Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  “He had no price!”

  He paused thoughtfully. “He was a rich man’s son, you see, who discovered suddenly that he was poor. He needed money and he needed a job. He got both those things by marrying you.”

  “You didn’t give him any money! Only to his mother—”

  “Really?” He stared at her fixedly. “Well, perhaps he’s forgotten taking it, though it was a reasonably large amount. But the point is that he has not kept up his end of things. If things continue this way, I shall have to consider making a change.” He smiled at her. “Will you have another whisky, Edith?”

  She stood up. “No thank you,” she said. “I’ve got to get home.”

  “Is it true?” she screamed at Charles that evening. “Papa says it is!”

  “He gave me ten thousand dollars,” he said calmly. “He said it was a wedding present. I didn’t ask him for it. It’s in the bank, in a trust account for Diana right now.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He looked very tired. “I suppose it’s because I knew you’d react just the way you’re reacting now.”

  “No! You didn’t tell me because you were too ashamed.”

  He was moving toward the library door again.

  “Go ahead!” she cried. “Lock yourself up again. You never loved me. It was only the money! Where would you be, if it weren’t for Papa and me? In a little law office somewhere? Or on a mountaintop eating berries?”

  “A long way from here, I guess,” he said.

  “Oh! So that’s it. Now that you’ve got all you can get from us, you’re going to leave me.”

  He turned to her sharply and said, “Do you want me to?”

  For some reason, the question staggered her. “Of course not.”

  “Then stop this!” he shouted, and he slammed his fist hard against the side of the door. “Whatever you’re trying to do, stop it! Stop!”

  He stepped into the library and closed the door.

  The next day, Louis Bertin stood at the bottom of the veranda steps looking up at her. “What did you do?” he asked her. And when she didn’t answer he repeated the question: “What did you do?”

  “Go away, Louis. I don’t want to talk to you.”

  He came up one step. “Tell me what you did. It was something you said to your father, about Monique.”

  “What business is it of yours what I way to my father?”

  “He’s beaten her very badly,” he said. “It was because of something you said.”

  She stood very still with one hand on the veranda rail, and he came up one more step toward her.

  “Whatever it was, you shouldn’t have done it, Edith. Why do you interfere in things you don’t understand? You should have left them alone.”

  “How is Monique?” she asked finally.

  “She’ll be all right. She’s with him now.”

  “With him? I thought she wanted to leave him.”

  “You see? You make so many mistakes, Edith. You don’t understand anything about the two of them. She’ll never leave him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because she loves him,” he said simply.

  “Even when he beats her?”

  “That was your fault. He has a sense of respectability, this man. He may be a millionaire, but he has the soul of a clerk. What upsets him now is knowing that his daughter knows about it.”

  “It’s thanks to you I know about it. Oh, why didn’t you both go away—long ago?”

  “You made a mistake to tell him that you knew,” he said. “You made a mistake to become involved with them at all. But now that you are involved, you’ll have to suffer the consequences, I’m afraid.”

  “What sort of consequences?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. But I know your father and I know my wife. I could have taught you a lot of things, Edith, years ago, if you’d been willing to listen to me.”

  She stood very still for a long time. Finally she said, “But you. I don’t understand you at all, Louis. How can you tolerate having your wife—”

  “I’m not involved with them. This has been going on for a long time, and I’ve kept out of it—the way you should have.”

  “How can you go on letting her live with you?”

  “She doesn’t live with me. She lives with him.”

  “But you—permit it.”

  “It’s not a question of permitting. I accept it,” and suddenly his hooded eyes were smiling at her. “I accept it—the way you accept the pretty husband your father bought for you.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Isn’t it true? Your father boasts of it all the time. He says, ‘This young aristocrat I bought for Edith.’ He says it right in front of your husband, and your husband says nothing. He doesn’t deny it.”

  “Charles would never let Papa say a thing like that.”

  “Why should I lie to you? Your father says things like that and worse in front of him. He says nothing.”

  She was silent, staring at the garden.

  “And isn’t it funny,” Louis was saying, “that the only love you’ve ever had that wasn’t bought and paid for was the love I gave you, Edith? I taught you what love was, and I did it for nothing in return. Just for you.”

  “Please go now, Louis.”

  “Don’t you remember? How easy it was, how free? Has it ever been that way for you again? I could have taught you more, but you wouldn’t let me. Remember the gatehouse? I’ll never forget the look on your face when you saw the dirty hole I lived in. But it didn’t matter, did it? We loved each other, and there was nothing demanded in return.”

  “You never loved me, Louis. Never.”

  “What is it that I remember then?”

  “It was—making love. Not love.”

  “Ah, so many mistakes,” he said. “You make so many mistakes.”

  The breeze stirred the fronds of ferns that hung in hanging baskets on the veranda. The roses in Charles’ garden tossed their heads, and remembering that morning now it is impossible not to think that she was almost exactly Leona’s present age then: twenty-seven. Old, wise, a third of her life over. And sometimes it seems as though all human emotions have an existence of their own, apart from the human beings they possess. They float at loose in the world, roll about at random like beads from a broken necklace until, almost by accident, they touch with a little click.

  That sad, monkish face looked up at her and smiled. “It’s love that I remember,” he said.

  She blinked her eyes. “Come into the house, Louis,” she said.

  She remembers that he said, “I’ve always wanted to see what the inside of this house was like,” and that she had thought of how before, in Morristown, he had said she was punishing her father. She had wondered whom she was punishing now.

  And now it is after five o’clock. Alan’s office will have closed. All afternoon she has stationed herself within earshot of the telephone, waiting for it to ring. But it has not rung. And so, when Nellie comes to her and asks, “Will Miss Leona be coming home for dinner tonight, Miss Edith?” Edith shakes her head and says, “No, not tonight.”

  Arch comes into the hotel room with a copy of the evening paper under his arm, and Leona, who has been sitting at the small writing table, puts down her pen.

  “Writing letters?” he asks her.

  “Yes,” she smiles. “Letters to old friends.”

  “Go ahead. Don’t let me interrupt you.”

  “That’s all right. I’ll finish later.” She folds the unfinished letter and puts it in her purse.

  He yawns and tosses the paper on the bed. “Kind of like being married, isn’t it?” he says. He comes and stands behind her, his hands on her shoulders, and together they confront their reflections in the wide mirror over the table.

  “Arch,” she says in a quiet voice, “this is the first affair—” She looks up into his reflected eyes, “I hate that word, don’t you? But this is the first affair with a man I’ve ever had. So
can I ask a dumb question? What happens next?”

  “Not a dumb question. A good one.”

  “I know it has to end. But how?”

  “The trouble is, I’m beginning to care about you. A lot. And that’s not good.”

  She nods.

  “The domestic life just isn’t for me. Not any more.”

  “Then,” she says carefully, “should I leave now?”

  He kneads her shoulders with his fingers. “No. Not yet.” Then he smiles. “Now what would you like to do tonight?” he asks.

  Fifteen

  There was an advertisement in one of Edith’s magazines which recently caught her eye. It was for men’s suits made out of one of those synthetic fibers, and it showed a young man sitting with his legs crossed at the knees, looking pressed and debonair. The world, the picture seemed to state, was this young man’s oyster. A proper length of shirt cuff protruded from the sleeves of his jacket, his top jacket-button was buttoned, his lapels were narrow, and a white handkerchief, folded square, flourished discreetly in his breast pocket. He wore a waistcoat, and a supercilious expression was in his eyes. He held a pipe. Though this last detail could not possibly have been there (it would have been a French cigarette), everything else about the expression and appearance of that young man suggested, to Edith, Harold at sixteen years old. At sixteen, he was already a regular little tufthunter. His conversation was sprinkled with references to titled people. He had become dandyish in his dress and, because he had begun to hear people speak of him as handsome, he was very vain.

  He was tall and thin, and in those days he had extraordinarily white skin, almost milky. Tiny bluish blood vessels beneath the surface made that skin seem luminous and translucent. His mouth was small and pink (later, a thin, sandy-colored mustache would form an eyebrow over that small mouth), and he had begun to affect a droop to his eyelids, which was enhanced by very long, curled, and almost colorless lashes. His hair was soft and fine, and he wore it cut long in the fashion of the day, and a light lock always hung across that wide, white forehead of his. In later life his hairline has receded, but that one silky lock, through some artistry of the comb, still manages to tumble the same way, and he lifts that forelock thoughtfully as he talks, strokes it between his long fingers, and then lets it fall back again—just as he did then. At sixteen, he was also becoming famous among his contemporaries for his sexual exploits.

  “Once Papa caught old Harry in bed with one of Mama’s maids,” Arthur said to Edith years later. “They’d pulled the covers up over their heads, but their feet were sticking out at the bottom. Papa yanked the covers down, just to satisfy himself that it was a girl Harry was in bed with and not a boy. Papa’s biggest concern in those days was whether we were both normal …”

  Thinking of Harold in those days, Edith remembers the family meeting which her father called, after Charles left. “Now that Edith’s husband has departed,” her father began, and Harold, smoking his cigarette, had given her that sly look out of the corner of his eye, and had begun stroking that pale forelock.

  And when the meeting was over, Harold had cornered her in the hall and said with a smirk, “Well, you’ve gone and done it for yourself good and proper this time, haven’t you, old girl?” And when she had turned away from him, he said, “You know I always thought you were such a goody-goody, Edith. But now you’ve redeemed yourself. That’s what this is—the redemption of a goody-goody.…”

  All this of course, was after all the little wheels Edith had set into motion had spun out their inevitable courses. (“Charles,” she says to him now, “you didn’t have to go!” Then she adds, “No. You did, of course you did.”) What might she have done differently that year—1916, when Diana was two years old? Why had she felt it necessary to go to her father again? Hadn’t there been another human being in the world she could have gone to? Why hadn’t she gone directly to Charles himself, and told him the whole thing? But no, she had been too frightened to go to Charles, and too uncertain of him.

  By late autumn of 1916, the news of the war in Europe was eclipsed in St. Thomas by local news: The United States had offered to purchase the Danish Virgin Islands from Denmark. In December, the question went before the Danish people, and the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of giving up the colony. It was a time for parties and nostalgic songs, and the patriotic songs of both nations. St. Thomas forgave old Denmark all her sins, all King Christian’s oversights, and crossed flags appeared in all the shop windows of Charlotte Amalie. The largest and most important of the parties was to be given in the colonial governor’s house, under his crystal chandeliers and potted palms. Everyone was invited, or at least almost everyone. Dolly and Meredith Harper were not—despite Edith’s mother’s dreams, the governor and his wife had always conspicuously overlooked the Harpers. But Edith and Charles had received one of the encrusted invitations, delivered to the house by a footman in a red jacket.

  Then, on the day of the governor’s party, Monique Bertin came to call on Edith.

  “She’s in the garden, ma’am,” Nellie said. “She wants to see you.”

  And there she was, all in yellow, walking among the flower beds, sniffing the wilted heads of roses.

  Edith went quickly out into the garden. “What are you doing here?”

  “Ah, Edith!” Monique said, smiling, stepping toward her. “How are you, Edith?” Her speech was more heavily accented than her husband’s, and she pronounced Edith’s name Aydeet.

  “Very well, thank you,” Edith had said, too shaken by the sight of her there to say much else. “What do you want?” The woman was pretty, very pretty in her yellow dress; one might even have said beautiful. She was not much older than Edith herself.

  Monique Bertin laughed and cocked her head. “How nice to finally meet you, Edith,” she said. “We’ve only seen each other from a distance.”

  Edith felt the warm color rise to her cheeks. “Please tell me what you want,” she repeated.

  “Isn’t it you who wants something?” she said. “I have heard you want me to go away.”

  “You’re quite right. I do.”

  Monique pouted. “Why didn’t you come to me first?” she said. “Why did you go to your father? He hurt me very much.”

  “I’m sorry about that,” Edith said. “But in a way I think you deserved it.”

  “Ah, Edith,” she said. “I? Who have meant so much to your father for such a long time?”

  “And who have also helped destroy my mother.”

  She sighed. “I do not know your mother. You should have come to me first. I would have listened.” Then her smile faded. “I’m ready to talk now. I’m ready to go now. All I need is the money.” She held out her hand. “Give me the money.”

  Edith considered it. “You’re ready to leave for good?”

  “For good.”

  “They say the Atlantic is full of submarines. How do you propose to go?”

  “Never mind how. I’ll go. If you give me the money.”

  “How much money?” she asked.

  “From you, three thousand Danish kroner.”

  “That’s quite a bit,” Edith said. And it was: Though it amounted in American money only to about five hundred dollars, it was for Edith in those days a sizable amount. With that much money she could run her household for a long time.

  “It’s what I need.”

  “Where do you expect me to get that much money?”

  “You’re a rich girl.”

  “My father may be rich. I am not.”

  Monique shrugged. “You can get it,” she said.

  “Will this cover yourself and your husband?”

  She smiled brightly at Edith now, but her hand was still outstretched, the palm curved upward. “Why of course! Louis and I always travel together. We’re friends!”

  “I’ll have to think about this,” Edith said.

  “But I need it now. If I’m going to go, I need the money now.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Edith sa
id carefully. “I don’t believe you have any intention of leaving. This is just a scheme of yours to extract a little money out of me. The answer is no.”

  With another little sigh, Monique sat down on the stone garden bench, the skirts of her yellow dress falling about her. “Oh, you are not nice,” she said. “I thought you would be nice to me. I hate this hot place so. It’s killing me, this hot place.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  A slender water pipe with a spigot at the top rises from the ground by the stone bench where Monique Bertin sat that day—the spigot to which the gardeners attach the garden hose when they water—and Monique suddenly reached for the tap, and said, “Is this fresh water? May I have a drink? I’ve heard about your famous well, Edith.” Kneeling by the tap, she turned on the water and let it run into her mouth, drinking deeply. “Ah!” she said at last, sitting up again and turning off the water. “Cool and good! Not as sweet as the well water in France, but cool and good.” With the back of her wrist she wiped her dripping chin—a peasant’s gesture, Edith thought—and smiled at Edith. “I thought you would be so nice,” she said. “You have that nice husband, that handsome husband. They say he is so nice.”

  “Please leave my husband out of this,” Edith said.

  Monique put her hand on the spigot again. “Forgive me—I can’t resist this—” she said. And this time she lowered her whole head beneath the tap, and let the water run full across her face, her throat, turning her head and letting it soak her dark hair. “Oh, this feels so good! You should try this, Edith—so cooling.” Her hands splashed in the water, carrying handfuls of it to her face and arms and shoulders, splashing it across her bosom, the tiny silver crucifix spinning and shining in the sun.

  “The water in my cistern is very low,” Edith said. “Please don’t waste it like this.”

  But Monique ignored her. “And wouldn’t it be sad to think of what your nice, handsome husband would do if he knew how close—how very close, Edith—you and Louis have been to each other? Or what your father would do? Or what everybody on the island would say?” She turned off the water and shook her dripping head. “May I borrow a hairbrush, Edith?” she said, and she held out her hand again in that same flat gesture.