manor House, with its new paint and its effort at sprightliness, did not make him feel his age. The place was like an old actor trying to be a part of the present. It taught a rather ugly visual lesson that one should not try new tricks after a certain space of time. The air had a new chill in it when he stopped the car at the broad steps that led to the deserted veranda, with a row of empty rocking chairs; and now and then one of them moved in the faint afternoon breeze as though invisible guests were there watching him drive up. A bell captain in a fresh new uniform was on the drive even before the car had stopped.

  “Good afternoon,” the bellboy said. “If you’ll give me the key to the luggage compartment, sir, I’ll help you with your bags.”

  He had always enjoyed trying to guess what bell captains were like when out of uniform. The boy at the door of the car was young, and his posture indicated military service. One could guess that he had entered the army at eighteen, had finished his hitch and was now working his way through college.

  “I’m not stopping,” he said. “I’m here to call on one of your guests—Mrs. Presley Brake.”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said. “Mrs. Brake is in the lobby waiting. May I park the car for you further along the drive?”

  “Why, yes,” he said, “thank you very much.”

  It occurred to him that the brisk bellboy, with his crew cut, was a fair norm of youth. He represented what everyone invariably lost after a certain age, and the gentle motion of the deserted rocking chairs accentuated the bereavement. When he had last seen the Wellington Manor House with Rhoda, and a boy had come to take the bags, he had thought the boy was not so much younger than he, and now that unattainable time was back for a moment. He took a dollar from his pocket. He had been remiss in many things, but he had always been generous with gra
tuities.

  “Keep the keys in case you have to move it,” he said. “I won’t be here very long.”

  The season now was spring and the hotel had just opened, which, on second thought, might have accounted for its emptiness. Returning to any place one had known years ago inevitably conveyed some species of disillusion, but old impressions were always intermingled. He could understand that most of what he remembered had not been true memory, but imagination. Nevertheless, there was a stateliness about the place. It had the careless generosity of the turn of the century, when the income tax was nonexistent, when there was steak for breakfast and lumber cost a few cents a foot, and no architect had to be bothered about size. It was good theatre, the dark walnut of the reception desk, the window seats, the convoluted columns by the fireplace; and the indestructible black walnut furniture was still there, its elaborateness now concealed, he was sorry to see, by slip covers. To his surprise, the lobby seemed as large as he remembered it. To the left, an old couple sat working over a communal jigsaw puzzle; in the center was the reception desk; and to the right, in a sort of fireplace nook, he saw Rhoda. If he had written the directions for his own entrance and for Rhoda’s placing, he could not have done better. The unworldliness of that summer hotel lobby removed any sense of strangeness from their meeting. He had not seen Rhoda since he had left the apartment for North Africa, but now an elision of time made the length of separation unimportant.