by John O'Hara
It was night after night of the warming companionship of Arthur McHenry in the den at 10 North Frederick Street. From there Joe watched the Anschluss and the carryings-on in Washington and never told the story of Kate Drummond. The new highway was by-passing Gibbsville, and the two friends could not decide whether it meant that Gibbsville was becoming important, or passé. A large bakery was going up on South Frederick Street, and Joe’s opposition to the change in zoning ordinances was disregarded. A Gibbsville High School boy became runner-up in the national junior singles championship, and neither Joe nor Arthur knew the boy’s parents. A man at the Lantenengo Country Club told Joe that a fellow named Chapin, who never played golf, underwrote the expenditures of the greens committee (which was not completely true). The young Pennsylvania Law Review fellow was doing splendidly at McHenry & Chapin. The new slag roof on 10 North Frederick had cost Joe not quite one-third as much as the entire dwelling had cost his grandfather. Arthur was sure he had seen the last of the Chapin Pierce-Arrows—without tires, the windshield smashed, the top crumpled—just sitting in a ravine near Collieryville. Harry Jackson had an operation for hernia, successful. Billy English had a prostatectomy. Joby Chapin had informed his family and friends that he preferred to be called Joe or Chape.
The two friends hardly ever discussed professional matters at 10 North Frederick. In the office they called each other by their first names, but each referred to the other as Mr. Chapin, Mr. McHenry, and the relationship was conducted on such politely businesslike terms that the long silences and the informality of 10 North Frederick could not have been suspected by acquaintances who had not witnessed them. The Chapins and the McHenrys did not go out much any more. There were the Second Thursdays and some smaller and some larger dinner parties, and the two annual Assemblies; but they stayed away from the regular dances at the country club and the Gibbsville Club, and they would appear at cocktail parties only when the parties were in honor of a friend or a friend’s guest or had something to do with a coming wedding.
The meetings in the den at 10 North Frederick were a fixed custom, without ever quite losing spontaneity. Each night before leaving his house Arthur would say to Rose: “Going over to see Joe,” just as he had said it to her sister and predecessor Mildred. And Joe would say to Edith: “I think Arthur’s going to drop in this evening.” There were just enough breaks in the strings of meetings to keep them irregular. There were no meetings on Friday or Saturday or Sunday evenings, although Arthur sometimes dropped in on Sunday afternoons.
As the years went by, and beginning rather soon after Joe’s hotel luncheon with Kate Drummond, the silences often were longer, and whiskey became more a part of the meetings. The bottle of Scotch, the glasses, the ice, the water carafe, the soda for Arthur would be placed on a large silver tray on an old mahogany taboret, the last act before Mary retired for the evening. Arthur continued to drink Scotch and soda, but Joe, after the last lunch with Kate, stopped putting ice in his drinks and the proportion of water to whiskey became closer to even. The quiet drinking never increased to the point where Arthur, saying good night, could have called his friend drunk, but he could not help noticing that every night there was a fresh, new bottle, and without asking, Arthur had no way of knowing how long Joe would sit in the den, smoking a pipe, humming old songs, sipping watered whiskey and reviewing his life.
The habit of politeness, the early discipline in good behavior, were upon him, and Joe made Edith the beneficiary of the boyhood training and the mature execution. He had no cross words with her, no recriminations, no proud confessions. He gave her no cause for disturbance other than his more orderly repetition of her own father’s devotion to whiskey. At midnight, at one-thirty, at two, he would come to their room and undress by the light of a heavily frosted small bulb, hanging up his suit, putting the trees in his shoes, disposing of the linen, and quietly lowering himself into his bed. “Good night, Joe,” she would say.
“Good night, Edith,” he would say.
They would exchange their good nights as though taking pains not to disturb anyone in the sleeping house, as if to let a baby lie in his slumber. Then soon Joe’s long inspiration and expiration would begin, and then the snoring, and then the talking, and she would listen for a telling word or name, but the only sensible sentence she ever heard was, “We know what the waiter thinks.”
As a younger man Joe had always used Harry Jackson as a social chauffeur as distinguished from a chauffeur who drove him in his professional rounds. Joe always walked to and from the office of McHenry & Chapin, and the distances between offices and banks in the business district were too short to require a car. Following the leg fracture, during the first months back in the office, Joe had used Harry on trips to the courthouse, the hill being too steep for a man with a bad leg. It was, indeed, too steep for many lawyers with cardiac and vascular imperfections, and the incidence of damage worsened by the courthouse hill was high but virtually unrecognized. When the leg got better, Joe restored Harry to his previous household status, but Arthur had taken over as much of the courthouse work as he could, and Joe was in effect the downtown, or office, partner.
He thus became an even more familiar figure on Main Street, and to be seen so often helped to create the illusion that he was as active as ever. Gibbsville consequently was not immediately aware that Joe was slowing down. He was cutting out more and more of his community-charitable endeavors, but the reduction was easily attributable to his cessation of all but nominal political activity. His quick two Martini cocktails before lunch at the Gibbsville Club were so quick that they often were not noticed at all, and his way of drinking them was as neat as the small-figured neckties he always wore, his well-boned English shoes, his narrow-sleeved double-breasted suits. He would stand at the bar and he would not touch his glass until he was ready to drink, then he would take one sip, consuming half the cocktail, another sip for the other half. He would nod to the barman, and another two-sip cocktail would be on its way. Then he would go to his reserved table or to the common table and eat his lunch. There was no standing with glass in hand, no glass at the table. Sometimes, but not every day, and in the beginning never on two successive days, he would go to the club before going home for dinner; on the non-club days he would drop in at the John Gibb Hotel bar. His afternoon visits to the club and the hotel bars were moved up from six o’clock to five-thirty and to five, the changes in schedule taking place over a period of three years. The extension of the hours was followed by an understanding with both barmen that the Martinis were to be served as doubles, without being so ordered. In about five years Joe was having two double Martinis before lunch and four double Martinis before going home to dinner, and a single Martini with Edith before going in to dinner.
The changes were not lost on Arthur, but he withheld comment. For Uncle Arthur knew something that Joe Chapin did not tell him. And he had known it almost from the beginning of its existence: he knew of Joe’s hopeless love for Kate Drummond.
Arthur’s meeting with Ann took place at her request in New York, when three or four months had passed from the time of the last meeting of Kate Drummond and Joe Chapin. The meeting took place because Ann had a conversation with Kate.
“Where did you ever get this ruby? Isn’t it something new?”
“An unknown admirer,” said Kate.
“Well, unknown maybe, but rich. Boy!” said Ann. “Someone you met in California, no doubt.”
“No doubt,” said Kate.
“The way you say it, there is some doubt,” said Ann. “You know, Kate, I have to admit that when you suddenly upped and took off for Santa Barbara, I though it was because you were unhappy in New York. But I guess this shows you weren’t, whether you got the ruby from California, or here.”
“I never wear the ruby.”
“Or at least I’ve never seen it before.”
“It’s something to look at and touch. If I wear it, I’ll be asked question
s.”
“Believe me, if I owned it, I’d wear it and to hell with the questions.”
“Well, then I might as well tell you, I’ve left it to you. In my will. I’d give it to you, but I can’t while the person’s still alive.”
Ann thought a moment. “That’s a strange statement. It sounds as though you expected him to die.”
“I don’t, but I wouldn’t ever want him to know I gave you the ring. If he saw it on . . .”
“Somebody that’s likely to see it on me? I don’t know anybody that I see that’s likely to give you a ruby, do I? It is somebody older. Who do I know older?”
“Don’t guess any more, Ann. It’s no good. But I’ve left it to you, so consider it mine only temporarily. And change the subject.”
A few days later Ann said to Kate: “Kate, did my father give you the ruby?”
Kate nodded her head.
“I thought so. I’m glad.”
“How did you guess?”
“Well, it wasn’t too clever of me. I knew you were protecting somebody, somebody older, somebody fairly well-to-do, somebody that sees me. And I always knew that night you went out together, when I couldn’t go . . . Kate, did you have an affair with my father?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I love him too. But it’s over?”
“It’s been over. It never really was. It was one night and that was all.”
“How sweet you were. My father at last! Oh, rubies aren’t good enough for you, Kate. To have someone lovely and young and beautiful. You don’t know, Kate. You don’t know. And you fell in love with him?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, he’d take off the armor with you. He wears armor.” Ann smiled. “Where did he hang it? In this apartment, I hope.”
Kate nodded.
“I’d love to be able to talk to him, but that’s impossible.”
“Yes, everything’s impossible.”
“I can see how that would be. You’ve made up your minds? Yes, of course you have. It couldn’t be any other way with my poor, dear stuffed-shirt father.”
“A stuffed shirt didn’t give me the ruby.”
“No, you’re damn right. I’ll always look at you differently now, Kate. I hope it doesn’t make you self-conscious, because I’m full of admiration. And I’m obligated to you. A lot of things I want to ask you, but—”
“Don’t,” said Kate.
“I won’t,” said Ann.
She called Arthur McHenry. They met at a restaurant and she said: “Uncle Arthur, what do you consider the holiest thing you know?”
“The holiest thing I know? Give me a moment.”
“In other words, what would you swear on that would make it the most solemn promise you ever made?”
“Ann, if I gave my word to you.”
“Good enough, as long as you appreciate the seriousness of it.” She then told him about her father and Kate Drummond. “He’ll never tell you, I know that,” she said.
“He tells me a lot, and he’s had a lot of chances to tell me that, but he hasn’t. But it explains some things.”
“What things? Is he in trouble?”
“It’s a kind of trouble you or I can’t do anything about. You might call it stopping the clock. It can’t be done.”
“Yes, and he not only wants to stop it. He wants to turn it back,” said Ann. “Well, another secret of the Chapin family for you. God knows you have a full share of them.”
A year later, in an elaborately chatty letter to her father, Ann wrote:
And my nice Kate Drummond has announced her engagement to a man from Santa Barbara, California, whom I have yet to meet but she has asked me to be her matron of honor and I have accepted with alacrity. Wedding in Buffalo, Oct. 20th. Stuart also to be an usher. Kate’s fiancé was also ’27 Princeton although they were not close friends, but since Stuart is a Buffalo native and Jack Rupert, Kate’s fiancé, is having most of his ushers from the east, it is a logical choice.
Arthur would often—in the beginning—try to present Joe with an opportunity to talk about Kate Drummond. Soon, though, he realized that Joe would not speak of Kate, short of the direct questions that Arthur could not ask. Arthur began to realize too, that it would be futile to try to separate his friend from the bottle. Nor was he sure that a separation was desirable. The pious attitude would have been to talk to Joe, reason with him, preach to him. But Arthur’s piety was his own kind of piety. His friend was now in his late fifties, he had spent his life in a manner that did harm to the fewest possible people, and—according to Arthur’s view—life had not given much to Joe Chapin. Even if he could have summoned the impertinence to ask Joe to stop drinking, Arthur believed he ought to have something to offer Joe as a substitute. Joe had his booze; what was there to offer to take its place? There was, Arthur concluded, nothing. So far, in the late Nineteen Thirties, the early Nineteen Forties, Joe had not made a fool of himself, and whatever he might be doing to his heart and liver, so far there had been no cause for alarm. No dramatic collapse, no signs that could not be merely the signs of getting to be close to sixty. By the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Joe Chapin had become known as a steady drinker, but not a drunk. He continued as a senior partner in McHenry & Chapin, offered no resistance when another Law Review young man was taken on, yielded gracefully to Arthur’s considerate maneuvers that relieved him of the firm’s important work. Arthur saw to it that Joe took longer vacations; the entire summer, two months in the winter, a week or two in the spring, a week or so in the fall. If anyone had pointed out to Arthur that he was protecting Joe, he would have denied it, but that was not to say that Arthur did not believe his best friend had an incurable disease called weariness. If a friend has an incurable disease, you do what you can to make his last years comfortable, and Arthur did what he could: he respected his friend’s reticence, he allowed his friend to administer alcohol, precisely as though Joe secretly had diabetes and gave himself insulin.
At fifty-nine a man’s indignation at an insult to his country’s honor is likely to be controlled by the knowledge that there is nothing much he can do about it. It soon became apparent also that Joe’s protest was not going to be carried to the front by his son, who was drafted and released because of the inner-ear trouble which no one had known about. Ann’s husband, Stuart Musgrove, accompanied his Ivy League friends to Quonset and Naval Aviation in the Pacific, and Ann spent much more time at 10 North Frederick, which gave Joe Chapin pleasure, but not all pleasure, for it was inevitable that Ann should begin to confide again in her father, and she confessed that if it had not been for the war she would now have been divorced from Musgrove. She could bring herself to say no more—even to Joe—than that she and Musgrove were incompatible, that incompatibility had led him to other women and her to other men.
“Well, after the war you can try again,” said Joe.
“Not with Stuart,” said Ann.
“Oh, as bad as that?”
“Well, maybe I’ll try. Yes, I’ll try. But maybe he won’t want to. I keep hoping he’ll get a girl somewhere and want to marry her.” And so it was, and Musgrove did ask Ann to get a divorce, and she got it. But he did not marry another girl. Instead he begged Ann to try again with him, and she did, on his leave. She left him in the middle of the night in a Washington hotel, and waited in the Union Station for the first of the trains that would take her back to 10 North Frederick Street.
That was in 1944.
“What really was the trouble, Ann?” said Joe. “I have a considerable knowledge of such things, and you can tell me.”
“No, I couldn’t tell you. It’s a sexual matter and nothing will change it.”
“I see,” said Joe. “Well, at least you didn’t marry him again, and we have you home, the old place. You know it’s approaching its hundredth anniversary, this dear old shack. Gloomy old barn, but I love it
. Don’t you?”
“Yes, I guess so. I always seem to come back to it,” said Ann.
“Don’t worry, you’ll have a place of your own. You’ll meet somebody that you can love, then you can bring your grandchildren here.”
“You mean your grandchildren.”
“Of course I mean my grandchildren. Your children, my grandchildren. But you might bring your grandchildren here too. If Joby, or Joe, as he wants to be called, if he gets married and lives here, although I can’t say I expect to live to see the day when that happens. Joe is going to want to live in some God damn foreign country and shake the dust of Gibbsville from his heels, if I know Joe.”
“Most likely,” said Ann.
“I’ll live out my life here, and then your mother will, but after she’s gone I’ll bet you and Joby sell the place. Well, why shouldn’t you? It’s too expensive to run, and people aren’t coming along to take the place of the Marians and Harrys. Still, I’m glad you had a Marian and a Harry. You’ll be able to tell your grandchildren what it was like to have servants, decent, capable, self-respecting people. I understand there’s a new kind of servant called a baby-sitter. Fifty cents an hour, use of the radio, eat everything they can out of the icebox, rationed or not. Young man at the office, inclined to think of us as candidates for the guillotine. But I happened to hear him complaining about these baby-sitters, how they steal his cigarettes and go home with half a pound of his butter, besides getting paid fifty, seventy-five cents an hour. But he didn’t see any inconsistency, looking down his nose at us for having servants, at the same time complaining about the quality of the servant he has to have. I wanted to say to him, ‘Frank, you’ve got the kind of servant you deserve. Just ask Marian and Harry to work for you, for any amount of money.’ They’d laugh him to scorn, because Harry’s more of a gentleman than Frank is, in every way except that Frank is a member of the bar, and Harry is a butler, if that difference means anything any more. Which I doubt. I guess the truth of the matter is that people like us treated servants better than we did our own children. But Frank wouldn’t know that.” He smiled, and she returned his smile. “After you’re sixty you’re expected to say these things, but I never had any difficulty saying them when I was fifty. Or thirty. I haven’t changed my mind much since I was thirty.”