Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  Tom had gone too far, but it was too late to stop.

  “The only one worth looking at,” Tom Harrow said. “The one in the polo coat.”

  “Oh,” Everett Wilkins said, “she walks in a sort of a sliding way, doesn’t she? But she looks kind of plain to me.”

  “She wouldn’t, with another dress and another hairdo,” Tom Harrow said. “Look at her bone structure.”

  “Bone structure?” Everett Wilkins said. “I’m afraid I don’t quite follow you.”

  By evening everyone would know that Tom had been discussing bone structure on Dock Street, but it was too late to stop.

  “The cheekbones and the molding of the jaw,” he said. “It’s a beautiful face. You’d see it if she had another hairdo.”

  “Well, I suppose you ought to know, Tom,” Everett Wilkins said, “just the way I know good mortgages.”

  He stopped because the girl was too near them to allow further discussion; Tom Harrow was embarrassed by the clumsy silence that followed, and yet the quality in the silence in itself was a part of memory.… He was standing on Dock Street again, and it was spring with the same sun and the same tone of sunlight.

  “God damn,” he was saying, “that’s a pretty girl.” …

  She was still walking toward them and Everett Wilkins raised his antiquated straw hat.

  “’Morning, Irene,” he said. The girl nodded and smiled. She must have known they had been talking about her, but she looked more interested in both of them than in what they were saying. Tom Harrow was highly conscious of the glance she gave him. She had blue-gray eyes. He was glad he was still not too old to be attracted by a pretty face. He would never be too old. She looked at him in a questioning sort of a way, just as he must have looked at her, but of course their reasons were different.

  “Good morning, Mr. Wilkins,” she said.

  She had not changed her pace. She walked past them unhurriedly and it would have been ridiculous if they had still gazed at her without speaking.

  “I don’t know what you see in her,” Everett said. “Frankly, she looks kind of skinny and peaked to me, Tom, but then maybe I don’t understand women.”

  “Irene …” Tom Harrow said. “What’s her last name?”

  “Why, Dodd,” Everett Wilkins said. “She’s Jack Dodd’s oldest girl. She’s been at college somewhere. Mount Holyoke or somewhere. But I hear she’s been dropped or something.”

  Now that he had seen Jack Dodd’s daughter, he could understand why Harold had come home late the previous evening and he could completely applaud Harold’s good taste, but at the same time he felt no wistfulness, no twinge of envy and no regret that he was no longer Harold’s age. He was not moved by the girl herself—only by memory.

  The girl’s voice lingered with him, modulated, confident and unself-conscious. “Good morning, Mr. Wilkins” was all she had said, but he was not thinking of the voice of Irene Dodd. He was thinking, instead, of that constantly written scené of fiction and drama, the scene now stereotyped in Hollywood, of boy-meets-girl. In spite of all the times such scenes had been written and rewritten, the essence of them was evasive. At some time or other almost everyone on Dock Street, or anywhere else, for that matter, had played that scene, but always without knowing until later that he had played it. You could not rededicate yourself. Dedication could be done only once. And there never could be consciousness in that sort of dedication. There was a scene in Richard Feverel, and Beatrix walking down the stairs in Esmond, and the gawky grace of one of Arnold Bennett’s heroines. These approached what he was thinking of, without being wholly satisfying. They reminded him, like the Dodd girl, of something in one’s life that had never completely been put into words and something that could happen only once.

  He had been Henry Esmond and Richard Feverel himself once, when he had first seen Rhoda Browne on Dock Street. He had thought the whole thing was forgotten, but then, no one ever completely forgets anything. Irene on Dock Street had not looked like Rhoda Browne. Rhoda had been better-looking, in spite of the impossible clothes of the period. There had only been the voice, the walk, the self-confidence and the restiveness. But now it was time to get to the post office and go back and call New York, and it was not time to think of melodies that boys and girls once sang on the beach at night. He had been able to sing “Mandalay” himself once, and some of the words were appropriate.… Long ago and far away … There ain’t no buses running from the Bank to Mandalay.… There were no buses going back to Dock Street, either, and it was time to get the mail.

  IV

  He Meant It When He Said, “God Bless and Keep You, Thomas”

  It occurred to him, as he crossed Dock to Walter’s Drugstore and proceeded down Bay Street toward the post office, that he was walking under the umbrella of consciousness, which he recalled from his college reading of Bishop Berkeley’s philosophy. He had never returned to those pages to refresh his memory and now doubted that he ever would, but he still thought he had the whole thing straight. It was the Bishop’s contention, if he remembered rightly, that nothing could provably exist which was not within the immediate radius of an individual’s senses. Frequently this concept had given him considerable consolation. By its logic, for example, as he walked down Bay Street, Rhoda Browne, Laura Hopedale, Emily, Walter Price, Harold, and a lot of other people including Mr. Beechley in New York, were merely figments of the imagination and Bay Street alone was demonstrably real. For some reason difficult to explain, Bay Street had been the point from which the commercial impetus of the modern town had emanated. The first chain stores had opened on Bay Street. Warren’s Toggery Shop had been the first men’s store to handle nationally advertised sporting regalia. The Bijou Theatre opposite the venerable Congregational Church had been the first motion picture house in town. Pendle’s Notion Store, having changed its name to Chez Nanette, had been the first store in town to produce a window display of girdles and brassières, and right next to the old First Congregational Church. Tom Harrow had once walked each morning the length of Bay Street to reach high school and the street had given him many ideas. For instance, he had never seen a brassière until he encountered one in the window of Chez Nanette, and his knowledge of the Bible had been derived initially from Mr. Naughton’s Bible class at the First Congregational Church. A swinging sign had been placed in front of the church ending with the name of its present minister, Ernest W. Godfrey. A narrow strip of lawn separated the church from Chez Nanette on one side; an identical strip on the other side separated the church from a candy shop; but Sam’s Liquor Store (another first on the street, having been the town’s first package store after Repeal) was at a legal distance. Upon the strips of lawn were two identical billboards facing the advertisements of the Bijou Theatre across the street. This morning the church was advertising Mr. Ernest W. Godfrey’s sermon topic for the next Sunday. The topic was, “How Happy Are You Inside?” and the Bijou Theatre feature across the way was entitled Love, Honor, and Oh Baby. Tom Harrow read the signs just as he had reached the package store and it was a coincidence that he should meet Mr. Ernest W. Godfrey at almost that same moment.

  “Well, well,” Mr. Godfrey said. “Welcome back home, stranger.”

  The breezy greeting made Tom Harrow wonder what Mr. Naughton would think if his spirit still lingered by the old church door. Mr. Ernest W. Godfrey’s face had not a cracker-barrel but a quizzical expression, and it was too young to have many lines on it. In fact, he was not much older than Harold and his hair was done in a crew cut. There were heavy, crepe-rubber soles on his low shoes and he, too, was in gray flannels and a brown tweed coat. He was also vigorously smoking a straight-stemmed, straight-grain pipe. Trollope and Barchester Towers were no longer in the picture.

  “Well, hello,” Tom Harrow said. “Am I blocking your way to the package store?”

  It was just the sort of joke that anyone who was in there pitching should appreciate, and Ernest Godfrey laughed.

  “Seriously, sir,” he said,
“I can shake a pretty mean Martini, if you would care to come to the parsonage and try one some afternoon. There are a lot of things that I should like to get together with you about.” He waved a hand toward the church. “Seriously, we’re both in show business, Mr. Harrow.”

  “I suppose that’s one way of putting it,” Tom Harrow said.

  He looked at Mr. Godfrey more attentively now that his train of thought had been broken. As far as he could remember, he had met the young man only once before.

  “But then, perhaps my line is more in the area of entertainment than yours,” he said.

  Mr. Godfrey shook his head decisively.

  “Well, now, I wouldn’t be quite so sure of that,” he said. “It always seems to me there is a kind of message in any good play—and in my experience, anyway, entertainment helps the message.”

  Everyone was always interesting if you looked at him in a certain way. Mr. Godfrey’s obviousness was illumined by an enthusiasm and that would be destroyed by time. Mr. Godfrey made him remember his own somewhat hysterical discoveries of the obvious and the turbulence of his own enthusiasms. It seemed hardly credible but still it was barely possible that he had looked like Mr. Godfrey once.

  “You mean it pays to sugar-coat the pill?” he said.

  Mr. Godfrey shook his head again.

  “Oh no,” he said, “not seriously, but how about the New Testament? The parables are entertaining, aren’t they?”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Tom Harrow said, “but they were never presented to me in quite that way.”

  “I know what you mean,” Mr. Godfrey said. “Black leather on the Bible and all that sort of thing. You’ve got to sell religion, don’t you agree, Mr. Harrow?”

  Tom Harrow glanced at the theatre sign across the street and at the two-tone cars and at the liquor store and at Chez Nanette.

  “We’ve got to face competition like everybody else,” Mr. Godfrey said. “Have you got enough time on your hands so you could step inside the church for a moment? I’d like you to see the swell new paint job we did this winter, incidentally, and we’ll be out of the noise there, and we might embroider on this salesmanship topic for a while. It’s been on my mind.”

  He waved his hand toward the church invitingly, and Tom Harrow nodded. It was a new experience and he had never avoided experience.

  “All right,” Tom Harrow said, “but if I go inside there with you, don’t try to convert me. Just remember you’re young and I’m a hardened sinner, will you?”

  “Right,” Mr. Godfrey said, “not a conversion in a carload, sir.”

  He took a key from his pocket and opened the wide church door.

  The noises of the street died away to a murmur when the heavy door had closed behind them. In their place there was silence and the musty odor of pew cushions and hymnals. The interior was puritanically but theatrically impressive. Light flooded it without adornment impartially emphasizing the box pews, the carpeted aisles and the fluted columns suporting the balcony, and the tall pulpit with its double staircases. The vacancy around them made him feel very much alone, and as he stood in the aisle looking at the pulpit, he forgot for a moment that the latest incumbent of the First Congregational Church was with him, until Mr. Godfrey spoke.

  “It’s a pretty big house for one man to play to, isn’t it?”

  Although the remark was characteristic of some of Mr. Godfrey’s others, it was appropriate. It was a big house, indeed, a fragile monument in perishable wood, and yet there was eternity in the white light and the white woodwork. There was a defiance in the simplicity, a breaking-away from imagery and tradition that had itself become traditional. He felt closer to truth there than he ever had at Notre Dame or Chartres. The thing that was called the New England conscience was in the cool silence, not reproof, but conscience. He and Rhoda Browne had been married at the foot of that pulpit, but there was no rebuke, only a feeling that the cards were on the table, although that was not the religious way to put it.

  “I use the small room under the pulpit for writing and thinking in warm weather,” Mr. Godfrey said.

  Tom Harrow followed Mr. Godfrey without speaking.

  There were some places that were better skipped, and the room beneath the pulpit was one of them. He had not seen it since the day he and Rhoda were married. “How Happy Are You Inside?” he remembered was the sermon topic for next Sunday. He did not feel happy inside. He could almost hear again the low, wheezy tones of the organ that had played when he had stood there waiting.

  The small room itself, built directly beneath the pulpit, with its single window cut in the rear wall of the church revealing unimproved back yards beyond the lot, was so startingly unchanged that his last time in it might have been yesterday. The room was the place where, ever since the church was built, ministers had donned their black gowns, and then had waited until the moment arrived to march out the small door and ascend the pulpit steps. It could have been furnished by a Ladies’ Auxiliary shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War. At least the horsehair sofa and the two horsehair armchairs were Gothic rather than General Grant. The Boston rocker was older, but all those four pieces were indestructible, and the horsehair still shone like new in the light that was dim and gray because of the single window’s unwashed exterior. The pen rack and the iron inkwell, on the writing table that held the parish record book, had seemingly not moved an iota. The reddish carpet tacked down to cover the flooring had not faded. The glass in the mahogany veneer mirror above the writing table had the same smoky opaqueness as when it had reflected his wavering image in the last moments when he had waited for the strains of the wedding march. He could almost believe that Mr. Naughton was back there with him and Mort Sullivan, who had been best man. Tom Harrow pulled himself together. Given the time and place, he thought, it could be completely possible to believe in any doctrine of original, not to mention homemade, sin and of retribution. Instinctively he glanced in the mirror above the table and saw that he was fifty-four and not twenty-four. He was gray at the temples. His eyes were harder. His mouth was firmer; it had to be. But in the surface of ancient glass backed by its half-oxidized quicksilver, he could see traces of the young Tom Harrow waiting on the verge of his first great decision and wondering, as he wondered now, exactly how he had got there.

  “The last time I was here beneath this pulpit,” he said to Mr. Godfrey, “was when I was waiting to get married.”

  “That’s funny,” Mr. Godfrey said, “I would have thought that you had been married in New York.”

  It was time to get things straight with Mr. Godfrey.

  “New York was my third time,” he said. “I was referring to the first time. It occurred here on the low platform in front of the pulpit. She was what I think you might call a local girl and she wanted to get out of town. We may both be in the show business, Mr. Godfrey, but you preachers seem able to work out your marital problems—with the exception of an occasional choir singer—better than actors and playwrights. I’m not going to mention actresses.”

  It may have been a good idea that Mr. Godfrey had been called by the First Congregational, but at the same time, his easy laugh was startling when delivered beneath the pulpit.

  “Now, Mr. Harrow,” he said, “please don’t act as though you think I’d be shocked. I haven’t been in this game as long as I might, but I’ve been in it long enough to know that every single one of us has his own problem and his own method of motivation as well as his own particular means of adjustment, and his own particular subconscious mind.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” Tom Harrow said, “although it doesn’t seem to me that anybody knows very much about the subconscious. I am interested that you refer to your calling as a game, Mr. Godfrey.”

  He had written dialogue so long that the problems of measure and compression of words often obtruded themselves in an ordinary conversation and he was aware that this was happening now. He and Mr. Godfrey were playing a scene, and the scene and its values and the h
orsehair furnishings as a background all meant more to him while they were talking.

  “Maybe ‘game’ is a colloquial ward for the ministry,” he heard Mr. Godfrey say, “but it strikes me as about time that a little informality got into ministry. Only last week when I was thinking along these lines I happened to pull the American College Dictionary off my shelf so I could get the word ‘minister’ redefined. It’s funny how all of us deal with words without ever getting together on their meanings, and that wouldn’t be a bad sermon topic, come to think of it. Forgive me, will you, while I pull out the little black book and jot it down?”

  It was a fair piece of business as done by Mr. Godfrey. First he pulled from his tweed coat a massive pair of horn-rimmed spectacles of a design which Tom Harrow had thought was indigenous only to the West Coast. The spectacles changed Mr. Godfrey. Combined with his crew cut, they made him resemble a skin-diver. It was a bit that was worth remembering; and so was the black notebook and the ball-point pen.

  “When you get ideas, catch ’em,” Mr. Godfrey said. “That’s what one of the profs used to say back on campus. That’s how I got my idea for this Sunday’s sermon.”

  It was time to break the continuity. Too long a speech never went well out in front. Tom Harrow coughed softly. It was time to break the speech.

  “You mean, ‘How Happy Are You Inside?’” he asked.

  “That’s it,” Mr. Godfrey said. “I like to personalize topics. However, I guess I’m a point or two off the beam and we were sailing another course. Let me see, where was I?”

  Like Emily back at the house, he needed a gyroscopic compass, but then, the older you got, the less sure you were of latitudes and longitudes.

  “You were taking down your American College Dictionary,” Tom Harrow said, “in order to refresh your memory of the definition of a minister, and not a bad thing to do at all, I’d say, for anyone in your game.”

  Mr. Godfrey laughed. With the horn-rimmed spectacles, the laugh was also an effective bit.