Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  “You never think,” Rhoda said. “You let it run through your fingers.”

  Very well, he had let it run through his fingers. There were other types who could hold it and never let it go, but there was one thing that even they were not able to hold, and that was the sand of life, and if you couldn’t hold onto that, why hold money? He had a distinct realization that he had wasted something, but it was impossible to tell what was waste when all creative effort was a distillation of experience.

  He could see Algiers again as it had been the first time he had seen it, standing with Rhoda on the deck of someone’s yacht. There was always a good chance to get on a yacht in those days if you were sufficiently entertaining at Antibes, and they were more entertaining than most people. It was morning when they anchored in the harbor of Algiers. The houses that rose up on steep slopes, forming terraces of walls and roofs, looked more French than he had believed they would, though, according to Frenchmen, Algeria was an integral part of the Republic. He had walked through the narrow streets with Rhoda and he was positive that they had stopped for tea at the beige-colored Hotel Aletti. He could remember its terrace overlooking the harbor. Even the Kasbah, to which they had gone with a guide under careful supervision, was more French than Arabian Nights. He had not dreamed, naturally, of the auspices under which he would see the place again. There had been rumors of war, but if one came, he could not see it in Algeria. He had cared more about motoring in the back country and visiting the remains of a lost Roman city than about visiting contemporary Algiers, but he had never thought of France as a projection of older Rome.

  He could even remember that he and Rhoda in Algeria had gone through at least one argument about money.

  “Let’s talk about something else,” he said.

  “I know,” she said, “I know you think it’s stupid.”

  “I don’t think money’s stupid,” he said, “I only think it’s dull.”

  “That’s a tiresome attitude,” Rhoda said. “It may be dull, but what would we have done if dull people hadn’t told us how to invest your savings? I don’t think it’s kind of you to say they’re dull.”

  “I didn’t say they were,” he said. “I said that money was.”

  “You think Dick and Marion Bramhall are dull,” she said.

  “Not always,” he said, “I just think they’re different from you and me.”

  “And I suppose you think Presley Brake is dull,” she said.

  It was three in the afternoon. They were among semiarid hills, driving back from somewhere, and they had just passed the well of an Arab village.

  “He isn’t entirely,” he said, “but I don’t like him.”

  “Why don’t you?” she asked.

  “I don’t like the shape of his head,” he said, “and I don’t like the sound of his voice, and all he cares about are motor cars and money.”

  In retrospect, this was not a bad thumbnail sketch, even if it might have fitted several other people.

  “Tom, you’re an awful snob,” she said. “You say that because he hasn’t got an Eastern accent.”

  “Look,” he said, “we’re having a nice time in a very peculiar country. I want to see what’s going on and not talk about Presley Brake.”

  “All right,” she said, “I never said I wanted to talk about him, either.”

  She was the one who had brought him up. She was the one, not he, who had him on her mind. He had never given a damn, and he didn’t now, for Presley Brake.

  They had never quarreled vociferously because they both were easygoing people. They had never been through those marital scenes so hilarious in drama and so tragic in private life—no shrieks, no shouts, no throwing of small articles. Could it have been that there had been too much repression between them both? He could not honestly believe so. On the contrary, they were both naturally considerate, but it might have been that they had been too civilized. Years had passed before he could have a glimpse of himself as she must have seen him, erratic, careless, with a juvenile desire to be a playboy. But at least they had both lived. Furthermore, he wished that he felt like a playboy now, that he were as alive as he had been then, or as aware, instead of trading both for cynical, weary wisdom. The swap was inevitable, perhaps, but it was still a bad exchange.

  xxv

  The Army Had a Name for Them

  The thing that happened had to happen somewhere, but it was incongruous that the Hotel Aletti should have been the place—not the Aletti as he had seen it first, but the Aletti in the war, down at the heel and deathly threadbare like the whole city of Algiers. Though war had touched Algiers almost as lightly as Paris, the blight of war, not its physical aspects, had made the city drab and devoid of the character he had previously remembered. It exhibited a waning of spirit more than physical hurt, and the echoes of a defeated nation constantly caught one’s ear. The shelves of the shops were bare and so was the Hotel Aletti, an empty shell, its furnishings ruined. The main dining room was stripped of its silver and napery. The plates passed by tired waiters, had come from defunct hotels in the States or from vanished ocean liners; the napkins were wrapping paper; but the rooms could have been much worse. He was lucky to have obtained one, with his rank of lieutenant colonel, the most meaningless and most fluid rank in the army. He was on the Army staff after a motion-picture assignment that he had started with evaporated during the sporadic street fighting outside of Oran. It had ended when he had called across the street in French to a French officer. He was doing staffwork in Algiers, and not only his French but his ability to get on with the British had been a help. Now it was summer in Algiers, shortly before the invasion of Sicily, and he had been there long enough to realize that Rhoda had been right. It had been a piece of selfishness for him to go. He was not of much use, even though he was popular around G-1 and was able to handle confidential information without its going to his head; but, selfishness or not, he was in the orchestra out front watching the most terrible yet the greatest show on earth and one that had always made men leave home.

  Mail from the States had arrived that afternoon, but he had been too busy to read his letters until he was back at the hotel; and even if he had not been occupied, he would not have read Rhoda’s letter sooner because he had never cared to read her letters at headquarters. His room at the Aletti overlooked the harbor, and he could remember the lengthening shadows and the afternoon light reflected on the water. His familiarity with stage sets enabled him to replace each article of furniture in his memory. There was a worn-out carpet, there were dingy blackout curtains, soiled walls, a bureau, a three-quarters bed with a sagging spring and olive-drab army blanket, a wardrobe with a cracked mirror, two chairs, one straight with a broken seat, the other with plum-colored, frayed upholstery, and a hat rack with his helmet and his gas mask hanging on its hooks. He had poured himself a small drink of bourbon into the cup of his canteen because he was tired and pleased to be hearing from home. He balanced her letter in his hand a few minutes before he opened it, observing that the postmark was Watch Hill, and he reconstructed the details of the house they had rented there for several summers. It would be approximately five hours earlier there than in Algiers, and he could think of Rhoda on the beach with Hal; he wondered how much Hal had grown. She would be tanned, and the sun always made her hair lighter. The memory was both near and distant. Lately he had been able to understand the contradiction, since like many others he had learned to place home and its attributes into a realm of a very remote possibility; and this was a practical point of view, the quicker attained the better. In the loneliness that necessarily accompanied an army overseas, it helped one’s general attitude to be concerned exclusively with the present and not to bother with the past.

  He could afford to relive those hours now that he had not seen Algiers for fifteen years. He lay in the dark, and with the clarity that darkness brings to thought the letter might as well have been before his eyes again. He could see the bold, rebellious, slanting handwriting that had a
lways reminded him of a schoolgirl rebelling against her teachers. There was always anticipation whenever he opened one of Rhoda’s letters, because she wrote the way she spoke, impulsively but never stupidly, and he could always read a dozen of her thoughts between the lines. What impressed him, now, was his utter lack of suspicion. He never knew until he had read the first two sentences that his letter from Rhoda was one of those letters that the Army had a name for, and there was an appreciable lapse of time before he could read it intelligently.

  He could recollect it word for word, but he still refused to give himself the pain of drawing upon the accuracy of memory. His instinct for preservation had helped, because even then he had tried to see himself as another person and not himself. He had rehearsed himself, as he would an actor who had received the news; he had tried to cultivate an actor’s professional virtuosity. It was the theatre that saved him back there in Algiers. He had seen the simulation of so much emotion that it governed his behavior.

  From the moment he finished the letter, a part of himself must have observed the scene curiously, with a knowledge that it was a valuable experience professionally. He could not say that he welcomed it, but part of him admitted that this was an opportunity to observe behavior under the influence of grief, a species of behavior which he had studied often academically. He was sure back there in Algiers that, given the faculties he now possessed, he would have observed with interest the processes of dying—and as it was, a part of him was as dead as the corpses on the road near Oran.

  He sat recovering from the blow, knowing that he was as much in shock as a battle casualty. In shock body and mind acted defensively, so that it was impossible to tell at first the extent of damage, which became apparent only after the first impetus of the thing was over; and by then you could only hope that processes of healing might begin. It must have been his own desire for preservation that helped him put Rhoda from his mind.

  There was nothing, he was sure, less predictable than the human mind or the caprice of will. It was no wonder that the Book of Common Prayer made reference to omissions and commissions and implied that devout congregations were miserable sinners. All one could do was to live under the leadership of the Chief Justice of the mind, and the mind was always more interested in the preservation of the ego than in abstract truth. He could see that defense mechanism had been in control of him already, and that after the shock there had come a wave of indignation which sounded to him now like an oration on Armistice Day. It was dastardly of Rhoda, his mind was saying, to have played this trick upon him while he was far from home fighting for his country, or at least a member of the armed services trying to be useful. He perceived the flaccidity of the argument, but Rhoda had been ungenerous and ungrateful. Then, with this meretricious indignation was combined an element of pride, and no one could tell how much of this one possessed until faced by disaster. Some of his pride must have been drawn from the stage, where appearances often counted more than fact. There was pride in keeping the production in correct proportion, pride in a traditional façade, and never mind what lay behind it.

  He remembered that he had poured himself another drink and that he had been careful not to take too much because he was to dine up on the hill with his boss, General Whelk, who was a West Pointer disapproving of civilian officers, and they were going to work on logistics. The thing to do was to live in the present and to remember that Rhoda and Hal were in a country so hard to reconstruct that they were already in the past. When he had finished his second drink, he opened the foot locker beside his bed and took out a writing tablet and an air-mail envelope.

  Dear Rhoda, he wrote, I have received your letter. I am sorry you have not felt that you could wait until this show got finished here, but then, that is your privilege. I am writing to my lawyers to get in touch with you at once. Please give my love to Hal. Sincerely …

  Of all the letters he had written her, this was the last, and he could still believe it was admirable in that it expresed his feelings better than pages could have done. He was aware of the glacial quality but he could believe she deserved it. There was always that doubt, that question of what might have happened if he had written differently, but there were lots of things that one could do only once. He could address that letter only once; he could put it only once in the pocket of his blouse. He could put his cap on in that same way only once and look at himself in the cracked wardrobe mirror. He had lost weight since New York; summer had given him a coat of tan in spite of his work indoors. In his uniform he looked nearly like a pro, because he had studied the mannerisms. He had even been able to fool some people on the hill until they had seen he did not have the ring, but no one could be like General Whelk without intensive training. He was new wine in an old bottle, or was he doing right in quoting from the Scriptures?

  The general had sent a jeep down from the pool.

  “Evening, Sergeant,” Tom said to the driver. “I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”

  The sergeant looked like a pro himself, and at least he had been through basic training.

  “No reason not to wait, sir,” the sergeant said, “I’ve had my chow. It’s a lovely evening, isn’t it—the kind that makes you wish you were back home, doesn’t it?”

  They were civilians together in spite of the uniform. It was a civilian army until one reached the higher echelons or encountered an occasional survivor from the peacetime regulars.

  “If you think of home,” he said, “it means you have a nice home, Sergeant. You’re married, I suppose.”

  “And two kids,” the sergeant said. “Yes, sir, I have a lovely home.”

  “Well,” he said, “there’s a saying—I wish I had my book of Familiar Quotations here—that anyone who has a wife and children gives hostages to fortune.”

  “That’s a fact, isn’t it, sir?” the sergeant said. “It kind of slows you up. If I may be frank, colonel, I get a lot more of a charge driving you than most officers. You’ve always got something to say that’s on the ball.”

  “As long as it isn’t a lovely charge,” he said, “and this isn’t an order, but if it’s all the same with you, Sergeant, would you please not use the word ‘lovely’ again until we get there?”

  “Say,” the sergeant said, “what’s wrong with the word ‘lovely’?”

  “Nothing, Sergeant,” he said, “except it makes me gag tonight. The younger writers are using it and it is frequently employed in fiction in the New Yorker magazine.”

  “Jesus, sir,” the sergeant said, “you really know your way around.”

  Tom was adaptable, and besides, headquarters was like a stage. He remembered a profile that had been written about him by one of those bright young men with a gift for words and a penchant for collecting comical details. Maybe the author had given a key to his character in one phrase he remembered, “the affable Mr. Harrow.” He was glad he had not been called “tweedy and affable” since affable in itself was enough. Did affable mean a placating manner, smacking of cowardice? Did it mean a commercial desire to please, a Dale-Cargnegie-calculated drive to make friends and influence people, or merely proper manners? You never could tell how contemporary taste might succeed in warping the meaning of a word.

  He had been a figure that appealed to a naïve quality in the army. There were generals who, in their peacetime lives, had never come in contact with Figures, and now the net of war had brought them great Figures wholesale. They collected them indiscriminately—pugilists, ball players, movie stars, professors, writers, artists, singers. He was glad he had got in G-1 originally because he could speak French, but he might have stayed because he was a Figure that could answer affably when asked how he had so many ideas for plays. He may have kept the sergeant waiting, but he was just on time when he knocked on the door of the general’s quarters.

  “Good evening, sir,” he said.

  The general’s room on the second floor of the converted resort hotel, looking over the orange trees and the bougainvillaea of the garden, wa
s as spacious as his rank demanded but as plain and neat as Sparta. The general was writing a letter. As the waning light fell on his thinning hair and graying temples, it occurred to Tom Harrow that he would be a dead ringer for Julius Caesar if he had only possessed a better voice. He had been put into G-1 because of ability. It had been no kick upstairs and he was not yet on his way to Washington.

  “Hello, Tom,” he said, “pardon me, I’m writing a line to Mrs. Whelk. There’s a courier going out tonight who will take it in the pouch. The old lady gets nervous if she doesn’t hear from me twice a week. I hope you write Mrs. Harrow regularly.”

  “Yes, sir,” Tom said. “In fact, I just wrote her a line at the Aletti and also a kind of a business letter, too. Would it be asking too much, sir, if you could get them off with yours?”

  “No, no,” the general said, “as long as one is for the Lucky Little Woman. My motto is, always write the Lucky Little Woman.”

  The general would have been beautiful as Shaw’s Caesar. He could even wonder what the general would do if he should come in contact with Cleopatra in Cairo.

  “Tom,” the general said, “open that closet over there and get the bourbon off the right-hand shelf, and two glasses by the washstand, will you? And there’s clean water in the bottle. Pour out two stiff snorts before we go over to the mess.”

  “Why, that sounds fine, sir,” Tom said, “but not altogether like you.”