Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  “I’m still here. Listen, the reason I called was to tell you not to talk to any reporters who come snooping around asking questions about me. You can pass those instructions on to your friend Leona too.”

  She could lie to him about Mr. Winslow’s visit. But Harold would probably find out about it anyway, sooner or later. So she says, “I see.” And then, “Harold, what’s going on? What are you up to?”

  “Is that any of your damned business?”

  “No,” she says. “I merely asked.”

  “But from that very transparent question I gather that you’ve already talked to someone. Christ! What a stupid woman you are, Edith.”

  She says nothing.

  “Spill it,” he says. “Who did you talk to? What did you say?”

  “A man came,” she says wearily. “We talked about the old days. About Papa.”

  “What did you tell him about the old man?”

  “I showed him the Sargent. I told him the tennis story.”

  “Christ! How do you think that will look in print? Did he ask you anything about me?”

  “Yes, and I told him I didn’t know anything about anything.”

  “Well, that was the truth, wasn’t it! What else?”

  “Harold—what’s wrong? Please tell me what it is.”

  “Shut up, nothing’s wrong. But you know—or at least I thought you knew—that it was the old man’s policy never to talk to the press. Now listen here, Edith. If this guy comes around to you again—or if anybody else comes around—you are not to see anybody. Do you understand that? Just stick to your charity work, and I’ll take care of things here, and everything will be all right.” There is another pause, and she hears him laughing softly. “After all, sister mine, I should think that you, of all people, would be aware of the—ah—unfortunate effects of personal publicity. Am I right, sister mine?”

  Edith hangs up the receiver. She stands there by the telephone, momentarily without a sense of direction. She cannot remember where she was before the telephone call, or where she is headed next. All she knows is that, quite obviously, she has made another mistake. Then she remembers dinner, and returns to the dining room.

  An interruption such as this deflects Nellie from her routine also. Like everyone else, servants function best when they can follow patterns. Nellie has served Edith’s dessert, a mousse au chocolat, but in Edith’s absence from the table it has become unjellified. But Edith has no appetite for the dessert now anyway. She rings for Nellie. “You may clear,” she says. In the distance, the telephone rings again. “Don’t answer that, Nellie,” she says. “Let it ring.”

  “Are you really a countess?”

  Leona laughs. He has brought her another drink from the bar and, in his blunt, abrupt way, this man is beginning to amuse her. Though heavily built and stubby-fingered, he is not bad-looking. It is a face that seems to have many little muscles working in it, and he has an odd way of wrinkling his nose when he asks a question. “Nearly everybody who marries a Spaniard is a countess these days,” she says. “Just plain señoras are hard to find. Yes, my ex-husband is a count—or so he says.”

  “I guess Europe is full of phony counts.”

  “You’re terribly right.” She sips her ice-cold cocktail. It is not a bad antidote, a cocktail, to despair and confusion; not the best antidote, perhaps, but not the worst either.

  “So you and I have a lot in common, Countess.”

  She smiles at him. “How is that? What makes you think so?”

  “We’ve both, as the saying goes, shaken our spouses.”

  “Oh,” she says. “Well, yes.”

  “Have you been divorced from the Count long?”

  “Four months.” She can play this game as well as he. “And you?”

  “Two years,” he says. “It was one of those things. She was a mercenary bitch. She really socked me for alimony, too. Do you know how much it costs to keep her in the style to which I got her accustomed? A thousand dollars a week. She said ‘I’ll never get married again just so you’ll be paying me this for the rest of your life.’”

  “Well! Were there children?”

  “No kids. Too busy for kids. I was making money in the oil business, and I was afraid kids would tie me down. Sometimes I wish I had had kids, though. You have kids?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Never wanted any?”

  “I’m not sure,” she says. “I think I did.”

  “What do you mean you think you did?”

  She runs a finger around the rim of her glass, hesitating. They seem to have gotten on awfully intimate terms in a very short space of time. “Well, it was Gordon, my second husband, who wanted children more than anybody,” she says. “And it was when I was married to him that I came closest to considering it seriously. But—I guess I was scared. I’d been divorced already you see, once—and perhaps I was afraid it would happen again. And it did. And that’s an honest answer, Mr. Purdy.”

  “Say, you’ve been divorced and divorced, haven’t you?”

  She holds up three fingers.

  “No kidding? Not bad for a little girl.”

  “It’s funny. As a child, I was never accident-prone.” She smiles at him briefly over her glass. “It’s not much of a solution. Marriage.”

  He aims his finger at her, an imaginary gun. “You’re right,” he says. “You never wanted kids with the first guy?”

  “Oh, Jimmy was—we were both so young. That’s a familiar excuse, I know, but it’s true. Jimmy was just a nice, screwy kid from Princeton, and we ran off together. He came up to me at a dance, and cut in on the boy I was with, and said, ‘I’ve been watching you. I’m going to run away with you tonight and marry you.’ ‘Oh, are you?’ I said. ‘What confidence!’ And we had a drink at the bar, and twelve hours later we were man and wife.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Just like that … and for weeks we ran all over the United States in his little car. We had this crazy idea that we were being followed, that the police were after us, or our families, or the FBI, and that there was a nation-wide search for us, and that if they ever caught us, we might be arrested because we were under age. We went from motel to motel, using false names—it was mad. But the awful thing was that we found out later than nobody was looking for us at all. Nobody cared where we were except a few newspaper reporters.”

  He nods.

  “Still, there was an almost-baby of Jimmy’s and mine once—not much of a one, but a little almost-baby, in a hospital—who never—”

  “Miscarriage?”

  She nods, blinks, and takes another swallow of her drink. “Nobody knows this, not even Jimmy. It was after the divorce. Why am I telling all this to you?”

  “Maybe,” he says smiling, “because I’m such an honest, decent fellow.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did you ever take alimony from any of your husbands?”

  “No. I never wanted anything from them.”

  “Well, in my book, for that you deserve the Nobel Prize.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Did you ever love any of them?”

  “Hey, no fair!” she says. “Did you love your wife?”

  “Sorry,” he says. “It was a no-fair question.”

  They are silent for a moment as the noise of the cocktail party rises around them.

  “Pearls on sunburned skin,” he says. “I love the way pearls look on a woman’s sunburned skin.”

  She touches the pearls.

  “You have wonderful eyes.”

  Her smile is noncommittal. Back in her boarding-school days, this man would have been known as a fast worker.

  “Say,” he says, “what do you say we duck out of this party and get some dinner? Okay?”

  She hesitates. There is, she supposes, no reason why not.

  “Let’s go to the Club Contant, have a couple more drinks, then dinner.”

  “Well, all right,” she says.

  As they cross the terra
ce together, his hand moves as though to circle her waist but, with a slight movement of her body, she avoids him.

  “Where are you staying?” he asks her.

  “At my grandmother’s. She lives here.”

  “With your grandmother? Doesn’t that cramp your style a little?”

  “Not really.”

  Going down the walk to his car, he says, “You know, when I first met you there on the beach with Ed Winslow—I couldn’t figure it. You and Winslow. He doesn’t seem your type.”

  “Eddie is—a very dear friend.”

  “When you shook hands, I didn’t think you liked me. But now I think maybe you do like me. I think maybe we can be buddies, don’t you?”

  “Well,” she says, “why not?”

  Holding the car door open for her, he says, “Hi, buddy.”

  Leona slides into the front seat. Smiling at him, she says, “Hi.”

  Beside her in the dark car he says, “One more question. Were your folks divorced too, by any chance?”

  “Why, yes. What made you ask that?”

  “Just psychic. Mine were too. Did it make a difference with you?”

  “Of course it did.”

  “At least after the divorce the fighting stopped,” he says.

  Leona nods. “I was very little when Mother and Daddy got theirs,” she says. “That was when they began sending me here, to Granny’s—to get a little sunshine, they told me, but I knew better. I was only five or six. I loved those trips on the plane, though, and coming to see Granny. But one day when I was here, my great-grandmother came to call—Granny’s mother. She was a terribly funny-looking old woman, all painted up like a doll. She must have been eighty and she had a terrible stammer. She used to scare me to death, the way she talked. I overheard her talking to Granny once, saying ‘Edith, you know that Diana’—Diana’s my mother—‘is just mooching on you, parking Leona here all the time. She’s turning Leona into a regular little moocher. You should not allow it, Edith.’ Granny didn’t say anything, so I assumed that she agreed, and that that was what I was—a little moocher. I used to go around thinking that I was a little moocher. It was a long time before I knew what a moocher was, but I used to think of it as a funny little hairy animal, with a snout—”

  She laughs, but this story seems to make him remote from her. He looks straight ahead for a moment, and then shrugs. “Well, I guess we all have experiences like that when we’re kids, buddy,” he says. He starts the car.

  After Charles Blakewell left to go to the war, Edith’s father called one of those little family meetings he called in any crisis. They had assembled—Edith, Harold, Arthur, and her mother and father—in his big study in the old house at Sans Souci. Edith was twenty-nine then, Harold was seventeen, and Arthur was sixteen. But they gathered as they always did—like solemn-faced children to listen to what Meredith Harper had to say. “Now that Edith’s husband has departed,” he began. Edith remembers looking around the room at the others. Harold was smoking a French cigarette, and he gave her a sly look out of the corner of his eye, then raised his pale eyes heavenward. Sad-looking Arthur gazed at the toes of his shoes. Edith’s mother twisted the rings on her fingers.

  “Now that Edith’s husband has departed, and she is alone with her small child, I shall expect you boys to be of whatever assistance you can to your sister,” he said. “Though she is older, she is a woman.”

  The boys nodded.

  “We have heard that there have been some unpleasant stories circulating about your sister,” he said. “I shall not mention them again. During the time Mr. Blakewell is—absent—I suspect the gossips will find increased opportunities to exercise their malicious tongues. I expect all of you to do absolutely nothing about this—neither to repeat the stories to anyone else nor to deny them if you hear them. In other words, ignore them. People like ourselves, who enjoy a position of respect and power in a community, are the natural targets of rumor. We are objects of envy, and envy breeds malice. We cannot allow ourselves to suffer from this fact. We cannot even allow ourselves to care about it. We must conduct ourselves in such a way that no one can accuse us of caring. This way, rumors about us will collapse of their own weight. We are above rumor. It doesn’t exist for us. Do you understand?”

  The others nodded again. Edith sat very still and closed her eyes.

  “Edith,” he said, “you are independent now. You might take a little trip. There are plenty of places you could go, war or no war. The Morristown house is staffed and furnished. You could go there, or—”

  “I want to stay here.”

  “It seems an odd choice,” he said.

  “I have my house here.”

  “I can’t force you to go anywhere, of course.”

  “I’m going to stay here, Papa. Till Charles comes back.” Of course she did not expect him to come back. And he had not come back.

  Remembering this scene now, which Harold’s call has brought to mind, Edith sits at her large desk in her quiet house, searching through the drawers and cubbyholes trying to find her will. It is exasperating and thoroughly incomprehensible how—in a desk where everything, for years, has been so perfectly organized that the things she wanted were always at her fingertips—this one document should have now decided to vanish, and somehow this too seems Harold’s fault. She knows exactly what it looks like—a thick, many-paged affair, paper-clipped with a great many little notes and memoranda to herself, and notes attached to other notes with common pins: reminders of the disposition of certain pieces of jewelry, a ring to this one and a necklace to that, and special bequests to certain servants whom she had overlooked when the will was drawn. She has been working on it lately, going over it in careful detail before taking up the small additional matters with her lawyer and having codicils added.

  The will is also liberally sprinkled with Harold Harper’s name; it appears in paragraph after paragraph, like a small, ugly worm. It is essential that it be there, Mr. Morris, her lawyer, told her; though Harold is not a beneficiary, he is her trustee. Well, Edith has at last decided that his name shall not be there. If she should predecease her brother, which is a possibility, she is not going to have Harold taking charge of Leona the way he has been in charge of Edith all her life—certainly not after his remark this evening that everyone had given up on Leona. No, she will insist upon it: Harold’s name must be removed, deleted, expunged.

  Now the will unearths itself from under a pile of letters (What was it doing there?) and Edith unfolds it carefully and reads:

  THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

  Of Edith Bruce Harper Blakewell, resident of the City of Charlotte Amalie, of Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands (Territory of the United States of America) having as a place of business Number One William Street, New York City, New York, c/o Harold Bruce Harper, made and published this twelfth day of August, in the year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Fifty-Seven. In the Name of God, Amen. I, Edith Bruce Harper Blakewell.…

  The position of Harold’s name, between her name and God’s, strikes her tonight as sinister. She is tempted, in fact, to take a pen and cross him out here and now. “Just stick to your charity work,” she can hear him saying, “and everything will be all right.”

  But one does not say “everything will be all right” unless there is a distinct possibility that everything will be all wrong. The house around her, as she considers this, grows even quieter. “Very well, Harold,” she says in a soft voice, “what is going on? Your business is my business too, young man.”

  She refolds the will carefully and places it in its proper spot in her desk. Then she picks up her pen and a sheet of her stationery and quickly writes:

  Leona—

  If it’s not too late when you come in, will you please knock on my door and wake me? I must talk to you!

  E.B.H.B.

  She folds the note and goes upstairs, and places the note on Leona’s pillow where she will be sure to see it.

  Three

  At nine
o’clock, Nellie brings Edith her glass of hot milk. Edith picks up her book, sipping the milk, and tries to read, but after reading a dozen pages realizes that she has no idea what any of it is about, and puts the book down. She is listening for Leona to come in, and her head is a jumble of thoughts. She is remembering what Alan Osborn said, that being a Harper meant something, and she is thinking of all the things that being a Harper means, and through it all she cannot seem to rid herself of Harold’s voice, recalling all the old unpleasantnesses of years ago, all the old stories.

  There was Diana’s wedding, a winter wedding in 1934, at St. James’s in New York. It was supposed to be the wedding of the year, or so someone said. They came out of the church into Madison Avenue, and the street was crowded with people, and there were newspaper photographers with exploding flashbulbs. Diana was smiling. Edith looked blank at the cameras. Then she smiled. A woman broke through the police cordon and spat at Diana. Diana went on smiling. That evening the headlines said BRIDE AT $100,000 WEDDING LAUGHS AT HARD TIMES, and the story continued:

  “Let them eat cake—wedding cake,” seemed to be the motto of beautiful Diana Harper Blakewell at her marriage today to society playboy John Hamilton (“Jack”) Ware. While hundreds of guests waited to greet the happy couple in a glittering receiving line, hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country waited in bread lines. The bride, a granddaughter of the late Meredith D. Harper, West Indian sugar baron, is the daughter of Mrs. Charles M. Blakewell and the late Mr. Blakewell. The groom is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Lucius G. Ware of New York, Fairfield, and Palm Beach. The bride’s mother, who has maintained homes in Morristown, N.J., and Paris, currently resides in St. Thomas, V.I.