Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  “I miss winter! It’s been eleven years since I’ve seen snow, and besides, this island hates me. You know that, Andreas. They laugh at the Harpers. But they really hate us. Do you know that when I was walking in the town the other day, a group of little Danish children came running up to me and stood in a circle around me, and sang a song about me? ‘Edie, Edie, skinny and greedy, how does your garden grow? With your daddy’s rum and your silly old mum, and dollar bills all in a row.’”

  Andreas laughed. “Next time they sing that song to you, here’s what you should say to them.” He leaned over and whispered Danish words in her ear. “Say that, and watch their faces, Edie.”

  “What does it mean?”

  He laughed again. “I’ll tell you when you’re older!”

  “And even that old man, the old man who’s always sitting in that doorway in Christian Street with his guitar, and who sings his little song about making music the way my father makes money—he laughs, and smiles, but he hates us too. They all do.”

  His face was serious now. “This is the price of being a rich man’s daughter,” he said.

  “But your father’s rich! They don’t sing songs about him!”

  “Not as rich and powerful as your father, Edie. And besides—” He paused, scowling, pushing little wet mounds of sand together between his hands. “My father doesn’t own people,” he said. “They say slavery hasn’t existed here for sixty years, but your father has slaves. He owns people, human lives.…”

  “Who does he own?” It had been a totally new thought to her.

  “Otto Frère. His latest purchase.”

  “Papa won that plantation in a tennis match!”

  “He bought it. Cheap. Have you seen Otto Frère lately, Edie? Take a look at him. You’ll see what a man who’s sold his life looks like.”

  She was silent then. “Well, you see, that’s why they hate us,” she said.

  He reached out and took her hand. His hand was warm and rough with sand. “Do you hate this island now, Edie?” he said. “This afternoon?”

  She had smiled and told him no, she didn’t hate it that afternoon.

  He raised himself on one elbow and leaned across her. “I’ve shown you the sun, haven’t I, Edie—the sun and the sea. Look at you now.” Slowly, he drew a straight line across her forehead with his fingertip. “You’re turning my color. You’re beautiful.”

  She lay there, very still, feeling the pressure of his finger and the sun on her skin. (Once, when she was little, Leona had stared at a cracked and browning photograph and said, “Granny? Were you beautiful?” “I believe,” she had answered carefully, “that I was considered beautiful. By some.” By him. That afternoon at Magens Bay.)

  “I wouldn’t like you in the cold country,” he said. “All pale and pinched-looking, with your nose dripping.”

  “Do you like me, Andreas?”

  He bent and kissed her, his lips cracked and salty from the sea air. “I love you,” he said.

  “Perhaps—this summer, when I’m in Paris, and you’re in Copenhagen—”

  He had jumped up then and stood over her, tall and broad-shouldered, his arms folded across his chest, looking exactly like a Viking chief. “I’m not going to Copenhagen. I told my father this morning.”

  “What did he say?” She knew that his father wanted to send him to the University.

  “What would he say? He knows I make my own decisions.”

  “Are you going to stay here?”

  “This is my island, Edie,” he said. “My future is here.” He began pacing up and down, smashing his fist into his palm taking long, swift strides and kicking up arcs of sand. “What a future this place has,” he said. “Look at it—” He spread his arms. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? Can you see it, Edie? What this place will be like some day? Rich—with people coming here from all over the world to see how beautiful it is? There are fortunes to be made here, Edie.”

  “Papa says this island is good for nothing but sugar.”

  “Sugar? Your father may not know it, but sugar is in trouble here. For a hundred years they’ve planted nothing but cane, and the earth is dying. I’m not talking about sugar. I’m talking about hotels! Yes, and rich houses. These hills with nothing on them but ceibas—some day they’ll have pavilions on them, and cafés, and shops—and there’ll be sailboats in the bay. I know this, Edie, I can see it coming.”

  His blue eyes would seem to grow bluer as he spoke.

  “And irrigation. With irrigation, the canefields could yield three times what they do now. Even the sugar men know this. But nobody does anything.” He dropped on his knees beside her in the sand. “Listen,” he said. “Just for a minute stop and think what would happen if we could find some simple way to store up rainwater. Tanks under the hills perhaps.” He quickly built a hill of sand and punched a crater in its top with his finger. “Water storage.” He drew curving pathways down the side of the sandhill. “Irrigation ditches. But now—” destroying the hill with the back of his hand “—every extra drop of rainwater runs into the sea. But what if there were some way to take the salt out of the seawater? Why not? Is that so crazy? ‘No, no, it wouldn’t work,’ the planters say. ‘Take away the tax on sugar,’ they say. “Then we’ll make more money. While the sugar lasts.’ Well, we’ll see …”

  She was dazzled by all the things he saw. And remembering these words now, more than fifty years later, Edith sees that his vision, like all visions, was flawed. Yes, the ragtag and bobtail from all over the world have come, and to house them there are many inferior hotels. For pavilions and cafés there are night clubs and bars, and a few inadequate catch basins have been built to collect the spring and autumn rains. And a bit of cane still struggles up, between times, from the dry earth.

  “Listen,” he used to say, “they say that this place is dying. But it’s Denmark that’s dying—Copenhagen! The United States wants to buy these islands, but Copenhagen keeps refusing. They want to hold on, hold on—while we sit and rot.”

  “Doesn’t the King care about the islands?” she asked innocently.

  “The King?” he said in a mocking voice. “Christian the Tenth, King of the Vandals and the Goths, Duke of Slesvig, Holstein, Stornmarn, Ditmarsh, Lauenborg, and Oldenborg? That King?”

  “Is that what he’s King of?” she asked, laughing. “But it’s your own country you’re talking against, Andreas.”

  He sneered. “My country. Denmark is being run by the Germans. No, this is my country, here. And I’m not going to let it lie here and be robbed by foreign exploiters, men who suck their money out of human lives, parasites, men like—” Suddenly he broke off.

  “Men like whom, Andreas?” she had asked him quietly.

  For a moment his face was dark. Then he smiled. “Pardon my political speeches,” he said.

  “Men like my father is what you meant. You hate us too.”

  “Come on. Let’s swim.” He jumped up and pulled her up with him.

  It is morning. Nellie has just tiptoed into her bedroom and opened the curtains and the wooden shutters. The sun streams in. “Good morning, Nellie,” Edith mutters, pretending to be still half-asleep though, for the last half-hour or so she has been wide awake and thinking about Andreas.

  “Let Miss Leona sleep late, Nellie,” she says. “She’s tired.”

  “Yes, Miss Edith.”

  Nellie tiptoes out again. Edith thinks about that swim that afternoon fifty—oh, Lord, nearer sixty—years ago. She remembers that they undressed, as they always had, in the manner of European bathers, with their backs to each other. He walked to the water first, and then she had slowly turned her head to look at him. He never knew. It was the first time she had seen him, or any other man, naked, and she remembers being stunned by the sudden taut beauty of him. As the first wave spooned about his ankles, the muscles of his calves quivered and his buttocks tightened. He hesitated, then waded deeper, the waves rising like cuffs around his brown legs. He took two quick ste
ps, then dove, his body splitting a wave as it broke. She saw him next only as a stained blond head above the water, still with his back to her, and an arm raised, beckoning her in after him. She ran into the water and swam after him.

  “I’ll race you to Brass Cay!” he said when she reached him.

  “All right,” she had said, laughing, sure that he was joking, since Brass Cay was more than four miles out. They began swimming outward, Edith using the easy natural stroke that he had been teaching her, Andreas swimming beside her.

  “Faster!” he shouted. “Faster!”

  She swam faster, but he was outdistancing her. “Come on!” he heard him call her. “We haven’t got all day.”

  Then she could no longer see him, and she called—“Andreas?”

  She stopped swimming, treading water, trying to find his head in the waves. “Andreas?”

  She had no idea how far out she was. The beach had vanished behind the heavy swells, and the shoreline was only a dark smudge of hills that appeared to be miles way and then sank entirely behind a wave, and reappeared in a different place as she turned in the water, trying to rest, treading water. Her arms and shoulders ached. Her waving feet explored the water and found nothing. She took deep gasps of breath. “Andreas!” She suddenly knew that he had swum on to Brass Cay and left her foundering there. Hours later, he would swim back—but not to find her. He hated her father, he hated her. And so, of course, this was what he had planned. How could she have been so stupid? This was his trick; he had tricked her. In a fury, she told herself: I must simply rest, simply get my breath. She put her head back, looking up at the sun, opened her mouth wide for air. A wave struck her face and water poured into her mouth. She reached up as though the sun were something tangible and solid that she could catch hold of. Gripping the edges of the sun, another wave hit her, and she thought: I am drowning. Very well. And it was curious, the peace that this simple knowledge gave her, a kind of drowsy joy. Thinking of nothing any more, she let go the sun, and spread her arms wide and let herself sink beneath the surface, into the green depths, where the water that filled her lungs was warm and sweet, watching the green grow darker. Then she felt his hands seize her under the armpits and pull her to the surface. She struggled with him. “Murderer!” She screamed, trying to twist from his grip, flailing at him with her fists and feet. “Murderer! Let me go!”

  “Don’t move, Edie!” he was shouting at her. “Don’t move!”

  His arm swung around her neck like a vise, and briefly her head went under the water again.

  When at last he had her, coughing and gasping, stretched out on the sand, and she looked up at him, his face was very pale and there were tears in his eyes. And she remembers thinking, now he has seen me, just as I have seen him, and because he made no move to cover her nakedness she thought: perhaps I please him too.

  “My God, Edie—I shouldn’t have left you!” he said. “I almost lost you.”

  “Andreas,” she said, “are there barracuda in the bay?”

  “Barracuda? If all the barracuda in the sea attacked you, Edie, I’d fight them off for you.”

  In her vision his face swam. She stretched her arms forward and rested her hands on his knees. “It wasn’t your fault, Andreas,” she said. “I got tired. Oh, I’m so weak. Don’t hate me for being so weak, Andreas. I’m sorry. What did I say to you? Forgive me …”

  “I know. Don’t talk.” He lay down beside her then, on the sands, the lengths of their naked bodies touching, his arm across her back. He lay without moving. Once she felt his fingers press into her side, then relax.

  In the stillness, she could hear his breathing, and she waited. In the secret pages of her diary she had written, just the day before, “I love Andreas Peder Larsen. I love him with all my heart and with all my soul and with all my body. I want him and need him and want to give myself to him wholly and have him take my body with his love—” using all the words she had heard and read and wanted to discover. Now, she thought, what was going to happen—what had been bound to happen all those past weeks—will happen. She was ready for him, waiting for him. She would not have resisted him now; she would have welcomed him, and she wanted all her thoughts to be telling him that this was so. But, though they lay there very still for a long time, he did not make love to her. At last, he stood up and silently dressed himself.

  “Are you awake, Edie?” he whispered.

  “Yes. Awake.”

  He turned his back. She rose and put on her dress. They walked home from Magens Bay in silence. She only knew that he had not made love to her, though she had been willing. And, at the time, she was too young to understand why, and was to frightened of her own willingness, and too uncertain of him, to ask him why.

  “But I was only eighteen!” she says now to her empty bedroom. “Only eighteen!”

  Edith does not expect Leona down for breakfast at the regular hour, and, after breakfast, Mr. Barbus arrives to tell Edith, all over again, what is wrong with her garden, and why he is the only man who can set it to rights. Mr. Barbus is one of the locals in St. Thomas—though he is not as local as Edith Blakewell—and his title, painted on the shingle of his shop just outside town, is NURSERYMAN & LANDSCAPE DESIGNER & LAWN DOCTOR. Perhaps he is all these things. In any case, every month or so, J. Everett Barbus appears at her front door to describe shrubs, plants, paving stones, organic fertilizers, manures, and mulches.

  “Now you can tell this soil of yours is starved, Mrs. B,” he says, poking his toe into a spot of lawn beneath Edith’s bedroom windows where, it might appear, someone has pulled up a few small tufts of grass. “Just look at the grainy, chalky color of that dirt. Now, for four hundred dollars I’d dig this whole yard up—and that’s bottom prices I quote you, Mrs. B, family prices you might say—and lay in a layer of good, well-rotted cow manure, foot, foot-and-a-half deep. Then—”

  “Mr. Barbus, I can’t make any decisions about this house now. My granddaughter Leona’s here, and before I can decide what to do about this place I’ve got to find out what her plans are.”

  “Thinking of leaving the place to her, are you? Sure wish somebody’d die and leave a place like this to me, Mrs. B. Why, I’d tear this old ark down and put up a nice motel. You could fit a nice sixty-unit job on this lot, with place left over for parking. Build it right around that swimming pool of yours, Mrs. B, and I bet it’d pull in twenty, twenty-five thousand simoleons a year. But to get back to this-here starved soil. Come over here a minute, where you’re trying to grow roses in this-here bed. Roses! Why, Mrs. B, did you ever see a hungrier, more malnutritioned rose?”

  They continue across the garden. “They say when your husband was alive, this garden was the real showplace of the island. Now ain’t it a shame how you’ve let it go? Just think, Mrs. B, what your poor husband would say if he came back and saw the way it looks now!”

  “But Mr. Barbus,” Edith says firmly. “That is not the point. I do not expect my husband back.”

  Leona is having a hectic dream, and she struggles to pull herself up out of it. It is a meeting of all her husbands. Someone has summoned them all, and the subject under consideration is, of course, Leona—what to do about her. Jimmy Breed arrives late, as usual, all smiles and enthusiasm. Taking his seat at the conference table, he scarcely seems to notice that she is there. Edouardo is sulking. Someone has told him that all Latins must be permitted long, unreasoning sulks—that this is part of his temperament and heritage—and today his sulk is impenetrable. Gordon Paine has taken charge of the proceedings. With his logical lawyer’s mind, he is all efficiency, all business, rubbing his palms together as he reads the agenda and the minutes of the last meeting. (“Oh, you’ve had these meetings before!” she exclaims, trying to be funny, but the words have not come out.) If anyone is to be appealed to, it is Gordon. She knows this. She tries to rise to defend herself, but she is made of iron, and cannot move from her seat. The men all stand up to welcome Doctor Hardman, who has just come in. Looking at her, Doctor
Hardman says, “This woman tells nothing but lies.” “White lies!” Leona says. “Beige lies,” he insists. “Ecru lies.” She opens her eyes.

  The room is dark, but through the heavy curtains she can see that it is sunny outside, broad day. She asks herself: Do I have a hangover? The answer is both yes and no, and disappoints her a little. Considering how much she had to drink last night, the hangover really should be more severe than it is. All she has is a dull headache and a dry region in her throat.

  She gets out of bed, goes into the bathroom, and runs cold water in the bowl. She swallows two tumblerfuls of water and, with the second tumbler, two aspirin tablets and a vitamin-B-complex capsule. Then she scrubs her face fiercely with a wash cloth and cold water, and looks in the mirror at the result, which is considerable damage to her waterproof mascara—which, apparently, she forgot to remove last night before she went to bed. Only then does she notice also that, obviously, she has slept in all her clothes. This discovery steps up the beat of her hangover considerably, and for a moment or two she leans against the washbowl, thinking Dear God, what is happening to me? Then she flips on the water in the shower and begins to unbutton her dress.

  The shower is a benediction, a purification. She runs it alternately hot and cold, standing directly underneath the spray with the water rattling deafeningly on her plastic shower cap, and she begins to feel a little better. Bit by bit, details of the evening before come back to her. What time was it? Three or four o’clock, surely, and she remembers that he needled her about her art gallery, and about her brief career at Bennington. Well, perhaps he had a point there, about Bennington; Jimmy had kidnaped her from Bennington. And then, later—oh, she remembers, oh, dear—having a maudlin conversation with Granny, sitting on the bed, talking about love. Love. This was exactly, precisely, absolutely, the one sort of conversation she had promised herself not to have with Granny. And now in some stupid, sentimental moment, she has done it. Probably she cried. A crying drunk. And now, of course, Granny will be involved. Granny will give her no peace, no peace at all, until she has spread open Leona’s soul. She shuts off the shower, and steps out, dripping. “Why does she do this to me?” she asks herself. Why does she want to get so close that she can see and touch all those deep and secret places which, all her life, Leona has so carefully guarded from any other human being’s view? Why does she want to know me? she asks, banging her forehead with her balled fists. Then, without thinking, she answers her own question. It is simple. “Because she loves me.”