Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  He recalled the last time that the three of them had been together in the Fowler house. It was when his aunt had been ailing, before her last illness. Coming from New York and going to the Fowler house, Rhoda had always said quite frankly, gave her the heebie-jeebies—the same sort of reaction she had experienced when as a child she read back volumes of a set of bound copies of Harper’s Young People. The house was, as Tom himself had often admitted, an architectural impossibility that exhibited the extremes of an era of bad taste. Of course Tom had his obligations to his Aunt Edith, and so Rhoda, being his wife, was glad to come on flying visits, but that fixed idea of his aunt’s that they should occupy the three-quarters, black-walnut bed in the rear spare room, simply because it had been his room once for two years, was honestly preposterous. It was true that it was far enough away so that they could mix a Martini before supper without causing undue excitement, but he had to admit that the mattress was like a washboard; and the bathroom still had a zinc bathtub and a stained-glass window.

  “Tom,” she said, on the last night they had ever spent in the Fowler house, “move over here. I wish I had wool socks on because my feet are frozen. It’s that back entry on the way to the bathroom, and I will not use the bedroom crockery. Tom, dear, I don’t know how you stood it. I honestly can’t understand.”

  She could not, and why should she have? “Everyone to his own taste,” though a tiresome motto, at the same time was true. She simply had not seen what he had. It had never been Rhoda’s gift to project her imagination behind façades.

  It may very well have been that Tom had always known that he would inevitably leave that galère only too soon, whereas Rhoda never had thought she would. Anyone who had suffered from claustrophobia, even restless houseflies of a summer’s day, found it difficult to observe the beauty of environment. He must always have been aware of a sense of destiny during the two years he had lived in the Judge’s house. Subconsciously he must have realized their precious quality. Somehow he had recognized the values around him because his character had been set.

  Once when Rhoda told him that those two years with his Aunt Edith, desperately unpleasant though they must have been for a boy who had previously attended a fashionable school, had done a great deal to mold his character and had taught him his neatness and industry, he had not argued. His years with his Aunt Edith had done more to train his character than any subsequent experience. It was tantalizing that he never could discover exactly why, because they had been dull years, without a glowing moment of triumph or excitement.

  Yet on sleepless nights they were the years his mind moved back to most often. For instance, he would be back again in the Judge’s library, and somehow it would always be snowing or sleeting outside and there was comfort in the minute staccato sounds of ice particles against the window panes.

  The judge must have faced, like many another self-made man, severe discipline and feelings of inferiority in his youth, combined with an intense desire for self-expression. It was odd that although the house had been sold to wreckers years ago the strength of the Judge’s personality lingered in its decoration. It was now only a fascinating air castle and not an heirloom that could be passed on. Its unanswered questions could be treasured only by a single survivor now. Had the entrance hall, for instance, with its hideous yellow fireplace and fake inglenook, warmed the Judge’s heart when he returned there from his chambers? Tom could only depend on a single remark of his Aunt Edith’s left for him to treasure.

  “The Judge always said,” she had told him once, “that this hallway is baronial. He had always desired such a hallway after reading Scott’s Marmion in his childhood. And he always used to add, ‘Wax it, Edith. Wax brings out the beauty of the golden wood.’”

  She had seen that it was waxed until her last illness. But she only dusted, never waxed, the library floor, because the Judge had once slipped on the Oriental rug before the library door, because of excessive waxing. Tom could still hear the gentle tapping of sleet on the library windowpanes as though ghosts were tossing the sands of time against them, and genial warmth always rose from the hot-air register behind the Judge’s desk. The library, being directly over the furnace, was the warmest room in the house; yet his Aunt Edith with her embroidery sat by preference in the cold front parlor, by the artificial gas fire, which she never lighted except in emergencies because gas was expensive.

  “Your mother and I were never accustomed to enter the library,” she had told him once, “unless we were invited by the Judge. The Judge made it clear that the library was a man’s room, and so it is. On a damp day there is still the odor of his cigar smoke, and I am sorry to say, though Marie and I clean it faithfully and dust the books twice annually, there is still the odor of something worse. When Court was in session, the Judge occasionally entertained visiting lawyers in the library and he then thought it necessary to offer them a glass of Kentucky whiskey. The Judge never drank himself in company, and in private as he explained to me once, only because of a nervous affliction. At the time of his death there were eight bottles of Kentucky whiskey in the cupboard directly below his shelves of Legislative Acts, and there still remains a slight odor of whiskey. Marie mentioned it only last year. Your father asked the Judge for your mother’s hand in the library.”

  In such a game of retrospection, it was impossible to gauge the degree of seriousness with which his aunt had been speaking, but a sort of irony did remain—something that was sweet and infinitely gentle, the sort of strange balance that existed between love and laughter. She must have loved the Judge whose ghost still wandered through the memory of his house, and particularly in the library, and she had been right. There was the ghost of the odor of cigar smoke, not the best Havana, either. There had been no one to disturb Tom there. He could sit by the hour in the Judge’s leather chair that made flatulent sounds whenever you settled yourself, and instead of doing his high school reading, could examine the Judge’s libido. The library became his first theatre of the imagination, and he realized later that the only true reality in the world existed there—the reality of appeal of mind to mind.

  He learned more about women from the library than he ever did from Marie. The personality of the Judge was kinder and more genial in the library than elsewhere. When you examined the books in the golden-oak bookshelves, there were splits in the façade and traces of human frailty. It took time to detect these rifts. It was necessary first to face the lawbooks, some of which stood on every shelf like a masonry curtain protecting the inner bailey of a fortress. It was necessary to look in lower cupboards and to take down the state statutes to understand the Judge fully.

  The library had been a gentleman’s library, consisting primarily of solid leather-bound sets, all of them lubricated annually by Aunt Edith. A gentleman’s library, as the Judge very well understood, comprised the British poets, the works of Bulwer-Lytton, the Waverly Novels, Dickens and Thackeray, Austen and the Brontë sisters and Trollope. Given these, there was space for a few deviations of fancy. Tacitus, perhaps, and Gibbon, and a set of Grote’s History of Greece, Green’s Short History of the English People, Macaulay’s History of England, and Boswell’s Johnson. Because the Judge was American, Parkman’s Montcalm and Wolfe was with the histories, and Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico and Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic. Then, as a dash of erudition, a set of Goethe—which appeared never to have been touched—and a set of Molière and Racine next to several volumes of the Variorum Shakespeare. Tom got his first taste of the theatre on that shelf, and his first love for reading French. He often wondered where the Judge had bought those books, so massive and so conventional, and his Aunt Edith had once given him a partial answer.

  “Many of the volumes,” she told him once, “particularly the more handsome ones, were acquired from the estate of a deceased client which was in partial bankruptcy when the Judge acted as its administrator. The Judge was anxious that his children be exposed to proper literature. He frequently read aloud to us portions of Di
ckens in the North parlor, and once I saw a tear in his eye when Barkus was passing on.”

  Judging from the almost mint condition of these volumes, it was safe to conclude that neither the deceased owner of the embarrassed estate nor the Judge had turned to them frequently, but his Aunt Edith said once that she had read them nearly all.

  “I mean the ones that the Judge left exposed for perusal,” she said. “Of course I covered each, on reading, with a folded wrapper of brown paper in order to preserve the exterior, and I trust you will do the same, Thomas.”

  He did not always do so. He was a fast reader and that dangerous facility threw him too closely into the bookshelf world to make him think of protective covers. Molière, he always thought, drew him to the theatre more than Shakespeare ever had. He remembered having told Rhoda once that there was a modernity and a compulsion and a sparkle in the Molière dialogue that Shakespeare had never captured. He must have been very much in love with Rhoda when he told her that.

  “Tom, darling,” she said, “I wish you wouldn’t feel you had to be so radical in front of me, because I’m not one of those people at those theatrical Sunday nights. Now give me a kiss quickly and stop trying to be odd. You know that Shakespeare is a greater playwright than Molière. You said that he knew everything. I heard you say so the other night to Walter Hampden, darling.”

  “Maybe he knew too much,” he had told her. “Maybe I don’t go much for Shakespearian actors. You always have to be so polite to Shakespearian actors that you get to thinking that they are Shakespeare.”

  But it never did any good to argue with Rhoda, or any other woman, either. It took time to make an estimate of the books the Judge had really enjoyed. These were in the lower cupboards, presumably to be protected from perusal by his daughters. A large part of the Comédie Humaine was there, and so was War and Peace and Anna Karénina and the maladjusted Madame Bovary and Salammbô, this one a French paperback, and an almost complete set of the romances of Dumas. It was surprising how often he found flecks of cigar ash between their pages. It was only months later that he found the other books, when he had thought of looking behind the Legislative Acts. There he had found standing guiltily sideways the Memoirs of Casanova, Burton’s Arabian Nights, Suetonius, three plays by Plautus, Balzac’s Droll Stories, an odd volume in a very limited edition entitled Kama Sutra, or Love Practices of the Hindus, Rabelais, Boccaccio, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. He might never have appreciated Chaucer if that volume had not lurked behind the Legislative Acts.

  There was no wonder that he learned a lot about women, there in the Judge’s library, in his lonely years during the long, hard winters. There was many a time when he was so engrossed with the way women behaved on the printed page and what they might be up to next that he often tiptoed downstairs in the small hours of the morning and lighted the Judge’s table lamp. Twice his aunt had interrupted him, standing in the doorway in the heavy Jaegar wool wrapper which she had inherited from the Judge, with her hair tight in curlpapers. She had never once asked what he was reading. It may have been unmentioned experience with the Judge, or possibly her own literary perusals, that had stopped her.

  “Thomas,” was all she had ever said, “you must not study so hard or else you will overstrain your eyes and have to be fitted for glasses.”

  You had to study hard, and strain your eyes and reflex emotions besides, if you were to understand about the women in the Judge’s library. And all he had to help him in the beginning were those obscure hints of Marie’s; but his reading taught him what she meant, and incidentally it was generally more brightly stated. Yet he still did not understand all about women. They had delighted him in the Judge’s library and they delighted him today, disparate though they were, and confusing. If he had never written in college an exhaustive disquisition on the women of polite and impolite literature, he was nevertheless fully equipped to do so after his time in the Judge’s library.

  The difficulty in any such effort was to set an arbitrary standard of values by which the women in the Judge’s library could be classified. One could take Scheherazade in the Arabian Nights. She was not, according to standards under which he was brought up, a good girl. She was not only glad to suffer at the hands of an embittered sultan a fate worse than death for a thousand and one nights, instead of throwing herself off a castle tower as Rebecca had threatened in Ivanhoe, but she had also contrived to tell the Sultan a series of absorbing if immoral stories, and she had appeared to enjoy it all. In spite of her habit pattern, Tom had ended by thinking of her as a very nice girl and even on occasions wished that he might have been the Sultan. Then there was Madame Bovary. She was a flighty young woman, but who would not have been, after associating with that dull doctor? Besides she received her just deserts as had Mr. Tolstoy’s Anna. Tom regretted the just deserts partly because later in Hollywood he so often heard them brought up, although few of the participants in the story conferences there had read more than a synopsis of any of those works.

  Then there were the naughty girls who took everything they could without ever throwing their hearts over the jumps—or only for a very material reason. Becky Sharp was a classic example, as was Beatrix Esmond, and Cleopatra was designing. Then there were King Lear’s daughters, and why go further than Goneril? They, too, most of them, received their just deserts. Then there were the very wicked women, including Lady Macbeth, and Miladi in The Three Musketeers, and Jeanne de LaMotte Valois. These were all people who made one shudder, though later he sometimes also wished that he might have met them. Then there were the girls who went wrong, who could not seem to help it, particularly in the pages of Charles Dickens. Finally, in his classification, came the good girls, not the grisettes or the farmers’ or the shopkeepers’ daughters—who could never be expected to help what they did when they met a handsome young gentleman—but the Jane Austen girls, and the more impulsive but still correct Brontë girls.

  It was not a bad training to review this gallery of literary portraits in the Judge’s library, and very early his acquaintanceship made him aware of a disturbing fact.

  Somehow the Balzac girls, the Brontë girls, the Tolstoy and the Dickens girls, and all the rest, never seemed wholly to resemble girls he met. He could understand that there were differences in period or in historic culture, but there was something more elusive still. It was seldom, in fact almost never, that the behavior patterns of living women coincided with those on printed pages.

  It was no help to go back to high school after a session in the Judge’s study and to glance across the rows of desks to the space where a girl named Malvina Frith, the first girl with whom he had ever fallen in love, was sitting. He would have done better to have gazed at her, bemused, watching the north light from the classroom window give luster to Malvina’s reddish hair and add an incomprehensible piquancy to her unpowdered retroussé nose, without connecting Malvina with The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. She did not behave in the Meredith manner when he finally got up courage to ask her to go for a walk to look for wild flowers one afternoon in May. She did not behave like a Balzac or a Charles Lever girl, either. There was always a fearful inaccuracy about falling in love.

  Come to think of it, Malvina Frith, whose father had been in the hardware business, might not have appealed to Mr. Meredith. Her nose, which had been irresistible across Room A in high school, had freckles on it. Due to their search for wild flowers, she was perspiring so freely that the undersleeves of her blue cotton dress were moist and her posture was no longer so agile and graceful as it had seemed to be when they had brushed past each other in the high school corridors all winter. Actually, though small, she was a rather dumpy girl, and she was more direct than anyone in Thackeray. Fielding might have understood her better, but she did not have the eighteenth-century touch. Her moment and her setting belonged to her alone, and she could never be removed from either.

  “It certainly took you a long time to get around to it,” she said.

  “Around to asking you
to go for a walk?” he asked. “I don’t see why that’s getting around to much.”

  “Don’t be so dumb, and don’t talk like you were in a book,” Malvina said. “Haven’t you been looking at me all winter, and not getting around to doing anything, and haven’t I done all I could?”

  “I don’t see that you did much,” he said.

  “You can’t in school, can you, dumbness?” Malvina said. “I did all I could and I kept bumping against you outside in the hall.”

  “Did you?” he asked. “I didn’t know it was on purpose.”

  “The trouble with you,” she said, “is that you read too many books and people who read too many books never know what is what outside of books—at least that’s how it seems to me.”

  It was what you might call intuitive. It went to show that character was character and he should have treasured what Malvina had said a long, long time ago.

  “Well,” he said, “I’m glad you did it on purpose. I think that’s swell, Malvina.”

  She laughed, not the way one of the Judge’s girls would have laughed, but in a ripply way.

  “Maybe you’d have got it if you’d been a football player or something,” she said, “you dumb thing, you. Anyway, I’m glad you started doing something. Gosh, it’s been awful waiting and kind of wondering—and you haven’t done much yet.”