Women and Thomas Harrow

by John P. Marquand

  For purely dramatic reasons he had made many of his stage characters do the right thing, customarily in the third act, and the reason for this was obvious. When the right thing was achieved, it was time to drop the curtain because not much else could happen in the face of this accomplished fact.

  Yet in the ending of a play he had seldom approved of a definite conclusion, but had preferred to leave the impression with his audience that only an episode was over when the curtain fell, and that the characters who had solved their problems by doing the right thing or the wrong thing would continue existing behind the curtain, still busy about their lives. That was approved technique in play-writing, but now it was not consoling. True, he himself was moving on after having done the right thing. The car was running perfectly, and he had always enjoyed driving an expensive motor car. But was all this haste or the journey itself worthwhile? After all, where would the car take him? Only into a highly foreseeable future in which there was nothing that he did not already know. There was nothing new in Emily, and nothing startling in the play that he had finished. It was competent and up to standard, but was there more? Doubtless he could write other plays and would be obliged to do so, but there would be no surprise about them except the possibility of a failure. The truth was that the time had nearly run from its inverted glass. There it was, and there it wasn’t. It was again like that persistent question of the shell-game operator at a half-forgotten county fair. Where was the little joker now?

  He was on the main north-south highway, and the traffic was light so that he could step on the gas and move at sixty miles an hour back to everything that was waiting, but still he could not avoid the fact that there was nothing in front of him that mattered. He had in reality been traveling rapidly all his life over a shoddy road, decorated as meretriciously as the north-south highway, with its plastic refreshment booths and overnight motels … places of temporary respite for temporary indulgence, but no more. Still, once there had been something more, and once again, where was the little joker now? He had lost the little joker somewhere along the way.

  He was back in the First Congregationalist Church again and Mr. Naughton, that vanished minister, was saying, “God bless you, Thomas.” Those were days when he had everything without knowing it, youth, and Rhoda, and his untarnished talent. There was no reason to bolster his ego any longer now that he had done the right thing and was going home. There was no solace in being a psychopathic liar like Walter Price. He could face the truth without a tremor, now that he was going home. He was a mediocre playwright who was occasionally a good one, and he had failed in his human relationships besides. He had failed in ordinary consistency, and the worst of it was that the show was dragging on into a shocking anticlimax, with no way of ending it, no way of cutting short the script. At least he was sure there was no way until he found himself availing himself of one about ten miles down on the north-south highway where the road curved adequately, but still sharply, on a cliff that overlooked the sea.

  He could tell himself that his action was not conscious. In fact, he was very sure of this, but when he faced what was happening nothing had been sheer accident. Granted that the car was at a high speed, it had the weight and balance to hold it on such a curve. It was his own impulse at the wheel that jerked it across the road toward the highway fence above the granite cliff by the sea. When he was aware of this, he was deeply shocked because he knew that he had deliberately intended it. In the instants that were left, there was time to recollect that there was always a pressure of self-destruction somewhere in any background. He saw the deep blue of the sea colored by the setting sun, and concrete posts with the cables between them; and obviously a heavy car like his could knock the structure down. He could see that he was facing an ending as surely as Ethan Frome had faced his on a wintry hill, and that the time was too short for successful counter-measures; but he had the sense not to step too hard on the power brakes or to turn the wheel too abruptly. Above all, it became clear in his mind that he did not want to die.

  He could see and think so clearly that everything progressed in slow motion. The car was slowing down and its angle of impact had changed. He saw the left fender strike a post. He saw the fender crumple and heard the breaking of glass of a headlight. The impact threw him against the wheel, but the car was stopped. It had not broken through and still was on the road.

  His being thrown against the wheel had knocked his wind out so that he found he was fighting to regain his breath and also against a wave of nausea. His hands shook as he put the car in reverse, and it moved back easily. The door was not jammed but his hands and knees still shook when he stepped out upon the road, and he was still fighting for his breath. When he moved to the front of the car, he saw that the fender was badly crumpled, but still free of the tire, and the radiator was not leaking. After all, it did pay perhaps to drive a high-priced car. He did not like to estimate what the repairs would cost, but the car could take him home.

  The road had been clear, since it was the hour when the average motorist drew off to eat the home-cooked meals offered at the roadside, but nothing was empty for long on such a route. There was no reason for him to have been startled by the sound of a motorcycle behind him. It was a state trooper, of course, and all sorts of signs had told him that the road was carefully patrolled. The motorcycle came to a coughing stop behind the car and the trooper swung off it in a coordinated, single motion. The appearance of the trooper had made him feel for the first time that he might have died without knowing it. The sunset, the sea, the roadside and the officer were all reminiscent of any of those tales or plays of death in which our hero does not know he has passed on until unlikely details dawn upon his consciousness. The trooper just then might readily have been a representative of the Power Above All Things, like the man with the account book in Liliom or the pilot in Outward Bound.

  The trooper gave a worldly and unworldly illusion in the sunset because state troopers had always appeared to him like the chorus of a Viennese operetta. The man was dressed in light blue, a tightly buttoned tunic in the tradition of the Canadian Mounties. In the same tradition, he wore a ten-gallon hat whose stiff brim would protect him from sun and rain. He also wore flaring riding breeches with dark blue stripes and shiny black puttees, although it was doubtful whether he or anybody else in his barracks had ever been on horseback. Then there was his belt, with his efficient holster to round out the tableau. It was possible indeed to hold the thought that this lithe young man moving toward him briskly might have been an emissary of God, and the homeliness of his first question would have delighted Mr. Molnár.

  “Just what do you think you’re doing, Mac?” the trooper asked.

  Tom Harrow had conversed with state troopers before, and it was an error to think that they all looked and thought alike, for once scrupulously observed, they became individuals. The man before him was in his middle thirties, with service in the last war stamped on him, conceivably military police. His face was sunburned. Though very closely shaven, his chin and jaw had a dark look and his eyebrows and hair were coal-black. “Black Irish” was probably the word for him, but second or third generation, judging from his speech. There was nothing in common between them except the crumpled car and the line of duty, until the officer had asked his question. He asked what he had been doing, and now it was time to answer.

  “I’m not exactly sure what I was doing, officer,” he said. “I’m still sorting it out in my mind.”

  It was probably necessary to maintain the dignity of the law by being arrogantly slow. The trooper walked to the fender and tapped it with his forefinger.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I was betting you’d break through. You got horseshoes in both pockets, Mac.”

  The shaking had gone from his hands, and except for a taste of bile in his mouth, his impulse to be sick was over, and it was the second time the officer had called him Mac.

  “Trooper,” he said, “from now on you call me ‘mister,’ or if you don’t like tha
t, call me ‘sir.’”

  He knew exactly the military way to say it, and the presence of the high bracket car was a help.

  “I guess you’ve been an army officer,” the trooper said.

  “I was,” he said, “not that the fact is germane, trooper.”

  He was talking in as dated a manner as someone out of the works of Richard Harding Davis. He had not intended to be patronizing, nor would he have been if he had not still been shaken; but the trooper’s manner changed, and now he was curious rather than personal. Someone had said once that all cops were nice when you got to know them. He doubted it, and he had no desire to know the trooper, but the atmosphere was different.

  “Didn’t you see me in your rear-view mirror?” the trooper asked. “I’d been following you for the last five miles. You were over the speed limit, mister.”

  Tom was feeling better, but he still felt a sense of unreality. He had almost gone to some other place.

  “I wasn’t looking,” he said. “I was thinking about other problems.”

  “Drivers shouldn’t have problems,” the trooper said.

  The trooper unbuttoned his breast pocket, not the one with the whistle, and took out his book and pencil.

  “Well,” Tom Harrow said, and the sight of the book relieved him, “now it looks as though we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Mister,” the trooper said, “you were over the limit but you were driving good. What made you swerve over? Did you fall asleep?”

  A truck passed them going north, oversized and overloaded, and its noise broke his thoughts.

  “Perhaps I’d better move the car over into the right lane,” Tom said.

  “Never mind it now,” the trooper said. “I asked: did you fall asleep, mister?”

  “No, no, I wasn’t asleep,” Tom Harrow said. “I told you, my attention was off the road.”

  The trooper took a step nearer.

  “How many drinks have you had, mister?”

  Tom found himself wishing he had the money now that had gone for liquor bills. But, as it was, the officer would find nothing on his breath. If necessary he could walk a mile on a straight chalk line.

  “That’s a frank question; it deserves a frank answer,” he said. “I was calling on someone and, yes, she did offer me a drink.”

  He felt his face redden because there was no reason for Rhoda or her memory to have entered the conversation, but now she was there, part of the sunset, part of the cold air that came off the ocean.

  “To be more accurate,” he said, “a lady offered me a drink of her husband’s liquor. First some whiskey—Scotch—and it was so smoky that I couldn’t get it down. Self-consciously smoky is what I mean. Then I asked her, how about some gin? And I couldn’t take the gin either. It was too discriminating, intended solely for gentlemen of distinction, son; and, as it happened, I didn’t feel I had any distinction at the time. No, I haven’t been drinking lately, except for two swallows, son.”

  The eyes of the trooper were still on him, like eyes of justice.

  “You don’t look like you’d turn down smoky liquor,” the trooper said.

  Then Tom Harrow found that he was growing impatient.

  “Suppose we leave my looks right here, officer,” he said. “You can arrest me for speeding, or reckless driving—and here’s my license—but suppose you do something. It’s getting late.”

  The trooper made a notation in his book, but he was not writing a ticket.

  “Oh,” he said, “so you live right down the line?”

  “Yes,” Tom Harrow answered. “At least at the present time.”

  “Are you feeling all right, mister?” the trooper asked. “Not hurt or nervy or anything?”

  “I’m feeling all right,” Tom Harrow said. “In fact, I’m feeling fine.”

  “You wouldn’t feel better if I was to drive you?”

  “Why, no,” he answered. “No, thanks. But it’s kind of you to suggest it.”

  “You wouldn’t like me to follow behind and see no one picks you up with that broken fender and only one good light?”

  The trooper was letting Tom off and he appreciated it. He realized only later that his answer was, in its way, an answer to almost everything.

  “Why, thanks,” Tom said, “I can drive back alone all right.”

  In the end, no matter how many were in the car, you always drove alone.

  About the Author

  John P. Marquand (1893–1960) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, proclaimed “the most successful novelist in the United States” by Life magazine in 1944. A descendant of governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, shipping magnates Daniel Marquand and Samuel Curzon, and famed nineteenth-century writer Margaret Fuller, Marquand always had one foot inside the blue-blooded New England establishment, the focus of his social satire. But he grew up on the outside, sent to live with maiden aunts in Newburyport, Massachusetts, the setting of many of his novels, after his father lost the once-considerable family fortune in the crash of 1907. From this dual perspective, Marquand crafted stories and novels that were applauded for their keen observation of cultural detail and social mores.

  By the 1930s, Marquand was a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, where he debuted the character of Mr. Moto, a Japanese secret agent. No Hero, the first in a series of bestselling spy novels featuring Mr. Moto, was published in 1935. Three years later, Marquand won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Late George Apley, a subtle lampoon of Boston’s upper classes. The novels that followed, including H. M. Pulham, Esquire (1941), So Little Time (1943), B.F.’s Daughter (1946), Point of No Return (1949), Melvin Goodwin, USA (1952), Sincerely, Willis Wayde (1955), and Women and Thomas Harrow (1959), cemented his reputation as the preeminent chronicler of contemporary New England society and one of America’s finest writers.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1958 by John P. Marquand

  Cover design by Andy Ross

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-1574-5

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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