Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  “That’s right,” she said. “I guess you’re right.”

  “Well, as long as you admit it,” he said, “stop crying, Rhoda.”

  She did not stop, but there had never been anything painful about Rhoda’s weeping because she was always attractive when she cried.

  “I know you’re right, dear,” she said. “I know I’m selfish. Mother’s always told me so, and I love you, and I know all the things you’ve done for me. Tom, you’re wonderful and there isn’t much I can do back for you.”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” he said, “you only have to love me.”

  “Oh, Tom,” she said, “of course I love you, and I always will—only I wish we didn’t have to worry.”

  “Listen, baby,” he said, and for once she did not mind if he called her baby, because she was crying in a nice way and her head was on his shoulder, “everybody has to worry.”

  “Yes,” she said, “except the du Ponts, the Fords, the Rockefellers and people like that.”

  “Listen, baby,” he said, “maybe they have to worry, too, in different ways.”

  “Oh, Tom,” she said, and she sobbed, “I don’t think I’d mind so much worrying in a different way.”

  He held her closer. After all, she had taken his mind off the opening, and furthermore, he was master of the situation.

  “Listen, baby,” he said again, “if you would only stop it, everything would be wonderful. Just you let me do the worrying.”

  “But, Tom,” she said, “I have to worry, too.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Can’t you stop it, Rhoda?”

  Her sobs increased but she still was beautiful. He could almost think, much as he hated Victorian similes, that Rhoda was like a lily of the valley in the spring.

  “But I’ve got something more to worry about,” she said.

  “Well, put it off,” he said. “We’ve got to have supper with Arthur Higgins. Rhoda, I don’t mean to be cross, but I’ve a lot on my mind tonight.”

  “I’ve a lot on mine, too,” she said.

  “I can only repeat,” he told her, “you’re being selfish.”

  “Maybe I am,” she said. “But Tom, I really am going to have a baby.”

  He had never brought himself to tell Harold of that moment. There were some things one never could discuss freely, and this was one of them. In a few episodes in life, at least, there came a first time which you knew could not be the same again. Rhoda’s news had seemed incredible that night and at the same time like a gift from the gods. He had tried later to recapture the portents of that moment by the aid of the written word and the skill of actors, and once or twice the result was not bad, but it had never been the same. You could not live through a first time twice, and no one could ever do it for you, and there it was that night, on top of everything.

  “Darling,” he said, “don’t cry. That’s the best thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “How’s that again?” she asked.

  “It’s the best thing I’ve ever heard,” he said. “It makes me feel like a du Pont. It’s all right, I’ll take care of everything.”

  He wished there had been more times when she had needed to believe him as much as she had then. Everything might have been much better if he had not taken care of her too quickly, too easily and too well. A time of stress and struggle would have brought them together, and Rhoda could have taken it if he had not hit the jackpot quite so soon. Neither of them knew, he was glad to recall, that the scales were already weighted down. All that they could know of that present was the joy that they took in each other and a sense of confidence and fulfillment that was gone before you could recognize its worth.

  “Darling,” she said, “I never knew you were so wonderful.”

  It was still something to remember that they had stood alone and self-sufficient and that there had been a union of their thoughts and wishes.

  “And I don’t want you to be anything else,” she said. “I love you just the way you are, and if he’s a boy, I want to call him Harold.”

  “Harold?” he repeated after her. “Why Harold?”

  “Because he lost the Battle of Hastings, the way his mother did,” she said. “I never expected there to be a Harold, but I’m awfully glad because I love you, darling.”

  Then the room telephone rang, reminding him that they were late.

  “Hurry and wash your face,” he said. “It’s a good thing you don’t puff up when you cry.”

  No matter what might happen to a marriage, the play moved on, and in the end everyone on the program owed his first allegiance to the play.

  “Have you two been quarreling?” Helen Adair asked.

  “Why no,” he answered, “not at all.”

  “Well, if you haven’t been,” she said, “you’ve been making love and it’s almost the same thing.”

  “Helen,” Arthur said, “let’s not think any more quaint thoughts. Helen only means you’re looking charming, Rhoda dear—Venus rising from the sea.”

  “Arthur,” Tom said, “how is it you think of things like that?”

  “Because I’ve had a drink,” Arthur Higgins said. “The shaker’s on the table, and there are orchids for the girls beside the cocktail shaker, Tom.”

  “Orchids,” Tom said, “I should have thought of orchids.”

  “You will eventually,” Arthur said. Arthur was in a dinner coat and pearl studs, impeccable in spite of the endless days and sleepless nights. “I’ve sent flowers to the girls backstage in both your name and mine. Sandwiches and salad are coming up and black coffee. I’ve never believed in prisoners eating a hearty breakfast.”

  “Arthur,” he said, “do you think it’s going to be as bad as all that?”

  “We don’t know,” Arthur said, “but we may three hours from now.”

  “Don’t look so worried, dear,” Helen said to Rhoda, “Arthur’s always like this before openings, bitter and nasty nice.”

  “We should go backstage before curtaintime and say kind words,” Arthur Higgins said. “Then you and I will watch from the back of the house.”

  The worst of it all, and this never changed with years of experience, was standing at the back of the house watching the waiting audience. There was a hostile impersonality in the voices and in the rustling of the programs. He could never get rid of a tenseness that verged on stage fright, and the uncertainty never changed. He had first faced that night one of the theatre’s most hideous dangers, that once you had lost the attention of an audience, nothing could bring it back again. The first sight of the set, the first motion of the players, their first speeches, grew vitally important. Standing together in back of the darkened theatre while the curtain rose, revealing the sitting room of a small-town home, he was aware of tension in Arthur Higgins.

  “Yes, son,” Arthur said later in New York, “in the first two minutes most of your chips are down. A play’s like a newborn baby. If it breathes in the first two minutes, maybe it will live to grow up.”

  He was aware even then of the first stirrings of life in Hero’s Return. The first moves of Albert Briggs made the play move: the door opening to the left, the tired man returning to the scene he had left two years ago—and the pause, the incredulity. Albert Briggs had understood the elements as Arthur Higgins had been sure he would. Arthur Higgins had wanted someone who would give a suitable character interpretation of the part, not necessarily an actor with a public, and Albert Briggs had not been well known before that night. In fact, Hero’s Return made two stars, Albert Briggs and Delia Duneen. Tom Harrow must have known, that night, that nothing mattered so much as the craft to which he was dedicated, and even Rhoda and her secret vanished while he watched his people live.

  The show as it had played in Wilmington was closer to being set and ready to move to New York than they had thought it would be; but there was some cutting and a new series of lines for the final curtain, and the revisions had to reach the actors early enough so that they could be tried in the afternoon run-thr
ough. They got back to their rooms at one o’clock and Rhoda had been tired, but he still had the impression that she always looked prettier as the night wore on.

  “I wish you could come to bed,” she said, “instead of sitting up writing, and if you keep having to do this as a regular thing, I wish you had a wine-colored silk dressing gown, that writers and artists wear in the movies when they are on one of those Italian terraces having breakfast with their mistresses.”

  “How do you know their dressing gowns are wine-colored?” he asked.

  “They’d have to be,” she said, “if you had one. I’ll buy you one as soon as we get some money. The funny little man who comes around with the railroad tickets and pays the hotel bill and things said we ought to get a piece of change from the box office tonight. That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I guess so.”

  “There’s one nice thing about being on the road,” Rhoda said, “Arthur Higgins pays all the expenses.”

  “Don’t forget it’s very generous of Arthur,” Tom said. “There’s nothing in the contract that makes him pay for us both.”

  “Well, anyway, the first thing, I’m going to buy you a wine-colored dressing gown. There must be some in Wilmington. The du Ponts must wear them, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe none of the du Ponts are writers,” he said.

  “They don’t need to be,” she said, “but maybe some of them have mistresses.”

  “Maybe. I wouldn’t know,” he said. “You don’t need it, but you’d better get your beauty sleep.”

  “I’m glad if you think I’m beautiful,” she said.

  “You know I think so, and I’ve told you that before,” he said.

  “I still don’t believe it,” she said, “unless you tell me. Tom, everything’s awfully strange tonight. All those people talking and kissing each other and calling each other ‘darling.’ Are theatre people always like that?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I guess they’re volatile. But what’s so strange?”

  “We seem to be moving around so fast,” she said, “into Niagara Falls and sex and that Hotel Bulwer and new dresses, and then down here and all this, and then going to have a baby.”

  “All right,” he said, “blame it on the Bulwer.”

  “I’m not blaming either you or the Bulwer,” she said. “But everything’s moving so fast I can’t remember what I used to be like.”

  “I thought the idea was that you didn’t want to be what you were like,” he said.

  “I know,” she said, “but it’s unsettling when you begin not to be able to remember. Now kiss me, and not the way the hero did when he met his high-school sweetheart. Good night, and don’t sit up too long.”

  He could never estimate the lapse of time, but he must have been at his typewriter an hour or so when he heard her speak to him again. He had not heard her enter the room and her voice startled him.

  “Tom,” she said, “you’re not angry about our going to have a baby, are you?”

  “No,” he said, “on the contrary, I’m getting more enthusiastic every minute.”

  “All right,” she said. “I only wanted to know, and I won’t interrupt you any more. I love you, and I’d rather have you than the du Ponts, in case that worried you.”

  “Why, thanks, dear,” he said, “it’s been worrying me all night.”

  “And now you’d better come to bed,” she said. “You must be finished with that by now.”

  It had always been a problem when to stop writing plays and dealing with characters, and get back again to being married.

  There could never be an adequate preview of the world of tomorrow, no way of realizing until much later how close he had been to Rhoda, or how near he had been to grasping the elusive. A word or two would have done it, and those words might not have been associated with the act of love. Had she been willing to give that night while he had been unwilling? It was too late now fully to reconstruct the scene, and no way of realizing then that opportunity was moving and that each advancing minute would add to the static, unbreakable side of a relationship. There was a time for everything under the sun, but you seldom knew the time.

  “Do you have a feeling,” she said that night, “that everything is beginning to move so fast that we’ll have to run to keep up with it?”

  “Yes,” he said. “If it keeps on going this way, there won’t ever be any time for you and me—but of course it’s going to stop.”

  “I wish we could stop, just you and me,” she said, “and watch the rest of it move. Just you and me on solid ground.”

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “There’ll be lots of time for you and me, but it’s got to be our kind of time.”

  He never should have taken it for granted that he and she could be much alike, and perhaps it was something to be thankful for that neither one of them had ever tried too ploddingly to understand the other.

  XIX

  Don’t Look at All of It Just Yet

  He must have dozed off, but the Scotch-and-soda that Harold had poured for him was still firmly clasped in his hand, and his arm was resting on the arm of the incongruous leather chair that had come from the Judge’s library. The silence of the room, which was what he noticed first, was like the silence of the Judge’s library. The town was always still after a certain hour, but for a moment after he realized he had been dozing, it was hard to separate the past from the present. For just a second, but one could not measure the time, he thought that he was at school again and that he was in the Judge’s house and that he had fallen asleep reading a book from one of the hidden shelves. There was always that bewildering interval between sleeping and waking, and the troubles of the day and the dinner that the Bramhalls had attended had caused him to drink more than usual, so that it was an effort to sort things out; and while he did so, he had the disturbing impression that he might be lapsing into senility.

  Was he in the Judge’s library or not? There was a split second of panic while he struggled with the thought that he might never again know where he was. Then the libido, or whatever you chose to call it, had pulled his consciousness together. He was not in the Hotel du Pont, and Rhoda was not asking him to come to bed. The present was breaking through the shadows of the past. It was after dinner, and the Bramhalls had gone. Rhoda had been a ghost, and she was gone; and Emily was upstairs, probably snoring softly, although Emily had always been sure that he was the one who snored. Harold had gone to bed, and Harold had turned into a very nice boy who could mix the drinks efficiently. Harold must have learned how in some officers’ club, or on Makalapa Row where the admirals had their houses at Pearl Harbor. Walter Price, too, was gone. He remembered that Walter had fallen asleep and that Harold had aroused Walter with the cheerful efficiency of someone who understood people who were gone with liquor. Harold must have learned this know-how in Guam or in the Philippines or in Makalapa Row. He remembered distinctly, after the Bramhalls had gone, that he had asked Harold to give him another Scotch—and there it was, still in his hand. He was sitting facing shelves of the Judge’s books, but he was now in the Saebury house that he had remodeled, no longer in the Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, Delaware, working on the second act of Hero’s Return. He was in the Saebury house and he was a damn fool to have bought it, and the bank had called his loan—but he had not spilled his drink, which he now perceived had grown lukewarm. Now was the time to finish it so that sleep could knit up the ravelled sleave of care, to quote Shakespeare, not that sleep ever knitted the sleeves of his care any longer. It was always just as ravelled when he awoke in the morning as it had been in the evening, and he was growing tired of apt quotations.

  There were times when stirrings in a house were highly disquieting—the ghostly creaking of some beam or board due to some pressure of construction or heat or cold, the abrupt tapping of a twig against a windowpane due to an eccentric veering of night air. Heard in the middle of the night, such sounds, all subject to rational explanation, occasional
ly would move into the realm of superstition that common sense could never quite invade. His thoughts that day and night had set up in him a perfect receptivity such as the late William James had discussed in his Varieties of Religious Experience. If he had been listening intently, he would have been better prepared, but he had heard nothing until he was aroused by the sound of steps descending the front stairs, and the steps had a ponderous slowness with which he was unfamiliar. Their steady progress had brought his mind back to the three measured taps on the stage before the curtain rose at the Comédie. In spite of wit and reason, he sat transfixed by a childish sort of dread that the footsteps were coming to carry him away to a bar of judgment; and for no good reason except that there were eccentricities in everybody’s mind, he had the childish memory of the routine of the Punch and Judy show. Punch had done away with Judy and the policeman, but the Devil got him in the end. There had been a rap-rap before it had happened. It was the Devil, coming to take Punch away. Doubtless free guilt contributed to his illusion that destiny in the shape of inevitable ending was moving down the stairs. The steps were not the steps of Emily with the clatter of her mules, nor the easy steps of Hal. The steps, growing nearer, were not stealthy but excruciatingly slow. His concept of destiny and free guilt could have lasted only a second or so before he realized that each careful footfall carried its burden of years and waste. He was no longer facing dread, but there was no relief when he realized it was Walter Price, because Walter, in his shabby woolen dressing gown, in the doorway with the light reflected on his partially bald head, was a harbinger of the inevitable tomorrow.

  It was all well enough to remind himself that Walter Price was some ten or twelve years his senior and had led an irregular and dissipated life, and that he had not yet reached by a long shot Walter’s phase of physical shakiness. Still, there was a grim thrust of time in Walter, a sharp nudge, a warning of what was coming. The glimpse of Walter, unguarded and disheveled, revealed the unalterable truth that, given a year or two, time would be pushing Walter, like Punch, off the stage. Walter was nearing the van of the big parade, following the stream of human frailty, of all ambitions, on his way to where Mort Sullivan had gone and Arthur Higgins and Helen Adair. He was on his way toward that bourne they wrote about and that one fact, after birth, that was completely unescapable. These were obvious facts, but now there was an urgent reminder that not only Walter but he, too, was a part of the big parade. The younger generation, the younger writers, and Hal and Emily were waiting for him to pass the stand in review. Time was gently nudging so that he would make room for someone else. The show was never over, but pregnancy was continuing, drums were beating, and you had to march along.