When I took Joe Bingham down there he did not see it at all as I did. Joe just said that it was the damnedest crazy show that he had ever seen. His main idea was to make passes at the girls and to get drunk, and he hurt people’s feelings by laughing at their poetry and pictures.
“You wait,” Joe said, “until I tell the boys about this when I get home.”
When he called me up at the office late one Friday afternoon I took him there a second time, since he was one of my oldest friends. That was how he happened to meet Marvin, and he was almost the only one of my friends who ever did.
“Well, here I am,” he called to me over the telephone. “What are we going to do?”
“I’m having dinner with a girl,” I said, “but it will be fine if you come along.”
“Hot dog! Tell her to bring a friend,” Joe said.
“No,” I said. “Just come along. I’ll meet you at half-past six.”
I was afraid that Marvin might mind, but she didn’t when I explained that it was Joe Bingham whom I used to room with at college, and that naturally I had to do something about him. She said that of course I had to do something, that we could come and call for her, that she would love to see him. So I met Joe at the Harvard Club and we took a taxi to Marvin’s apartment.
“She works in the office,” I told him.
“Boy,” Joe said, “don’t you know better than to step out with any little chicken in the office?”
“Now, look here, Joe,” I said, “she isn’t like that. She writes copy.”
“Yes,” said Joe, “I know I know.”
“Damn it, Joe,” I said, “it isn’t like that.”
“So that’s what you’ve been doing here?” Joe said. “Listen, Harry, you’d better tell me about it.”
“There isn’t anything to tell you,” I said.
Joe was perfectly all right with Marvin, once we all met, except that he was different from the way he would have been if Marvin had been one of the girls whom he knew at home. He would not have told the same stories. He would not have drunk as much red wine out of teapots. Though it all made me angry and made the whole evening rather unpleasant, I could understand Joe. He simply had never seen anyone like Marvin Myles. Once long afterwards Joe asked me what had ever happened to her.
“Now, there was a nice girl,” he said, “awfully nice. Do you remember Washington Square? Boy, I thought you wanted to marry her.”
“Did you?” I asked.
“I used to have a lot of fool ideas in those days,” Joe said. “Now, there she was, a great deal nicer than a lot of girls at home, just as much of a lady, intelligent, amusing. Why, she was wonderful.”
“Yes, she was,” I said.
“And I was just a fool,” Joe said. “I tell you what the trouble was. None of us were grown up, were we?”
That was the trouble with a good many people I have known. I felt older than Joe Bingham that night, and I could see him as something I had been once—moving along, not able to see what there was around him; but Joe would have given me the shirt off his back any time and I would have given him mine. I remember what he told us in the middle of the evening when he got used to Marvin and understood that she was a nice girl, even though she did work for a living.
“Now, Harry’s my oldest friend,” he said to Marvin, “and my best friend, aren’t you, Harry?”
“I certainly am, Joe,” I said.
“So I want to tell you both something,” Joe said. “I want to ask your advice, Harry—”
He glanced at Marvin, hesitated, and went on.
“You won’t mind my talking about myself for a minute, will you?” Joe said to her. “It’s only Harry’s my oldest friend. Harry, how do you think it would be—what would you say if I told you—I was going to marry Kay Motford?”
That was a queer scene as I look back on it now.
“Why, Joe,” I said, “that’s wonderful,” and I remember that Marvin asked me about it afterwards when I tried to explain to her about Joe.
“It was nice to hear you talk,” she said. “It made me know so much about you. Who is Kay Motford?”
“Kay?” I said. “Oh, a girl I used to know.”
It always seemed to amaze Marvin that I had a few simple accomplishments, and when she was surprised it made me happier than anything else. There was the evening when she found that I could play squash and the time when she discovered that I knew how to sail a boat and the day I took her riding in Central Park. I could never tell why it was that she was so anxious to learn to ride.
One Sunday we met Bill in the country and after lunch Bill and I played three sets of tennis while Marvin watched. The games were not exciting, because I was better than Bill.
“You see, I had tennis lessons from the time I was eleven years old,” I told her.
“They gave you lessons in everything, didn’t they?” she said.
I told her that I could teach her, but she shook her head.
“No,” she said, “they’ve got to catch you young. Darling, they caught you awfully young.”
I asked her why she was so silent when we drove back to town afterwards in that little car of mine.
“I was just thinking,” she said. “It makes me jealous.”
“What does?” I asked.
“Never mind,” she said. “Even when I see you drive a car. I’m being nasty. I’ll get over it. All women have to be nasty sometimes.”
“You never are,” I said. “Is it anything I’ve done?”
“No,” she said, “of course not. I’ve never known you to do a mean thing. You’re too uncomplicated.”
“Then, what’s the matter, Marvin?” I asked. “You know I love you more than anything.”
“Harry,” she asked, “are you sure of that?”
We were driving down to the ferry, so I could not go on with it until the car was safe aboard and I had cut off the engine.
“I’ll tell you something, Marvin,” I said. “I wish I could tell you properly. Every time I see you everything is better. It’s like compound interest. Everything we do keeps being more so.”
“Like liquor,” Marvin said. “First you take a drink and then you take another.”
“No,” I said, “it’s not that way at all. There’s never any morning after.”
“Darling,” she answered, “you’re awfully sweet, but it’s hard to be honest when you’re in love. It’s awfully hard. Sometimes it hits me all of a sudden. Sometimes I’m frightened.”
“You needn’t be,” I said.
“It makes me frightened when I see you do things that I can’t do. They take you away from me, all those little things.”
I took both her hands and I laughed at her.
“You see how nasty I am,” she said. “Women take everything so seriously.”
I remember the queer horsy smell of the ferry boat and the dank smell of the water from the Hudson and the way the sky line moved toward us with all the downtown buildings. I remember how the sun struck them and made the windows glitter.
“Marvin,” I said, “let’s get married.”
Her hand gripped mine tight, but she did not answer.
“I’m not good,” I went on, “at this business of pretending.”
“Yes, I know,” she said.
“I want everyone to know the way I feel about you.”
“Darling,” Marvin said, “let’s not talk about it now. It—might spoil it all.”
“It wouldn’t,” I said. “We’ve got to talk about it, Marvin; if we don’t, this may not last.”
As soon as I said it I knew it had been in the back of my mind all the time—that it could not last—that it was impossible that it could.
“I know,” she said. “We’ll have to talk about it sometime soon. It isn’t that I don’t think about it all the time, but it’s going to be so complicated. There’ll be all those people I don’t know and all these things I don’t know. Someday we’ll go down to Maryland or somewhere—and we’ll get
it over with—and we’ll go and see your family—but let’s not talk about it now.”
I have often wondered what would have happened if I had not kept thinking that there was lots of time. Time has always seemed to me to move strangely, now swiftly and now slowly, and all that time with Marvin Myles gives me the impression of looking from the window of a train which is hastening through some country that I have always wanted to see.
That autumn I took Marvin to the Yale game at New Haven and we sat in the section with my Class, and we met a good many people too between the halves, the way you do at games. That was when Marvin met Kay Motford. Kay had come down from Boston with Joe Bingham. Kay was in a raccoon-skin coat with a red feather in her hat, standing very straight as she always did. Her face still had a touch of the summer tan. Her eyes were bright and she had a grim look around the lips. I heard her calling, “Joe, there’s Harry,” and I let go of Marvin’s arm.
“Harry,” she said, “I wondered if you’d be here. Joe can’t explain the rules.”
“You ought to understand them if you go to a game,” said Joe. “It’s perfectly simple. One side has the ball for four downs.”
“I know,” said Kay. “You’ve tried to tell it to me.” She wasn’t interested. Everything except the game itself always interested her. I saw her looking at Marvin Myles, in that way that women look when they see a man they know with a stranger—at Marvin’s hat and at her gloves—and I suppose Kay felt that everything was too elaborate.
“This is Miss Myles, Miss Motford,” I said, and they shook hands.
“Hello, Marvin,” Joe said, and I saw Kay look at him.
“Oh,” Kay asked, “do you know Joe?”
“Yes,” Marvin said, “we all had dinner in New York.”
“Oh,” Kay said. “You must have Harry bring you up to Boston sometime.”
I did not like the way she said it. Something always makes me nervous when women talk together when they first meet.
As we walked down the steps to our seats Marvin said, “Harry, I hope I look all right. Do you think I’m overdressed?”
“No,” I said, “of course you’re not.”
“If I go anywhere I don’t dress as though I were going to play field hockey,” Marvin said. “Do you think they’re engaged?”
“Probably,” I said, “if he took her all the way here.”
“She’s pretty,” Marvin said.
“Who?” I said. “Kay?”
“If she knew how to dress,” Marvin said.
“I don’t see how you can say she’s pretty,” I told her.
“Her eyes are so clear,” Marvin said. “And anyone’s pretty if she’s having a good time.”
“Hello, Harry,” someone called.
“Hello, Bob,” I called back.
“How’s it going, Harry?” someone called.
“Fine, Tom,” I called back. “How’s it going with you?”
I was glad that I had taken her and glad that they had seen her with me. She was the best-looking girl that I could see anywhere.
“We’ve got to go to a lot of games,” I said.
“Yes,” she answered, “lots and lots,” and then I forgot all about her. The team was on the field again.
It must have been about two weeks later that Father came to town. He said he had come on business—about a new issue for which the New York branch of Smith and Wilding was negotiating—but I like to think that he came to see me. He came and he brought Mary with him, and I met them at the Belmont for lunch.
When Father saw me he waved and called to me, so loudly that everyone sitting in chairs around the marble pillars looked up at us. I felt responsible for the way he acted, somewhat as though I were still at School and as though he had come to see me there. I actually found myself worrying about the way Father would behave at lunch. Perhaps there comes a time when everyone feels that his father is a little out of touch with the present day.
“Here we are,” he called. “Don’t you see us?” And then he dropped his cane and stooped to pick it up and then some letters fell out of his pocket.
“Oh, damnation,” Father said.
I wondered if he would blow his nose when he picked his letters up—and he did, very loudly.
“I don’t see what you see in this town,” he said. “Let’s go downstairs and eat. Don’t you see Mary? Aren’t you going to kiss your sister?”
“Father,” Mary said, “Harry isn’t deaf,” and I saw that she felt the same way about him that I did.
I began wishing that Marvin could take Mary out and do something about her clothes. I knew that Mary would like it, because she was trying to be smart and wasn’t doing it very well. Her dress had a ready-made look and her coat was not properly tailored—suddenly I felt sorry for her. I wanted her to have a good time.
Downstairs in the grillroom Father asked me what I knew about speakeasies and he suggested that sometime later in the afternoon we leave Mary and go to one of them. You could see that he was awfully glad to have us both all alone with him. He kept looking at us and smiling as though we were children at a party. When he got back home, he said, he was going down to the Cape for duck shooting, if Mother was well enough to let him; it was getting late in the season but the birds were still flying and the club he belonged to had a good warm blind; all you had to do was to play poker and to wait until they called that the birds were coming in. Frank Wilding was coming down for two days.
“I don’t suppose you can get off, Harry?” he asked, and I told him that I couldn’t, not possibly. Then he told me how Mother was, and then he said that he had had Hugh on the carpet for taking a commission from the butcher.
Mary sat staring about the room, trying to look bored.
“Harry,” she said, “tell us about the shows.” I told her about “Dear Brutus” while Father lighted a cigar.
“It sounds all right,” he said. “Do you think it would be all right for Mary?”
Mary said nothing; she gave me a martyred look.
“The title comes from Shakespeare,” I said. “‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.’ It’s all about having a second chance. The characters have a second chance and they do the same thing over again.”
“No one ought to have a second chance,” said Father. “That’s damned rot.”
“Some people,” Mary said, “never have a chance at all.”
When I looked at the gold watch that Father had given me, it was after two o’clock.
“I’ve got to be going back,” I said. “We’re pretty busy at the office.”
“All right,” said Father. “We want to see where you work.”
“Oh, no,” I said, “you don’t want to do that.”
“We certainly do,” said Father. “I want to see your boss. What’s his name? Bullard?”
“He’ll be busy,” I said.
“I don’t know why it is,” Father said, “that you and Mary always want to keep me out of everything. Why shouldn’t I see this Bullard?”
When I got them up to the reception room Father looked at the rows of books.
“Maybe you’d better wait here,” I said. “I’ll see if Mr. Bullard can see you.”
“Why should I wait here?” Father asked. “Take me in where you work. I want to see what it looks like.”
I took them through the main office back to where it was partitioned off and opened the door of our room. I hoped that Bill King might be there and that Marvin might be somewhere else, but Bill was out and Marvin was writing.
“Where have you been?” she said. “Bullard’s looking for you,” and then she stopped when she saw Mary and Father.
“This is my father, Miss Myles,” I said.
“How do you do,” Father said. “Is this where my boy works?”
“Yes,” Marvin said, “at the desk over there.”
“Well, I hope he’s doing well,” Father said, and he smiled at her.
“This is Mary
, my sister,” I told Marvin.
I could see that it was all a shock to Marvin, having them come upon her that way suddenly.
“Oh,” she said, “you’re Harry’s sister. I’ve often heard him talk about you.”
We left Marvin and Mary together when I took Father to see Mr. Bullard.
“Who’s that girl?” Father asked, as he walked beside me down the aisle through the main office. “Do all the women in this office call you by your first name?”
“She’s one of the writers,” I said.
“Do you sit in there alone with her all the time?” Father asked.
“Bill King’s in there too,” I said.
“Look here,” Father said. “She isn’t the one you were seen with at the Yale game?”
“How did you hear about that?” I asked.
Before he had time to answer we reached Mr. Bullard’s door, and I was just as glad. Sometime I would have to tell him all about Marvin Myles, but I did not want to then. It was difficult, a good deal worse than I had thought.
H. M. Pulham, Esquire Page 21
