Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  Recently when he had met someone after a term of years, he had found himself acutely conscious of physical change, but Rhoda was just as he had expected her to be. In his thoughts she had been a timeless person because she had always disregarded time. He was very used to the efforts made by women, and men too, in the acting profession, to combat approaching age. Massage, wheat germ, stretching, bending, to develop a posture more youthful than it would have been in one’s teens—brisk, new-cut tweeds, and then the new horizons of hair styling, the comb that corrected the graying tendency—corrected, mind you, without coloration. In addition, new pills were just around the corner. Rats could be turned from gray back to brown again, and vice versa, if they were given or lacked the proper vitamins. It was said that no one had as yet properly worked out this problem with human beings, but a great many people, including hair stylists, were bringing some very important contributions toward its solution.

  A few of these cosmetic thoughts passed through his mind in the first instant he saw Rhoda, and doubtless she must have thought of the same things, since everybody had an unpleasantly acute curiosity regarding geriatrics—but this was gone almost immediately. He knew at once that no one had needed to try to keep Rhoda’s hair as it had been. It was lighter; the bronze quality that he had always loved was still there, though dimmer. Looking at her professionally, he could believe that the photogenic quality of her face had improved, giving it a more compelling character; and though she had not put on an ounce of weight, her face and figure gave no sign that abstinence had been an effort. She wore a severe gray tailored suit closely resembling the one he had first bought her. The only jewelry she wore was a diamond ring, not his diamond, and no wedding band. This last change amused him when he remembered her worrying about inadvertently keeping her glove on her left hand. He was aware of no effort in Rhoda’s appearance, and his final thought was that she had got exactly what she wanted.

  As she stood there, she was a perfect portrait of what she had wished to become, and the irony of it was that it was now a little out of date. She was too close to the Jamesian Portrait of a Lady or an Edith Wharton girl in Hudson River Bracketed to be wholly accepted in the present scene. There would be no one of her type this year at El Morocco or the Stork. There would have been a hush of wonder if she had appeared in either of these places, but this would be exactly as she would have wished it. She was still the unattainable ideal, and she had attained it. He could not help thinking that the man whose opinion on such a subject he respected more highly than anyone else in the world—the hall porter at Claridge’s—would have rated Rhoda very highly, and by God, he would have been exactly right. Rhoda had turned out to be the answer to her girlhood dreams. He could think to himself when he saw her that Rhoda, of all the people he had known, had finally made it, and he could even feel honestly proud that he had contributed toward her effort and proud that she had loved him once.

  “Tom,” she said, “you think I look all right, don’t you?”

  “You do, Rhoda,” he said, “and I do hope you tried.”

  She smiled. It was one of her smiles that stopped just on the verge of a laugh.

  “You know damn well I did,” she said, and her voice was as young as it was when they met on Dock Street, “and you’re the hardest man I’ve ever known to please in that way, except possibly Arthur Higgins.”

  “Thank you, dear,” he said. “Linking Arthur and me together in that manner makes me very happy.”

  The speech was brittle and nervous, but he enjoyed the dialogue, and a quality behind the words made him think they were both behaving very well. He had been afraid that he might feel resentment, but he felt none at all now that he saw her. It was hard to know exactly what he felt. In spite of all there had been between them, he could partially believe that he was meeting Rhoda for the first time. He felt the old curiosity and quickened interest.

  “As long as we’re going to talk,” she said, “we’d better go upstairs. We have one of those turret rooms and a sitting room. Do you remember—the one you wished we had?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I remember. I’m glad that you don’t feel you’re throwing your money away uselessly, Rhoda.”

  She smiled again, but her smile was different.

  “Tom,” she said, “it’s awfully nice to see you again.”

  “Now that you mention it,” he said, “the journey here has been worthwhile for me. I’m glad to see you, too, Rhoda, or as they say on the West Coast, the reaction is likewise.”

  “God, Tom,” she said, “you still do brittle dialogue.”

  “Yes,” he said, “brittle, but sometimes it isn’t corny, Rhoda.”

  “Do you think anything I’ve said is corny?” Rhoda asked.

  “No,” he said, “not yet, Rhoda.”

  “I don’t know why you still impress me,” she said.

  “I don’t know why myself,” he said, “but I’m delighted if I do.”

  She was right that the talk was brittle. It had a Pinero-Sheridan quality, but there still was something behind it.

  “Because you’re more intelligent than anyone else,” she said, “at least for me.”

  “I may be,” he said, “but I’ve never been smart, and really intelligent people ought to be smart, Rhoda.”

  “They don’t go together very well,” she said. “I’ve never known anyone who was both intelligent and smart.”

  The lapse of time momentarily was gone. He had not believed that this could have been so possible, but he knew the reason. He was living, as always, in two worlds at once and for once these worlds had coincided.

  “You come pretty near to it,” he said. “You’re both intelligent and smart, my dear.”

  “Oh, Tom,” she said, “please don’t say that.”

  He was surprised that he had hurt her. He was even sorry that he was close to being right.

  “Don’t take it seriously,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Tom,” she said, “let’s not stay down here being sorry. Let’s go upstairs where we can talk.”

  “I’d love to,” he said, “as long as Mr. Brake won’t mind. By the way, where is Mr. Brake?”

  “Tom,” she said, “do you still feel hurt?”

  “No,” he said, “not any more, not really, Rhoda.”

  “I know I was a bitch in certain ways,” she said.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t let’s indulge in self-reproach. I had it coming to myself in certain ways.”

  “Presley knows you’re coming,” she said. “In fact, he wanted you to, and he won’t be back for hours. Let’s go upstairs. The bell captain is so interested.”

  “Only in a nice way, I’m sure,” he said. “He seemed to me in the brief conversation I had with him like a clean, American boy.”

  “That’s because you tipped him a dollar,” she said. “I was looking out the window. Do you know they have the same elevator here?”

  “You mean,” he said, “the one with all the ropes and cables?”

  “Yes,” she said, “and it still goes up just as slowly. Do you remember what you said about it when it took us upstairs?”

  He tried to think, but for once recall was gone.

  “You said it was an elevator with a New England conscience,” she said, “and it wasn’t sure we were married.”

  He was touched that she had remembered, but women were more sentimental about small things than men; and then he recollected for a hideous, derisive moment that Emily had remembered that morning the bon mot about the Princess and the Crumb.

  “If that’s the way it still feels,” he said, “maybe it will stall between floors this time.”

  “Darling,” she said, “I wouldn’t mind if it did, except for the boy who runs it.”

  “That’s right,” he said, “we do seem to be surrounded by clean American boys.”

  “You were one once yourself,” she said, “and so is Harold.”

  “That’s right,” he said, “there’s Harold.�
�

  “I’m glad there’s Harold,” she said. “I have been for years and years. Let’s move out of here now. Everyone guesses at strange relationships in hotels, especially the room clerks.”

  “Why, Rhoda,” he said, “in my experience everyone guesses at them anywhere.”

  In the end perhaps every human contact had its own extraneous quality, and all the qualities were different. He was the one who should have known, having stirred them in his imagination for more years than he cared to remember.

  The bedroom-sitting room suites in the two ornate turrets that flanked the enormous building were, from their self-conscious decoration, obviously the most desirable in the house. The sitting room, with its arc of windows and its huge empty fireplace, still gave a hint of the pseudo-baronial atmosphere that its architect had obviously intended. There had once been a wealthy love for baronial halls and turrents, presumably a revolt from the Gothic that itself had been a revolt from the stern lines of Colonialism. At any rate, the room was highly suitable for their conversation.

  “You have an imposing view,” he said, “those young stands of spruce look as though Birnam Wood were moving toward Dunsinane.”

  He could not tell—she often could maintain a poker face—whether Rhoda had grasped his ponderously Booth-like allusion, but he was sorry that he had made it because he could now think of himself and Rhoda partially as a Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth, and that together they had murdered one or two things unintentionally, and that a regret still lingered of which neither of them would speak.

  “Yes,” she said, “all the pastures and everything have grown up since we were here. The jungle is closing in, but don’t you have a feeling that everything else is closing in?”

  An urgency in her question disturbed him without his being able to grasp exactly what she meant. Talking to her was like returning to another country whose language he had once spoken fluently but which he had not used recently.

  “Maybe I have,” he said, “but I don’t know what you mean by everything else.”

  She smiled, and there was no change whatsoever in the quickness of her smile.

  “The end of the show,” she said. “You always used to say that in the third act that everything should be closing in.”

  “Oh, yes, the end of the show,” he said. “I suppose it is getting to be about time when the exurbanites start wondering whether they can catch the last train to New Canaan, but I wouldn’t say we were quite there yet.”

  “You’d like a drink, wouldn’t you?” she asked. “Presley has some special Scotch and he’d feel hurt if you didn’t try it.”

  There was one thing of which he was sure; he did not care in the least whether Presley was hurt or not.

  “I’m of two minds,” he said. “I’ve got to be driving back and I have an idea that I drank a good deal of Scotch last evening.”

  “I know,” she said, “you had the Bramhalls up to dinner. Marion called me this morning.”

  “Yes,” he said, “Emily asked them because she knew I wouldn’t want to go up to their farm. It was like old times, partially.”

  It was only fair to mention Emily as long as she had mentioned Presley.

  “I’ll get the glasses and things,” she said. “I’ve told the boy already to bring up ice.”

  “Oh,” he said, “well, if he’s bringing up the ice.”

  “And don’t give him a dollar,” she said. “I can’t bear seeing you hand out dollars.”

  “Why can’t you?” he asked. “I don’t quite follow you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I just know that I can’t bear it. Here he comes now. Have him put it on the table by the window.”

  It was the bell captain again with a neat paper ice container and three tall glasses, two bottles of soda and one of quinine water. The three glasses, he thought, made a tactful implication, and as he put his hand in his pocket, he had a vision of platoons of bellboys through the years bringing ice and glasses—a restive vision, an overtone to a wasted life—but in America, if you wanted a drink, you had to have an ice cube.

  “Shall I open the soda, sir?” the captain asked. “Or shall I leave the opener on the tray?”

  “You’d better leave it in case Mrs. Harrow hasn’t an opener with her,” he said, and then immediately realized his mistake, and Rhoda was coming from the bedroom with a whiskey bottle.

  “I beg everybody’s pardon,” he said. “It was a slip of the tongue. I meant Mrs. Brake, captain.”

  He pulled a dollar from his pocket and Rhoda spoke quickly.

  “Mr. Harrow wants some silver if you have any,” she said.

  “Of course he hasn’t any,” Tom said. “Silver only wears out pockets. Stick to dollars, captain, and the quarters will take care of themselves.”

  “Oh, God,” Rhoda said, “you haven’t changed at all.”

  He was still laughing after the captain closed the door.

  “It’s unanticipated,” he said, “isn’t it? Yes, it’s just the same. My weakness for you still persists. But then, I never did have a strong character. Never mind ice for me. To hell with ice.”

  “You’ve got to have ice if you paid a dollar for it,” she said.

  “You’re wrong there,” he said. “You don’t necessarily get what you pay for, Rhoda.”

  “I wonder what he’ll be saying to the clerk downstairs,” she said.

  “My dear,” he said, “are you still worrying about what people say downstairs?”

  He was glad when he sat down to see that Rhoda had not put ice in his glass. Although it was a very minor triumph, all success in life was the summation of such small things. He sat looking out of the window at the old fields covered by aggressive young spruce that stood with the military precision of wooden soldiers. Rhoda sat with her accurate untheatrical posture on the sofa with her back to the view. He had been careful not to sit beside her, not from a lack of desire, or because of fear of misinterpretation, but rather from a sense of something impending. The spruces made him think of what she had said about everything closing in. Birnam Wood was moving up to Dunsinane. Obviously things had always been moving from his earliest days, but he had not noticed the approach until lately. He was sorry to be confronted suddenly with the thought that the margin of life’s possibilities had been narrowing rapidly for a long, long time until there no longer remained an adequate field for trial or error. He was glad to be in her company, because they had tried many of the same things together and now neither of them could erase the old mistakes. He had tossed away a great many things that were valuable as casually as he had tossed the dollar to the captain, and now he was not sure that he cared. If you had tossed enough away, there was something gained in the sheer exercise of tossing.

  “Tom,” she asked, “what are you thinking about?”

  “I’m thinking that I’m glad you asked me here,” he said.

  “You mean because you’re glad to see me?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “partially. Frankly, I thought it would be more of an emotional strain, and instead it isn’t one. That’s one peculiar thing about living, isn’t it? You haven’t the remotest idea what’s going to be tough until you do it, and no one can tell you anything beforehand. At least no one ever told me.”

  In the silence that followed, he found himself smiling when he looked at her and he was thinking again that he was glad that she had asked him there. He had seldom felt so free to speak to anyone, so free that he had a fear of growing loquacious.

  “Tom,” she said, “are you sorry that you married me?”

  “No dear,” he said, “not at all. I wouldn’t have missed a minute of it.”

  “You’re not being nasty nice, are you?” she asked. “You’re not thinking I caught you unawares because I was a designing little bitch?”

  He took a sip of her husband’s whiskey; it tasted exactly as he thought it would taste, too heavy, too rare, too redolent of heather, and to hell with heather and aroma. He was weary of aro
ma.

  “Let’s get this straight,” he said, “and incidentally, I’ve been giving this matter quite a little thought lately. Don’t give yourself any credit. No one gets into anything because someone makes him. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

  She gave the paper ice container an angry push and the ice made a complaining sound, not at all like the tinkle of ice on glass of which one read in childhood.

  “I wish you’d stop quoting Shakespeare,” she said. “You only do when you’re difficult.”

  It was exactly like old times.

  “At any rate, he’s quotable,” he said, “and it’s remarkable how few people nowadays are. For instance, I’m not quotable.”

  “No,” she said, “at least not in polite society.”

  It was exactly like old times.

  “Marion Bramhall said I’m quotable,” he said, “last night.”

  “Marion’s a fool,” she said. “Not that I mean to be disagreeable, dear.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say so,” he said. “It relieves me after all these years.”

  “All right,” she said, “what did Marion think you said that she thought was quotable?”

  The whiskey tasted of heather that was thicker than the songs of the late Sir Harry Lauder, and why was it that so much in life seemed to end in what resembled defunct Palace Theatre vaudeville?

  “Well, it was this way,” he said, “she was sitting next to me at dinner, and there had been a slight domestic upheaval before dinner—not over infidelity, but only over finances—and Marion Bramhall said something about casting bread upon the waters, and I said, quick as a flash—you know the way I am—I’ve always cast my bread upon the gals. Marion, not I, thought that this was quotable.”

  It was a long speech, but it had held her attention, and that was the main thing, to hold attention.

  “Marion would have said it was quotable,” she said, “and you’ve always been a bread thrower.”

  “Only on the gals,” he said.

  “Oh, no,” she said, “you’ve thrown it everywhere.”