Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Lousy money?” Edith cries, shaking Leona’s arm. “Do you realize that Harold’s the trustee for my share of my father’s estate? And my custodian for practically everything else I own? I’m an old woman, Leona—I don’t intend to die in the poor-house! And do you realize that when I die everything comes to you? What’s mine is going to be yours someday. You can say to hell with Uncle Harold when I’m dead, but not before!”

  “Granny, please … stop!”

  “And what about your mother’s lousy money? And Arthur’s? And Arthur’s and Harold’s children? The business is the family, and the family is the business—that’s what my father used to say, and it’s still true, my dear young girl—”

  “Oh, stop!”

  “And you!” Edith says. “What lousy money do you live on, pray? The same lousy money that the rest of us do! And Harold’s in charge of it. Somehow I can’t see you enjoying the poorhouse, Leona!”

  “Who said anything about the poorhouse, for God’s sake, Granny?”

  “I can’t see you as a member of the working classes, either! Have you ever earned an honest nickel in your life, my dear?”

  “Oh, stop!” Leona cries, trying to pull away from Edith’s grip.

  And suddenly Leona screams, and Edith, seeing what has happened, answers Leona’s scream with a shriek of her own, for Leona’s lighted cigarette has flown from her fingers and dropped on Edith’s bed. “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Edith cries as they both lunge for the cigarette together, chasing the small smoldering cylinder that rolls like a mad live thing back and forth across the sheets. “We’re all going to go up in flames, Leona!” Edith sobs. But at last Leona reaches the cigarette, and brushes furiously at the bedclothes, wildly scattering the ashes, and then, all at once, they are in each other’s arms, locked in a violent embrace, weeping and moaning together. “Dear God, we must have wakened every servant in the house, Leona,” Edith says, patting her shoulder, and then, in a whisper, “It’s just that there mustn’t be any scandal! There must not be any stories.” Then there is silence.

  Edith’s knees, under the bedclothes, make a mountain, and Leona’s head rests heavily against this slope. “I did this,” Leona says in a choking, muffled voice into the blanket. “I got you into all this, Granny.”

  Edith strokes Leona’s dark head. “Well, so you did,” she says. “But I wouldn’t worry about it, dear. I’m sure it’s not as serious as we’re making it. Harold himself said everything would be all right.”

  “I have a knack for messing things up, don’t I?” Leona says. “It’s practically the only knack I have.”

  “There, there,” Edith says, stroking, stroking Leona’s soft hair. “We both got a little—overstimulated.”

  For several minutes there is no sound in the room except the low hum of the electric clock; its hour hand has dipped toward four. Quietly, Edith says, “You say that these are not exactly things that Mr. Winslow knows about Harold, but things he would like to find out.”

  Against her knees, Leona nods.

  “There was a man who ran a newspaper here in St. Thomas once,” Edith says. “He wanted to write a story about Papa. It was a story Papa thought would be embarrassing to him. Papa gave the man some money. The story was not printed.”

  When Leona makes no immediate reply to this, Edith says, “What are Mr. Winslow’s personal financial circumstances, do you know?”

  Leona sighs. “Ah, Granny.…”

  “I just wondered, dear,” she says, stroking Leona’s hair.

  Leona lies very still. She still holds the lighted cigarette in one hand, and, as Edith watches, a long, looping ash forms. Leona’s hand, Edith sees, still quivers slightly as though her body, even in repose like this, knew no peace. Smoke curls upward into the quiet air. Edith forces herself to watch with equanimity as the long ash falls. Then, suddenly wondering whether Leona has fallen asleep, she reaches out and very gingerly takes the cigarette from between her fingers and stubs it out in the saucer.

  Leona stirs slightly. “Thanks, Granny,” she says.

  “I thought you were asleep. Do you care for him, Leona?”

  “Care for whom?”

  “Mr. Winslow.”

  Again, there is no answer right away. Then she says, “He’s just a good friend.”

  “He cares for you, though. He as much as told me so.”

  Into the blanket, Leona says, “Yes, I know. He told me tonight he loved me.”

  “Then,” Edith says gently, stroking Leona’s hair, “you must tell him to leave us alone.”

  Leona sits up now and looks straight at Edith, her eyes wide and thoughtful. Edith smiles. “If he’s fond of you, that shouldn’t be hard to do,” she says. “He’ll do it as a simple favor.”

  “No,” Leona says. “It won’t be hard.”

  “Well, then,” Edith says.

  “No, it won’t be hard,” Leona begins slowly. “Because he loves me, and I don’t love him. I’ve never loved anybody.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “When you asked me that—did I care about him?—I suddenly thought, have I ever cared about anybody?”

  “Oh, Leona—”

  “And it’s true. I’ve never cared about anybody, Granny! Not anybody! Did you love your husband, Granny?”

  “Well of course. Very much!”

  “And anybody else? Ever?”

  Edith laughs. “Well, there were a couple of others. One or two. But—”

  “But not me. I didn’t love the men I married—I just married them. All of them. I let them make love to me, and I loved their making love to me, but I didn’t love them. Granny, why can’t I love someone?”

  “But you will, my dear,” Edith says, a trifle uneasily, turning her eyes from Leona’s intense look. “You’re young, you’re beautiful—”

  “I’m tired of being beautiful! Why do people keep saying that, as though it made everything else all right? Is that all I am—beautiful?”

  “Of course not, dear. But meanwhile—”

  “But meanwhile, why can’t I love someone? I’m afraid I never will because I’m afraid I don’t know how. Do you know what I feel like sometimes?” she asks in a distant-seeming voice. “I feel as though I were frozen. The man I was with tonight—he saw it right away: ice! I’m like a centerpiece, Granny—one of those pieces of frozen ice sculpture in the middle of a party. Only the party’s over—there’s no one there but me, frozen in the center of the room.”

  Edith says, “Sometimes I think if you’d had a child. A child, you know, can hold a marriage together. Sometimes.”

  “If I had a child, would that help me now?” Tears are hanging in her eyes again. “Oh, no. Thank God we didn’t have a child.”

  Edith considers this. “By we, whom do you mean?”

  “Jimmy and me. It doesn’t matter which, does it? But if only somebody could teach me—if only you could teach me, Granny—how to love—”

  “But my dear,” Edith says, “how can I ever teach you that?”

  Leona stares at her hands. “No,” she says at last, “I guess nobody can. I’m a mess, Granny. No, I’m not even that. I don’t know what I am.” She stands up quickly and starts across the room.

  “There’s so much I’d like to talk to you about, Leona. About your plans, and—”

  “Plans,” Leona says. “Oh, yes, I’ve got plans.”

  “But—”

  “I know. It’s late.” She opens the door. “Good night, Granny.”

  “Now wait!” Edith says. Leona’s hand on the half-opened door seems suddenly symbolic, prophetic. This is the door, yes, that Edith has been waiting for Leona to open all along; Leona has opened herself, just a crack, perhaps, to Edith and now the door is about to close again, maybe forever. “Wait,” she says urgently, holding out her hand. “Don’t go off like this, don’t leave me with this thought to dream about—that you can’t love anybody! I mean, real love is—it only happens once or twice in a lifetime, I think, and even then—�
��

  “Then no wonder the rest of the time people can’t even talk to each other. Right?” She smiles. “Good night, Granny. It is late.”

  “Look,” Edith says, half-rising. “What difference does late make? We’re both night owls, aren’t we? Why don’t you run in, put on your pajamas and robe, and come back in here. We’ll have a brandy, a nightcap, how’s that? And have a good talk right now. Would you like that?”

  Leona seems uncertain. Then she says, “All right.”

  “Good!” Edith says, suddenly excited. “Then hurry!”

  Edith gets quickly out of bed and puts on her own robe. She fetches the brandy and the glasses from the dresser and sets them out, unstoppers the brandy, fills both glasses and, still holding the decanter in one hand, gives herself a giddy sip. Love? Well, there was precious little of that wasted in this family, she thinks. So where shall she begin with love? With the Frenchman? No, she thinks, pushing her feet into her slippers, the beginning goes back farther than that, back to Mama and Papa, and Harold and Arthur, and Cyrus in the cart, back to those early days when she was a girl growing up in St. Thomas—back to before Charles, to when Edith was younger than Leona is now, but when Edith was just about the same age as Leona when she was first married. And Andreas. Would Andreas do? Perhaps. Seeing him dimly, she asks him: Will you do? Come closer, anyway—closer, where I can get a good look at you. There were so many beginnings, so many branches to reach into and pick from, in that tree of years—for love.

  Standing in the middle of her bedroom, she thinks: Diana! It’s a pity you can’t be here to listen to what I’m going to say!

  It is a moment or two before she notices that there are no sounds from the direction of Leona’s room. She goes quietly out into the hall and looks. Leona’s door is open, and the light is on, and Leona is lying, still in her dress, across the top of her bed. The end of another cigarette is burning in a little ashtray placed on the floor by the bed.

  Edith puts the cigarette out, and puts the ashtray on the table. Leona’s breathing is in the soft, gulping rhythm of heavy sleep. Leona is too heavy for Edith to lift up, and undress, and put into bed, but Edith pulls the comforter up around Leona’s shoulders and tucks it in at the sides. She is afraid to kiss her good night, afraid of disturbing her. She turns out both lamps, and goes to the door. “Good night, dear,” she whispers, and goes out the door, closing it quietly behind her.

  Six

  “Good afternoon, Miss Edith Harper. How are you today?”

  “Very well, thank you.”

  “And your daddy? He still make money?” Laughing, the old man would put his hands on the strings of his guitar and sing, “Oh, I wish I could make music like that man make his money.…” Edith would laugh and wave to him. The old man was always there, sitting in the same doorway, his battered guitar across his knees. She never knew his name.

  Edith’s mother would have been horrified to know that in the year 1907 her eighteen-year-old daughter had taken to wandering through the town, speaking to dark-skinned native men as she went. To Dolly Harper, all the St. Thomas Negroes were dirty, diseased, depraved. “Why are they dirty, Mama?” Edith remembers asking her once.

  “We don’t know they’re dirty,” her mother said. “It’s just that, with that nigger skin, we can’t tell.”

  Why did she do it, Edith wonders now? Why did she take those walks and make those curious, nameless acquaintances? Starved for company, she supposes, and yet there remains something a bit irrational about her behavior that year, like the time she had stolen all the bottles of French perfume off her mother’s dressing table and emptied one bottle after another over herself as she lay on her bed, turning the air around her into a thick, sweet syrup, and ruining the dress she wore. Why? And each day, when her mother would take her second glass of wine from the lunch table and go upstairs to her room to rest, Edith would escape the house—free until six o’clock, when it was time to tap on her mother’s door and wake her for dinner. She would go down the hill into Charlotte Amalie, walking slowly along the steep and narrow streets, past the old houses that leaned against each other like so many tipsy old friends, the afternoon sun turning their peeling stucco walls to gold, past archways and shuttered windows, little grilled balconies crowded with flowerpots, and sleeping cats on windowsills. She would try to imagine herself a part of this strange city. Naked children playing in the dusty streets would look up at her as she passed, holding out thin gray hands for coins, and, here and there, a familiar face would nod to her and say “Good afternoon, Miss Edith Harper. How are you today?”

  It was on one of these walks that she met Andreas. He was standing in the street talking to a group of young men and, as she passed, he turned and spoke to her. “You’re Edith Harper, aren’t you? Do you remember me? Andreas Larsen?”

  “Yes.”

  She remembered him from years before, from the donkey-cart rides with Cyrus and the boys. His father was a Dane, a planter. But lately, she had heard, his father had sold his fields and gone into the insurance business. Andreas had been a towheaded youth when they had waved to him from the cart but now, at twenty-two, he was tall and slender, his shock of fair hair was bleached almost white from the sun, and his face and arms were the color of brandy.

  “I often see you, walking by,” he said.

  “Yes. I take walks.”

  Smiling, he said, “May I walk with you, Miss Harper?”

  “Yes,” she said, “if you’d like.”

  By the end of that walk, foolish and romantic though it sounded to say it, she had fallen in love.

  It was strange that, in over eleven years of living—for a part of each year, at least—on an island, it should have taken someone like Andreas to introduce her to the sea. Up to then, she had always associated the sea with the livid waters of the harbor that lapped under the wharves where the coal ships loaded and the lighters sat—still, smutchy waters full of off-scourings and teredo worms—the harbor that was always her first view of St. Thomas arriving, each autumn, on the old Quebec Line steamer from New York. She knew there were beaches, but her mother had warned her that the beaches were dangerous, that the worst sort of natives were encountered there, and that heaven only knew what tropical monsters swam offshore. So she had only seen the beaches from a distance.

  She is sure Magens Bay is not the same today. She has not been there in years. She has not chosen to go there and watch boys and girls cavorting in their bikini suits, preferring to remember it when it seemed like Eden, a sloping beach that emerged from the cottonwoods, where the sand was always scattered with shells, leading down to the surprise of the water which seemed to run through every shade and variation of color, from the palest yellow to a delicate green, to sapphire, to purple. They shared Magens Bay, in those days, only now and then with a net fisherman or two, or a boat on the horizon. Otherwise, they owned it all, the water and the shore, the island of Brass Cay, far out in the Bay’s mouth, and the rocks of Picara Point. Andreas taught her how to swim there. She remembers them lying side by side on their stomachs in the sand.

  “What are you thinking about now?” Andreas asked her.

  “What I always think about when I’m here. That I shouldn’t be.”

  “Why shouldn’t you?”

  “I should be home, with Mama. It’s where Papa wants me to be.”

  “She takes naps in the afternoons.”

  “Yes. But if I told Papa that, he’d probably tell me to sit with her while she takes her nap.”

  “Why would he want you to do that?”

  “Because she’s ill, Andreas—that’s why.”

  “A person who’s ill should have a nurse.”

  “It’s hard to find a person he can trust.”

  “Ah,” he said. “He wants you to nurse her because he trusts you. And because he trusts you, you can meet me here.”

  She laughed guiltily. “Yes.”

  “What do you do with your mother when she’s awake?”

  �
�Sometimes I read to her. Or we play cards. Rubicon Piquet. Écarté. Games like that. Then we have lunch.”

  “Then she takes her nap. What’s wrong with her, anyway?”

  “It’s—nerves,” she had said.

  What was wrong with her mother was no longer any mystery to her, but it was a secret. It was never to be mentioned, never discussed, even though it had grown steadily worse since Arthur had been born. There had been more of the sudden tantrums followed by longer silences, more of the long, drugged sleeps. “It is la saison furieuse of a woman’s life!” Mademoiselle Laric, the boys’ governess, had exclaimed dramatically, rolling her eyes, and clutching her breast. And, when Edith had asked her what la saison furieuse was, Mademoiselle had explained it, and followed this explanation with an enthusiastic, and highly Gallicized, description of sex. (“At last he comes pouncing upon you, ma chere, his teeth biting into the flesh of your lips, his loins afire! With a thrust he possesses you …” and on, and on, with furious gestures of her hands—a surprisingly vivid account for a maiden lady.) Then there was the problem of the little glasses of wine which were now never very far from Dolly Harper’s reach. The wine, she said, was the only thing that could ‘relax’ her, or make her sleep. The word alcoholic was not in use in those days. There was only the uglier word drunkard, which no one had been cruel enough to use about Edith’s mother either. And so her mother’s drinking, like la saison furieuse, had become something one accepted mutely, without comment, a secret guarded closely within the family. She was ill. It was nerves.

  “Why do you ask me so many questions about my family, Andreas?” she asked him.

  “Because I know I’ll never meet them.”

  “You’ll meet them. Some day.”

  “Why not now? Why not today?”

  They had talked this way before. Perhaps someday an answer would offer itself. Meanwhile, wasn’t it enough that they loved each other? “If only there was someplace we could go,” she said. “I hate this island.”

  “Hate St. Thomas? Why?”