For the reception, reliably reported to have cost in the neighborhood of $100,000, the Morristown Club was transformed into a replica of the Petit Trianon. The only thing that could have dampened the poor little rich girl’s spirits today was the fact that the sun did not shine. Wedding guests included.…
No, Edith remembers, the sun did not shine; it snowed buckets.
There are many snowy scenes, some happy, some not. She remembers best the snows of Staten Island, where she was born, and where she spent the first eight years of her life. She remembers the sundial in the yard outside her window, and watching it rise, like a cake, in a fresh snowfall. Meredith Harper was in the wholesale hardware business in Staten Island before he made his money in these more prosperous islands. In her bedroom Edith Blakewell keeps a picture (only a reproduction, not the original) called Tracks in Winter, by Francis Speight. It is not a pretty picture, but Edith is fond of it. It shows railroad tracks running parallel, and footprints in the snow that have shuffled across the tracks toward a gaunt looking house. A great deal of ugly smoke rises from a pair of smokestacks on the horizon. No people are in the picture. Though there is no resemblance, when she looks into it Edith can see Tottenville when she was a girl, before everything that there is now came to be. Leona thinks little of the picture. “It looks like bad nineteen-thirties realism,” she said. “It’s dull and old hat, Granny.”
Leona seems to prefer the moderns, the spatter people. Edith told her that this was a famous painting and that the original hangs in an excellent New York collection, but Leona was unimpressed.
“It’s Depression art,” she said to Edith. “And what in the world do you know about the Depression, Granny? You came sailing through.”
“Sailing. But with my jib backed to windward.” But it was not the Depression Edith was talking about. Pointing to the picture again, she said, “Your background, Leona.”
“Then you should be proud that great-grandfather Harper made enough to take us away from that sort of place.”
“It was sheer luck. Seventy years ago my father accepted a handful of leases on a couple of unknown Danish islands in settlement of a debt. He had no idea the leases were for cane fields and rum distilleries.”
(“Darling Edith!” she remembers her mother saying to her one snowy morning, coming into her room and lifting her out of her sheets and hugging her. “Your Papa has become rich! Rich!”)
“But Granny, he had factories all over the place.”
“Eventually, yes. It’s easy to buy up factories once you’ve cornered the West Indian rum market.”
(“My husband got his start in spirits,” Dolly Harper would explain carefully, years later. “But his real interests were in bringing certain industrial techniques, which he had studied in Europe, to the United States.” There was always, to Edith’s mother, something undignified about the liquor business.)
“You always rather run him down, don’t you?” Leona said. “I should think you’d be kind of grateful for all his money.”
“Grateful?” Edith cried, despairing. “Why? Are you?”
Being a Harper was what Meredith Harper made of it. “I want you to be a princess!” he would say to her, and he would lift her by her armpits high into the air. She was still a little girl, and he was becoming an industrialist. She was his princess, and he was her king. “Touch the ceiling!” he would say. “Reach way, way up—try to touch it. Remember that to be a princess you must always be trying to touch the ceiling. If you can touch it, then the ceiling’s too low, and you must order them to build you a taller castle with higher rooms.” And, when he had built this house for Edith and her husband and had taken them to see it on the afternoon of their wedding day and handed them the key, he had said, “I had the ceilings built high. Are they high enough, Edith?” smiling at her over their old joke, his eyes shining with tears.
People often ask her for impressions of her father. “How would you sum him up—in a word?” someone will say. There are so many words, some delicate and pretty, some stained and embarrassing. “Majestic,” she often says. “He liked kings.” But another thing about him was that he wept well. His ability to cry at will must certainly have been a business asset, for tears created an instant illusion of honesty about him. Edith remembers one old friend, one of the few who had known him as a youth, describing the weeping phenomenon. “He used to deliver ice, you know, in the neighborhood before he bought the hardware business,” this woman said. “He brought it to our house three times a week, on a cart behind his bicycle. He must have been sixteen or so, and very handsome—those enormous black eyes—and terribly polite, and he worked so hard. He was so ambitious, and he was such a gentleman—we knew he’d go far, even then. But I remember one afternoon when he came to collect for the ice, and I was short of money and asked him if he could possibly wait until next week. He said yes, of course, but those great black eyes looked so sad—I thought he was going to cry. So I rushed right into the house and got the money for him—and even tipped him a little extra.”
Everyone speaks of those manners. “Your father was so polite,” Edith’s mother once said to her. “When he asked me to marry him, my parents were against it, of course. But your father was so insistent, and begged me in the sweetest way—I didn’t have the heart to turn him down.” (A few years later, however, Edith was to hear a somewhat different version of his proposal scene.)
He never mentioned parents. They were a closed subject. Where did the manners come from? Biographies of him have always given his place of birth as New York City, and perhaps, after all, he was born there. But Edith has long suspected that he was Canadian, and may have entered the United States illegally. Once, during one of their quarrels, she heard her mother say to him, “Why don’t you go back to Canada, where you came from!” And she remembers the terrible look her father gave her. She thought he was going to strike her mother. Later, after he died, they would sometimes discuss him. “Where do you suppose he came from, really?” someone would ask. “He just materialized,” someone would say—materialized, with his handsome face, his manners, and a sense of his destiny, Edith supposes.
At nine or ten Edith would spend whole afternoons in front of her mirror, mourning over her brownish-blondish no-color hair, wondering why it grew all different lengths and wouldn’t curl. She made up her mind that she was ugly, and decided that only some tragedy would make her memorable. If only half of her face should become hideously scarred—then she would have to wear a black veil over the ravaged half, and no one would mind that the half that showed was plain. This was in the days when her father was building all the houses—the house at Sans Souci, and the house in Paris, and the one in Morristown. The schedule was devised; they would divide their year between the three places. (And contrary to what that newspaper said, Edith never maintained houses anywhere but in St. Thomas; she only lived in them. Nor did Diana’s Depression wedding cost more than a quarter of the $100,000 figure “reliably reported.”) Wherever they went there was a smell of wet plaster and paint, of sawdust and new wood. Edith would decorate her ears with the curled shavings from the carpenters’ planes—a princess with pine ringlets.
At Sans Souci, the room behind his study was Meredith Harper’s office, and Edith and her father used to meet there to go over her accounts. For her twelfth birthday she had been given a bank account. Regular deposits went into it, and she was authorized to draw checks. Her father lectured her about the importance of managing money, about interest rates, and how to keep a checkbook balanced. Nothing mattered more, he said, than understanding money. There was an element of secrecy about their meetings because her mother was not supposed to know about the checking account. Dolly Harper had no such luxuries. “She wouldn’t know how to handle it if she had one,” her father said—not having been trained in the intricacies of finance at an early age.
Edith would tap on the door and be admitted to the office, and would sit there quietly while he opened his large ledgers and went over the bo
okkeeping entries of the week. He would explain how many tons of sugar had been harvested, how many had been sold, how many barrels of rum had left the distillery, and what the shipping and labor costs had been. He explained the intricacies of the Danish export tax on sugar and the various import duties of northern ports. Then he would show her comparative balances for other sugar harvests of other years. “I see no reason why a woman shouldn’t be able to run the sugar business,” he said. “The only thing you need to be is hard—hard and strong, and never listen to the complaints the natives make. Is it impossible that a woman should run this business someday?” he said looking at her intently. “Why shouldn’t it be possible?”
Then he would turn to her bank statement, matching the canceled checks with the stubs—but this was awkward because there were almost never any canceled checks. He would stare, perplexed, at the unfolded statement, poring over the non-existent entries, and then say, “Well, you’ve certainly been a thrifty princess. I suppose that’s good.”
She wanted him to love her, and she wanted him to pity her. She spent no money because she wanted him to know how little in the world there was that interested her beyond this. Oh, she had wanted to buy a cow. She had wanted a cow more than anything, but she was sure that if she told him about the cow he would laugh at her, and so she never told him, and never had a cow.
“No trinkets that have caught your eye in the shops?”
She shook her head.
“Well, perhaps when we get to Paris.…”
Once, during one of their meetings, a native houseboy came in with a letter for her father. He was a new boy in the house, which meant that he had just been elevated from work in the yard. The boys all liked housework, her father said, because the work was clean, there was less to do, there were more opportunities to steal, and there were more corners for them to fall asleep in unobserved. The boy’s gray jacket, Edith remembers, was a fusillade of proud brass buttons, and his black face gleamed with the importance of delivering a messsage to Meredith Harper. Her father clapped his hands over the open set of company books—though surely this boy was no different from any of the others and could not read or write.
“How many times have you been told to knock before coming in here?” her father demanded. The boy gaped. “Now go out and try it again.” The boy tiptoed out, and closed the door behind him. Then he knocked.
“Come in.”
The boy opened the door again.
“That was better,” her father said. “Now take off that uniform and report back to the yard.” You paid them the equivalent of three dollars a month in St. Thomas in those days, and you expected strict obedience. The greatest danger with native servants was that they would become too familiar. “They’ll learn,” her father said.
He returned to the problem of her bank statement. “Well—” he said, and Edith is certain now that he did not pity her for having nothing she wanted to spend her money on. Probably he only thought her dull. Finally he folded the statement, put it in the strongbox with the others, and locked the box. The safe was in a closet. He put the locked strongbox in the safe, then locked the safe, then locked the closet.
He would give her a sad little smile, “Well, run along now, princess,” he would say. “See what your mother’s up to.”
The house at Sans Souci was large and sprawling, and what her mother was usually up to was cleaning it. Edith remembers her hands—thin and long-fingered and strong, forever reaching out, straightening and tugging at things, at each bedspread and dresser scarf, each sofa cushion and table runner. It was the era of the Turkish corner and the era of cut glass and the era of tiny pillows gritty with beads, and her mother’s hands would fuss at, and pat, and plump up, and rearrange the multitude of beaded and embroidered and tasseled cushions of the Turkish corner. Her hands would pat and tug at Edith too, when she appeared—at hairbows, skirts, shirtwaists, hair. She had a habit of referring to Edith as a thing: “You’re an untidy thing.” “You’re a spoiled thing.” “You’re a dirty thing—run and wash.”
Cleanliness obsessed her. She followed her servants around the house, repeating their work after them. Her silver gleamed because much of it was polished twice a day—once by the girls, once by her. One day Meredith Harper found his wife down on her hands and knees, waxing the ballroom floor. “Dolly!” Edith’s father shouted. “Get up off your knees! I won’t have my wife on her knees.”
Though Dolly Harper may have understood the value of anonymity, she was rocketed into a kind of celebrity when she became a rich man’s wife. Still, she took comfort in the fact that she was a Bruce from Boston—an old New England family. “Remember,” she once said to Edith, “that for all the talk of Meredith Harper and his money, you are also a Bruce. The name Bruce is more important than the name Harper, which is why you are called Edith Bruce. When I married your father, I was considered to have married beneath me,” she said. “They were afraid he couldn’t provide.” She had trouble sleeping and, when she did sleep, she often had nightmares. Late at night, she would slip into Edith’s room and Edith would wake to find her mother lying across her with her arms around her, holding Edith so tightly that she could feel the thin bands of muscle in her long arms. They would lie like that for what seemed hours, like two spoons nested in a drawer. “What did you dream about, Mama?” Edith would ask her. The dream was always the same. “I dreamt that your Papa went away and left us all alone,” she would say.
And Edith remembers one night in the Morristown house when she was twelve. The air was chilly, but the house was new, and all her bedroom windows were opened wide to carry out the paint smell. Her head ached and she couldn’t sleep, and downstairs in the drawing room she could hear her mother and father quarreling. She got out of bed and went down the hall to the top of the stairs.
Her mother was sitting in one of the French chairs with a copy of the Delineator spread open in her lap. “There’s absolutely nothing here that I like,” she said, and snapped the book closed.
Meredith Harper walked across the room to her. “How can you sit and look at dresses when we’re discussing a thing like this?” he said.
“Meredith, please,” she said in a tired voice. “I’ve said all I can.”
He stood over her, staring down at her. It was the year Sargent painted him. Tall, straight, in his black velvet smoking jacket with braided cuffs, his eyes glittered. “You still refuse? Very well,” he said.
“Please,” she said again, her hand across her eyes. “I can’t.”
“It’s not that you can’t, is it? It’s that you won’t. But very well.”
“I can’t take the risk.”
“I take risks every day, to give you the things you’ve got. But very well, Dolly. Very well.”
“Stop saying ‘very well,’” she said. “Can’t you understand? It nearly killed me having Edith, you know that. Doctor Mallory said that I mustn’t have another—ever.”
“You listen to what some country doctor said years ago? When now you can afford to have the best medical attention in the country? But very well, Dolly. The subject is closed.”
She reached up and touched his hand. “Forgive me,” she said. “He made me promise him.”
He smiled at her then. “And what about your promises to me when we were married, Dolly?”
Her hand withdrew. “You haven’t exactly suffered in the meantime, have you, Meredith?” she said.
The room was very still for a moment. Then he said, “You’re quite right, Dolly. I haven’t suffered.”
“Have I ever criticized you for that? Haven’t I tried to understand—even when there were things that seemed to me impossible to understand?”
He turned away from her, walked across the room, and sat down in a chair, crossing his legs. “Why don’t you look through some other magazines, Dolly? You might find a dress that would amuse you.”
“Why do you want this so much?”
“I want a son.”
“We have our family! We h
ave Edith!”
“I need a son. What good is Edith? What good is a fool daughter ever going to be to me? I need a son. Or two sons. Or three.”
“Why? So you can found a dynasty?”
“I need sons to carry on.”
“And you’d risk my life to get them!”
“No,” he said carefully. “I wouldn’t. There is another solution, Dolly, to this problem. I could find, my dear—rather easily—another wife.”
She stood up and went to the small commode where the sherry decanter stood on a footed tray. She lifted the decanter, her hand trembling very lightly, and filled a glass. Then she stood holding the glass in front of her with both hands like a small chalice, shoulders hunched, head bent over the glass, taking little sips. She said something then that Edith could not hear, and apparently her father had not heard it either, for she heard him say sharply, “What?”
“A threat,” she said. “Isn’t it?” She sipped her wine.
“Not really. I’m just being honest with you, Dolly.”
She laughed, but there was an edge of fear in the laugh. “You mean a divorce? How could you? What would people say? Your position. Your reputation. Your precious name. Your pride. The scandal.”
“But Dolly, it would be your scandal—not mine. It’s you who’ve made our marriage what it is.”
“Wait,” she said. “Have you forgotten? We agreed long ago—”
“No, it would be your own private little scandal, Dolly.” And he smiled. “I’d have to see to that. And will.”
Reaching for the decanter she filled her glass again. Then she filled another glass. “Come, let’s have some wine and talk. Forgive me, my nerves are bad. Do you remember, in the old days, years ago—”
He stood up. “The subject is closed.”
“We used to say never let the sun set on a quarrel. Remember?” With a laugh that was almost gay, she stepped toward him. “I’ve been in an irritable mood, this is all my fault. Come, we’ll drink to—”
Those Harper Women Page 6