Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Now wait a minute,” Jimmy says. “Are you trying to say Lee’s crazy?”

  “Waiter!” Leona cries, waving forlornly to the back of a disappearing white jacket.

  “Running away is a highly neurotic pattern. It indicates—”

  “Please,” she says. “We promised—no arguments—”

  “I want to hear what this uncircumcised nut has got to say! Go on with your story, Mr. Paine, and with what it’s got to do with Lee.”

  Gordon looks at him. “I see, Breed, that you are also something of a bully.”

  “Gordon—Jimmy—stop this, both of you.”

  There is a long pause. “Please explain,” Jimmy says, “what you mean by also something of a bully.”

  “I mean that in addition to being a lush and a no-good, you are also something of a bully.”

  “Just a minute,” Jimmy says. “Just a minute! Repeat that, what you said.”

  “I said,” says Gordon smiling, “that in addition to being a lush and a no-good, you are also something of a bully. And also a noisy roughneck.”

  On his feet, Jimmy says, “Why, you lousy little Dartmouth stuffed-shirt prig, do you think I’m going to let you get away with that? You’re also a goddamned bigot. You’re an anti-Semite, you’re a—”

  “Stop! Just stop!”

  “It’s not a defenseless woman you’re speaking to now, Breed.”

  “You’re goddamned right I’m not, you dirty little wife-stealing shyster. Sniffing around my apartment and taking out my wife behind my back.”

  “Your back was usually planted on a barroom floor.”

  “Stop!”

  “Would you care to step outside?”

  “I damn well would!”

  “Oh, please—please stop this!” Leona begs. She tries to pull both of them into their seats again, but they push her hands angrily away. She turns to the room at large. “Please—somebody stop them!” But all she sees are, now, too many waiters and a restaurant full of bored, disinterested faces turned upward from dinner plates and cocktails to observe the commotion at the corner table.

  “You said let’s go outside. What’re you waiting for? Have you changed your mind?”

  “I have not changed my mind!”

  “Well …”

  “Oh, come on!” Leona says. “This isn’t about anything!”

  The two men start rapidly for the glass door which leads from the dining room out onto the terrace, and Leona runs after them.

  On the terrace, the two men face each other. Leona turns once more to the restaurant and calls, “Can’t somebody stop this?” But now the bored and somewhat less disinterested faces have moved to the door and to the windows to watch. Leona hears:

  “The big one’ll flatten him. Look at the size of that bastard’s shoulders …”

  “Don’t be too sure. The little one looks pretty wiry.”

  “What’s it all about, anyway?”

  “The little one’s a Jew. The big one made some crack about Jews.”

  Gordon and Jimmy remove jackets and ties and toss them in a heap on the terrace. Gordon removes his wrist watch and Jimmy, grateful for this suggestion, removes his also. Then they face each other again, crouched this time, rocking on the balls of their feet.

  “For the last time, I’m telling you to stop,” Leona says.

  At the first blow, both men stagger apart, stumble, and fall on their hands and knees on the terrace. For a moment, they approach each other, on all fours, panting. Then they are up again, swinging, and for several minutes the air is filled with the cracking of fists, and the grunts, and groans, and gasping breaths of the two opponents. They fight in these guttural voices, uttering no words, and shirts rip, and suddenly they are both on the ground again, rolling over and over across the terrace, pummeling each other as they go. Jimmy is certainly the heavier one, but Gordon, as that observer observed, is wiry, and keeps himself in shape with squash and handball. It is so ludicrous, seeing them tumbling about on the terrace and punching each other like schoolboys, that Leona almost laughs. If they were even fighting over her she would laugh. But instead she begins to cry. “Oh, you damn fools!” she says. “Damn fools!” She turns and runs back into the restaurant.

  To reach the front door, she must pass through the bar again. As she pushes through the crowd, a man’s hand reaches out to detain her. “Hey,” he says, “is that ruckus out there over you?”

  “Arch,” she says, “will you help me break it up?”

  “Are you kidding? I don’t want to get mixed up in it. I’ve got something for you,” he says, reaching in his pocket. “From this morning’s paper.” He hands her a small clipping.

  “What?”

  “Thought you might be interested,” he says. “Well, see you around.”

  “Yes,” she says.

  Standing under the orange light by the front door, she reads:

  Rumor has it that one of the nation’s top business weeklies will explode this week with a story on the wheeler dealings of that enigmatic Wall Streeter, Harold B. Harper. Details are still unknown, but sources say the story will make the fur fly at Harper Industries, Inc. H. B. Harper is the son of West Indian sugar baron Meredith Harper and uncle of socialite Diana Gardiner. His grandniece is ex-deb Leona Harper Ware, popular and much-married Jet-Setter, presently the Countess Edouardo Para-Diaz.…

  “Are you all right, Miss Harper?” the doorman asks her.

  “Please get me a taxi.”

  Eighteen

  Five years ago, in the winter of 1959, Nellie came to Edith to tell her that a Miss Mary Miles was here to see her. It was a minute or two before Edith connected the name. She went downstairs, and there she was—a little old lady, much wrinkled, wearing a beige suit, beige shoes, and a little beige hat. “Did they ever get a decent girl for your mother?” was practically the first question she asked.

  “It took some finding, after you left. Mama had her ups and downs.”

  She clicked her tongue. “Exactly as I feared,” she said.

  “She had a series of little strokes. They were what finally made her stop. Those strokes scared her just the way you used to scare her, Mary.”

  “When did she pass on?”

  “In nineteen fifty-one.”

  “Well, that was a nice long life, wasn’t it—considering? And your father? Gone too, of course …”

  They went into the sitting room for tea. Mary Miles still worked as a nurse, she said, but she was on holiday. She had taken herself on a Cunard winter cruise, and the cruise had a free day in St. Thomas.

  “And your baby?” Mary said. “Grown and away, I suppose.”

  “Grown and away. Here’s a picture of her I ran across in a magazine.”

  “Gracious!” said Mary Miles, looking at the picture. “Isn’t she elegant? Hard to think I was the first person to take her in my arms.”

  “I follow her career in these magazines. And I have a grown granddaughter now.” She got Leona’s picture from the table where it stood. “This is Leona.”

  Mary studied the picture. “Very pretty,” she said, and handed it back. “My. How times does fly.” Then she said, “And your husband? Is he still living?”

  “Charles died years ago.”

  “Ah. Well, we women do seem to live longer than the men. Persistent creatures, aren’t we? And rather mean of us—to hang around so long after the men are gone.” And then, with that sudden forthrightness that is so particularly English, she said to Edith, “By the way, whatever happened to the girl your father was having the affair with? What was her name?”

  “Monique.”

  “Ah, yes. French. Did that little fling ever run its course?”

  “Until he died. Then they wandered off.”

  “Found some other meal ticket, I suppose. Sycophants was the word for them. And I’ve never understood it, Edith, why your father let that woman say things about you that she did. She used to say you were an immoral woman. She cornered me once and tried to
tell me that you misbehaved with every man in sight—even tried to convince me that you had misbehaved with her husband! Your father could have stopped her, but it was almost as though he didn’t want to. You know, I really think he loved you very much, and then suddenly began to hate you for some reason. Was it when you broke those pearls? Well, he was a very queer fellow, your father.”

  “Yes, queer.”

  “And to think that your mother had to put up with that woman all those years. Poor little lady. She was a lady, you know—for all her airs.”

  Edith had only one other meeting with her father. It occurred several months after Charles was buried, when her father arrived unannounced one evening at her house. This was at the beginning of his long decline, and the decline had begun to age him. The United States’ purchase of the islands, which all the planters had taken as a signal of better days to come, had turned out to be the opposite. Almost as soon as the purchase had been accomplished, the United States government stuck a knife in the planters’ backs with the passage of the treacherous Volstead Act. The rum market collapsed, and cane sugar did not fare much better. Many of the planters left, but Meredith Harper stayed on, struggling to establish new markets in Canada and elsewhere, losing money at a steady rate. She noticed that he had begun to stoop and that the climb up her front steps had made him short of breath. “I have some papers for you to sign,” he said. She took him into the library, where they sat down. He handed her a sheaf of legal documents.

  “What is this all about?” she said at last.

  “This is your consent to make me Diana’s legal guardian. She can continue to live with you, but as my ward. We have decided that this is best.”

  “I’m not going to sign any such agreement. Take these papers back.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you must.”

  “Must I indeed? Well, I won’t. You’re not going to take Diana from me.”

  He sat forward in his chair. “I’m afraid you can’t refuse, under the circumstances. There is some question as to whose child Diana is.”

  “There is no question. Now get out of here. I’m sick to death of you.”

  “Not until you sign this agreement.”

  She ripped the agreement down the middle and threw the pieces on the floor. “There. Now go.”

  He looked at her with expressionless eyes. “Then you force me to take other measures,” he said. “I shall take it to court and start adoption proceedings. She’ll be taken away from you altogether on the grounds that you are an unfit mother. My own daughter is a common hunker, a slut, a whore.”

  “Oh, Papa. Go away.”

  “You don’t think I’m serious?”

  “All right,” she said, “take it to court. If you do, I’ll fight it. I know a few things about you, and I’ll shout them from the rooftops! We’ll see what your precious name and reputation look like when I get through—and which of us looks the more unfit to take care of a little child.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.” He was struggling out of his chair, and suddenly his hand went to his chest. “I’m sick,” he gasped. “My heart …”

  “Get out of this house and don’t ever come back.”

  “I’m dying …”

  “Oh, I wish you would die, Papa.”

  She watched him struggling and gasping in the chair for several minutes, wondering if he actually was dying. Finally she went out of the library and out of the house to the street where his chauffeur sat, dozing over the steering wheel of the car. “Mr. Harper’s sick,” she said, prodding the man’s shoulder, “you’d better come in the house and get him.”

  Of course he was not dying. It would take more than a few strong words from her to kill him. It would take more of the heart attacks, real or feigned, which she heard about. His death was speeded by an increasing accumulation of business problems. Prohibition, which he never lived to see repealed, undoubtedly helped. So did the collapse of investments in Germany, and the worthlessness of his accounts in prewar Deutschemarks. When he died it was peacefully, in his sleep, in his house at Sans Souci and, though the fortune he left was a far cry from what it had been, he was too widely diversified to have died poor. He died worth roughly twelve million dollars, and the marvelous simplicity of his last will and testament was in all the newspapers. In dying, Meredith Harper succeeded in taking Diana Blakewell away from her mother in perhaps the most effective of all the ways at his command. He left her three of his millions.

  “My beloved daughter Edith,” his will stated, “will understand why she is not to partake of my Estate, since she has already been separately provided with her rightful share. I do, however, bequeath to her my gold signet ring embossed with the Harper family crest, which I instruct her not to dispose of. The remainder of my Estate I will to divide in four equal portions, thusly: To my devoted wife, Dolly Elizabeth Bruce Harper, one fourth; to my sons, Harold Bruce Harper and Arthur Meredith Harper, one fourth each; and to my granddaughter, Diana Harper Blakewell, one fourth. My elder son, Harold, who upon my death shall become head of the Harper family, I appoint as trustee of all funds and properties accruing to my other heirs.” Not a penny to any of his servants. Not a penny to Monique Bertin. Not a penny to charity.

  “This is a great deal of money you will be receiving, my dear,” Edith had written to Diana, at school in Westchester at the time the details of her grandfather’s will were published. “I trust you will not let it go to your head.…” But that much money, in all likelihood, had already gone to Diana’s head, and it stayed there.

  After her husband’s death, Dolly Harper, also wealthy, decided to move to Paris. She was tired of the tropics, she said, and after all she was not old—sixty-seven was not really “old,” was it? She didn’t feel that old, and she didn’t think she looked that old, did she? She begged Edith to go with her, and Edith remembers her mother on the day she left, wearing a traveling suit of dark blue wool, a blue hat and gloves. She was still a handsome woman, still thin, and she had taken to wearing the cosmetics that were by then the vogue—red lipstick, rouge, and nail lacquer. But her handsomeness had acquired a certain angular, haggard quality, and she stood there, gold bracelets jangling, tapping the pointed toe of one blue patent pump on the floor, and said, “Please. Come over and join me, Edith—for a little while, at least. We’ll have fun. We’ll do the couturiers, and the modistes—the opera, the theatre, the ballet. We’ll entertain …”

  And then they heard, along the grillwork of the garden gate—click, click-click-click-click, and the children’s voices, “Edie, Edie, fat and greedy …”

  In a rush of perfume and dark blue wool, her mother came toward her. “Listen to that! Oh, Edith—have sense! Have some sense. Don’t stay here another minute. Think of Paris. Haven’t you had enough of this wretched island? Can’t we go back to people who are our equals, away from this riffraff? Don’t give yourself up to the Hottentots! Aren’t you sick of islands? Every dreadful place I’ve ever lived has been an island—from Staten Island to this dunghill. I’m ready for continents now, aren’t you?”

  She shook her head. “No, Mama.”

  “You’re giving yourself up to this terrible island, to a life too hideous to think about. You’ll end up like everybody else here. Nigger men and women sitting, dreaming in doorways, waiting for something to happen that never does happen, that never will happen—”

  “But this is my home,” Edith said, not meaning it to sound melodramatic. After all, she reflected, it was high time she discovered what a home was.

  After Dolly Harper left, Edith Blakewell stood in the garden for a while, looking out at the hills and the town below, at the harbor, sickle-shaped, with Hassel Island trapped in the blade’s path. Though she could not see any of the others, she could feel them there—the satellite islands circling and guarding the craggy quarry of St. Thomas. Buck Island, Little St. James, Great St. James, Mingo Cay, Thatch Cay, Hans Lollik and Little Hans Lolik, Outer Brass Cay, Inner Brass, Cricket, Cockroach, Savana, Saba,
Water Island, Hassel—the queer little names which she knows by heart reminding her that this is home. With Hassel Island, the circle completes itself, begins again with Buck Island, Little St. James.… And, after a while, she began to feel that she was not giving herself up to the island at all, but that the island was being offered at last to her, and she stood admiring the amplitude and wonder of the gift.

  From that day, it was seven years before she saw her mother again—when failing health and the threat of another war in Europe drove Dolly Harper back to the island again.

  Now, from the small back bedroom where she has temporarily put herself, she hears footsteps in the hall outside. Leona’s meeting, apparently, is over, and Edith cannot help thinking that it did not last long. She considers getting out of bed and going to Leona’s room for a report on the evening’s proceedings, but decides against it. Questions of chaperonage and supervision of this quaint gathering of people also occur to her, considering Leona’s own somewhat … lax attitudes. Oh, to the devil with it, she thinks. Let them both sleep with her, together or in relays, all night long if that’s what Leona wants! Edith lies back on her pillow and closes her eyes. She has developed a splitting headache and, a few minutes ago, giving in to it, she reached for the bottle with Alan’s prescription—ONE CAPSULE, AS NEEDED, FOR PAIN—and took a pill.

  At Bluebeard’s Castle, the fight has continued for perhaps twenty minutes, and the two opponents have long since rolled off the terrace and down the slope of dry grass where they grapple and pound at each other now, under the sea-grape bushes by the wall. They have taken brief, mutually agreed-upon rest periods, then thrown themselves at each other again, and most of the spectators, bored with the fight and by the non-appearance of any decisive victor, have gone back to their dinners or their drinks.

  In the panting darkness under the bushes, Jimmy Breed suddenly goes rigid and says, “Jesus! What’s that?” Both men lie still.

  “Huh?” Gordon says, looking up. “Oh. One of those damn lizards.”