Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  Arch is still smiling at her, his elbow on the bar. He rubs his chin slowly with his big hand. Then he says, “Will you have another drink? I don’t want to shut off that little valve.”

  “All right.” With surprise she sees that the glass in front of her is empty. Wasn’t it just full? Didn’t whatsisname behind the bar just give her a fresh drink, with the old straight-rum-for-you-Miss-Harper gag? Well, perhaps he didn’t. Perhaps it was longer ago than she thinks it was because there’s no doubt that the glass in front of her is empty.

  “Another round for me and Mrs. Paradise,” Arch orders.

  “Oh, it’s an old, old story, isn’t it?” she says quietly. “Hates her mother, loves her father. But oh, she’s something, Arch. You should meet her. No, you shouldn’t. Clever—that’s the trouble. Too clever. Too good at figuring all the angles, knowing just how much another person will believe, how much he won’t.”

  “Which one are you talking about? Your mother or your grandmother?”

  “Oh, Granny’s quite different. Except—her life is so remote from mine. She’s never wanted anything, never been desperate—” (stop, she tells herself, oh, stop, stop, stop. Your thoughts are running away with your tongue, old girl, running away.) “Thank you, Tommy,” she says for the fresh drink. “Let me give you just one more example,” she says to Arch, “of Mother. The time Jimmy and I ran away—Mother’s reaction. There were the usual headlines in the papers—HEIRESS VANISHES; ELOPING HEIRESS FOUND AT SUN VALLEY. Well, do you know what? Mother clipped all those newspaper stories, and put them in a scrapbook! She still has them, and you can catch her looking at them! I mean, to Mother those silly newspaper gossip stories were just wonderful—the nicest thing I ever did to her was get myself in the newspapers that way! And do you know what the most important word in all those stories was? Heiress. The word heiress. She loved that. It established her. It confirmed her—her whole purpose in life, as an heiress-owner, an heiress-producer. Isn’t that interesting?”

  It was interesting. And she had truly never thought of it before. That was the good thing about talking, saying things out loud—it made you perceive, all at once, things you had simply never perceived or considered before. Because, of course, this is what Leona has always been to her mother: not her daughter, but her heiress. How simple. How true.

  “She didn’t like Gordon because Gordon married me properly, in front of a proper little New England justice of the peace, and there was no publicity.”

  “And what ever happened to Jimmy?” he asks her.

  “Jimmy? He happened. It didn’t …” She is suddenly afraid she is going to cry, and she sets her teeth down lightly on the rim of the glass, and a shiver of cold runs through her teeth. A sure-fire way to stop tears, she says to herself, having just discovered it. “He always asked questions. That was his trouble,” she says, referring to Gordon.

  “Who did?”

  “Gordon. Not Jimmy. Gordon asked questions about Jimmy. Wanted to know everything about Jimmy.”

  “About your sex life with him, you mean?”

  “Oh, not so much that. But about that too. Am I getting too tight? Am I talking too much?”

  “Go on. Let off all the steam, buddy. I love hearing you talk.”

  “Do you?” She looks at him doubtfully. “I’m afraid I’m giving away—all my secrets. But oh, he’d ask me such questions as … when we were shopping for furniture he’d ask me, ‘Did you and Jimmy have twin beds?’ And once he said, ‘Did you and Jimmy ever take a shower together?’ I mean, now really! A shower together! I suppose that’s sex. He’d say, ‘Did Jimmy wear pajamas?’ But it wasn’t only things like that. He’d want to know, ‘Did Jimmy take cream and sugar in his coffee?’ ‘Did Jimmy like his steak rare or well done?’ And honestly, Arch, it got to be the creepiest feeling—as though Jimmy were still there, somehow, in the room with us, watching us, taking part in everything Gordon and I did. Or even controlling what we did. It was as though there was a little voodoo doll of me somewhere, and Jimmy, wherever he was, was sticking little pins in it, making me remember.… And meanwhile, poor Jimmy … poor Jimmy was nowhere in sight, and he wasn’t really sticking pins in me at all. Do you see?”

  “Sure,” he says. “I see.”

  “Do you? I’m not sure I see.” She laughs uncertainly. “But anyway, here we are.”

  He smiles at her. “Yes, here we are, buddy. Here we both are.”

  Behind them a voice says, “Hello, you two.”

  She turns and looks up, and Eddie Winslow’s dark face swims above her in the gloomy light of the bar. “Hello, Eddie,” she says.

  Standing up, Arch says, “Won’t you join us, Winslow?”

  Eddie hesitates, looking down at Leona. “No,” he says finally. “No thanks. I’ve got to get to bed. See you,” he says, nodding to them both. He turns and walks away from them through the crowded bar.

  “Eddie …” Leona calls weakly after him. He does not turn.

  Watching. Eddie Winslow’s retreating back, Arch Purdy’s eyes narrow. “You may not know it, buddy,” he says, “but that guy’s nuts about you.”

  She says nothing.

  “It’s written all over his face. Did you notice it? He gets a real muddy look on his face when he looks at you. He’s got it bad. Boy, I’ve never seen a guy who’s got it so bad.” Then he smiles at her. “Look, it’s still early. What do you say we finish these drinks and go on over to the Virgin Isle? See what’s going on over there.”

  “All right. And meanwhile—you do like these pictures.”

  “I do. I told you I did.”

  She gathers up the little pile of transparencies that has been sitting, all the while, in front of her on the bar. She gathers them as tenderly and affectionately in her hands as a child gathers a bright bunch of autumn leaves. “And you can see why I’m so—oh, damn! Look what I’ve done!” One of the little squares has fluttered, leaflike, from her hand and landed in her half-filled glass.

  “Here, let me fish it out.”

  “Oh, how stupid!”

  “Look, it’s all right.” He dries it with his folded handkerchief.

  “It’s not all right! It’ll just pucker up. It’s ruined.” She takes it. “Well, thank God it’s Kirkpatrick. But how could I do such a dumb thing?”

  “I’d put them in my purse if I were you, buddy.”

  “Yes. And of course—if you’d like to look at them again sometime—”

  “Sure,” he says. “Let me get the check, and we’ll be on our way.”

  “I just remembered something Eddie said to me this morning on the beach. He said, ‘At least you can afford these divorces.’”

  He laughs. “Well, can’t you?”

  “Oh, Arch!” she wails. “Not you too!”

  She stands up now, smoothing the front of her dress, her hand resting on the edge of the bar while he waits for his change. Funny, she thinks, that she had completely forgotten that incredible remark of Eddie’s. Don’t tell me, she says to herself, that I’m beginning to have blank spots from the mornings after as well as the nights before. Standing there, she knows that she has already had plenty to drink and, at the same time, she knows that before the evening is over she will have a few more. The blank spots. A vision of tomorrow’s hangover, much like today’s, washes over her, like a flood of filthy water. When you began having the blank spots, it was high time to worry. That was what Jimmy, who was quite a drinker himself, had always said. When he began to have the blank spots, he had cut down on his drinking a bit—yes, he had, and she had admired him for it. I did, Jimmy. Jimbo. He had begun to approach each drink with new caution and respect. There was no doubt, no doubt at all, that they moved—were forced to move, whether they liked it or not, with a drinking group. She still did. How could one ever, if one was born Leona Ware, ever hope to move in a nondrinking group? Move to Topeka, Kansas, where ladies had church suppers and worked for the P.T.A.? No, it wouldn’t matter. Even in Topeka, Kansas, being born Leona Ware,
she would find herself with Topeka, Kansas’ drinking group. It would be the same, only smaller. There was no such thing as the grass being greener, anywhere. It was, would be, the same grass wherever she went. She had portable grass. Her own little plot that she set down around her, everywhere.

  The dismalness of this realization sinks in, with “Be honest, be honest, face facts” repeating in her head. “How can you talk about your mother’s cheating when you cheat too? Not on your husbands, but on yourself; cheat by telling yourself that you have possibilities for changing which you don’t have at all.” Once, Jimmy had gone on the wagon for a little while, and at the time she had asked him, “Do you really think you’ll never take another drink as long as you live?” She had asked it quite seriously, wanting to know. But it was an awfully young and innocent question, and he had laughed at her and said, “Of course not.” And she had liked him for that answer. Be honest. Face facts. Well, here is a fact: She has already, again tonight, had too much to drink. Tomorrow, no doubt, all that she is thinking and perceiving now will be a blank spot.

  Leaving the bar, she leans on his arm. “Where are we going now?”

  “To the Virgin Isle, remember?”

  “Oh, yes.” And then, with a faint smile, she says, “How can you trust a woman who’s had three divorces?”

  He laughs. “Well, who said I trusted you?” he says.

  “A lady who lives in a shoe, who’s had so many husbands she doesn’t know what to do. A lady Bluebeard. Or what am I?”

  “You’re Mrs. Paradise,” he says.

  Returning to the Morristown house for the months of August and September was never exactly like coming home. It was more like checking into a large hotel. Edith had no regularly assigned room there, since it was a large house—the largest and most ostentatious of all her father’s residences. Her room was where she was put. “Now where shall we put you?” her mother would say. The second and third floors were mostly bedrooms; they were similar in decor and furnishings, since all the furniture had been purchased at the same time. It made no difference to Edith which room she had; they were equally impersonal. She would unpack her trunks and suitcases and hatboxes, her French traveling clock, her silver-backed combs and brushes and little mirrors—scatter her itinerant possessions around the room and try to make it feel like her own. But it never really did. It was merely a resting place in which she was a guest entitled to certain privileges, the luxury and hospitality of the house, permission to ring the servants’ bells that were nested in the moldings of the doors, and to order her breakfast on a tray. As Edith thinks of it, it was like this in the Paris house too; the atmosphere was the same. Those places were always “the Paris house” and “the Morristown house”; only the house in St. Thomas was really home and contained a room that truly belonged to her.

  Since arriving on the Mauretania that summer, Edith’s mother had been working very hard at “pulling herself together.” She had decided, in the process, to try to re-establish herself as a social figure, or at least a woman of importance in that corner of New Jersey—a chore which she had neglected for the past few years. She began to plan a series of large parties. (“Good for her,” Mary Miles had pronounced. “It keeps her busy. The devil finds work for idle hands.”)

  Dolly Harper made an oddly accurate comment about the American social structure of those days when she said, once, to Edith, “In this country there is a distinct society. In Europe, there isn’t any, except for royalty. Anybody who has money can be accepted in European society, but in America one must work hard to be taken in.” And she had added, “Always remember that you are second-generation rich. This will make it easier for you than it is for me.”

  Whether her mother ever succeeded in penetrating the fixity of New York, or even Morristown, society is, Edith thinks now, open to doubt. Still, there were then—just as there are now—people who were glad to accept invitations to parties, and the invitations went out. Golf had been sweeping the country for a number of years, and by 1908 it was a popular sport for women. Edith purchased her first golf clubs that summer in Morristown, and started taking lessons. Golf, at least, offered an escape from the afternoons of riding with her father—and the terror of the jumps. But her mother’s parties, she soon learned, were being given largely for her benefit, and her attendance at all of them was expected.

  “What did you think of the Horsfall boy?” her mother asked her after one of them.

  “Which one was he?”

  “The blond one, who played crokinole with your father after dinner.”

  “Oh, he seemed nice enough.”

  “They say he has the world at his feet. And he’s handsome.”

  “He’s a bit of a prig.”

  “He’s a Horsfall.”

  “That’s the trouble.”

  “Harlan Horsfall comes to my parties. The Horsfalls accept us.”

  “Yes, but I find him dull.”

  “It’s wrong to have too high a standard where men are concerned,” she said. “The higher your standard is, the fewer men there are who can possibly meet them. You must not expect perfection.”

  “I don’t expect perfection.”

  “You’re too eligible a girl to go on much longer without seriously thinking of each man you meet as a prospective husband,” she said. “And you can afford to be a little choosy. But you can’t let too many opportunities pass you by. One doesn’t stay eligible forever, alas.” Then, after a moment, she said, “Of course you realize now that the other thing would never have worked out. It would have ruined us, all of us, everywhere—in St. Thomas and everywhere. The heart must be ruled by the head in such matters.”

  Then, a few days later, her mother said, “I am considering inviting Mrs. Blakewell to tea.”

  “Oh, Mama!” Edith said. “Why do you put yourself up against such things?”

  “Against what things?”

  “Against the humiliation of having her turn you down flat, in the most snubbing way possible.”

  “Hmm. Is that what you think will happen?”

  “I know it will happen.”

  “She may need me more than I need her,” her mother said with a cryptic look.

  “Nonsense. I’ll make you a wager that she never even acknowledges.”

  Her mother considered this. “Very well, what do you wager?”

  “My pearl necklace.”

  “No, I won’t wager you that. I’ll make you a ladylike wager of one dollar. I’ll wager you one dollar that she not only accepts, but accepts rather promptly, and that by the end of our tea she has asked me to call her Nancy.”

  “Dream on, Mama.”

  “Because her son, you see, has already accepted my invitation for the weekend.”

  “What?”

  “Charles Blakewell is coming to Morristown to visit us the weekend after next. After that weekend, my invitation will go out to his mother.”

  “Why did you ask him here?”

  “For you, of course. He liked you. He asked you to dance.”

  “Mama, will you stop trying to run my life?” Edith had walked out of the room and seized, angrily, her bag of golf clubs from the rack in the hall and walked out the door onto the summer lawn.

  Her first ball arced straight and high against the sky and sank far beyond the curve of the lawn. The excellence of the shot had exhilarated her and pushed all her hot anger at her mother into the past. Lugging her clubs, she walked down across the grass, which fell in a series of sloping terraces away from the house, in search of the ball.

  When she got to the spot, behind a clump of poplars, where she believed the ball had landed and was walking slowly, poking with her club through the taller grass that grew there, she all at once found herself staring down upon—indeed, almost stepping upon—the prone figure of a man lying in the grass, and she screamed.

  He rolled over immediately and sat up. Her first impression of him was that he looked very rough and unshaven, wearing a faded blue shirt and denim trouse
rs, and that he must be a tramp or drunk who had wandered onto the place. She dropped her bag of clubs, and began to run.

  But he called after her, “Are you Edith?”

  She stopped and looked back at him. He was standing now, and smiling. “Are you Edith?” he said again. And there was something in the way he pronounced her name that made her guess that this must be the Frenchman who, with his wife, she had been told, had been given quarters in the gatehouse.

  “Are you Papa’s Frenchman?” she asked him.

  He laughed, stooped and picked up her golf bag, and walked toward her. “I am Louis Bertin,” he said.

  “How do you do,” Edith said, and the formality of her words sounded foolishly hollow there in the tall grass. “Yes, I’m Edith.”

  “I startled you.”

  “And I startled you,” she said, “—Monsieur.”

  He yawned. “I was taking a nap. I’m a very lazy man. May I carry this bag for you?”

  They started back up across the grass toward the house. He was a small man, scarcely taller than she, but wirily built. He slung her gold bag over his shoulder with ease and hooked an arm through the strap. He was, she guessed, in his middle or late thirties, but his step was springy and youthful, and his face was altogether extraordinary. It was a face that was somehow instantly familiar, and yet totally strange to her—a thin, almost sallow face, with heavy-lidded gray eyes. His cheekbones were high and prominent and he was not, she saw now, ill-shaven, but his cheeks were hollow and dark. It was an ascetic face, a monkish face.

  “I was looking for my ball,” she said. “But I guess it’s gone for good.”

  “Where did you shoot from?”

  “Up there, from the edge of the terrace,” she pointed.

  “Not a bad shot. You’re not a bad golfer.”

  “I’m sorry my instructor couldn’t see it. If I tell her about it, she won’t believe it. Are you comfortable in the gatehouse?” she asked him.