Ten North Frederick

by John O'Hara

  “True. But think of what I just told you. I was almost that man. I thought she expected me to marry her.”

  “But she didn’t.”

  “Luckily. That’s what it was, sheer luck. But do you know what the experience did to me? This doesn’t apply to you, but I look at the fellows we know and I wonder how much they know about women. And I also wonder if it shows on me, my experience.”

  “Well, I knew there was something going on that you didn’t want to tell me about, but I don’t know whether it would have shown itself to the other fellows.”

  “I hope not. I have no use for a rounder. I could never trust one in business, professionally, any more than I could socially. And I wouldn’t want anyone to consider me a rounder, although of course I’m not one. But if my experience with Marie showed on my face, it would show a weakness in my character. My mother always said those weaknesses show up sooner or later.”

  “I believe that.”

  “Do you know that that’s one of the few houses my mother fully approved of? The Harrisons’. One of the fine old New York families, according to Mother.”

  “Well, they are.”

  “But it shows that you can’t always go by outward appearances or what you think you know about people,” said Joe. “Arthur, do you still believe what we used to believe—about the husband? You remember, the husband should be just as decent as he expects his wife to be?”

  “You mean bride and groom?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, I believe that. I expect to be when I get married.”

  “But I’m not any more. Do you think that’s something I ought to tell my wife when I get married?”

  “Well—I wouldn’t, if I were you.”

  “I was hoping you’d say that. I don’t feel that I belong to Marie, and that’s what counts. If you didn’t really belong to somebody else before you’re married. I can truthfully tell my wife that I never belonged to another woman.”

  “With a mental reservation.”

  “Yes, a mental reservation. Oh, I’ll tell her a white lie for that matter.”

  “Unless another girl comes to your room sometime. Then it might not be a white lie.”

  “I never thought of that. It never crossed my mind. I don’t think it’s liable to happen.”

  “Do you half wish it would, Joe?”

  “Well—we don’t lie to each other, you and I. So I’ll tell you the truth. If I had the powers of the Almighty, and I could eradicate my experience with Marie—I wouldn’t. I think if she came to my room again I couldn’t resist her.”

  “Then you did belong to her, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did, Arthur. I admit it. When I get married I am going to have to lie to my wife about Marie. You know, I’ve lied to myself, but I couldn’t lie to you. Isn’t that odd?”

  “You’re truthful.”

  “It’s best in the long run.”

  “No doubt about it,” said Arthur.

  The friends avoided Marie as a topic of conversation for almost two years. They were rooming together in a fraternity house at the University of Pennsylvania. Arthur came home one afternoon in the late winter and found Joe sitting in the Morris chair, still wearing his ulster and overshoes.

  “What’s the matter, Joe? Is there something wrong?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your family? Your mother and father?”

  “No. Marie. Here’s what was waiting for me when I got home. It’s from Dave.”

  Arthur read the letter:

  Dear Joe:

  Knowing your fondness for Marie and hers for you I am faced with the sad duty to tell you that she died last Thursday evening from peritonitis following an abdominal operation. The operation was performed at one of the private hospitals in the suburbs and the funeral services, which were strictly private, took place on Saturday. We had no pallbearers and we did not invite anyone but family to the funeral.

  In going through her effects I found a small stack of letters which I recognized to be in your handwriting. I confess that I read one of the letters, although only one after I realized that they were love letters. I am returning them to you since I do not feel that they are for other eyes. It may console you to learn that Marie still had your photograph in a locket which she carried in her purse until the day she went to the hospital. I wish I had known that you and Marie had once been in love with each other. If your romance had been encouraged to completion there might be a different and happier story to tell today. But no more for the present . . .

  Dave

  “The poor thing,” said Arthur.

  “Is she, or am I?”

  “I said it about her, but I don’t know, Joe,” said Arthur. “It sounds as though she’d been in love with you all the time.”

  “It sounds like more than that, too,” said Joe.

  “You’re thinking of the operation?”

  “I’m thinking of the operation in a private hospital in the suburbs, and strictly private funeral, and mystery, covering up. You must know what I’m thinking.”

  “That she died of an abortion.”

  “Yes. That’s what poor Dave is trying to tell me. I’m going over to New York on the next train.”

  “Shall I go with you?”

  “Thanks, Arthur. But I’ll be back later this evening. I just want to talk to Dave. I’ll send him a telegram and he can meet me at the University Club. I don’t want to see the family if I can help it. Just Dave.”

  Joe returned from New York after midnight.

  From his bed Arthur spoke to Joe. “I’m awake, if you want to talk.”

  “I don’t know,” said Joe. He was putting his things in the coat closet.

  “Will you throw me a cigarette?” said Arthur.

  Joe did so and sat in the Morris chair. “Dave asked me not to repeat any of this.”

  “I understand,” said Arthur.

  “On a slight technicality—everything we guessed from the letter was true.”

  “Everything you guessed,” said Arthur.

  “And what you guessed, too,” said Joe. “You guessed that she was in love with me, remember?”

  “Yes, I remember I did.”

  “Two nights before she died, or rather the night before she died, she mentioned my name when she was in a sort of delirium. When she came out of it they asked her if she wanted to see me, and she said no, no, she didn’t want me to become involved in it. If I had shown up at the hospital—you know. Oh, Arthur, why couldn’t I have known? Why was I so stupid about her? She loved me! She’s the only person who ever did love me! And what did I think? What did I say?”

  “Whatever you said, you only said it to me.”

  “Yes. I’m not so much ashamed of what I said to you as what I thought. I tell you everything, but that was evil of me, thinking she was no more than . . .”

  “Listen, Joe, if we were all hanged for what we thought we’d all be on the gallows.”

  “I have a very strange feeling. I feel as though I’d been found guilty of something that happened so long ago that I’ve almost forgotten the crime I committed. I feel as though I ought to feel guilty, but I don’t feel guilty. And yet I know that all my life I will feel guilty. The older I get, the more I’ll feel the guilt.”

  “But you’re not guilty of anything.”

  “I wasn’t responsible for the abortion, no. And yet I was. If I had been wiser, more knowing—what do I mean?—more perceptive? What I want to say is, if I’d seen that she loved me she wouldn’t have had the affair that ended the way it did.”

  “She sent you on your way, remember that, Joe.”

  “That’s when I should have been—perceptive. I keep using that word. There must be a better one. Understanding. I don’t know.”

  “How would you like a highball?”

&
nbsp; “I tried one. I couldn’t finish it,” said Joe.

  “Joe, you’re making yourself feel what you don’t feel, trying to. You’re trying to make yourself feel what you think you ought to feel.”

  “Do you consider me as insincere as all that? I like that.”

  “Not insincere, no. But as though you had a duty to feel badly,” said Arthur.

  “I don’t think I like that. I don’t think I like that at all, Arthur.”

  “But am I right?”

  “No, I don’t think you’re right for one minute.”

  “Well—you misunderstand me. I’m trying to prevent you from upsetting yourself needlessly.”

  “Needlessly! A girl that loved me lies dead in New York City because I wasn’t perceptive enough to realize. Needlessly!”

  “Well—go to bed and try to get some sleep.”

  “Damn little sleep I’ll get tonight,” said Joe.

  But he went to bed, and, as Arthur noted, sleep came quite soon.

  In the succeeding months Arthur also noted that he had been unfair to Joe’s capacity for feeling. On a fine day Joe would bring up Marie’s name apropos of nothing. They would be at a University baseball game, or watching the rowing on the Schuylkill, and Joe would say, “I can’t believe Marie is dead,” or, “Marie would have enjoyed this day.” He displayed no lachrymose grief, but it was not like Joe to bring up sad subjects, and Death was not a subject he brought up at all. Marie was the first of their contemporaries to die and the phenomenon which Death is to the young was brought even closer to them by the lively intimacy Joe had shared with Marie.

  There was something else about Joe that Arthur noticed, observing it so frequently that he could predict it: at college dances and the larger Philadelphia functions and on visits to the seashore—where the two young men might be likely to meet girls they had not met before—Joe avoided the girls who were pretty and bright and gay. He would perform the duty dances, and his good manners were maintained, but he managed never to be alone with girls who might be—were—romantically intentioned. He seemed to prefer the company of spiritless pretty girls, who had only their prettiness to remind him of Marie, but even those girls were alone with him for no longer than the measures of a waltz, and it would amuse Arthur to watch Joe, at the conclusion of a dance number, guiding his partner to the safety of a group. For an outsider Joe was well received in Philadelphia. If he had been a Philadelphian he would have been a prospective member of the City Troop and the State-in-Schuylkill, but he approved of his own ineligibility. “I’d feel the same way about a Philadelphian that came to Gibbsville,” he told Arthur. “You don’t just walk in and join our Assembly or The Second Thursdays. If you could, things like that wouldn’t mean as much as they do to us.” Whatever Joe secretly felt about the organizations, Arthur was sure of one thing: Joe was not going to marry into them.

  “I’ll probably marry some day,” he said to Arthur. “But it will be a Gibbsville girl, and it won’t be soon.”

  • • •

  Five hundred invitations went out, requesting the honor of approximately eight hundred persons’ presence at the Chapin-Stokes marriage ceremony. In several hundred cases the invitations were the next thing to an insult: if out of the stiff envelope did not fall a card for the reception, a Gibbsville citizen and her husband were being reminded that they were not yet of consequence in the town. It was a local custom that silverware and china were not expected of persons who had been invited to the church but not to the reception. Nevertheless the purchasers of silverware and china were more numerous than the list of persons invited to the reception. A few women bought the items because they would not admit to their jewelers that they had not received the double invitation; and a smaller number of women bought the items because they were sure there had been a mistake.

  Edith Stokes made no such mistakes. Her lists had been checked and rechecked long before the engagement announcement, so that when she took the list to Charlotte Chapin, the mother of the groom and the bride-to-be were in almost perfect accord. Names marked with an “R” for reception remained marked with an “R”; a few, but a very few, marked with a “C” for church-only, were re-marked with an “R” because Charlotte felt that this husband or that husband was slightly more important in the business affairs of the town than Edith could be expected to know. “It will mean a lot to Joe later on, Edith dear. I’d have done just what you did, but if you let down the bars just a little bit, just in one or two instances, I know it will be appreciated. And they’re worthwhile people, and in one more generation there wouldn’t be the slightest question about their being invited. So don’t you think we ought to be nice to them now?”

  “It’s remarkable, Mother Chapin, how you’ve kept up your interest.”

  “Well—you will, too, dear. Our dear old Gibbsville, we’re very fond of our dear old Gibbsville.”

  Charlotte was genuinely pleased with the match. (“I wonder how Charlotte Chapin is taking the turn of events.”) The engagement came as no surprise to her and caused her no displeasure. She confidently believed that there was nothing about Edith Stokes that she did not know, and the very fact that Joe had selected Edith as his bride was reassurance to Charlotte that her son knew nothing about women. He would have some surprises and some excitement from this girl, surprises and excitement that an inexperienced boy would have with any girl. After a time the surprises would end and during some of the excitement they would create a grandchild. But no girl with a face as plain as Edith’s could inspire a love or even a passion that would cause a son to reject his mother. It would be a safe marriage for the son, and it would present no problems to the mother. “You are going to have this house eventually,” said Charlotte, during the engagement period. “So why not from the very beginning? I hope that you’ll live here all your lives, and your children too.” Edith had agreed so quickly that Charlotte was not compelled to make the concessions she was prepared to make if Edith had resisted. Instead of having a whole story to themselves, or a suite, the bride and groom were given a bedroom and their own bath and some extra closet space.

  It was a six o’clock wedding and the chimes of Trinity and the long striped canopy down the terrace and across the sidewalk had given notice to the uninvited that something was up—and there were few who were unaware of what was up. A wedding in Trinity was always a favorite free show for the poor, who arrived early and stood against the inside of the canopy walls, defying the routine efforts of the two constables to chase them away. The carriages of the bride and her bridesmaids began to arrive at ten minutes before the hour and when Edith with her father passed through the double line of the poor and up the carpeted stone steps there were remarks suitable to the occasion: “Ah . . . Pretty . . . Lovely . . . Lace . . . Satin . . . Isn’t she? . . . Ah . . . Bouquet . . . Her father . . . Ain’t she? . . . Did you ever? . . . Good luck . . . Lovely . . . Isn’t she? . . .” Her father produced a cut-glass, silver-capped vessel shaped like a cornucopia and offered it to Edith. “It’s smelling salts, dear.”

  “I know, but I don’t need them,” said Edith.

  “Well, I do,” he said. “Any of the girls need them?”

  “No, of course not, Father,” said Edith.

  “Well, give me a kiss, Miss. The last one as a miss.” He kissed her and the march to the altar was begun.

  Joe was as pale as his tie, but his responses were audible in the good acoustics of Trinity, and when the now married pair turned their back to the altar and commenced the recessional they walked briskly and smiling. It had gone off well, without the breaking of a bridesmaid’s garter, a fainting, a coughing spell, a flatulent report, an apopleptic stroke, a child’s vomiting, an upset candelabrum, a bass gaffe by the organist, a popping of an usher’s shirtfront, a case of hiccoughs, a dropped walking-stick in the aisle, a weeping spell, a Socialist’s protest. It was as nice a wedding as anyone could hope for, with none of th
e disturbances that sometimes occur as a result of nervousness, anger, or jubilance. The reception, on which foolish expense had been spared, was in the best of good taste, dispensing with such ostentatious features as out-of-town caterers, florists, and orchestra, and taking on some of the spirit of a large family party. The secret of the principal couple’s destination was well kept and when they departed in a closed carriage there was no vulgar attempt to follow them.

  They were driven ten miles down country to the Laubach farm, which had an owner’s house separate from the quarters occupied by the hired farmer’s family. In the late morning they were to be driven to the railroad station and the train to Philadelphia and White Sulphur Springs; meanwhile the Laubach country house, warm and comfortable, lit by kerosene lamps and candles, was theirs. It was a house with which the bride and groom were familiar and when the Laubach coachman deposited their overnight luggage in the hall Edith and Joe were completely alone.

  He kissed her. “My wife, my love,” he said.

  “My dearest one,” she said. “My husband.”

  “Isn’t it nice of the Laubachs?”

  “Sweet of them. I don’t know what we would have done.”

  “It would have been awful to take the sleeper.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t have stood that,” said Edith.

  “Everything went so beautifully, don’t you think?” said Joe.

  “I expect so, dear.”

  “I know, you must have been, as my Aunt Jane used to say, in a tizzy.”

  “I hope I remembered everyone’s name.”

  “You did. You were positively splendid. Much better than I was.”

  “Well—it’s over, and we’ll have the rest of our lives to think about it.”

  “The happiest day of my life,” said Joe.

  “And of mine,” said Edith. “Shall I—go upstairs?”

  “Do you feel like it? We can sit and talk awhile, if you like.”

  “No, my dear. I want to start our life together.”

  “Yes.”

  “Shall I call you?”

  “Yes.”