“She has a good speaking voice, and she’s a pretty girl,” he said.
“Yes,” she answered, “but she’s selfish. You can see it in her face.”
Rhoda should have understood that most girls had to be, to get on.
“Tom,” she said, “you don’t think I’m selfish, do you?”
“No,” he said, “but you don’t have to be.”
Then the doorbell rang. Myra was there to open it.
“Well,” he said, “it’s started,” and he kissed Rhoda. “Don’t worry, I’m right with you.”
Everything around him had been changing ever since, assuming new shapes with the rapidity of waves on a stormy sea, including literary tastes. Out of gale-tossed thought had come philosophies, new modes of artistic expression, sometimes fascinating only because of their confusion. Lady Chatterley’s Lover had appeared. Tom and the late D. H. Lawrence would have blushed at the antics of characters subsequently dreamed up by the young hopes of modern American literature. Then there was Mr. Joyce and his Ulysses—and be sure to read the chapter in which the heroine gave free rein to her subconscious. These thoughts, the last time he had perused them, seemed like pallid stuff now that our boys and girls could use all the bad words freely and now that sexual aberrations were old hat. And yet he believed that Joyce might survive the rest of them. But what about all those people in the Judge’s library? There was a light run on Trollope lately, but what about William Makepeace Thackeray? He was now only someone to be passed off with a nervous shrug in a small Ivy League lecture room. He was aware of a lack, in the Victorians, of what modern publishers called “lustiness”—or did this mean that his own taste was becoming dulled by a newer, braver, lustier world?
Old-hat though it might be, when he thought of their party that September night, his mind moved to the Belgian ball in Vanity Fair with its news of Napoleon’s advancing armies. It was a quiet, old-fashioned and stilted passage, but it remained sound. His had been another festivity before another Waterloo, on Lexington Avenue that night, and it was strange that the parallel should never have occurred to him until more than a quarter of a century later. Everything had been there, if he had only had the wit to see it: all the moods, emotions, and main characters had appeared in that vanished Victorian room. The mood was implicit in the lilt of the voices, and in the banality of the champagne humor, in all the wit that was not wit, though some of it was amusing in retrospect.
Sitting quietly now in the library late in the night—and it was doubtless later than he thought—holding an empty whiskey tumbler and aware of the small-town nocturnal silence, different from any other silence, he could recall the guests of that other night, and their names and faces, far more clearly than he could any he had encountered in New York six months back. Players, playwrights, critics and managers had been moving in from the country then, for Labor Day was over. He could hear himself saying, standing beside Rhoda, “Rhoda, you remember Gilbert Smythe”—and that would have been Gilbert Smythe from the old New York World. And now he had no knowledge as to whether Gilbert was alive or dead.
“Rhoda, this is Norman Wyatt from Hollywood. You remember, he’s come to New York to talk to me about a script.”
Norman was the one who died of an overdose of sleeping pills just before the war, but he had an old pro’s mind for plot.
“Hello, Honoria, darling. Rhoda, of course you remember Honoria.”
If Rhoda did not, she should have. Honoria had been in the front row of one of the Scandals and had just married Boris Klutch, who was being spoken of as a new David Griffith of the movies.… Klutch was the one who had run off to Tahiti a year later, at a time when Tahiti was a fashionable running-off place. Then Honoria had married Guy H. Nestling, the oil man, who, incidentally, had once been a close friend of the Hertimes; and when that had broken up, she married Clarence Hugee, ten years her junior, the fashionable film juvenile; if he remembered rightly, Honoria had pulled a gun on Clarence in the Brown Derby or somewhere. He could not remember when he had last heard about her. The drifting dunes of time had covered a lot of people who had been conspicuously active before the Twenties had become a dust bowl of the past.…
“Duneen, darling,” he heard himself saying, “you’re looking marvelous. How is everything at the Vineyard? It it still safe to swim on your beach in the altogether?”
It was only a casual question and there was no reason at all for Rhoda to have been annoyed. He had only been to the Vineyard for a short week end to see the Higginses on business.
“Tom,” Arthur Higgins was saying, “I’ve brought along Burt Sturgess. I thought you boys ought to get to know each other.”
That was the Burt Sturgess who had written the play about the evangelist, the name of which had now escaped him; the Sturgess who was once going to be a new adornment of the American drama until Hollywood had got him. Hollywood nearly always got them. Why was it that Tom had managed to escape, and where in heaven’s name was Burt Sturgess now?
“Laura, dear,” Tom said, “thanks ever so much for coming. Rhoda, here’s Laura Hopedale.”
At least Rhoda had recognized Laura Hopedale, and back in those days Laura had been something to remember. Laura, who was then still an ingenue, had what was called around the theatre a “spiritual quality.” Her dark eyes had a startled look, and when she smiled she had a pleadingly wistful expression. With such attraction, it was already being said that she had a future in the pictures as well as on the stage. Her close-up was disastrously compelling. Her expression had not changed much when she was in North Africa with a USO troupe considerably later, and even then her complexion had been vastly better than most movie actresses’. Her words came back to him; her voice, with its soft and alluring huskiness and its almost perfect modulation, was as fine a speaking voice as he had ever heard on any stage or any picture set.
“Oh, Tom,” she said, “it’s enchanting to have a glimpse of you in your own milieu. This, all of it, is so entirely you.”
“Rhoda had quite a lot to do with it,” he said. “I’d call it seventy-five per cent Rhoda.”
“Oh, now,” Rhoda said, “I just shopped around for the things. He’s the one who arranged everything. He’s good at setting scenes, isn’t he, Miss Hopedale?”
“Call me Laura,” Miss Hopedale said. “It seems as though I’ve known you always, dear.”
“I’m good at setting scenes,” he said, “but I hope I never make them.”
“That’s true,” Rhoda said, “he never does make them, Miss Hopedale—excuse me, dear, I meant to say Laura.”
All the characters were there that night, or almost all, who had a part to play in the scenario of his middle years, and yet there was no warning of a distant drum. He was willing to bet that a soothsayer had never said, “Beware the Ides of March”—or if he had, that Julius Caesar had never heard him.
“Here come the Hertimes, Tom,” Rhoda said. “How sweet of you both to come. Tom was just saying that he hoped that you weren’t going to forget.”
“Oh, sweetness,” Mrs. Hertime said, “we wouldn’t have missed this for anything. They may grow corn but not interesting people like this in the Mississippi valley. That’s just what Art was saying in the taxi, weren’t you, Art?”
“I sure was, honey,” Art Hertime said, “and I might also add, not even at Grosse Pointe, Michigan. Say, Tom, I’ve got a tip for you. Buy yourself a few shares of Packard tomorrow and put them away and forget it.”
“Art, honey,” Mrs. Hertime said, “aren’t you forgetting something else?”
“Forgetting what, sugar?” Mr. Hertime asked.
“To introduce our overnight guest, Art.”
“Oh,” Mr. Hertime said, “excuse me, sweetness.… We brought along with us one of our closest friends and one who I hope you’ll agree with us is one of the finest guys in the world, Presley Brake—you know, the one who started the new investment trust, Monolith Security Mutual. Pres, I want you to meet one of the cutest and most brilli
ant couples in New York, Rhoda and Tom Harrow, and I know you’ll all get along like a house afire.”
“I know Rhoda’s going to love him,” he could still hear himself saying, “if the middle name of that investment trust is Security.”
“That’s its middle name”—and he could still recall the dry and lisping precision of Presley Brake. Presley already was growing bald, but the thinning hair gave his features and his thin nose reliability and balance. “Security is something you have to watch carefully just now.”
“It’s awfully nice that you could come, Mr. Brake,” Rhoda said.
“Come on, Pres,” Art Hertime said, “let’s get a glass of happy water before these actors and geniuses drink it all up on us.”
Presley Brake was slightly corpulent already, but perhaps this impression was based only on prejudice. There was no indication that he was another Marquis of Steyne. He had always been a colorless man, devoid of imagination, but again, this possibly was prejudice. There was no reason to think charitably of him any longer. In fact, there was no reason to think of him at all any more.…
“Well,” he had said to Rhoda, “that balances the party. Get a few figures from the financial district in, and everything has sanctity.”
“Sanctity?” Rhoda said.
“Maybe that isn’t the word,” he answered. “I guess the word’s validity.”
“Anyway,” Rhoda said, “it’s a good thing we know some people who know about finance, because you know that you don’t.”
“That’s right,” he said, “and I don’t want to know.”
“That’s a pose,” she said, “and you know it. Who’s that coming in now, the very pretty young girl in the gray silk dress? What play is she rehearsing for?”
“Oh,” he said. “She’s in the Higgins office. She’s been working on the acting script for Little Liar.”
“I thought you said Miss Hopedale was the conscience,” Rhoda said. “I’d rather have this one for my conscience.”
“She doesn’t act,” he said. “She works in the Higgins office. But she is pretty, isn’t she? Her name is Nancy Mulford.…
“Hello, Miss Mulford,” he said. “I don’t believe you’ve seen my wife since the party after Hero opened.”
“You don’t remember me, of course,” Nancy Mulford said.
“I ought to,” Rhoda said, “and we ought to be friends, if you’re typing Tom’s new play. You know, Tom met me—in fact, he picked me up—outside a typing school. Perhaps he has a weakness for girls who type.”
“Only if they type beautfully,” he said.
Then they were alone again, he and Rhoda, and the voices were louder in the room.
“Why were you so formal with her?” Rhoda asked. “Why didn’t you kiss her and call her darling, the way you do Duneen?”
“Because I’m old-fashioned at heart,” he said, “and it wouldn’t do in the Higgins office, and she wouldn’t like it.”
“That’s true,” Rhoda said, “she isn’t on the stage.”
Everything was there that night, all the people and all the elements that were to make up success or failure in his life, except Emily, who was still in Indiana with blond pigtails, no doubt, and freckles on her nose.
At that moment, on Lexington Avenue, they were moving out of what one might still call the Age of Confidence into the Age of Christ-I’m-Confused, in which he had spent most of his active life and in which he was dwelling still. They were moving through regimentation to social significance, to a region where theory was indistinguishable from practice. They were moving into electronics, to war, and thence to atomic fission. Wishing was immature; he could only wish that he were back on Lexington Avenue with a foreseeable future ahead and with Rhoda beside him in her new party dress.
“Tom,” she said that night, “I’m awfully glad we had the party.”
It was easier to be glad about things in the Age of Confidence. They were still not surfeited with too much to be glad or sorry over. It was a simpler age, full of error, no doubt, but he wished again that he were there.
XXIV
Too Dark Downstairs for Sleeping
It was very late at night and nothing had been gained by sitting alone with semiconnected reminiscences except spasms of regret and the feeling of surprise one always had at how fast time had moved and how little was left to show for it. There had been a girl one summer in New York, and never mind who she was or what had happened to her. At any rate, there was no free guilt about her as there might have been about some others he could bring up. She was a college girl and interested in the theatre in a more intelligent and less emotional way than was true with most.
It had been summer in New York, quite a while after the Lexington Avenue days. He was alone in the Park Avenue duplex, getting his meals out, except his breakfast. He was in town as usual getting a play ready for casting and Rhoda and Harold had gone to Watch Hill. For the life of him he had never been able to do any work at Watch Hill, in spite of its coolness, comfort, and swimming and everything else. At the end of an August afternoon, he had gone to have a cocktail at the Patricks’. It had been Bill Patrick, the writer, who was married to a nice brunette named Molly at the time, and who had a house in the Turtle Bay development—the one with all the back yards in the block put together, forming a communal garden. Bill Patrick was finishing a novel and Molly had said that Turtle Bay was better than the country what with the garden and everything. He wished he could get the exact date of that summer correctly, but it must have been after Repeal, judging from his memory of bottles on the table out there in the garden.
There were a number of people whom one might properly call interesting, in that they made their living from writing, painting, or acting. It was strange that the average American housewife felt that people who wrote were interesting. He had already become acutely conscious of the fallacy, and those guests of Bill and Molly Patrick were unusually tired of being interesting that afternoon. He was finishing his cocktail and getting ready to leave when the girl arrived, and it would have been impossible not to be impressed by her in that environment. It was not her beauty that attracted his attention. Her figure was good but her face was plain. What was unforgettable and appealing to him, at that moment, was her expression of wide-eyed innocence that matched the cotton print dress she was wearing. You could tell that she never before in her life had seen so many interesting people. The wonder would wear off, given time and opportunity, but it had not when she stood there in the garden uncertainly, because Molly had gone into the house for something, and at best Molly was always careless about introducing people.
“May I get you something to drink?” he asked. “I don’t believe we’ve ever met before. My name is Harrow.”
“I’m Augusta Drew,” she said, “and if I could, I’d like some gin and ginger ale, with very little gin.”
“That’s a college girl’s drink,” he said. “You must still be in college.”
“Why, I am, as a matter of fact,” she said. “Next year will be my second year at Vassar.”
“A cradle for heroines,” he said. “Don’t go away, I’ll be right back with your gin and ginger ale.”
“Excuse me,” she said, “did you say your name was Harrow?”
“Why, yes,” he said, “Harrow’s the name, and Harrow’s my nature, if you don’t mind Dickens.”
“Not the Mr. Harrow who writes the plays?” she asked. “But you don’t have to answer that one. I can tell you are. You couldn’t be anyone else.”
Her look was something he could not forget. He had never seen it on Rhoda. That was the thought in the back of his mind when he poured her a very little gin and a great deal of ginger ale, and he remembered that he had asked himself an obvious question: Why had Rhoda never looked at him like that? Was it because she had always known too much about him, or was she basically too wise?
“I was thinking of going somewhere for supper,” he said, “and it would be much pleasanter if you cared to come along.�
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“I’d love to,” she said, “but are you sure you want me?”
Truthfully, he had not been sure; he had wanted the moment to stay preserved without its being spoiled. But it had not been spoiled. He had taken her to 21; she had never seen the place.
“It must be wonderful to have everyone know who you are,” she said.
“Not any more,” he said. “The catch in it is that nothing keeps on being wonderful.”
“This keeps on being, for me,” she said.
He had never forgotten, not that there had been much to forget. He talked to her about what he was writing, something he would seldom have done with Rhoda. He talked to her about Harold and about Watch Hill.
“I’d ask you up to the apartment,” he said, “but there’s nothing worse than an apartment in midsummer.”
He was conscious that he did not want anything to spoil it, and nothing had. He had not even touched her hand until he had said good night to her in front of the building where she was staying.
“Good night. You’re the nicest man I’ll ever know,” she said.
It was nothing much, but still something to remember. If he had ever seen her again, something would have been spoiled; and he never had seen her. Rhoda had known him too well, but not from their first meeting had her face ever worn that look, and maybe it was for the better. Undoubtedly he would have grown tired of it in time.
He must have dozed off for a moment, and he was glad he had, because the short space of oblivion, which was not unlike the dimming of the theatre lights that marked a lapse of time, finally broke the chain of his recollections. That dimming, which could not have been much more than a minute’s lapse, brought him back to the present again, and he discovered Hal was in the library. Hal was in a Liberty silk dressing-gown, something that someone must have given him for Christmas. He looked as though he had been asleep, but he also looked alert, with a nautical alertness he had not lost as yet.
“Hi, Pop,” he said. “You know it’s getting late?”
Women and Thomas Harrow Page 42