Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  “I’ve known Leona for—oh, four years, I’d say.”

  “Well,” Edith says, weighing her words carefully, “I’d consider it a very low trick—and you a very low human being indeed—if you’ve used Leona’s friendship to gain access to my house, to talk about my brother, and about his personal financial affairs, which I know nothing about, just to get gossip which you can put—”

  “Hey!” he cries. “Hey, please! Look, I—” He takes a final swallow of his drink and puts the glass down. Turning to her, he says, “Mrs. Blakewell, I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I intended. Forgive me.”

  “I can be peppery, you see, when I want to be!”

  “I honestly thought that you, as a Harper, and as a major Harper stockholder—”

  “A Harper! Why must I always be thought of as a Harper? I am Edith Blakewell.”

  “—might have an opinion on this latest Harper activity. Cross my heart, that’s all I was getting at, Mrs. Blakewell.” Then, in a different voice, he says, “And I’ll tell you another little secret of my trade—it’s tough to try to be objective about the family of someone I’m awfully fond of. You see?” He holds up two fingers in a V. “A dilemma. Here are its horns. On one side, a job to write a clinical analysis of the Harper fortune—using scalpel where necessary. On the other, a lovely girl. Between the horns hangs young Edward Winslow. Now I’d better say good-by.”

  “Now wait,” Edith says, reaching out to touch his arm. “Don’t run off. I got too peppery, didn’t I? Now it’s my turn to apologize.”

  From the town below, the Customs House clock strikes the half hour. “Pay no attention to that clock that just struck,” Edith says. “It’s always at least twenty minutes off. Come. Sit down.” He smiles at her.

  “Please let me sweeten your drink,” she says.

  Edith had planned, since he was a friend of Leona’s (though not knowing he was a beau), to make a little party of his visit. She had been going to offer him tea, and she had asked Nellie, her housekeeper, to fix toast, and to open a jar of her English green gooseberry jam, and to make one of her special ladyfinger cakes. But, when he arrived, Edith had offered him a drink, and he had accepted one. Now, remembering all Nellie’s preparations, Edith adds, “Or there is also tea.”

  “Another drink, I guess. Very short.”

  She takes his glass to the cellaret and pours a little whisky in it. Stirring it with Perrier water, she says, in a quiet voice, “Three husbands … three divorces. Now what? What’s going to happen to her? Since she’s been here I haven’t had a clue.” She returns with his drink. “Mr. Winslow, I want you to know that I’m not unconcerned.”

  “Well,” he says slowly, “Neither am I.” He lifts his glass. “And I also like her grandmother,” he says. “Which doesn’t help me off my horns.”

  Upstairs in her room at her grandmother’s house, Leona Harper Ware Breed Paine Para-Diaz, née Ware, who has been enjoined by her ex-husband’s relatives not to employ the title La Condesa de Para-Diaz (not that she’d ever consider using the silly title anyway), but to use, instead, the “American” form for a divorced woman, Mrs. Ware Para-Diaz (not that she’d bother with that nonsense, either), sits at her dressing table and picks up—for what must surely be the fiftieth time that afternoon—the letter she has been writing, and reads it through again.

  Dearest Mother—

  It’s been over three weeks now since I sent off my last letter to you … and I haven’t heard from you, so I guess I must have sent it to the wrong hotel. I got your itinerary from Perry’s secretary in N.Y., but I guess she must have had it wrong. Anyway, this time I am writing you c/o Morgan et Cie so let’s hope I have better luck! Hey, how are you two, anyway!!? As you must have guessed from the postmark, I am at Granny’s, who is just the same. Flew down last week, and my other letter was partly to tell you I was going. But it was also to ask you a tremendously big favor. Mother. You see, Mother, the thing is

  And this is as far as the letter goes. Each time she has come to the words the thing is she has stopped, and of course the trouble is that it took her so many pages before, in the other letter, to say what the thing was, that somehow she does not have the spirit to go through all those pages of explanation again. Once more, she puts the letter down, thinking: Perhaps I should wait one more day. Perhaps I’ll hear from her tomorrow. Tomorrow is Thursday. I’ll wait and see what happens Thursday. Hotels hold mail, or forward it.

  From the town below she hears the striking of the Customs House clock and, downstairs, she can hear the rise and fall of voices. Eddie Winslow is still talking to Granny but, through the shuttered summer doors of the old house, she can make out no words. She has been tempted to open her bedroom door, just a crack, and eavesdrop on them, but she has resisted this. (Even though, she knows, Granny eavesdrops on her from time to time—standing very quietly at the top of the stairs while she was down in the hall below, talking to Eddie on the telephone.) She has considered going downstairs to join the two of them, but has decided against that too. She would rather let Eddie see Granny pure, to see, hopefully, the things about Granny which Leona sees. She has decided that she must not interrupt them. “Just don’t let her cow you,” she had warned him. “And don’t be put off by her appearance, or the clothes she wears. She’s an anachronism, but she knows it. She’s an honest anachronism.”

  She picks up the unfinished letter, folds it at the center, puts it into the top drawer of the dressing table, and closes the drawer. Then, her chin cupped in her hand, she confronts her image in the oval mirror, and the reflection that comes back is mottled, leprous. Moisture and mildew have invaded the silver backing of the glass, and it is no longer possible to get a clear view of herself between the grayish patches. But, making allowances for the mirror, she decides that for twenty-seven (twenty-seven years, five months, and thirteen days, my dear) there are not too many signs of wear and tear. Not too many little lines. Isn’t it funny that nothing shows on the outside, but nothing ever does show. She used to think that having sex showed in a woman’s face, but it never did show. Nothing showed. She looks away from the mirrow now and reaches for a cigarette, and, striking the match, holding the match to the cigarette, Leona’s hand trembles. She steadies the shaking hand with the other, but still it is a moment before she can get the cigarette going. Granny has noticed the hands, and Leona has tried to explain them away. “You know I’m a coffee addict, Granny,” she said. “And I go right on drinking it even though it gives me the shakes.” She is not sure whether Granny believed her. Holding her hands straight out in front of her now she orders them to stop, but they do not obey, and how queer it is to have all at once two parts of your body that you cannot control, which seem to be running on little motors of their own. She cries “Oh!” as the lighted cigarette falls from her hand and rolls across the top of the dressing table, “Oh!” as she scrambles for it with her fingers. And, when she finally has the cigarette again, she sees that it has left a little bubble in the mahogany top. She rubs furiously at the bubble with her fingertip, which only dents the bubble, and then she quickly covers the burn with the ashtray, hoping Granny will not notice it—Granny has already scolded her about smoking too much—and stabs out the cigarette in the ashtray. Oh! Desperate! But no, she tells herself, no, she cannot be desperate; admit that you are desperate and you might as well give up entirely. To the despairer belongs defeat: that is a stern little rule of life. And how can she be desperate when she has so many plans? Oh, yes. Ambitious plans. Wonderful plans. Plans that are already beginning to work out. Thinking of the plans, her thoughts fly up in a wordless prayer. She jumps up quickly from the stool, smoothing the front of her skirt with her hands. “Leona Ware strode defiantly across the room.”

  She kicks off her shoes and lies down on her bed, on the white quilted coverlet, on her back, her arms straight at her sides. Outside, a warm breeze billows the white window curtains, and the green ipomoea vines on the wall outside the windows cast gray, marbly shadows on the w
hite ceiling. Why does lying like this, on her back, on top of the coverlet, in the exact center of her big old bed, always make her feel young, and virginal, and small? “The search for beginnings is important,” Dr. Hardman had said to her, and this, of course, is why she came back here—because this was where it all began, here, in this room, under these high ceilings; here, in this huge old-fashioned bed with a carved pineapple topping its tall headboard, surrounded by heavy furniture, chairs, and dressing table, the windows hung with long white (turning a bit yellow now) organdy curtains, Belgian, embroidered with fleurs-de-lis, their holes artfully mended with a spiderweb stitch; this room, behind the thick stone walls of this house, walls covered with vines that occasionally poked their way into the house, across the window sills. “You’re a hard man, Hardman,” Leona had quipped to him. He had returned her a look of stone. She had just been telling him about her odd habit of thinking about everything she said and did as though she were reading about herself: “Leona Ware paused thoughtfully in the doorway.” “Leona Ware riposted artfully …” “With a cheerful smile, Leona Ware interjected …” And so on. She had thought it might amuse him, might make him like her a little better than he seemed to. But he had suddenly interrupted, saying, “Why do you suppose you’ve had all these marriages, Mrs. Paine?” “But I’ve only had two!” she had cried, which was the correct number at the time. And then, “I think it’s because I’m a very moral woman, Doctor Hardman. I don’t sleep with men. I make them marry me first. It’s the New England blood in me. Did you know I’m one eighth Boston?” The only thing he ever said to her that made any sense at all was the business about beginnings. And so she came back here to try to retrace her steps. It was like a game. You went back to Go. Then, trying to keep your wits about you, you tried to play it better the second time.

  Leona closes her eyes. She makes of herself a long, heavy sack full of sand and, at one corner of the sack, there is a tiny hole and, very slowly, the sand trickles out, trickles out. Then, in another corner, another leak appears, and more sand pours out, slowly. All at once, unbidden, Edouardo appears and seems to hover over her closed eyes. “Oh, go away,” she whispers aloud. “Haven’t you done enough?” You are banished, she reminds him. You are gone, finished, over, dead, out of my life and dropped from the face of the earth. She likes to think of Edouardo Para-Diaz as in outer space—circling the moon, perhaps, in endless orbit. Or landed there. Ah, Edouardo, she thinks, how do you like the moon? How do you like the Sea of Tranquility, or that other sea you would surely love—the Sea of Sighs? Any cold, beautiful place will do for you. And what are the things Leona Para-Diaz loves? I love the touch of soft things, the feel of cotton cloth, the feel of my hair between my fingers, the soft, smooth place at the back of a man’s neck; and this place, the unannounced seasons, and the sea; all islands; and this house, and the tree-of-heaven in the garden, and the veranda where she used to have tea with Granny when she was a child, and the heavy, curving mahogany banisters on the stairs, and Granny’s great Chippendale desk full of clutter that Leona was never allowed to touch, and the damp, salt-sweet smell of the rooms, and Granny’s smell, and the smell of linen sheets that have been hung to dry in the sun. Is that list enough? And beautiful things: a celebration of lilies opening in a lilypond beyond their house on the coast of Spain. “How beautiful the lilies are!” Edouardo said. And she had wanted to say to him, Yes, and you are beautiful too—beautiful as a lily yourself, you beautiful man. Two identical-feeling tears form at the outer corners of her closed eyes and run down the sides of her face, into her hair, just above her ears. Oh, but this isn’t the way, she tells herself. No, this isn’t the way at all.

  The words form in her mind again:

  You see, Mother, the thing is

  “Her first husband was a rip,” Edith is saying, “and that didn’t last long. Her second was a decent sort, but apparently he didn’t suit her either. The third of course, the Spaniard, was an absolute bad hat, a rotter, a thorough Skeesicks.”

  “I met her between number two and number three,” Eddie Winslow says. And he chuckles softly.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “I like the way you tick each one of them off, Mrs. Blakewell.”

  “Now this last one,” Edith says, lowering her voice, “he was romantically inclined, it turns out, toward members of his own sex—if you can believe such a thing!”

  “Well, I guess I can believe it.”

  “Of course she made me promise, when she came here, that we would not discuss it. I can understand why she prefers not to talk about it. But now it seems as though she won’t discuss anything with me!”

  “As a matter of fact, I sort of promised her I wouldn’t discuss her with you,” he says.

  “Yes. Well, you see? That’s how she’s become. Secretive. But I do care about her. And why—” She has started to say, Why do I come upon her at times, and look at her, and see a look of absolute tragedy on her face? But she decides not to say this, and says, instead, “I want her to find the right person.”

  He nods and puts down his glass. “I’d really better be going,” he says.

  “Leona’s upstairs resting. She’ll want to see you. Won’t you stay?”

  “Don’t disturb her. I’ll be seeing her later on,” he says, rising and pocketing his notebook.

  Standing up, Edith says, “I’m afraid I haven’t been much help to you. Of course anything you want to know about the company you can get directly from Harold.”

  “The fact is, Mr. Harper has refused to see me.”

  “Refused? Why should he refuse? I’ll tell him to see you.”

  “Would you?” he says eagerly.

  “Well,” she hesitates, “I can’t actually tell him to see you. If he chooses not to—it’s a man’s world, and the two boys do run the business. Still, I can try. You see, Mr. Winslow,” she says, “the thing is that where the business is concerned I’m the one who’s small potatoes.”

  Following her out of the sitting room, he says, “This is a beautiful house, Mrs. Blakewell.”

  “My father built it for my husband and me as a wedding present. But it’s too big for one old woman. It needs a man in it.” She smiles at him. “Where are you staying on the island?”

  “The Virgin Isle.”

  “Poor man. You must be miserable. Do you know how many gallons of water it takes to flush a toilet?”

  “I admit it’s something I’ve never thought much about, Mrs. Blakewell.”

  “Five gallons! While the rest of us hoard our fresh water, and use salt water in our toilets, the Virgin Isle Hotel flushes away thousands of gallons of fresh water daily in its Mrs. Joneses. It’s a disgrace.”

  Crossing the drawing room she sees Nellie crouched in a corner, about to plug in her vacuum cleaner, and she gestures to Nellie to delay, please, her vacuuming until the guest has left. Nellie is a good girl, and has been with Edith many years, but one must keep reminding all these girls of certain things, again and again. “If you have time,” she says to Mr. Winslow, “you really should go over and take a look at what’s left of my father’s old house at Sans Souci. It burned in nineteen thirty-five, but the foundations will give you an idea of the size of that place. No one knows what caused the fire. My mother used to claim that the Roosevelt administration burned it down. She said that Mr. Roosevelt’s agents burned it to spite her because she was trying to sell it to the Navy. If you go, you will notice three enormous urns standing on what used to be the terrace. In the old days they were filled with plants and shrubs, and there were four urns. But suddenly, one morning, a few years after the fire, there were only three. Someone must have walked off with one of those urns, though they must have weighed tons apiece. Why would anyone want an iron urn? It’s always interested me.”

  “Yes,” he says, “well—”

  They are at the front door now, and moving out onto the long veranda that stretches the length of Edith Blakewell’s house. “If you are writing a story about us,”
she says, “you mustn’t believe the stories you hear about the Harpers. Gossip travels differently on an island than it does on a land mass, remember that. It travels in circles because it has no place else to go. And there are some people here, a few, who still resent my family. You’ll hear that I am practically the Charlotte Corday of the West Indies, and—” smiling at him, touching his arm “—that I absolutely devour handsome young men like you. Pay it no heed.”

  “Yes. Well, thanks very much, Mrs. Blakewell.”

  Callers are so few; she would like to detain him. Standing on the veranda, she says, “Do you like my garden, Mr. Winslow?”

  “It’s a nice garden. You’ve got a nice view of the sea too.”

  “I never look at the sea,” she says with an impatient gesture. “The sea is just something that takes people away from here. I look at the shore. It is the shores of life that have meaning and importance to me. The shores are where penetration begins, where humanity begins. An island is all shore, all edge, all lip. The sea rushes against it, but the lip fights back. Have you ever thought of that, Mr. Winslow?”

  Running his finger under the band of his collar (poor thing, he looks so hot), he says, “Yes, I guess you’re right.”

  “None of the others ever saw it that way—Mama or Papa, or my brothers, or my husband, or my daughter. Leona—perhaps. But mostly it is my thought.” And then she says absently, addressing the garden, really, more than Mr. Winslow, “And then of course there was the Frenchman.”

  “Who is the Frenchman?”

  “A Frenchman who once worked for my father. One of the flies. One of the swarm.”

  If it is background material Mr. Winslow wants, there it is, a beginning. Perhaps it is not the story he came to get, but it is a story nonetheless and perhaps, without knowing it, Edith is offering it to him out of sympathy for him, tossing the Frenchman to him as one would toss a ball to a bored and panting puppy on a sweltering afternoon. The place seems proper, the garden, and the time, and, inside her, a voice says, “Quick! Go pick up my Frenchman. If you don’t, I’ll not give you another chance.” They would, of course, have to go back into the house and begin all over again, and Leona would have to join them, and hear the story too. But he says, “Well, I’m only concerned in this story with members of the family—” shifting his weight from one foot to the other.