Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  Hal was to arrive in late June, which explained why they had stayed in town all summer and why afterwards he could agree with New Yorkers who said that New York was at its best then. At least it was so in those days, and the two floors were cool. Rhoda, who had never cared for flowers until then, had got a little man—she had now reached the stage where she could call a great many people little men—to plant some things in the back yard, and another little man installed an inexpensive garden fountain. He remembered the musty odor of the yard of an evening, pervading, but not unpleasant, like other New York backyards that had been turned into gardens in those enlightened days. It did not matter whether or not the plants did well; you could always get the little man to put in new ones, and you could always listen to the dripping of the fountain.

  “Darling, the stock market keeps going up all the time, doesn’t it?” Rhoda said.

  “Does it?” he asked.

  “Don’t you even look?” she said. “You read and read the paper.”

  “I look sometimes,” he said, “and I’m going to one of those offices sometime next week. I want to see the tickers. They say boys run around and chalk numbers up on blackboards in a place called a customers’ room.”

  “Remember not to buy anything. Remember what Dick said,” she told him. “It’s all too high.”

  “I don’t want to buy anything,” he said. “I want to watch the faces. I want to hear the talk.”

  “With all those friends of yours,” she said, “who come around for drinks, I’d think you hear enough conversation without going to a stockbroker’s.”

  “There are different kinds of talk,” he said. “I want to get it classified.”

  “You mean dialect and things like that?” she asked.

  “No, not that,” he said. “Some people say one thing; others with the same thoughts express them differently. Stockbrokers talk alike and bankers in a slightly different way. I like to listen for the difference.”

  “Does Dick Bramhall talk like a banker?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “he’s the norm for a banker.”

  “It isn’t very nice of you to be horrid about him,” she said, “after what Dick’s been doing about everything.”

  “It isn’t horrid to say that someone talks like a banker,” he said. “Don’t you wish I’d talk like one?”

  “Sometimes, not always,” she said. “Tom …?”

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Tom, after the baby’s born and we have a good nurse and everything, couldn’t you and I go away somewhere and have a trip—not Niagara Falls, but somewhere farther?”

  “That sounds swell,” he said. “Somewhere without the Bramhalls and the Hertimes.”

  “And let’s make it without the Higginses,” she said, “and without the people from the Hero who keep coming around, and especially without Delia Duneen.”

  “Why without Duneen?” he asked.

  “Because I’m tired of seeing her sitting around loving you,” she said, “and thinking how much happier she could make you than I can.”

  “Duneen?” he said. “Why, Duneen can’t think as long as that consecutively about anything but herself.”

  “Never mind,” she said, “she keeps getting you mixed up in her thought sequence.”

  “Darling,” he said, “I’m not mixed up in any Duneen sequence. She’s a sweet but stupid little girl. Don’t worry about Duneen.”

  “All right,” she said, “and don’t worry about Dick Bramhall.”

  “I don’t,” he said, “why should I?”

  “And you needn’t take that tone about him,” she said. “I don’t think he’s very happy with Marion.”

  “Did he ever tell you so?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said, “he wouldn’t dream of telling a thing like that.”

  “You bet he wouldn’t,” he said.

  “That isn’t kind,” she said. “Don’t keep saying things like that about Dick. Anyway, let’s go away somewhere. Abroad.”

  “That’s fine,” he said. “Whereabouts abroad?”

  “Oh, anywhere,” she said. “Let’s go to France. They say it’s beautiful in Antibes.”

  “Who told you?” he said.

  “Why, Dick,” she said. “And he says the exchange is very favorable. The poor French keep having trouble with the franc.”

  It was strange to recall the echo of her words, now that the poor Americans, despite enlightened struggles, were having troubles with their dollar. He could hear the dripping of the backyard fountain still. Of course each drip was counted and had to be paid for, but this did not amount to much. Superficially none of it amounted to much—not Dick Bramhall, not Duneen. If two people really had each other, they had everything and needed nothing more. There were no Bramhalls or Duneens those summer nights while he and she were waiting for the baby, only the fountain, which was connected with the city meter, but everything in life was metered in some way or other, and someone was always ringing the bell and saying, “Gas man, here to read the meter.”

  Perhaps obstetricians, and midwives before them, had always gone to great pains to make childbirth appear like a simple, merry affair. He had been lulled into a sense of security by having Dr. Jellison, who had been recommended by friends of the Bramhalls as the best man in New York, say that Rhoda would have an easy time of it.

  “You see,” he said, in one of his early talks—it had always been his practice to see each couple together—“your wife has a beautiful pelvis.”

  It had seemed to Tom stuffy of Rhoda to be annoyed.

  “I don’t know why he should have made that remark in front of you,” she said.

  “Well, he was only dealing with facts,” he told her. “I don’t think anything personal was intended.”

  “It sounded personal to me,” Rhoda said, “and I’m going to speak to him about it.”

  Rhoda was already learning how to put people in their places and until after Harold was born Dr. Jellison made no more than a veiled anatomical remark again.

  But the knowledge that she was going to have an easy time of it had made them both confident. He remembered that in spite of the pains that had started, as they had about six in the early evening, she was in high spirits driving to the hospital.

  “I don’t mind it as long as it’s your baby,” she said, “and I’ll look better when it’s over. Now don’t look worried, Tom.”

  “I’m not,” he said, “as long as he said it’s going to be all right.”

  “Of course it’s going to be all right,” she said, “and it’s going to be a boy, and I don’t want you around until it’s over.”

  The longer he lived, the more convinced he became that you had to pay for everything, whether it was for failure or success or routine living. He had never, like governments or citizens he could mention, attempted avoidance, but the practice was unfair because, more often than not, other people were involved when the chips were down. Rhoda had been talking so much about security that he was already beginning to revolt against it. There was no safety in living, and in the end, about all you got out of life was learning how to face truth without sidestepping to avoid it.

  Rhoda had been in the delivery room for about an hour and Tom had been waiting alone in a small reception room when he saw Dr. Jellison in his clean, white duster walking down the corridor. He saw the doctor for several seconds before the doctor knew he was being watched, and there was no way of forgetting those seconds because it was very seldom that one saw behind the academically compassionless medical front. For that second or two Jellison was more human than he had ever appeared. His step was slow and he looked deathly tired—until he saw that he was being watched. Tom Harrow had always distrusted doctors after that, even the best or ablest of them. He had never liked the arrogance of their assurance or their priestlike assumption that they were different from other people. Granted that all this was necessary in their profession and a part of their professional conditioning, he still did not
admire it. You could have them as friends until you were a patient, and then inescapably the veil dropped down.

  “Oh, there you are, Tom,” the doctor said. “Well, it’s a boy—seven-and-a-half pounds.”

  Tom felt no relief because he had seen the doctor’s face and had observed the hesitation in his step out there in the corridor.

  “Rhoda thought it was going to be a boy,” he said. “How’s Rhoda?”

  There was no longer a trace of uncertainty. If he no longer trusted doctors, he admired them; when he had a doctor in a play produced in 1938, he knew the scene was good, because his mind, when he wrote it, was back there in the hospital with the aura of ether that had emanated from Dr. Jellison.

  “She’s having a transfusion,” he said. “She hemorrhaged just when I thought the party was over.”

  Again that frightful American barbarism of turning nouns into verbs struck him as one of the worst parts of medical semantics; the lighthearted business of calling such a thing a “party” showed that the doctor was modern, and Dr. Jellison was still trying to maintain the pose when he went on with the rest of it.

  “I’m afraid once will be enough,” he said. “But we’ll talk about that later. I’d better go back now.”

  There was no use analyzing the sort of fear Tom had felt. Times might change, but moments of sickly terror never did. Circumstances might alter significance, but not the moment itself. The terror that he felt was that Rhoda might be leaving him. All their times together, which were more vivid than the separate times themselves—all the small things that made up a personality—were mingled with the memories: the wiry, unbrushed look of her hair when she awakened in the morning; the softness of her face when she was aroused from sleep; the swiftness of her smile.

  She was deathly pale when he saw her and there was a sickly smell of ether in her hair.

  “Darling,” he said to her, “I am awfully glad you’re here.”

  “I’m glad I am, too,” she said. “I didn’t want to lose you. There’s so much we can do. We’ll have a wonderful time.”

  They had been closer together then than they had ever been before or since, and you could not take away the essence of that memory.

  “Have you seen him?” she asked.

  “Who?” he said.

  “Why, Harold, of course,” she said.

  “No, not yet,” he said. “All right, we’ll call him Harold.”

  Watching through plate glass while the baby was held up by a nurse who would still have been ugly without a gauze mask, Tom had not been impressed, at the time, by Harold.

  It was appalling to him, occasionally, when he found himself in the company of learned men, to realize his own lack of deep specific knowledge. He could skim the surface of many subjects, but he had no grasp of any except on the single one from which he gained his livelihood. He knew a few of the basic principles underlying writing better than the average professor of literature or drama. This was only natural, since these people were theorists, not obliged to live by writing. The best of them seldom realized that craftsmanship or the ability to use words was the basis of all artistic effort. These individuals, preparing their lectures and writing their doctorate theses, spoke eloquently of art and life; but few of them appreciated how far life itself diverged from the printed page or the spoken line of the theatre. Writing was a heady brew, but it was never life itself. Actors or characters on a printed page did not behave like normal human beings. The problems of people in drama were not like those in real life. They were tenser, crisper, more sudden, more contrived, and limited by human patience, because those situations were the work of men, not gods. Situations had to be shaped and made comprehensible. They never could be vague, as they often were when molded by the gods. There were a great many clever people who did not know what life was about, but the audience had to know the meaning when you wrote the show. In those days, when they had everything, that was often the trouble with broken marriages—and he had seen a lot in his time—you seldom knew they were broken until they were smashed. All those people on the side streets of the city, those dextrous men who riveted broken porcelain—even their skill never made the object the same again, and they were better at it than the psychiatrists and the lawyers. But his mind was still back there at the time when they had everything and all the while everything had been slipping through his fingers.

  XXIII

  It Was Foreshadowed on Lexington Avenue

  He could think of a passable simile, now that his mind was on the subject. Once he had gone on a fishing trip in the Laurentians. He had never been so far away from anything as he had been on the string of lakes out in the woods in that canoe. Seth Maxwell had one guide in one canoe and he had one guide in another. His guide’s name was Gus, and Gus was at home in a canoe. On their way to the fishing area, they paddled for two days from lake to lake, and when the lakes ended, generally in a swamp, it was necessary to carry the canoes, the tents and the food to the shore of another lake. Gus, who had a bad cough and a birthmark on his neck, could handle the canoe and most of the gear himself, but there was always plenty left. The experience had been so unusual and so uncomfortable, and he had known so little about getting in and out of canoes or handling rods, that the thing ended by being amusing.

  He appreciated afterwards the solitude of the country through which they traveled. He must have seen the spruce trees and poplars and the lakes and the beaches with their rocky promontories through a subconscious eye because he had felt no immediate reaction to their beauty. He remembered the trails of the portages with stones on the downslopes that rolled beneath his feet. He had fallen several times, unbalanced by the pack on his back, but there had been one beautiful moment that stood out in that discomfort. Close to noon on the second day, when he was in the middle of a portage called Half Mile Carry, he had come upon a spring beside the trail, rising in a sandy bowl beside a granite boulder. Ferns and mosses grew around the spring’s edge and a clump of alders shaded its small basin, but erratic spots of sunlight moved in patterns when a light breeze moved the leaves of the alders. The whole sight was unexpected and the unexpectedness added to its beauty. There was a glint in that spring like the sun on Rhoda’s hair. He had never forgotten the scents by the spring’s margin, not the same as Rupert Brooke’s stream, but they were as unforgettable, unforgotten. There was the acrid smell of the emerald-green moss and the pungent odor of the broken fern fronds that he crushed as he had knelt beside the spring. He tossed aside the pack he was carrying and he plunged his cupped hands into the clear water. It was icy, numbingly cold and his bodily reaction was delightful as he lifted his cupped hands above the surface. He was thirsty, but he knelt staring at the water in his palms and watching it slip in tiny streams between his fingers; like sand in an hourglass, he thought, except that this was ice-cold water and the drops hit the spring’s surface in a golden, jewel-like way, making patterns more irregular than patterns of raindrops. He was holding the sands of time, except that this was water, and then his hands were empty and his thirst was back. He had allowed the water to vanish without drinking. Rhoda used to say that he forgot her half the time. She could never understand that his mind could be in two places at once and that part of her was still always with him.

  You should drink while you had it, and not let water slip through your fingers. The drops had returned to the spring like life to a greater life and he could see them now as a bittersweet symbol of what he and Rhoda had held once together.

  There would be a drop for the afternoons when Hal would come to the parlor from the nursery. Hal had been a modern anachronism: a nursery child, unduly excited by occasional social contacts with his parents. “Don’t pull the cigarette box off the table, dear.” “Watch it, Hal, watch out for the fire tongs.” In his memory there were always other people in for drinks or for tea. Rhoda had become fascinated by the ritual of tea and she had picked up a silver service from one of the estate silver people off Fifth Avenue. Tea was not a favorite bev
erage, but she loved to pour it, and it was a pleasure to watch her at the table in the afternoon. He wondered whether she remembered that he had rehearsed her in the act. There was always some actor or writer and usually some friend of Rhoda’s whom she had met at lunch or at her discussion club, now that Marion Bramhall had got her to be a member. Her friends were always eager and excited when they embarked on this antiseptic adventure that they doubtless called Bohemia—not that it was, because the Harrows were delightful and literally in the Social Register, since he was not an actor and Rhoda was not an actress; but still, he wrote for the stage and she was perfectly charming. There was a restrained excitement among Rhoda’s friends when they came in for tea or something stronger. He had always enjoyed watching them in this dangerous milieu, but it never paid to jest about them afterwards with Rhoda—not when his own friends burned holes in the carpets and kept drinking more and more bathtub gin, not when friends like Walter Price insisted on telling off-color stories.

  There would be the break when Harold appeared.

  “Here’s Harold,” he could hear Rhoda say. “This is Harold’s hour before his bedtime. ‘Harold’s Hour,’ by Longfellow.”

  This had been his line originally, but she had taken it over and he could still remember the soft, infectious note of her laugh that always followed.