Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Going to ask me in?”

  “I can’t, Arch. Granny’s home.” She opens the car door and slides out across the leather seat.

  “Hey—wait a sec.”

  Closing the door, she leans in through the open window. “What?”

  “Haven’t you forgotten something?” He opens the door on his side, gets out, and walks around the car toward her.

  Leona checks for her bag and gloves. “What is it?”

  He starts up the walk toward the gate.

  “You can’t come in. Honestly. It’s awfully late, and Granny’s—”

  “I’d just like to take a look at this place.”

  She hesitates. In the darkness she cannot see his face. “Well—you can come into the garden, but just for a minute. But not in the house.”

  She unlocks the gate with a key on a velvet ribbon.

  “This is quite a place,” he says.

  “It’s one of the last of the big old places. And when Granny goes—”

  He moves after her through the dark garden where, lying on the dry grass, someone has left a set of lawn bowls. “Ouch!” he says, as his foot strikes one of the bowls.

  “Ssh! Granny’s sleeping.”

  “You really care about this old lady, don’t you?”

  “Once, years ago, she did something awfully kind for me. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he says. “That’s always enough.” His arm circles her waist, and he pulls her to him.

  Arching her back against the pressure of his hand she faces him across the darkness and shakes her head very rapidly back and forth. “No,” she says. “Please, no. There’s nothing for you here. There’s nothing for anybody. I’m sorry. Please—”

  But he continues to hold her and then, his other hand cupping the back of her head, he pulls, rather roughly, her face to his and presses his mouth against hers.

  Mutely, while he kisses her, she goes on shaking her head, back and forth, keeping her body rigidly stiff and her lips unyielding. And, for some queer reason, she is now thinking for the second time today of Edouardo Para-Diaz. She had banished him to the moon, but he would not stay put. What was his one kind thing? She tries to remember. Her mind fills with the doorways of the villa at Alcalá de Chisvert, and he enters through the Moorish archway, a figure slim and emphatic in his white shirt and tight black trousers. He stands there, and all the other details immediately supply themselves: the purple Mediterranean air, the juniper-scented wind, mimosa and talisman roses in a gold bowl on the piano by the door, the sour-plum tree outside the window, the rustle of waves on the beach. Neither of them is aware any longer of the man who is kissing Leona. Edouardo stands there, smirking at her, but he will not speak.

  Edith has heard voices in the garden, and gotten out of bed and gone to a window. What she sees, in a very unsatisfactory glimmer of moonlight that comes through the trees, is Leona in her pale flowered dress, and a thick-set man in a blue blazer and white canvas trousers. The man is unfamiliar to her; it is certainly not Mr. Winslow. They move about the garden, where the lawn bowls have been left out, scattered in all directions on the grass. Edith hears Leona whisper something, and the man puts his arm around her, pulling her to him. Edith does not want to watch, but does watch, and the man kisses her while Leona stands very still, her arms at her sides, her head tipped backward.

  Now a few more words pass between them, and the man releases Leona. She begins walking up and down and back and forth, slowly across the grass, between the scattered lawn bowls. She seems totally intent on this odd task, weaving a path in and out among the bowls. She moves gracefully and silently, without pausing. The mood between them has changed.

  “What’re you doing, buddy?” Edith hears him ask her.

  “It’s a game. Don’t you know this game? It’s called go in and out the windows. You go in, and you go out. See? In … and out. And you mustn’t touch—”

  “You know,” the man says, “you’re a cool girl. But just don’t let yourself turn into an iceberg. Watch out for that.”

  But she does not acknowledge hearing this remark, and continues her slow, zigzagging path. The breeze smells of dew, and the night smells of nicotiana and jasmine, and in the middle of all that dark and scented tropic quiet, Edith thinks of the streets of large cities in the icy cold, of newspapers and crumpled Kleenex blowing through the canyons between old buildings, of the steamed windows and smoky lights of restaurants with the smell of beer emanating from their doorways, of empty apartments in the reflected glare of street lamps. Oh, what will become of her? she thinks. She sees the man turn quickly and walk out of the garden. She hears the gate close behind him, and his car start and drive away. Leona is alone.

  Then, as Edith watches, Leona does a strange thing. She suddenly falls to her knees on the lawn and, bending over, her dark hair tumbling across her face, she digs the fingers of both hands hard into the dry grass. Clutching and pulling at the grass she rips up two handfuls, then lets them fall. Then her fingers claw and tear at the grass again, pulling it up by the roots, clenching it in two more small hysterical fistfuls, then scattering the grass, with a sob, again.

  Edith puts her hands on the sill and calls softly out to her. “Leona—come to bed now.”

  Leona sits dead still, then lifts her head. Her hair falls back and her pale face looks up at Edith. “Why are you spying on me?” she cries. “Why can’t you leave me alone? Why can’t everybody leave me alone?”

  Five

  Edith Blakewell returns to her bed in the dark room, a convicted spy. But you have always been a spy, she reminds herself: always. The electric clock, its hands respectfully bowed at half past three, purrs on her bedside table and emits a faint, sulphurous glow. Looking at the clock, Edith is suddenly presented with an astonishing thought—astonishing because it is cheap and unworthy and yet, like all unpleasant things, there is something fascinating about it. She toys with this nasty, charming notion. Suppose she told Leona she is dying?

  Could she, she wonders, bring herself to employ a trick like that? And yet, if she did, wouldn’t Leona at least be willing to talk to her a little, open up to her a little? Wouldn’t Leona come to her, take her in her arms, and say, and be—And be what?

  “And become my property again.” Is that the answer? No. “And come to your senses, young lady, and start acting your age.”

  Spying was the word Leona used. Years ago, with her father’s old field glasses slung over her shoulder, Edith would go for long walks up Signal Hill, on the pretext of bird-watching but sometimes to meddle, vicariously, in the affairs of her household. She would perch herself on a flat rock on the hillside, and survey the house down there among the coconut palms and the sea-grapes: Nellie, at the kitchen door—past sixty, poor thing, but still with the faith of a girl in her charms—flirting with a grocery boy, often letting him kiss her passionately and touch her intimately, sometimes asking him in. Or she would watch Cyrus, an old man now and now one of her gardeners, put down his trowel and stretch out on his back under a tree, scratching his stomach with a slow, disinterested hand. Or, for a change of scene, she would train the glasses on her bedroom windows to watch her laundress tiptoe in, open the cedar closet, and take Edith’s stone marten cape off its hanger and put it on, dancing and posing with it barefoot in front of the pier glass.

  She did not always spy. Sometimes she would simply watch the sea, and the huge clumsy pelicans rising from the water and curving through the sky like boomerangs, and the ducks rocking on the waves in the lagoons, and the pigeons, at dusk, rising from their feeding-places in the woods to their nests in the mangrove trees. And once, turning her glasses from the birds to survey the harbor, she had suddenly seen the Frenchman, Louis Bertin. He was sitting on the pier of the old West India Company coaling wharf, smoking one of his small cigars. She could see Louis in every detail; the thin nose, the hooded gray eyes. Then a curious thing happened. He raised his head, shaded his eyes with one hand, and looked directly at Edi
th. With a gasp, she lowered the glasses. He was now invisible; she could barely make out the outlines of the coaling sheds. But when she raised the glasses again his eyes still met hers, and their look had been so exact, so appraising, that she couldn’t believe that he was not watching her, though it could not have been possible. At the time, the experience unsettled her. It was as though there was no such thing as privacy, no places where snoops such as she could hide.

  But about two months before Leona arrived Edith had a fall. The fall frightened her more than anything Alan Osborn has told her about what is going on inside her, and the fall did not happen, thank goodness, or a hillside but in her own house. A perfectly ordinary and familiar little Oriental runner that extends from her bedroom to her bathroom door suddenly and without warning betrayed her, and moved. That was it. The rug moved. She lay for a number of minutes on the floor where she had fallen, certain that her hip was broken, and seeing with dreadful clarity the brittleness of the bones that held her poor body together. Then, when she decided that the hip was perhaps not broken, she got to her feet and managed to get to a chair where she sat, feeling ill. She never mentioned the fall to Alan or to anyone else, even though, in the weeks after it, the most she could do was move painfully from chair to chair, and the stairs presented a twice-daily Everest, down in the morning, up at night. Now, whenever she approaches the treacherous rug, she stares at it. She has not moved it, or removed it, since the fall, but she and the rug now eye each other with mutual suspicion and distrust. From an old friend it has become a capricious enemy. Since the fall, there have been no more spying walks with the field glasses.

  I spy, she thinks to herself in the dark bedroom, only on what pertains to me, Leona. Furthermore, from spying I always find out something.

  There is, she realizes now, a ritual quality to these thoughts of hers; she has been reciting them to try to figure out exactly what she feels about Leona now, after seeing her down there, on her knees, gouging up the lawn with her fingernails. Edith finds herself mentally walking a very thin line between pity for Leona and indignation. An extremely thin line separates sympathy from exasperation, sorrow from anger. Edith is certainly sorry that Leona had a bad time of it with her last husband, and she is sure that getting a divorce has its harrowing side. But plenty of other people get divorces and manage to survive; movie stars get divorces the way other people get colds. For Leona to be upset is one thing; for her to give in to emotional self-indulgence is quite another. We Harpers, Edith reminds herself, do not succumb to moods and melancholy like that because our roots reach down into hard, dry West Indies soil, and our hides have been toughened by the endless sunshine, which is why we—we Harper women, especially—are long-lived. Yes, she has a good mind to tell Leona this. We Harper women, allowing for exceptions, are not softies. We do not dissolve to jelly at a crisis. Our flesh may ache, but it doesn’t tremble. We do not let down the side, even when we are all alone. We endure the pain rather than swallow the pill. “The tropics do strange things to some people,” she remembers her father saying. “But not to the strong. Only to the weak.”

  Now Edith hears Leona coming up the stairs, and moving along the upstairs hall. “Leona!” she calls. But there is no answer. She hears Leona’s door open, then close with a click. “Leona!” she calls again. “I want to speak to you.” Perhaps Leona hasn’t heard her. Well, then she will find the note and be in in a minute. She gives Leona a minute by the glowing clock to find the note, read it, and come in. Then two minutes; then three. Is it possible, she then asks herself, that Leona is simply going to ignore the note? “Leona!”

  “Please leave me alone,” Leona whispers to her empty bedroom. She picks up the note on her pillow, quickly reads it, and crumples it up into a tight, fierce ball. E.B.H.B. What does that first B stand for, she wonders? Borgia, perhaps. She tosses the crumpled note on the bed and goes to her dressing table and lights a cigarette.

  “Leona!”

  “Please,” she repeats softly to the mirror. “Not now.” She puts the cigarette down in a tiny ashtray. Then she returns to the bed, smooths out the note, and reads it again. She goes back to the dressing table, picks up her cigarette, and stands there for several minutes, deciding.

  Hearing Leona’s tap on the door, Edith sits straight up in bed, and says “Come in!”

  Opening the door, Leona says, “Hi, Granny.”

  “Now see here, Leona,” Edith says to the dark silhouette in the doorway. “I was not spying on you! If I hear strange voices in my garden at three-thirty in the morning, don’t I have a right to get up and see what’s going on? If I see a strange man in my garden at this hour, don’t I have the right to wonder what he’s doing there and who he is? Who is he? May I say I didn’t like his looks? Do you realize I’ve been waiting up half the night to talk to you? And what makes you think you can come in, and bring strangers in, at all hours of the night? I do not run a hotel, Leona. Come in here and close the door. I want to talk to you.”

  “Granny, I—”

  “And what were you doing down there, on your knees like a washerwoman pulling up my grass?”

  Leona’s hand rests on the door frame. “I dropped an earring,” she says. “I was looking for it.”

  “I see! And who was that man? What was he doing here?”

  There is another pause. “He’s a friend of mine. He’s interested in old houses,” Leona says finally. “I was showing him the garden.”

  “I see!” Edith says again. Interested in old houses, she thinks, and also in young ladies. “Baloney!” she says, reaching up and snapping on the lamp beside her bed. “Now come in. There’s something I want to tell you.”

  Leona closes the bedroom door and leans against it. “I’m sorry, Granny. Oh, please don’t be mad at me. I’ve had so many people mad at me tonight,” and she laughs a little helpless laugh.

  “This is not a laughing matter, Leona,” Edith says. “I’m very upset.” She slaps the bed sharply, twice. “Sit down. And, as my mother used to say, ‘Being sorry doesn’t help.’”

  Carrying her cigarette, Leona crosses the room and sits down on the edge of Edith’s bed. “Use this,” Edith says, lifting her empty milk glass and extracting the saucer from under it. “I don’t have any ashtrays in here.”

  “I didn’t mean to yell at you, Granny. But you startled me.”

  “Never mind that,” Edith says. “Your Uncle Harold called tonight.”

  “Oh,” Leona says.

  “Yes. I wonder if you have any idea what he called about?”

  Leona shakes her head.

  “It was about your young friend Winslow. Whom you had me see.”

  “Oh,” Leona says, with an odd little sidelong smile. “So we come full circle.”

  “You seem to think there’s something amusing about this!” Edith says, her voice rising, “Well, if you’d been given the rough edge of Harold’s tongue the way I was, you wouldn’t smile. I should not have seen that young man, Leona! You should not have asked me to see him. That man had no right—”

  “Granny, please, I—”

  “Let me finish! I want you to go to Mr. Winslow tomorrow, and tell him that he is to write nothing—not even a word—about any of the Harpers. Tell him I have changed my mind about everything I said. Do you understand that, Leona? Do you?”

  Leona sits very still, her shoulders hunched, on the edge of the bed, and Edith wonders if perhaps she has been too harsh with her. Now that Edith’s eyes are becoming accustomed to the light she studies Leona’s face, which looks flushed and smudged, the features somehow blurred, and Leona’s eyes look tired. Leona’s cigarette has gone out now and, in the silence that follows, Edith watches as Leona tries to get it going again. The match wavers out, and Leona tosses it into the wastebasket—a careless habit she has—and she strikes a second match, and Edith has an odd thought that this may be her most enduring picture of Leona: not young, not laughing, not glowing out of Degas, but frowning, hunched, occupied with a cigarette. Th
en she remembers that, after all, it is late, Leona probably is tired, and certainly wherever she has been she has had a cocktail or two. Normally, Edith thinks a cocktail improves Leona—as one tends to improve most people. But tonight Leona looks almost unwell. She has the cigarette lighted now, and she inhales deeply.

  Edith pushes the saucer a little closer to her across the bed and says in a gentler voice, “It was no fun, dear, being spoken to the way your great-uncle spoke to me tonight. But unfortunately he’s right. We do not want publicity. There are plenty of things Mr. Winslow could say about us that wouldn’t look well in print. My father wasn’t exactly a saint, you know. And what about your mother and Perry? Or yourself? What if he chose to say something about your divorces?”

  “Granny,” Leona says, “that isn’t the story he’s after.”

  “Which brings me to my next question. What is he after?”

  “It’s a story about—Uncle Harold, I guess.”

  “Is Harold in some sort of difficulties, Leona?”

  “Granny, I don’t know. Honestly I don’t. Eddie seems to think so—that’s what he wants to find out!”

  Edith takes a deep breath. “Financial difficulties, Leona?”

  “That’s what Eddie seems to think.”

  “That’s impossible!” Edith says. “Your Mr. Winslow could be sued for saying things like that! How could Harold be in any financial difficulties? He couldn’t!” And then: “Could he?”

  “Granny, Eddie told me all sorts of crazy things—about the business—about—”

  “Then we’ve got to stop him! Tell me what he said. If there’s something funny going on with Harold and the business I have a right to know.”

  “Oh,” Leona cries, “who cares about Uncle Harold! I’m so sick of talking about him. To hell with Uncle Harold!”

  “Harold is Harold,” Edith says sharply, leaning forward and gripping Leona’s arm. “He’s my brother! He’s a powerful man. He controls—”

  “I know. He controls all the money! And where would this family be without the lousy money!”