Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

It was a silly question, but he could not blame her for being curious.

  “Now, Emily,” he said, “I don’t see why you should come into this. You’ve hardly ever met her, have you?”

  Emily breathed in deeply, and this was always a bad sign.

  “I know what she wants to see you for,” she said, “just as sure as if she’d told you. She wants you to leave me. She wants to have you back.”

  He experienced a strange sensation that was like a note of freedom, a note of hope, a note of the impossible.

  “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t let’s be sillier than necessary, Emily. I haven’t seen Rhoda since she wrote me that letter to Africa. Let’s keep things on an even basis.”

  Emily’s voice grew louder, and it was not her acting voice.

  “You love her,” she said, “you’ve always loved her. Don’t tell me you don’t still love her.”

  The worst of the moment was that what Emily had said was true, and the devastating simplicity of it shocked him.

  “Emily,” he said, “it doesn’t do any good to go on like that. I’ll be back in time for dinner and I’ll promise to tell you everything that’s happened—but don’t let’s be silly, Emily.”

  “You love her,” Emily said, and her voice was still louder. “Why do you deny it? Why can’t you face up to anything? You loved her so much that you married that bitch, and that’s why you married me, because you still loved her. You wanted me to get you away from it. I’ve tried. I’ve tried, Tom, but I can’t keep on trying.’

  It had been a long while since he had felt so uncomfortable. He had never dreamed that Emily could be capable of upsetting him in just that way.

  “Emily,” he said, “it doesn’t do any good to go on like this. This sort of thing doesn’t help.”

  Few palliatives were ever more futile at such a time than words of reason. It was an occasion when nothing was helped by anything.

  “Why are you such a coward?” she said. “Why don’t you stand up like a man and admit you love her?”

  Like a lot of Emily’s questions, it led to nothing useful. He did not want to hear any more. He wanted to get away. He did not like to admit that he was afraid of Emily, but he wanted to get away. The older one got, the more anxious one was to escape from truth and revelation because one learned that they were increasingly incontrovertible.

  “Emily,” he said, “please stop this nonsense. Go and get some clothes on. I’ve got to take a shower.”

  When he had slammed and locked his bathroom door, he was aware that he had hurried, in fact had scuttled past her furtively, and her voice rang through the closed door. Arthur Higgins had always maintained that players must be heard to the outermost limits of an acoustically bad theatre.

  “It isn’t nonsense, Tom,” she called. “You love her. You’ve always loved her. You’re going away and leave me—don’t say you’re not. You’re going away and leave me, Tom!”

  She was still talking when he turned on the shower, although her words were indistinguishable; she was still talking, and she had made him run away. His thoughts were as confused as her muffled voice until he realized that they were moving, in a familiar repetitious pattern, along the sad incline of severing human relations over which the thoughts of others must have run before the Neolithic period. He was wondering again what he had ever seen in Emily that made her charming to him and acutely desirable. He was wondering what refraction of mental light, what secret conjuring of mirrors could have made her seem once mentally and physically compatible and the ultimate answer to life’s great unsolved problem. It was shocking to realize that he had asked himself these identical questions about Laura Hopedale as well as about several other women whom, by the grace of God, he had not married. What was it that inevitably happened to him, given a certain mood and place? Was his judgment of women invariably fallacious, or had they all been different once, only to slump into a slough of change while he alone remained discriminatingly superb? There had been something that had attracted him. He must have been, even in his worst moments, observant enough and intelligent enough to have separated sensible selection from the biological urge. On the other hand, it could possibly be that there was nothing whatsoever sensible in natural selection. Nature was always marking the cards and stacking the decks and Nature may have been amused by eventual upset and disillusion. At any rate, Nature did not care as long as desire continued or could be renewed by another face, or another type of charm. Nature did not care about monogamy or marriage counsels and Nature was wary of all forms of sublimation. Nature’s business was to let the race go on until Nature capriciously wearied of the species. What about the dinosaurs, or again, what about Peking man?

  The dining room, when he came down, gave him an illusion of repetition that he welcomed, since it removed part of his thoughts from the scene upstairs. Besides, his mind was adroit in moving from scene to scene and in show business hysteria was always just around the corner. The whole dining room might have been yesterday instead of today. The misty sunlight of late May again coming through the window had the same value as yesterday, creating the effect that he had tried in vain to approximate with artificial lighting. Outside, the sunlight on the budding lilacs and on the soft, timid green of the justevolved elm trees gave a note of hope. In fact, there was nothing in the world as hopeful as a New England spring or as maturely melancholy as an ending New England autumn. O’Neill had felt the beat of both of these seasons, and, once felt, they created a mental climate that could never be erased.

  Walter Price was sitting at his place looking exactly as he had yesterday, except that he was wearing a fresh white shirt. Its freshness showed that he must have arranged for Alfred to get Ruth to wash and iron it for him. Say what one might about Walter, with colored people he always had a way due doubtless to his association with them on the old plantation. As he had often said, no one but a Southern gentleman really understood Negroes; and colored people, even up at Harlem, he always said, recognized a Southern gentleman. Walter was eating exactly what he had eaten yesterday, grilled kidneys, and he himself must have arranged with Alfred to obtain these, because Emily had always winced at the idea.

  “Good morning, Walter,” Tom said, and his own voice sounded like yesterday. “Are they giving you everything you want?”

  Doubtless because of the kidneys, Walter had adopted his British intonation, showing that his thoughts were with the Price branch that had crossed the channel with William of Normandy and were depicted on the Bayeux tapestry.

  “Good morning, dear old boy,” Walter said, “you’re looking very fit this morning. Fit as a fiddle, to use an American anachronism.”

  “That’s right, Walter,” he said, “to quote from a recent American ballad, fit as a fiddle and ready for love.”

  “Oh dear,” Walter said, “not at breakfast, Tommy. It’s been my observation that love usually takes a holiday at breakfast.”

  Tom was glad to be back with Walter and to be dealing with facts of friendship, more durable than love. At least they could still each accept the other and understand the other and tolerate and be amused by the other—always within limitations.

  “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “I hope Alfred remembered your gin, Walter. Next time you come, I’m going to have a bathtub rack made especially for gin bottles.”

  Then he remembered that there could not be a next time in that house, but Walter, if he recollected it also, ignored the thought.

  “Oh, no,” Walter said, “Alfred did not forget the gin, the warmth against the cold, the spirit of fortitude against misfortune. That is a thought that comes over me whenever I plunge into my cold tub and swallow from a bottle of House of Lords, not that House of Lords is absolutely necessary. You should try it yourself sometime, Tommy.”

  It occurred to Tommy that he had tried too many things, so many that his curiosity might be ebbing, so many that experience in the end was a continuous production line.

  “I’ve always heard that some of
the world’s greatest thoughts have emanated from bathtubs,” he said. “Personally, I wouldn’t know. Personally, I shower.”

  There he was again. Emily was correct; he was repeating himself, but he had always been entertained by his own humor.

  “Good morning, Alfred,” he said. “I’ll have the same breakfast, please.”

  “Good morning, sir,” Alfred said, “will you be having lunch with Mrs. Harrow and Mr. Harold?”

  “No,” he said, “send some out to me when you send Miss Mulford’s.”

  “The kidneys are delicious this morning, Alfred,” Walter said. “But speaking of thoughts of bathtubs, I had a most entertaining thought sequence this morning. For the life of me I cannot understand how it happened to leap the way it did out of the stream of memory.”

  “No one ever knows,” Tom Harrow said. “Personally I was struggling with a few thoughts myself last night.” But Walter was thinking of his own experience. He was off to the land of myths.

  “I was thinking of Jimmy Finnegan’s gym,” he said.

  In spite of the years, Tom never could tell where Walter’s inventiveness might move next.

  “Jimmy Finnegan’s gym?” Tom said. “Where was that, Walter?”

  “Oh, a noisome place west of Sixth Avenue,” Walter said, “where fighters used to train. You’ve heard of Jimmy Finnegan, ‘Sunny Jim’ Finnegan, the writers used to call him. Sunny Jim, the lightweight. He lasted ten rounds with Benny Leonard—but surely you remember Sunny Jim.”

  “No,” Tom Harrow said, “no, I don’t remember.”

  “I keep forgetting,” Walter said, “that we are not quite contemporaries. It would be a few years before your time. Sunny Jim was always one of my admirers, before I hung up my gloves.”

  “Why, Walter,” Tom Harrow said, “I didn’t know you either hung up or put on gloves.”

  “Well, well,” Walter said, “it was only detail. Ever since I began boxing in the Yale gym as undergraduate with the boxing teacher, Tex Tellegan, I always had a weakness for the sport. There’s nothing like it for keeping down the waistline.”

  Walter was watching him and did not continue with his vanished boxing career. You could never be sure how much fact Walter perceived when his mind was in the realm of myths. It was disconcerting sometimes to discover how much Walter knew in terms of plain, cold truth.

  “Tom,” Walter asked, “can we hope that dear Emily will join us looking like Brunhilde in one of her damask housecoats?”

  “Emily wasn’t feeling very well this morning,” Tom said. “I don’t think she’s coming down for breakfast.”

  “Dear Emily,” Walter said. “The news, I suppose, the news. Strange, men can take bad news and rock with the punches, as we used to say at Sunny Jim’s, but women cannot take it like men, although they can stand physical suffering much better. Even Maxine Elliott would wince at misfortune. Dear Maxine, she used to understand me, but then, with the age differential, the understanding was more maternal than otherwise. Dear Maxine—but she could not take bad news.”

  When he looked at Walter Price, he felt free from a number of cares, because the bad news that Walter had taken in his lifetime was virtually continuous and enormous in its total, but Walter had absorbed it. Walter had escaped from it. In fact, it was even possible that Walter was happy, no longer defensive, merely contemptuous in the face of new advancing failure.

  “Walter,” he said, “I don’t care about myself. What with one thing and another I’ve had to think about money, but I’ve never cared about it seriously. I’m only sorry about your five thousand, and I’m sorry about Emily. None of it is her fault, after all, and Emily’s always done the best she could.”

  He immediately disapproved of his frankness, because it occurred to him that it was almost the unkindest thing a man could say about a woman—that she had done the best she could. The appraisal was insufferably patronizing, even when sprinkled with the powdered milk of human kindness. Yet the truth remained that Emily had done the best she could and the truth remained that there had not been much more for her to do, and this was his fault because, he realized, he had never honestly wanted her to do any more. He had only wanted her beauty and her cheerfulness and occasionally her sympathy. Now, having been so frank, he felt himself impelled to move on further.

  “Perhaps, Walter,” he said, “I’ve never asked enough of any woman. Maybe I’ve never known how. I’ve always expected them to do the asking. Somehow I’ve never got around to asking back.”

  “Dear old boy,” Walter said, “that is very nicely put, but then, in my experience, women always jump the gun when it comes to asking and it’s all a man can do as a rule to get a mild request in edgewise. Which reminds me of my experience with the Contessa Maria in Florence—good form forbids my telling you her high and resounding title. Dear Maria—did I ever tell you about Maria?”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t think you ever have, Walter.”

  “Well, remind me of it sometime, old boy,” Walter said. “There’s nostalgia in that memory as well as sadness, and Maria, though from an environment quite different from Emily’s, shared many of Emily’s drives. But never mind it now.”

  He could not understand why Walter had stopped about the Contessa; it was unlike Walter to stop. It made one confused and it put one off, but in the pause that followed that lack of reminiscence, he found himself discovering that there was something he wanted very much to learn from Walter Price.

  “Walter,” he said, “am I right in my idea that Emily has changed considerably since I met her at Arthur Higgins’s? I’m trying to think what she was like, and it’s damned funny, I can’t exactly remember.”

  “Dear old boy,” Walter said, “I see your point. It is much like myself and the Contessa, our first chance meeting on the Ponte Vecchio. I can only remember the charm of it, and I do know she was very different later. For example, when she tried to stab me after tea at Doney’s.”

  “Good God, Walter,” he said, “why did she try to stab you after tea? What did you do at Doney’s?”

  “Dear old boy,” Walter said, “you know as well as I that one never does anything at Doney’s, but I’ll tell you some other time. We were talking about Emily and not about dear, dead days in Florence. You may remember that I was there when you met. I was aware, if I may say so, of the mutual attraction, as was dear old Arthur. Dear Arthur, I can recall his happy relief and I can recall what he said after you had taken Emily out to the opening at the Lyceum. ‘Walter,’ he said, ‘I do believe that Tommy might look out for Emily.’ And do you know what I said to dear old Arthur?”

  “No,” he answered, “what did you say, Walter?”

  “I said, ‘Be careful, Arthur, not to throw them too obviously together.’”

  “Oh,” he said, “you did, did you?”

  “Of course I did not use those words, old boy,” Walter said, “but I was sympathetic with Arthur’s anxiety and his answer was typically Arthur. ‘Tommy needs some woman to look after him.’”

  He was sure that Walter was finally dealing with accuracy. It sounded like Arthur Higgins. Tom could perceive his own inadequacy now that it was, as usual, too late, but Walter was continuing.

  “Dear Emily, there were so many others who wanted to look after her.”

  He could remember all the others. There were Henry J. Alvin, in the wholesale jewelry business; and Bassett Tomkins, from Toledo; and Merton Hewes, another director from Hollywood; and Coburn Croll, the new curator of an American Wing being added to a museum in Des Moines or Wichita or somewhere. They had all wanted to look after Emily, and he had won the wanting contest. It was unfortunate for Emily. Those others may have lacked charm and glamour, but they would have been far better. He knew what women wanted—Rhoda had told him. And he had let Emily down.

  “Walter,” he said, “may I ask you a question? It’s going to put you on a spot, but I’d like to know. Do you think I’m slipping?”

  He saw Walter’s eyes widen. He was
watching, fascinated, because it did not matter whether Walter told the truth or not. Walter could not hide the truth, no matter what he said.

  “Slipping?” Walter asked. “Slipping in what way?”

  It gave him a sickening sensation when Walter hesitated. He could tell himself that Walter’s opinion was nothing, but at the same time he knew this was not true.

  “Professionally,” he said. “Go ahead and tell me—am I slipping, Walter?”

  Walter would not tell him in so many words, but the answer would be there.

  “Tommy,” Walter said, “I don’t see what’s worrying you.”

  “Go ahead,” he answered, “and tell me, Walter.”

  “Why, Tommy,” Walter said, “you’re the best in the field. I don’t have to tell you that. It’s the consensus of opinion. You have maturity, Tommy. I wouldn’t worry—you’re better than you were.”

  It was pathetic, the relief he felt, and Walter was still speaking.

  “I see now,” he said. “You heard Emily yesterday talking here at breakfast. I remember the door was open.”

  He nodded and there was no reason to apologize.

  “Tommy,” Walter said, “it’s only dear Emily. Dear Emily, she was only seeking for security.”

  “Jesus,” he said, “let’s not use that word again. I’ve got to go out. I’ve got to call up New York, Walter.”

  “Tommy,” Walter said, “a stay with you has always been a delightful interlude. I can’t remember whether or not I mentioned last evening that I’m going north to Ogunquit this morning.”

  “Why, no,” Tom said, “I can’t remember your saying it. I’ll miss you, and I’m glad you’ve been here at just this time.”

  “Dear old Tommy,” Walter said, “telephone New York. I’ll wait to say good-by to Hal. If I can get that play in summer production at Ogunquit, there will be no trouble finding capital. I’ll wait and say good-by to Emily. I suppose she’ll be down before long.”

  “Oh yes,” he said, “Emily will be down. Forgive me for leaving, Walter.”

  Old friends were the best friends was the way the saying went, but none of those sayings was invariably correct. He felt regret and also pleasure that Walter Price was leaving. Old friends knew too much and one knew too much about old friends. One could read between the lines too often and too far. One could detect too easily pity and compassion. Walter had underlined nothing, but Walter’s knowledge of that first meeting at Arthur Higgins’s apartment was too accurate to require explanation. Walter had been an open book all the while he had been speaking. Walter had as good as said that Emily should have married someone else. Walter had as good as said that he had always disapproved and now it was too late. There was only one consolation; it had been too late from the beginning and now it was time to call New York.