Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Yes. The two boys were born—later.” She laughed again. “By that time, you knew what rum was, didn’t you dear?”

  Her mother went on. “Now to be sure,” she said, “Edith absolutely hated St. Thomas at first. It was so much unlike what she’d been used to, you see. But now, of course, she absolutely adores it, don’t you, Edith?” Without waiting for an answer, she continued, “Your dear son really must visit us down there, Mrs. Blakewell. Honestly, I cannot tell you what a pleasure it was to have that nice young man as our houseguest last weekend in Morristown. Edith and he got on so well together, and my husband and I enjoyed him too. I do hope he’ll be able to visit us again—so we can get to know him even better. But Charles and Edith had so much fun together, didn’t you, dear? They rode, they walked. Of course we keep horses in St. Thomas too. Do you think, Mrs. Blakewell, that your son would like to visit us this winter at Sans Souci?”

  Mrs. Blakewell had a rattling laugh. “Well, Mrs. Harper, that would be entirely up to him,” she said. “He’s very much his own man. I wouldn’t dream of predicting what he’d like to do.”

  “Oh, but I’m thinking, Mrs. Blakewell, of how you must need him here. Especially now, these days, since your dear husband passed on.”

  “I refuse to tie my son down,” she said. “He is to have his own life, and not be saddled with me.”

  The woman was handsome, Edith thought, in a curious and perhaps not so formidable way. There was much of her in her son’s face. She looks, Edith thought, the way she talks: cynical, bitterly witty, mocking, self-assured, dry.

  “The only thing I cannot adjust to in St. Thomas is black servants,” her mother was saying. “I simply cannot get used to being waited upon by black faces. They look so fierce. And there is an element among them that is really quite dangerous, you know, and they cause my husband no end of trouble in the canefields. One tries to weed out the bad element when selecting people for the house. But of course they all steal, and they’re lazy. But,” and she laughed, “what can one do?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Blakewell said.

  “That’s why I’m personally glad my husband has so many other business interests, and that the sugar and the spirits part of it have become relatively minor. Still, we must all have sugar, mustn’t we? Why, I imagine there may be a bit of our sugar right there in that exceptionally handsome sugar bowl of yours.”

  “I shouldn’t be at all surprised.”

  “Well,” Dolly Harper said, putting down her cup, “we really must be going, Edith. And I can’t tell you, Mrs. Blakewell, what an enormous pleasure it has been to meet you, after meeting your charming son. And I shall certainly issue him an invitation to come to Sans Souci this winter, and hope that he’ll be able to accept. And perhaps, in the meantime, I shall be able to persuade you to visit me in Morristown?”

  “I should enjoy that, Mrs. Harper,” Mrs. Blakewell said.

  While the maid was helping them into their wraps, Mrs. Blakewell stepped over to Edith and smiled. “You’ve kept admirably mum while we two old ladies chattered,” she said. “I congratulate you.”

  “Thank you. I’ve enjoyed—just listening.”

  Mrs. Blakewell put her face close of Edith’s and tilted her chin up at her. “Tell me,” she said in her hoarse whisper, and Edith could feel the warm, dry breath against her cheek, “do you like my son?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s a nice man, don’t you think? A good person?”

  “Oh … yes. Yes, I do think so.”

  Mrs. Blakewell laughed. “You are a little waif,” she said. “But I like you.”

  “I can’t thank you enough again, Mrs. Blakewell,” Edith’s mother was saying. “You were too nice to have us.”

  And Edith heard Mrs. Thomas Blakewell say, “Please call me Nancy, dear.”

  In the car, going home, her mother said thoughtfully, “They say that when she travels she goes by private railway car—someone else’s car. She takes a house in Newport for the season. A borrowed house. She doesn’t have a fraction of the money I have, but she’s one of the great social leaders of New York. Royalty beats a path to her door. She doesn’t do it with money. She does it with something else—a je ne sais quoi.…”

  The following weekend Charles arrived in Morristown again. Edith was standing on the back lawn, with her golf clubs, practicing her chip shots, and she saw him come out into the terrace. Seeing her, he leaped over the azalea hedge and came running down the lawn to her—running with that particular, unemphatic grace he always had right up until the end. “There’s a conspiracy against us,” he said when he reached her. “They’re marshaling their forces—the older generation.”

  “What do they want us to do?”

  “We’re being put together. If we’re not careful, before we know it we’ll be man and wife.”

  “Oh,” she said casually. “Do you really think so?”

  “Come on, let’s walk.” They started slowly across the grass. Glancing at her briefly out of the corner of his eye, he took her hand. “You charmed the pins off my mother. Did you know that?”

  “I think you simply told her to be nice to us.”

  He winked at her. “You think too much,” he said. “The point is, she liked you. She wouldn’t say so if she didn’t.”

  They walked in silence for a while. “Well, what about it?” he asked. “This conspiracy.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Your mother asked me to St. Thomas this winter.”

  She nodded.

  “I could refuse the invitation. Do you want me to refuse it, Edith?”

  She hesitated. “No,” she said. “I don’t want you to refuse it.”

  “Do you want me to accept it, then?”

  “Yes.”

  He pointed. “Let’s go this way.” He led her behind a huge copper beech with spreading branches. “Nobody can see us here,” he whispered, taking her shoulders, and turning her to face him.

  She touched his sleeve. “Why should you want to get involved with me? Meredith Harper’s daughter.”

  “I’ve thought about you all week long,” he said. “Have you thought about me?”

  She looked up at him anxiously. “Yes.”

  “Well, then?” He drew her closer.

  But something, some movement in the distance, caught her eye, and she turned. “Oh,” she said, pulling away from him.

  His look followed hers. “Who—him? He can’t see us, can he? Who is that fellow, anyway?”

  “Just—just a man who works for my father. A Frenchman.”

  “You’re shivering.”

  “Let’s walk back this way,” she said. They turned and walked back slowly toward the house.

  And then, when their return to St. Thomas was just a week away, Mrs. Thomas Blakewell came to tea in Morristown, and Charles came with her to spend the weekend. Edith’s father joined them, and the five sat on stiff little gilt chairs in her mother’s drawing room while her mother, in a silk brocade from Molyneux, poured.

  There was a boyish exuberance about Charles that seemed more and more striking to her, the better she got to know him. It had nothing to do with silliness, but was a way his strong-jawed face had of going quickly from repose to animation, a quickness of response. He seemed to take small, spontaneous joys from the reactions of other people. Clearly, he was enjoying the tea. He had a way of holding up his hand, leaning forward eagerly to interrupt the conversation when he wanted to make a point; he interrupted, that is, without really interrupting—by sitting forward with that hand raised until he was given a chance to speak. Edith, watching him make a gesture like that, found that it took her breath away and made her a little dizzy, and she decided it was easier not to watch him. She listened as he laughed, very heartily, at the end of her mother’s Mama-what-is-rum story, and, when she sensed that his eyes had turned to look at her, her eyes were on her teacup.

  After tea, her father said, “You ladies can amuse yourselves for a while, I imagine. Mr. Blakew
ell and I would like a talk.” Charles looked up, startled, and then nodded. The two men went into the library and the doors were closed. Edith’s mother continued talking animatedly to Mrs. Blakewell, and Edith excused herself and went out into the garden.

  She sat on the edge of the unplumbed fountain, where the three bronze nymphs played in nonexistent splashes. The days were growing shorter now. The sun was already low in the sky.

  Charles came out of the house, about half an hour later, and found her there. His face was grave. He sat down beside her without speaking.

  “What did you and Papa talk about?” she asked him.

  “I probably shouldn’t ask you this—but I’ll ask it anyway,” he said. “Your father. Is he—sane?”

  “Why, I don’t know!”

  “The business about all the money he’s made. I’ve never heard anybody talk about money that way. I’ll say this for your father—he doesn’t believe in hiding his light under a bushel.”

  Edith had laughed. “No,” she said. “But I think he’s sane. He’s just—Meredith Harper.”

  In a different voice, he said, “There’ll be no objection if we marry.”

  She said nothing.

  “Queer. The queerest position I’ve ever been in. Having him offer you to me before I’d even asked you. I did plan to ask you, you see.”

  She continued to sit very still in the growing darkness, her hands in her lap.

  “Will you marry me, Edith? I love you.”

  “But I’m not sure I love you,” she said.

  And it was true. She wanted to add, now, “I’m afraid it’s only passion.” But the words sounded so foolish, so pompous, as they formed in her head that she couldn’t utter them. Mademoiselle Laric, in her day, had talked to Edith a good deal about passion, explaining its difference from “love.” The two things, she had said, were incompatible forces; one was misleading the other true. And Edith had begun to think that her feeling for Charles must be passion, the false one, and she wished ardently that someone like Mademoiselle could be there to help her decide. She had thought a great deal, in the past weeks, about her feelings for Charles, and surely there was something rather unseemly, a little primitive, about the way she had begun to think of him. She had had a thoroughly primitive dream about him, and certainly this was a sign. The books were all there, she had found them in her father’s library, and she had searched through all of them for a clue. But Doctor Sigmund Freud, whom everyone had begun saying had answers to everything, had hardly a word to say on the subject of passion. And though Doctor Freud had a number of things to say on a number of matters, she might have wished he would be a bit more specific about certain things. She had thought, again and again, of speaking to her mother, or to Mary Miles. But, too timorous and squeamish, she had not done so. “Is there such a thing as a woman having too much passion?” she wanted to ask someone. But she had asked no one anything at all.

  “Well,” Charles said quietly beside her, “you go back to St. Thomas next week. Will you think about it? And perhaps, when I come—”

  “I’ll think about it, Charles.”

  “If you still want me to come.”

  “I do want you to come. Very much.”

  “Good,” he said. He stood up and looked down at her.

  “Charles,” she said quickly, “I just want to tell you that if you hadn’t come here that first weekend when you did, I don’t know what I would have done. Because just a few days before you came, a terrible, awful thing happened—one of the worst things that’s ever happened to me. If you hadn’t come when you did, I don’t know if I’d even be alive. Because I thought of killing myself. It was something I did that was all my fault. That’s all I want to say now. It’s made me—not sure.”

  Bending, he kissed her. He started off quickly through the dark garden.

  Leaning forward, she called, “Charles?”

  He stopped and turned. “Yes?”

  He was coming toward her again, and so she had to say it; she couldn’t see his face clearly in the gloom, which made saying it easier. “Charles,” she whispered, “your room is—just down the hall from mine. No one sleeps in the bedrooms between.”

  He stood very still beside her.

  “Perhaps … I mean—perhaps, later on, when the house is quiet …”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “My door won’t be locked. I—I won’t be asleep—”

  “Yes,” he repeated.

  “Unless—”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless you think it’s wrong. Unless you think it’s wrong for me to—feel the way I do. Then, in that case—no. No, because I think it is wrong. No. We’d better not.”

  “No,” he said in a husky voice. “I don’t think it’s wrong.”

  There were tears in her eyes and she was lucky to have the darkness. She tried to speak, and couldn’t. “Then—” she began at last, trying to make her voice sound gay and offhand, as casual as possible, “then—”

  “Then I’ll be there,” he said. He touched her shoulder briefly and was gone, and she sat there, bunched, huddled, on the fountain’s lip, feeling that if she didn’t hug herself tightly her whole being would fly apart.

  The bar is called The Stick of Dynamite, and it is the fourth such place Leona has visited in her search for Eddie. Its interior is redly dark, illuminated with rushlights on the small, crowded tables, and she stands at the door, peering into the smoky, noisy room. In one corner, a Negro is playing slow, almost inaudible blue piano. A waiter approaches her, but she shakes her head. “I’m looking for a friend,” she says. Then she sees him, or rather the familiar shape of his back. He is sitting alone, at the far end of the long bar. She pushes her way between the tables. A group of the gay boys looks up at her and giggles coyly, and then, as she murmurs, “Excuse me … excuse me …” between the backs of chairs, a man reaches out and touches her arm. “Hi, buddy,” he says.

  “Oh, hello, Arch.” He is with a large party of men and women, who turn their heads and look up at her with tanned, disinterested faces.

  “Sit down a minute. Meet my friends.”

  “I can’t, Arch.”

  “Looking for your friend Winslow? He’s at the bar. Drowning his sorrows.”

  “Yes.”

  “Look,” he says, standing up and separating himself from the others, “about the other night. I’m a blunt guy. I say what’s on my mind. I believe in the direct approach, in calling a spade a spade. When I want to go to bed with a girl, I say let’s go to bed. Don’t hold it against me. Don’t blame me for being the kind of guy I am.”

  “No,” she says, “I don’t blame you, Arch.”

  “I don’t hold it against you for running off on me. That’s the way you are. This is the way I am.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then are we still buddies?”

  “I guess so,” she smiles.

  He nods in the direction of the table behind him. “This bunch of swingers wants me to take off in their boat for Montego tomorrow. But I’m not going. I’m going to stick around here for a few more days. So maybe we can get together again. Give it some thought.”

  “Yes. Well, good night, Arch.”

  Grinning, he shakes her hand. “‘Night, buddy. See? I still like you.”

  She continues toward the bar. She sits down in the empty stool next to Eddie and says gently, “Hey.… Hey, remember me?”

  He swivels on the stool, his drink cupped in his hands, and gives her a cloudy look. “Oh,” he says, “it’s you. How are you this lovely night?”

  “Why haven’t you called me, Eddie? I’ve left all sorts of messages at your hotel.”

  “Yeah. I got some messages. All sorts of messages. Buy you a drink?”

  “All right.”

  He lifts his glass and drains it. Then he slides his empty glass across the bar and says, “Two more. Two Scotches. A pair.” Then, turning to her, he says, “Scotch okay for you?”

  “Sure,” she says w
ith a little smile. “Scotch is fine.” And then, “What have you been doing, Eddie? I’ve been worried.”

  “Doing? Me?” He gives her another dim look. “Well, I’ve been drinking. Drinking, and—oh, yes—thinking.”

  “What about?”

  “About this kid. This little kid I used to know, back in the town I grew up in. In Massachusetts. A kid I went to grammar school with. A little mouse-faced kid. He had a—a face like a mouse’s. Mice. Micey eyes too. Nobody liked him, but he had a function. A function, you see. Thanks,” he says as a fresh drink is set down in front of him. He picks it up and takes a swallow of it. “Where was I? Oh, this kid. Henry Nichols. That was his name, Henry Nichols. But we used to call him Henry Quarters. Get it? His function was—when anybody did something, like throw a rock through a window of the girls’ can, or put a tack on the teacher’s chair—” He pauses, thoughtfully, stirring the ice in his glass with his finger. “But I don’t think anybody ever did that, come to think of it. But I remember the rock—through the window of the girls’ can.” He laughs loudly. “I did that. But anyway, my point is this. That any time anybody did something like that, and the principal of the school would be mad as hell and trying to find out who did it, Henry Nichols—or Henry Quarters—would come up to the kid who did it, and say, ‘If you’ll give me a quarter, I’ll say I did it.’” He takes another swallow of his drink. “Anything bad anybody did you could pay Henry Nichols a quarter and he’d say he did it. Of course if you didn’t give him the quarter, if you didn’t play Henry’s game, he’d just tell on you. Isn’t that something?”

  “Yes,” she says, “it certainly is.”

  “And so I’ve been sitting here wondering what ever happened to old Henry Quarters. I have a feeling he’s gone—far.” He scowls darkly at his glass. “How’s your drink?” he asks. And then, “I love you.”

  “I know,” she says quietly. “You told me that.”

  He leans back, away from the bar, hooking his feet in the legs of the stool. “Christ, I must be out of my mind,” he says.

  Leona says nothing.

  “Give me another Scotch!” he calls to he bartender.

  “Don’t have another drink, Eddie,” she says. “Let’s go somewhere else. I hate this dreary place.”