Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  Mr. Mort Sullivan had handled the deal but he had been noncommittal about the script. Sullivan and Herrick, shortly before Tom had gone to work there, had moved their offices to the third floor of the Ledyard Building on Park Avenue in order to get Broadway out of his hair, as Mortimer used to say. It was the damnedest thing, he used to say, how young playwrights and even a number of intelligent producers could never distinguish a dramatic agency, solely devoted to handling the problems of playwrights, from a theatrical, agency that handled actors, actresses, vaudeville turns and prestidigitators. If you were near Broadway—and he still missed looking across that street to Times Square—all the delightful people who were out of a job were always in your waiting room. It did no good to point out that the firm of Sullivan and Herrick was a dramatic agency. It always turned out that these delightful people—and there were more delightful people in the theatre district than anywhere else in the world—had dropped in just because Sullivan and Herrick was a dramatic agency. And Mort, who remembered them when, and was so successful handling plays, would know if there was a part for them in one of those new plays he was marketing and would put in a word for them just for old times’ sake. There were no people in the world more time-consuming than actors and actresses when at liberty, and this was why he had finally made the move to the small office in the Ledyard Building on Park Avenue.

  Actors and actresses, he had discovered after years of delightful associations with them, had developed an instinctive reluctance to move far from the theatre district, and only about half as many came to the Ledyard Building as used to come to the old shop off Times Square, and thus only half the time was consumed in brushing them off. He had tried, in decorating the new offices, to indicate in a tactful way that this was a literary dramatic agency. Mort Sullivan had not been able to bear the removal from the walls of his private office of autographed photographs of old friends and of old sets of old plays he had handled, but he had been very careful to make the outer reception room courteously uncomfortable. And here it had been Tom Harrow’s duty to learn a lot about the theatre by being polite, but firm, when he told theatrical people who were at liberty that Mr. Sullivan was away that day, or was just about to leave in ten minutes to watch a tryout in Philadelphia. The theatre had been all around him day and night during those two years, with all its peculiarly intangible values.

  You could have told immediately, when you entered his private office, that Mr. Mortimer Sullivan belonged to the theatre. Although he was only engaged in it by indirection, no one in his position could have wholly avoided its mannerisms. He had started years ago as an English instructor at Columbia, and then had become a minor dramatic critic on one of the New York evening papers that began disappearing so rapidly after World War I; and then he had been employed by Mr. Jack Herrick as a reader and general assistant in the agency, and he had saved enough to buy out the business at Mr. Herrick’s death. But he always said he did not like the social side of the theatre; he tried to avoid it as carefully as he could, by having his house in New Rochelle and never going to first nights or to parties afterwards unless absolutely necessary, for, as he always said, this was a side of the business that he left to his assistant, Walter Price. It might very well have happened that his phobia against the stage would have put him out of it altogether if he had not been endowed with an exceptional sense of play construction and with an outstanding ability to assess potentialities in unknown writers.

  “I am a man of letters,” he used to say very frequently, “and not a play writer. I make my living out of them, but I should rather be found dead than be one.”

  He endeavored in his dress, also, to prove that he had only an indirect connection with the theatre. It had often seemed to Tom that Mr. Sullivan must have revisited in his spare time English classrooms at Columbia in order to get hints in dress that would make him look like an English Ph.D. living on an instructor’s salary. He was as successful in his way as Mr. Belasco had been with his turn-around collar, but it never occurred to Mr. Sullivan that all these efforts to escape were in themselves theatrical. His attempts to look slovenly were an overelaboration, and his scholarly veneer was overdrawn. His hair was always too self-consciously unbrushed; his nickel-rimmed spectacles, that left metallic marks on the ridge of his nose, were an almost unobtainable piece of property, and once Tom had discovered him with the spectacles off examining his features in the mirror to assure himself that the spectacles had marked him. His blue suit was one of four that he had studiously allowed to grow frayed and shiny, and the spots on his lapels and waistcoat had a geometrical design. Best of all his properties, better than the scuffed shoes or his frayed shirts and ties, was his Phi Beta Kappa key. He must have gone to a number of pawnshops to have found a key that was worn to a ghost of its former self, a key that you would have thought a current of air would have blown from his gold-filled watch chain. And the strange part of it was that, besides having a good mind and a sense for drama, he also had a sense of humor. Yet he never understood that he was a character himself.

  On the afternoon of the day when the Higgins office had paid the advance on Hero’s Return, Mort Sullivan had called for Tom Harrow. It was toward the end of June and unseasonably hot, and since nobody in those days had heard of air-conditioning, the window overlooking Park Avenue was open, filling the space with sounds of traffic, and even in those days Park Avenue traffic was considerable.

  Mort Sullivan had taken off his coat but not his waistcoat, presumably because of the Phi Beta Kappa key. He had been looking through a pile of manuscripts by unknown writers.

  “Well, well, well,” he said, “judging from your appearance, Walter Price has told you, hasn’t he? And I suppose it’s all over the office now. Well, it isn’t every day the office boy makes good. I never told you, because I never like to be encouraging in such a hellish line as this, but I had a liking for that play. It almost surprised me. Do you know why?”

  Whenever he was called into the private office, Tom could believe that he was having a college conference with a professor of creative writing, which was probably exactly what Mort Sullivan wanted him to think.

  “No, sir,” he said, “but I’d like to know.”

  “All right,” Mr. Sullivan said, “the script surprised me because you’ve never looked to me like a playwright. You’ve never looked high thinking. Look at your clothes—they are tailor-made, aren’t they? You ought to look that way after, not before a Broadway hit. You are in reverse sequence.”

  “It hasn’t got to Broadway yet,” Tom said. “Maybe it’s just as well I’ve put the cart before the horse.”

  “Well, everyone’s eccentric somewhere, I suppose,” Mort Sullivan said. “I suppose you think I ought to go to a tailor instead of buying some thing off the rack. Well, I could, but I don’t believe in looking too successful.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter so much,” Tom Harrow said, “if you are successful.”

  “Just the same,” Mort Sullivan said, “you ought not to be as smart as you are and look like it. But don’t let me inflate your ego.”

  “Anyway,” Tom Harrow said, “I haven’t got a Phi Beta Kappa key.”

  Mort Sullivan smiled.

  “You know,” he said, “you’ve got a good eye, haven’t you? Let’s leave it that way and tell me how it feels to have the Higgins office come over with a thousand dollars. The size of that advance is a compliment to you, you know.”

  The news was like a sudden inspired solution of a mathematical problem. It was a part of a chain reaction that had been developing for some time and the answer was inevitable, but his satisfaction was not conceit. It was the simple confirmation of the theorem that he was good, and there was no reason to conceal his satisfaction.

  “Frankly,” he said, “it makes me feel just fine.”

  There was no jealousy or regret in Mort’s middle-aged face. Instead there was an almost parental look of friendly worry.

  “Well,” he said, “you look that way. I’v
e been trying to put myself in your position, but I can’t. Do you remember what the Greek father did when his son won the Olympic games?”

  “No, sir, not at the moment,” Tom Harrow said.

  There was still a puzzled look in the agent’s glance, a look of someone trying to be satisfied with a combination of unreconcilable factors.

  “He prayed the gods that the punishment might be light.”

  Mortimer Sullivan had been his agent and his close friend until he had died seven years ago from a coronary accident, and unlike most agents, he had never refrained for business reasons from saying what he thought. That speech of his, punctuated by the warm June air and by the sounds of the internal combustion engines from Park Avenue, had traveled unnoticed for years, through memory like a sound wave, and now the echo returned, stronger than he would have expected.

  “I wish it hadn’t come so easy for you,” he said. “Handling success is like handling liquor. It throws you when you don’t have a chance to build up a tolerance. I wish you didn’t look so much like a Shakespearian Golden Lad.”

  “Not too golden,” Tom said, “not yet.”

  “No,” Mort Sullivan said, “not yet, but I’m afraid you’re going to be. I hope you don’t think I’m being offensive.”

  “Oh, no,” Tom said. “You only asked me how I was feeling, and I said I was feeling fine.”

  “Because it wouldn’t be policy to offend an essentially valuable client,” Mort Sullivan said. “You understand you are a client now, don’t you? Not an employee, a client.”

  It was a fine day and Tom Harrow still felt fine.

  “You mean you’re firing me?” he asked.

  “Only as an employee,” Mort Sullivan said. “I don’t pay smart boys to be playwrights; they pay me—and by the way, in this new relationship, you might as well call me Mort. And now, as a business gesture, I should like to ask you out to lunch. We could go to that speak-easy near West Fifty-second Street. The food there isn’t bad, and we could have a drink to—what’s the play’s name again? I never could remember titles.”

  “Hero’s Return,” he answered, and Mort repeated the title after him.

  “Hero’s Return,” he said. “Well, hero, I hope that you return all right.”

  Tom wished that he could have had lunch there. Even in those days, with all the Prohibition handicaps, the cocktails were excellent there, but instead he had an engagement with his Uncle George for lunch at his uncle’s club on Fifth Avenue. The engagement, having been made ten days before, was something he could not break. Nevertheless, he still was feeling fine. He wore a very light gray felt hat when he stepped out on Park Avenue. It was strange to remember that it was possible in those days to carry a walking stick without causing any particular comment, but he had never used a walking stick except for the brief time it had taken to recover from a sprained ankle, an inadvertent accident that had occurred after coming home with Rhoda from the party after Hero’s Return. The twisted ankle had been painful, and it was a strange coincidence that Rhoda had said almost the same thing that Mort had said.

  “Well,” she had said, “the hero’s back home all right.”

  His luncheon engagement had been fixed for 1:30, the hour that his Uncle George usually selected when it was not necessary for him to return downtown for an afternoon appointment. There was ample time to walk uptown to the club, along Fifth Avenue, a more attractive street then, with finer shops and with a few of the great dwelling houses that had survived the novels of Edith Wharton; but then, any street would have looked well that day. There was truth in that apprehension of Mort Sullivan’s, whom he could call Mort now that things had gone too easily for him. It was true in a way that he had superficially led an existence that could be termed, a few years later, one of overprivilege; and he would be criticized later for that easy beginning. It was true that he had gone to a fashionable boarding school until his uncle had seen that the money was running low. It was true, also, as his uncle had been careful to indicate, that those years at boarding school had given him valuable connections which had helped him get into a club at college. It was true that his Aunt Mabel and his Uncle George and other family connections and friends, like his father’s cousins the Deerings and the Roswells, had been generous about school vacations. And he had invitations of his own when he got to college. It was also a fact, as his Aunt Mabel had often reminded him, that she and his Uncle George had been kind about getting him into the Metropolitan dances and onto the coming-out list; but this could not have been difficult, since eligible young men, and some not eligible at all, were eagerly welcomed at those parties, and also, he was always an extra young man for his cousin, Louise. Still, it always annoyed him when people, including liberal-minded critics, began harping on his gilt-edged youth as though there had not been many thousands of others and most of them better off. None of them ever seemed to remember that his had been a tragically lonely childhood, but it was over now. He was walking up Fifth Avenue to another of those luncheons with his Uncle George at the Carleton Club. As his Aunt Mabel had said, whenever he came to call and whenever he was asked to dinner when Louise needed an extra man, he must remember that his Uncle George would have done a great deal more for him if Uncle George were not very overtired and overworked by his partners downtown who, though brilliant, did have charming people’s inconsiderateness.

  “And Tom, dear,” she often said, “you, too, are developing in charm.”

  But, by God, he had been considerate. He had danced for miles with Louise and Louise’s friends, beginning with fat girls from Farmington and ending with plumper ones from Vassar. He had done what he could, too, for Alvin, at college; and he had always been to call on his Aunt Mabel every time he was in New York, except when the Howland girl had asked him for week ends and had not wanted Louise to know about it. Somehow his Aunt Mabel always found out about these occasions, but she had always spoken about them in a patient, yet merry manner.

  It was strange how vigorously one reacted to early impressions. The Carleton Club, he very well knew, was not much of a club as New York clubs went. Even in the Twenties, when it was in a highly solvent condition, it was already being said that its food and service grew mediocre like its membership. Nevertheless, Tom Harrow still had to pull himself together when he faced its solid doorway, still conscious of a sense of awe, and perhaps he had been right. The Carleton Club had been built at the turn of the century, when there must have been a general belief that all buildings would stand for eternity. It had the exterior of a Renaissance Roman palace, and an entrance hall to match. The doorman had been there when Tom Harrow had first appeared as a callow youth for luncheon with his uncle, and the doorman had a deep suspicion of all strangers. He stood behind his counter with the membership list in back of him and with pegs to mark the names of those present. He was writing on a pad when Tom Harrow entered and continued writing for some time while Tom gazed at the travertine marble hall, at the cavernous coatroom and at the red-carpeted staircase that led to the main rooms.

  Tom Harrow found himself clearing his throat nervously.

  “Is Mr. George Harrow in yet?” he asked.

  The doorman, florid and white-haired, looked up.

  “There isn’t any Mr. Marlow a member of this club,” he said.

  He was positive the doorman had heard him the first time.

  “Not Marlow,” he said. “Mr. George Harrow.”

  “Oh, Mr. Harrow? Yes, he’s in. Who wishes to see him?” the doorman asked, and he looked incredulous when Tom Harrow said his nephew.

  “Quentin,” he said to a boy in buttons—they still had boys in buttons at the Carleton Club in those days—“take the gentleman up to Mr. Harrow. And kindly leave your hat in the cloakroom; there’s no place for hanging it upstairs.”

  No matter how well he did, he had always done something wrong in the Carleton Club. Chairs were always in the way. Glasses were always in just the right position to be pushed off the table.

  His u
ncle, who was in the newspaper room, tossed down his paper at once and pushed himself up from his armchair when the boy in buttons spoke to him.

  “Tom,” he said, crossing the room, “this is a very real pleasure, and I have a surprise for you today.”

  Unlike most of the men of his age group at the Carleton Club, who were staring at them over the tops of their newspapers, his Uncle George had not lost his figure, although his hair was as white as the doorman’s. He was dressed in a light blue flannel suit with a pin stripe, suitable for the time of the year, and a starched turn-over collar and dark blue tie. He was a handsome and distinguished man who looked to Tom like an aging copy of the only photograph he possessed of his own father. There was the same thin face, there were the same sharp features, the same keen eyes, and the same even, rather thin-lipped mouth, but the humor and carelessness that he had observed in his father’s photograph was gone, and also some of the alertness. Uncle George was a measured, patient man who, however, would never quite make the first team of anything, but who had made the most of his capacities. His uncle’s color was not good that afternoon, and he looked unusually tired.

  “What surprise is it, Uncle George?”

  Uncle George smiled indulgently, as he might have at Alvin or Louise. As his Aunt Mabel had often said, his Uncle George always thought of Tom as one of their own children, which was why he was so worried that he had not been able to do all for him that he might have wished.

  “My doctor has given me a dispensation,” he said, “in the form of a prescriptive, relaxing medicine, to be ingested with moderation before luncheon and dinner. I’m going to ask you to join me in taking it, but I am afraid it will not be a new experience for you, and that you and Alvin—and yes, even dear little Louise—are already familiar with it. The medicine, with proper seals and government releases, is now waiting for us in the old bar, where old Patrick, whom I fear your father used to know once, is waiting to dispense it.”