Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  Five inches of gray chameleon are stretched on a twig above them. The creature stares down at them with wicked eyes.

  “They’re harmless,” Gordon says.

  “Yeah. But Christ, they always give me the creeps.”

  Jimmy pushes himself to his feet and begins brushing himself off. He spits out a bloody wad of saliva, and wipes his mouth. Gordon starts to rise, and Jimmy gives him a hand and pulls him to his feet, and then the two men totter, and lean heavily against each other like ancient lovers parting. “You all right?”

  “Yeah, I guess I’m all right. Are you all right?”

  “I guess so. Come on inside, I’ll buy you a drink.”

  “No, I’ll buy you a drink.”

  Jimmy’s shirt has lost a sleeve, and the back of it is ripped out from the collar, and Gordon’s shirt is also torn and bloody, and one leg of his sharkskin trousers is torn from the bottom of the side pocket down to the cuff.

  “Can’t go in this place looking like this,” Gordon says.

  “You’re right. Got to get cleaned up.”

  “Where’ll we go? Can’t go back to Mrs. Blakewell’s looking like this. Granny’d …”

  “Granny …”

  Suddenly they have both fallen against each other again, this time roaring with wild, almost giggled laughter, repeating, “Granny … Granny!” Just the mention of the word Granny is enough to set them off again. Staggering back, hugging his sides, Jimmy says, “Did you see her when she … practically … fell over the bar?” They both collapse again, doubled up, choking and gasping with laughter. Then there is silence.

  “Where’s Leona?” Gordon asks. “Probably in the laides’ room, I guess.”

  “No,” Jimmy says almost absently. “Not if I know her. She’s left. Leaving is a specialty of hers.”

  Somehow, this seems funny too. “Yeah,” Gordon says. “Well, we’ve got to get cleaned up somewhere …”

  Gordon has lost a shoe. Groping about on their hands and knees in the darkness under the bushes, looking for the lost shoe, Gordon says, “I’d say the hell with it, but it’s one of a pair I had made in England …”

  Crawling about beneath the bushes, patting the earth, their heads crack together.

  Sitting back on their heels, they rub their heads. “No harm done,” Jimmy grins.

  “No, no harm done.”

  “Granny …”

  Giggling softly, they resume the search for the English shoe.

  Leona has been lying for a long time in her dark bedroom, still in her clothes, on top of the coverlet. She has tried to light a cigarette, but her shaking hands cannot control the match, and she has had to give up. Now she lies very still in the darkness. Escape. Just escape. Run just as fast and as far as you can, farther and faster than you’ve ever run before, faster than you ran from Edouardo, farther than the moon. “I’m sorry, Madame, there are no night planes out of St. Thomas.” “But I must get on a plane. It’s urgent. It’s a matter of—” “I’m sorry, Madame.” Frightened, she thinks; yes, frightened. For the first time in your life you are really frightened, and it is almost a relief to know that this is what being frightened is like, and that there is absolutely nothing left to do. She hears hushed male voices in the hall beyond, murmured good nights. She lies very still. Then she hears her doorknob turn, and a tall figure stands silhouetted in the doorway. “Leona.” The door closes. “Turn on the light.”

  She snaps on the light. “Jimmy … you’re hurt.”

  “Never mind about that.” He moves toward her, and then stops abruptly as he sees her airplane ticket lying on the dressing table where she has left it. He picks it ip. “Yes,” he says softly. “That’s what you’d do, isn’t it? Hop a plane out of here—leave old Gordon and me with your grandmother. What the hell? Gordon and Jimmy are big boys now, they can find their own damn way home. Little Leona’s in a bigger hurry. Has a man ever beaten you up, baby? Because somebody’s going to one of these days—really smash that beautiful jaw of yours and knock you halfway across the room. If I had the energy I’d do it myself, right now.” He puts the ticket down.

  “Jimmy—I didn’t want this to happen!”

  “Shut up. Who cares if you wanted it to happen or not? You haven’t wanted a lot of things to happen, but they’ve happened, and they’ve happened because you’ve made them happen. What did you expect would happen, for Christ’s sake—from this crummy trick you’ve pulled, dragging us down here just to flatter your poor little hurt ego.”

  “It wasn’t that!”

  “Shut up. This is the cheapest, ugliest idea you’ve ever had, and you’ve had a few. What did you expect it to be? A ladies’ tea party? Are you just stupid?”

  “All right! I admit it was a mistake! I admit it!”

  “Sure—I should think you might. Now. And what do you do whenever you find out you’ve made a mistake? You hop a fast boat out of wherever you are. A plane is even faster! You’ve been hopping planes out of situations you’ve created all your life, baby, and do you know why? Gordon thinks you need your head examined, but I don’t think your problem’s as fancy as that. You’re just selfish—selfish and lazy. A selfish, lazy slob!”

  “I admit it!” she cries. “I admit it! I know.”

  “A slob who’s managed to get away with murder just because you happen to have a pretty face. Well, I’ll tell you something about that face, baby, the years are beginning to show. I give that face about five more years, and then what’ll you have? You’ll be a tough little middle-aged woman, exactly like your mother. You’ve lost one thing after another—peace, grace, love, in that order. Your looks will be next. And what do you do each time you lose one of those rather important qualities? You run.”

  “I think if I keep running I might get there! Somewhere!”

  “Somewhere. That’s a lot of bull because you don’t run anywhere at all, except in great big circles. You land up in the same places time after time, all ready to make another big mess for yourself.”

  “I know all this! That’s why I can’t bear myself.”

  Looking at her, his eyes glitter. “You know what you are?” he says. “You’re pathetic. Not tragic. Just pathetic. You’re too pathetic even to beat up.” He sits down heavily on the corner of the bed, his back to her, and puts his head in his hands. “Jesus!” he says. “And it’s like talking to a bank. Like bawling out the First National City Bank.”

  “No,” she whispers, “because I know everything you say is true.”

  A thin trickle of blood descends from the corner of his mouth, and he wipes it away with the back of his hand.

  “Jimmy … you’re hurt.”

  “You’ve hurt a lot of people, haven’t you? You’re going to run out of people to hurt one of these days. Then you’ll have only yourself to hurt.”

  “Do you think you need a doctor, Jimmy? Your lip …”

  “To hell with my lip. Your little meeting has accomplished one thing, Lee. It’s taught me not to underestimate Gordon Paine. And that I could use a few sessions at the gym when I get home.” His head hangs between his shoulders and he runs one hand through his thinning hair. “Peace, grace, love,” he mutters. “In that order.”

  “But don’t you see? I want those things back, Jimmy. So badly!”

  “I used to be something of a slob myself, you know,” he says. “But all these years I’ve worked, trying to make myself into some kind of a human being. Not you. You’re still the same as you were that day you killed—that little boy. The same.”

  “Oh, but couldn’t I try, Jimmy? Couldn’t I go on trying?”

  “Run … hide. All these years. You ought to be ditched, you know. Dumped. But why can’t I ever dump you? I’ve tried, though. All these years. Tried to shake you out of me, but I can’t. Isn’t it funny? You’re stuck in me some funny way, and you won’t shake loose. But Christ, I’ve tried.”

  “Jimmy!”

  “So what could I do when you called,” he asks in a whisper, “but come?” H
is body sags back across the foot of the bed. “Got to go now … too tired …”

  She rises to her knees on the bed and puts her arms around him, holding him almost desperately. “Jimmy, Jimmy,” she says to that beaten face, “couldn’t we go back to the beginning and try to begin again? Not the same beginning, a different one—and try? Oh, couldn’t I have another chance? Just one more chance? I’d try! Jimmy, I promise you I’d try! I’d try so hard!”

  Nineteen

  “Who is that funny-looking old lady?”

  “Why, don’t you know? That’s Edith Harper Blakewell—yes, the old despot’s daughter. Still lives here. She’s pretty much taken for granted now, but in her salad days, around the first world war, she was the talk of the island. They say she had lovers by the score … there was a French one who was the husband of her father’s mistress—how’s that for planning? Sexy old harridan—her husband finally walked out on her. They say she took up with a new man at the age of fifty-five! Oh, she’s odd as Dick’s hatband now—a bug about water conservation. But she’s done a few things for the island, gave a wing to the hospital, built the marine museum.…”

  Talk like this has drifted through her window, or over her garden wall, or across the square as she sits in the back seat of her big, Detroity car, pretending to doze while John waits for the policeman under the umbrella to raise his white-gloved hand and signal them to proceed.

  It would certainly not be true of a woman like Edith Blakewell to say that there were no more men in her life after her husband died, and after her mother and her daughter moved away. There were several. Two of them treated her well. One of them cost her money. None of them meant anything to her, perhaps because at that point she no longer wanted a man to mean anything to her, or to offer her anything more than consolation, like candy; Edith doesn’t really know. All she knows is that she has managed to forget their names over the years; they have blurred into one. All, that is, except Wallace Townsend—the one the gossips refer to as “the new one at age fifty-five”—who, ironically, was never a lover at all. (Poor Wallace would blush crimson if he knew he had assumed the position of lover in peoples’ minds.)

  The gossip at the time seemed to center on the fact that Wallace was several years younger than she—the old lady, it seemed, was turning to young men to try to recapture the luster and innocence of her youth. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. It was not the youth of Wallace Townsend that appealed to her; rather it was his quietness and gentleness, his industry and scholarship. There was no romance between them, though she had, once, asked him to kiss her—a mistake, the suggestion distressed him so. Romance with a woman, Edith has since decided, would not have been a possibility for Wallace. Not that he was a feminine man, but his manliness was more an abstraction of that quality. Once, on one of their walks, Wallace slipped and fell on a bit of crumpled wall and hurt himself in a sensitive place. His horror at Edith’s witnessing the accident was not, it seemed to her, a result of the physical pain but more because the area of the pain drew her attention to his sex. Edith loved him for his company, and grieved for the disappointments of his life. At college in the Middle West, he had been a promising young scientist. If he had continued in his field Edith is certain he would have become one of the great archeologists of his day. But his father had died, and he had had to discontinue his studies to support a quarrelsome mother at a job he hated. He had finally come, after his mother’s death, to St. Thomas with his savings. He had heard of the Indian kitchen middens that are still occasionally unearthed on the island. Edith often gave him meals and, in that sense, helped support him. She also gave him a room in her house for his books and papers. By day, they walked, explored, and dug. Edith helped him sift the ashes and humus and sea-sand of the buried middens, helped him catalogue the sea-shell implements, bones, artifacts, and fragments of broken Indian pottery that they found. She remembers their joint excitement whenever they discovered a piece of pottery whole, and she still has a small, simple mortuary vessel he gave her, and which he explained had doubtless been filled with foodstuffs, fruits, cassava bread, perhaps even human flesh, which were to serve the departed on his journey into the beyond. It was curiously appropriate, she thinks now, that she should have been left with the past, and a quiet companion to help her probe deeper into it, back into Indian prehistory, before any white man knew these islands existed, pulling aside all the diluvia of time. They walked the middens until the day he died.

  Now it is morning again, another day. What went on last night is quite beyond her. Coming down this morning and finding the three of them at the breakfast table, Edith had merely stared at them. “We had a little disagreement last night, Granny,” Leona said. “But we’re all friends again.” From the looks of the men’s swollen, bruised faces and bandaged hands, the disagreement must have been considerable. Today, at least, they seem subdued. But Edith has really stopped trying to understand what is going on. Sibbie, she has decided, was right; it is past trying to understand. It is too nutty. After breakfast, taking a picnic basket, the three friends departed for the beach.

  On the dresser in Leona’s room, Edith has come upon the unused half of Leona’s airplane ticket, written out to that same unlikely name: “Mrs. L. Diaz.” The date for the return trip is still a blank, but Edith knows Leona must be thinking of going or she would not have taken out the ticket. However, Edith reminds herself, Leona cannot leave until she gets her gallery money. She will have to wait for that. This reminds her that Harold must have received her letter, and she wonders how long it will be before she hears from him. “Get a wiggle on, Harold!” she whispers aloud. Yes, she realizes with a pang, it’s true. She would like the money to arrive immediately, now; she would like them to be gone—Leona, all of them; she is ready for the old, complacent, Edith-centered peace to return to her house. She stands there, holding Leona’s ticket in her hand. Beside her, the telephone rings.

  “Mother?” she hears someone say. “Mother—is that you?”

  “Diana!” she says in surprise. “Where are you, dear?”

  “In the West Palm Beach airport. Mother, what’s going on down there?”

  Edith laughs. “Well, I don’t really understand it myself,” she says. “It was Leona’s idea. How did you hear about it?”

  “Hear about it! It’s going to be in all the evening papers!”

  “Oh, Diana—you’re not serious.”

  “The hell I’m not. What is going on down there, Mother?”

  “Don’t shriek so! She simply wanted to invite them both. And did.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Leona—Jimmy and Gordon.”

  “What? Oh, Mother, for God’s sake! I’m talking about this magazine story and all the things you’ve been saying about us and this whole business about the Luxitron Corporation and Uncle Harold’s maneuverings, and—”

  “Wait! Don’t talk so fast, Diana. I can’t understand. What is it?”

  “This magazine story I’m holding in my hands.”

  Edith holds the phone very close to her ear. “What does it say?”

  “Well, besides making Grandfather sound like a monster and a maniac—practically whipping slaves and making old men jump over tennis nets, according to you—in addition to that—”

  “Yes … what else …”

  “What they’re saying about Uncle Harold. And Luxitron!”

  “What is this Luxitron?”

  “You’re going to hear of nothing else until this thing is settled. Where is Uncle Harold?”

  “I don’t know. Isn’t he—”

  “His office said he’s in St. Thomas.”

  “But why should he be here?”

  Diana’s voice becomes a wail. “He must be! Mother, our Harper stock has dropped twenty points since the market opened!”

  “Stocks go up and down, it doesn’t affect—”

  “Oh, Mother, how can you be so stupid! Don’t you see—this story calls Uncle Harold a croo
k.”

  Edith hesitates. “Well,” she says defiantly, “he always was a crook!”

  “Oh, wonderful! Why didn’t you tell that to the reporters?”

  “Well, I’m sure that if there’s anything in that story that isn’t true, Harold will sue.”

  “What good will that do? Our stock is dropping! Mother, I’m getting on a plane now and flying down there. Don’t do a thing till I get there; don’t talk to anybody. We’ve got to figure out something, and find Uncle Harold.”

  “You’re coming—here?”

  “I’ll be there in an hour and forty minutes.”

  “Is Perry with you?”

  “I’ve left Perry, but that’s another story. No, I just have Poo and Mrs. McCutcheon.”

  “Oh, dear! You’ve left Perry?”

  “We don’t have to talk about that now, do we, Mother? Oh, they’re calling the plane. I’ll be there at one twenty-five. Have your car meet me.”

  Dazed, Edith sits on the edge of the bed for several minutes. There is really only one person in the world who can give her a straight answer on this, and that, of course, is her brother Arthur. And why, she thinks, didn’t she go to Arthur right in the beginning, the minute there was any doubt about Mr. Winslow, instead of entrusting it all to Leona? Why does she always think of things too late? She picks up the phone and gives the operator Arthur’s number in New York. After a delay the operator reports, “I’m sorry, there is a long list of calls stacked up for Mr. Arthur Harper. Your call will have to wait its turn. I will call you.”

  “Thank you,” Edith says, and hangs up the phone.

  She has been clutching Leona’s ticket in one hand, and has crumpled it considerably. She goes to the dresser and flattens and smooths the ticket as best she can. She goes out of Leona’s room toward her own. At the door, she stops. “Your Harper stock is not available at the moment for the purposes you have in mind,” she remembers. She stands quite still, her hand on the doorknob, leaning against it. She had told Leona that they would have to prepare for the worst. But, she thinks, now that the worst—whatever it is—seems about to happen, we have made no preparations for it at all.