“Hello, Marion dear,” he said, as they embraced in the way that polite society now demanded of old friends of opposite sexes; and he thought, when he kissed her cheek, that she was putting on an extra layer of powder every year.
“Oh, Tom dear,” Marion Bramhall said, “how wonderfully you look! I haven’t seen you look so well in ages.”
There was no time to recall the last age, but indeed, he and Marion had known each other for ages and ages and had made perfunctory conversation for ages and ages.
“It must be the country air,” he said, “and the general bucolic atmosphere in which I live. Not that I am referring to you and Dick.”
“Oh, we’re bucolic too, this year,” Marion said, “trimming hedges and setting out pansies and everything. It’s given Dick a crick in the back. You must come to Bramma while the apple blossoms are still in bloom. There will be simply oceans of them this year. Do you remember when our yacht was named the Bramma?”
It was time to speak to Dick Bramhall and to forget the apple blossoms and the long departed yacht.
“Hello, Dick,” he said. “It’s wonderful to see you. It was a great thought of Em’s to get us all together this way, and thanks a lot for motoring so far.”
“It’s wonderful to see you, Tommy,” Dick Bramhall said. “Whenever I do, the journey’s always worth while.”
There was something about Dick Bramhall that was hard for him to understand, because of the different worlds in which they lived. Even through the veil of anger that still enshrouded him, Dick’s speech both disturbed and moved him, because he knew that Dick had meant every word of it, and it was one of the few wholly honest expressions he had heard all day, not contrived, but exactly what it was, demanding no analysis. Dick had honestly meant that the journey was worth while, but the honesty was disturbing. It was still hard to see why Dick Bramhall should like him when they had never had much in common with each other.
“Dick,” he said, “you’re a damn nice guy.”
He always spoke lines with Dick and Dick Bramhall never did. Dick’s face resembled the others that stared from the financial pages of the New York Times; there was the same assurance of success, but there was also a subtle difference between Dick’s and other photographic faces—a look of contentment, something wholly different from complacency, and the bewildering thing to Tom Harrow was that it was impossible to tell exactly what Dick had to be contented about, aside from finance.
“What can I get you to drink, Pops?” Harold asked.
He smiled at Harold.
“Make it a double Martini,” he said. “I’ve got to catch up with the rest of you, and you remember how I want them, almost no vermouth.”
He saw that Emily, who was standing beside Walter Price, was watching him, and he did not give a damn.
“Alfred,” he said, “I don’t know what’s been planned in the way of wine, but if it isn’t champagne, we’ll have champagne.”
“Darling,” Emily said, “we’re having roast beef.”
It was a pleasure to show Emily that she was not always right.
“Let’s not forget,” he said, “that champagne goes with anything.”
It might be interesting to think that when the champagne down in the cellar was used up, there might never be any more, and when he smiled at Emily, he was sure that the same thought had crossed her mind.
Harold handed him his cocktail and Dick Bramhall stared at it admiringly.
“That’s about as pale as they come, isn’t it?” he asked. “That’s what they call an ‘in and out,’ isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Tom answered, “in the drinking, not in the hunting sense.”
“If anybody fell off a horse into that,” Marion Bramhall said, “he’d just stay in. There couldn’t be any out.”
“I didn’t know you’d christened your place,” Tom Harrow said. “Did I get it right? Is it called Bramma?”
“That’s it,” Dick said, “pronounced as in grammar. You get the significance, don’t you?”
Dick’s simplicity was disturbing because you never could be sure how simple he really was.
“Let me see if I can guess,” Tom said. “Bram is for Bramhall; and Ma is for Marion. Am I right or am I right?”
“You got it,” Dick said, “first crack out of the box, Tommy. You think it’s simple, don’t you?”
“Well,” Tom said, “maybe it’s a little simple, Dick, and Marion just reminded me that you had a boat called that once.”
“I like the name,” Dick said, “because you don’t need a classical dictionary or anything.”
You never could be quite sure whether Dick was serious or not, not after a double in-and-out Martini.
“That’s right,” Tom said, “only it sounds more like a yacht than a place.”
“That’s right,” Dick said, “it does sound more like a yacht.”
“Tom,” Marion Bramhall said, “don’t get him thinking about yachts, or else he’ll buy another.”
“I wish he would,” Tom said. “I’m right down to my last one, personally. Hal, get moving and take the orders and get me another of those in-and-outs.”
“Now, Tom,” Marion Bramhall said, “if you ever get into another one of those, you never will get out.”
“You watch me,” Tom Harrow said. “If I’ve got in and out of two marriages, I can get out of a second double Martini, even at my age, dear.”
There was a slightly offbeat silence, but Emily spoke promptly.
“Tom, darling,” she said, “dinner will be ready any minute.”
What annoyed him particularly was that he knew that Emily was less worried about the effect the double Martini might have on him than she was about the Bramhalls; and he was not taking any more from Emily, not any more at all. Moreover, the intensity of his anger had made the first Martini negligible.
“Have you ever noticed,” he said, “that at some point when you want a cocktail, somebody’s wife is always saying that dinner is just about to be ready? And then if it is ready, she says you can take it in with you. I don’t like to take it in with me. Cocktails should be encapsulated. They should not go in to dinner outside you. Stir them cheerfully, Harold.”
He listened to himself carefully while he was speaking His syllables were accurate, but not exaggeratedly so. The first drink had been of no help and he was grateful for the other.
“I’m going to tell you something that I said to Dick about you the first time we met you—oh, years and years ago, wasn’t it, Tom?” Marion Bramhall said. “At Palm Beach. And you don’t look a day older, Tom, only more distinguished.”
Her words put him in a warm and kindly mood toward everyone, excepting always Emily.
“I wish you’d come around more often, Marion,” he said, “and tell me that every time.”
“You don’t have to,” Dick said. “Everybody tells Tommy that.”
“Well, anyway,” Marion said, and he found himself thinking that the bluish rinse in her gray hair gave it a look not unlike the sunlight striking the Gulf Stream off Palm Beach when the weather was rough, “everyone was in quite a tizzy, asking everybody else if they had met the playwright, Mr. Harrow, and his perfectly lovely wife. And Prince Boris, that Russian who is always all over coconut oil at the Bath and Tennis Club, said he had met you often, and of course he hadn’t, and of course he wasn’t a prince. Well, anyway—no, thank you, Hal, I don’t think I’ll have another one.”
She smiled sweetly. He had nearly forgotten that Marion was a talker, too. He would not need to talk to anybody during dinner, and after dinner Walter Price would take over. There was a real sector of usefulness in the world for talkers, and often they conjured up memories. He could see Palm Beach again and he could smell the sun-tan lotions at the Bath and Tennis Club, a different scent from Antibes, peculiarly but not unpleasantly American. It might be that Americans, because of their enlightened inflationary prosperity, were developing a national body odor. It was an interesting thought, but a me
re parenthesis, because he had to follow Marion Bramhall as she made her point.
“Well, anyway,” Marion was saying, “and please don’t interrupt me, Dick. Dick always says I sound like someone in a Ring Lardner story when I’ve had a Martini, but I don’t, do I? Well, anyway, when we met you and Rhoda, we clicked just like that, didn’t we, and we always have ever since, haven’t we? And I don’t think any other four people in the world could have had more fun than we—well, used to have, on the yacht and things like that. Well, anyway, I said to Dick, you were the only man I had ever known who could use long words gracefully, in a rhythm like other words—just the way you used ‘encapsulate’ just now. When Dick uses a word like that, it’s out of those old business reports of his. It isn’t living language, and I adore living language.”
“Tom, dear,” Emily called, “here’s Alfred looking very nervous. And it is roast beef, so why doesn’t everyone take their drinks in with them?”
It was exasperating and typical of Emily, who was always listening and never hearing.
“No,” he said, “don’t let’s take them in. Turn down an empty glass—not original with me, but with the Rubáiyát.” And he found himself repeating the sentence in loud, sonorous tones: “Turn down an empty glass.”
If he was not an actor, and he was very grateful that he was not, he still could not help picking up from actors the quality of compelling attention. Everyone listened as he repeated those last words, and he had forgotten, until the repetition, that they were hardly cheerful. He stood quietly while everyone filed into the dining room until he heard Emily giving directions for the seating. It was time for him to move and, like a courteous host, to pull out Marion Bramhall’s chair, but he lingered, listening to the voices. The library was still again with the silence that could only emanate from a wall of books, and his Martini glass was empty in his hand. It was not bad symbolism. The glass in his own life had been full with a fullness he once thought would last forever, and now in another minute he would be asking himself again where it had all gone, and it would be fatal if he asked himself that again. He tossed the glass into the library fireplace. At least he had achieved one thing; he had not taken it in with him.
He could think and talk regardless of his thoughts. The conditioning of a hundred dinner parties made the meal run smoothly. Emily respected him at dinners, because he had taught her what she knew about the amenities of a well-set table. He could still recall with a twinge of pain her ideas of a good meal and of a proper selection of dishes during the first months of their marriage. They had been derived from recipes in women’s magazines and from colored advertisements sponsored by mayonnaise and mustard companies. If he had known Emily’s taste for salads, he might never have married her at all; but she had listened to him in those days, and now the table was beautiful, the roast beef rare, the brown potatoes and the string beans perfect, the lettuce and water cress salad meticulously stirred, and the Bel Paese cheese exactly right. It was the couple, of course, but Emily had given the orders, and it was Emily who had ordered the three-pronged forks and the rattail spoons and the pistol-handled knives. It was Emily who had ordered the Crown Derby china. At least he had taught her a respect for possessions and the Crown Derby and the George the Second candlesticks and the George the Second bowl with its flower arrangement might all fetch more than he had paid for them when they went on sale in New York. The table was beautiful and mannered, but he could regard it, like the house, as a phase in his life that was over, and would there be any more phases? He was glad for the double Martinis, since it was not necessary to search for an answer to the question. And the champagne was very dry—a ’47 vintage.
“A delightful wine year,” he heard Walter say to Emily and Richard at the other end of the table, “what I would call an amusing year. As I may have told you, winetasting has always been my pet diversion, ever since I convalesced from my wound near Bordeaux during World War I. At that time I could do a very creditable blindfold act with the clarets. In fact, one evening at that dear old restaurant, the Chapon Fin, while dining very informally with, if I may say so, several of the outstanding winegrowers of the district …”
The ’47 vintage, if amusing, was so cold and good that it rebuked him for the Martinis in the library. You ought to respect wine and not allow your senses to be dulled by gin. When he had been with Rhoda at Antibes, he would have been outraged at the thought of a Martini. When was it he had taken them up? It was the war, of course, and nobody in America, or in Palm Beach, any longer seriously cared about wine and food.
Plain living and high thinking could have been significant substitutes, but it occurred to him, just as Alfred was refilling his glass, that there was neither plain living nor high living in America. Instead, national life was approaching an average that expressed itself in gastronomical and in spiritual mediocrity, and he had always hated mediocrity. At least the dining room and the table, and the champagne, though representing set conventions, were hardly in that realm; but they, too, would all soon be engulfed in the wave of the commonplace. The house, no doubt, would eventually house tourists or a dental clinic. No one could escape from convention for long, not even James Joyce. It was advisable to accept the mores of one’s time, no matter if they shifted. It was better to be in tune, like Dick Bramhall, with the beat of marching music.
He must have been speaking while he was thinking because he found himself smiling at Marion Bramhall.
“Tell me,” he asked her, “have you seen Rhoda lately?”
It was the gin plus the champagne that had released his subconscious enough to make him ask, but Marion was not embarrassed. If she was nothing else, as she always said, she was a tolerant, noninquisitive person who realized that, just because a lot of her friends could not make the wonderful go of marriage that she and Dick had achieved, there was no reason to take sides or be a voice of experience. On the contrary, it was more imperative than ever to be more friendly and gentler with these unfortunates, while being more grateful than ever that everything had been so wonderful between her and Dick. Oh, naturally, there had been troubles (what married couple did not have difficulties?), but she and Dick had been fortunate enough to worry through theirs. That name of their place in New Hampshire, Bramma, was an example in a nutshell of how she and Dick worked things out. By that she meant that Bramhall came first and Ma came second—most of the time, but not all of the time. She would not say she was a feminist or anything like that, but now and then she did have to put her foot down. She could not even tell how she and Dick had contrived to make a go of their marriage. All she could say was that associations seemed to grow and maybe that was all there was to a happy marriage. However, there had been enough friction, thank goodness, now and then, to cause her never to be censorious, but only very, very understanding about others. Tom saw her looking at him now in a very understanding way, as a friend and counselor should—a friend of both, of course.
“Yes, Tom,” she said, “Dick and I still see as much as we possibly can of Rhoda—of them—just as we try to see as much as we can of you and Emily.”
“Yes,” Tom said, “you don’t need to explain, Marion. I appreciate your and Dick’s position, and you’ve both been wonderful.”
“Tom, I’m so glad you think so,” Marion said, “and you do understand, don’t you, that Dick and I love each of you for your own characters, of course, just as much as we ever did when things were the way they used to be.”
The candlelight was reflected on her blue-gray hair.
“Of course I understand, Marion,” he said. “You and Dick have been swell.”
“Oh,” she said, “that’s sweet of you to say, but Dick and I haven’t done anything, really, except just love the people we love.”
The conversation had reached dead center, and he felt powerless to turn the wheel of talk.
“I know how much Rhoda used to love you and Dick, Marion,” he said. “Well, how is Rhoda?”
Marion paused with that judicial
impartiality characteristic of friends of severed couples.
“She’s looking beautiful, Tom,” she said, “but not so—how shall I say it?—happily comfortable as Emily.”
He glanced at her, but her eyes were guileless and her expression sympathetic, exactly the right expression for one who understood that there were two sides to every question.
“I’m glad she hasn’t changed,” he said. “Rhoda was always beautiful, and she never was the comfortable type, at least not with me very often, but I can’t blame her.”
“I know you can’t, dear,” Marion Bramhall said, “and I’m going to tell you something that may be talking out of school. Rhoda knows you’ve never blamed her, and I think that’s made her very happy.”
“All right,” he said, “just so long as it doesn’t make her comfortably happy. Does she still wear the emerald I gave her? I hope she does sometimes.”
“Yes,” Marion said. “Let me see—yes, I’m sure she does sometimes.”
“I used to try to compete in those days,” he said, “but you can’t compete with oil wells. And there’s a difference between me and an oil well. I don’t get a tax allowance for depletion. Rhoda noticed things like depletion.”
Mrs. Bramhall raised her blue-gray eyebrows.
“I think that’s being a little hard on Rhoda, dear,” she said. “I know what you mean, and Dick and I have always understood your point of view, and how wonderfully generous you were about Rhoda, but we also understand Rhoda’s side, too. Rhoda was always concerned with security, and I do think she was once a little immature, the way she used to worry, but she isn’t worried now.”
“Well,” Tom said, “that’s fine. Rhoda always knew what she wanted.”
Marion Bramhall nodded slowly and judicially, the tolerant mediator who had seen so many forms of human frailty that criticism vanished, giving place to great compassion.
“Yes, she did and does,” she said, “and I suppose that was a little of the reason for what went wrong between you. Rhoda always knew so definitely what she wanted, and you never did know for sure; and you never do quite now, do you, dear? Dick and I were talking it over only the other day. It isn’t a criticism, only a comment, made because Dick and I love you, and that restiveness of yours, that never being sure, is what has kept your talent so wonderful and youthful.”
Women and Thomas Harrow Page 20