Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  He shrugged. “Oh, yes, we are comfortable,” he said.

  “What sort of work do you do for my father, Monsieur Bertin?”

  “I am his tennis opponent.”

  She had laughed. “Tell me the truth!”

  He stopped and looked at her curiously, the hooded eyes almost closing. “I play tennis with him,” he said. “That’s my job. Your father is a very good tennis player, and so am I. It is important to him to keep up the physical end.”

  “Have you always been a tennis player?”

  “I have always been a tennis player,” he said, and laughed as though the answer to her question was so obvious she should not have asked it. Then he said, “Your father is good, but there are things I can teach him. And it keeps the wolf from the door. As I say, I am a lazy man.” He gave her a droll look. “But don’t tell your father that, Edith.”

  They walked on toward the house.

  “Well, I hope you’re happy in this country,” she said.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “But it’s lonely here. At times.” At the edge of the terrace, he handed her her bag. “Do you go to school?” he asked her.

  “No.”

  He looked thoughtful. “Your father is an interesting man,” he said. “In many ways.”

  “Well, thank you for carrying my bag. I’m sorry I disturbed your nap.”

  He took the hand she offered. “Good-by, Edith,” he said.

  She went into the house, thinking what a pleasantly peculiar man Louis Bertin seemed to be, and how odd it was of her father to employ a tennis player—a personal tennis player—to help him keep up “the physical end.” And yet perhaps it was not so odd. After all, her father was a man, she had been gradually discovering, who modeled himself on the behavior, the attitudes, the manners, the values and examples of other people—other men whose successes he admired. The lives of great men were all he read, the only volumes on his library shelves; biographies of United States Presidents, of kings, of generals, of the great American industrialists, the works of Julius Caesar, of Napoleon, of Nietzsche. From all the champions and would-be champions of the world, living and dead, he had culled bits of advice, traits of behavior, and assembled them into the composite that was himself. She put her golf clubs in the rack and paused in the hall, thinking about it. He was nearly fifty years old now. He needed a strong body to contain all the lives he had digested.

  Her small brothers were kneeling on the window seat when she came into the house, and now they came running across the hall to her. “You were talking to the Frenchman!” they cried. “We saw you!”

  “Yes, what of it?”

  “His wife is a witch! A real witch! Fraülein Schiller says so.”

  “Did Fraülein Schiller tell you that?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well, she should be ashamed of herself—and you can tell her I said that. There are no such things as witches, and you know it.”

  “But every night in the gatehouse an upstairs light stays on! Late. Sometimes it stays on all night long,” Harold said.

  “What does that mean? Lights in this house stay on all night too. It means the Bertins like a night light.”

  “It doesn’t mean she’s a witch and cooking witches’ brew?”

  “It certainly doesn’t. Now run along and stop talking about such things.”

  And yet, that night, unable to sleep, Edith got out of bed sometime after three and crossed her room to her window from where there was a distant view of the gatehouse. And, to be sure, there was a single yellow light, flame-colored, between the trees.

  Lying in her cool bed in St. Thomas now, reconstructing that other night so many miles and years ago, Edith remembers how she had found a position on her bed from which she could watch that tiny yellow light. Something had come over her since that night on the boat when she had danced with the prince and smoked the Murad—a change, or a determination for a change. She wanted to be wicked. She was ready to be wicked and just looking for a chance to prove to everyone just how wicked she could be. All this she had made her mind up to before meeting Louis Bertin. And now, at last, here he was.

  Meanwhile, all the changes in the temper of the times had not gone by her unobserved—only unexperienced. The twentieth century was well under way. Though the technical “emancipation” of women was not to come until more than a decade later, many women were already quite emancipated. That foolish prince, in a queer way, had emancipated her. It was the year Alice Lloyd was singing “Stockings on the Line” and “Never Introduce Your Bloke to a Lady Friend,” and Blossom Seeley was shouting “Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey!” and Eva Tanguay was bouncing around, showing her legs, and singing “I Don’t Care.” Everybody was “Doing the Toledo” and having dance marathons, and young men in Morristown were showing that they were on the qui vive by calling, “Oh, Lady, Lady!” and “Hot Dawg!” and “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” to each other, and Lillian Russell was a has-been. All these things Edith had heard, and observed, and read about, and was ready to know more about. And Doctor Freud was a figure in her generation too, a fact Leona—who considers him her generation’s exclusive property—would have a hard time comprehending.

  She had danced with a prince and smoked a Murad, and the prince had said he would like to have an adventure with her. Edith had examined herself. Though she might not be beautiful, she had decided that she was certainly attractive. Besides, there were other qualities that appealed to a man besides a pretty exterior. Wisdom. Companionship of the mind. Humor. Usefulness. Sensitivity. Most of all, she had decided that she was sensitive. Wickedness and sensitivity, it seemed to her, did not need to cancel each other out. She could possess both. Her eyes, whenever she opened them wide before her mirror, hinted at dark pools of feeling underneath, pools of sympathy and understanding and passion. Couldn’t a man know that here at last was a woman who could share his innermost thoughts, his hopes and fears? “Somehow, I always knew” he would say to her, “that somewhere in the world there had to be a woman like you, Edith.” And there she was, quietly waiting, grown up since Andreas—grateful to him, almost, perhaps (“If you’d been strong you wouldn’t have gone!” she had begun to tell him sternly), for having lifted her to this new plateau from which she could view the world both cynically and serenely.

  How quickly he had begun calling her Edith. That monkish face was a poetic face, with something dark, a little sullen around the corners of the mouth, a little broody around the hooded eyes, a face that spoke to her of suffering as she lay on her bed and looked out the window at his light; of suffering and longing. Methodically, she erased from her mind all the trivial things he had actually said. (“Do you go to school?”) Those words were camouflage for his secret thoughts. Across the dark night she made him be thinking of her, asking himself: Why didn’t I dare speak to her of what I really thought? Was it because she seemed so aloof and rare? Was it simply because I work for her father, and live in the gatehouse while she lives in the big house on the hill? Could the impossible ever be possible—that she would care for me?

  “Lover,” she whispered aloud. “Ah, lover!” And he answered her, and tomorrow, strolling in the poplars or wherever he strolled, perhaps he would meet a man friend, and perhaps her name would come up, as perhaps it often did among men (perhaps he would be the one to bring it up), and perhaps the man friend would look at him quizzically, and Louis Bertin would turn his head away quickly, abashed, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, by the agony of his desire. She had slept on that thought like a pillow.

  Edith Blakewell smiles now, remembering. Wasn’t it wonderful to be young? Wonderful and terrible?

  The air-conditioned cocktail lounge of the Virgin Isle Hotel is doing a good business, and little low lamps glow from the centers of little low tables. The music is New Yorky, fast and slick. But Arch and Leona have found a table outside, on the open terrace, where only the fringes of the music reach them.

  “You’ve told me a lot about husbands one and two,” Arch
says, “but not a word about number three.”

  “Edouardo.”

  “Yes.”

  “When I fell in love with Edouardo—” she begins. (Love? Was it love? No. And it is certainly not true, as a friend of hers suggested afterward, that she had wanted to save him—save him from his … affliction … whatever you wanted to call it. Saving him had not entered her thoughts at all. Many women adjusted themselves to the idea that their husbands slept with other women. Many women too, she supposes, can adjust themselves to the idea that their husbands sleep with other men. Which is harder to adjust to? It doesn’t matter, neither is easy.)

  “When that happened,” she continues, “Gordon insisted on having the Scott Fitzgerald scene. That’s what Eddie Winslow called it when I told him about it. It’s the scene where the girl and the girl’s husband and the girl’s new boy friend sit down and talk the situation over. ‘I think the three of us should sit down and talk this over, Leona,’ Gordon said. ‘After all, we’re all three mature human beings, not emotional children.’ So we sat down to talk it over. It was funny—it would have been funny if it hadn’t been so bizarre. Poor Gordon doesn’t speak any Spanish, you see, and Edouardo—he didn’t want to have this get-together, of course—he got so nervous he forgot all his English! Gordon would say things like ‘I understand, sir, that you have formed a strong attachment to my wife, and that my wife has formed a strong attachment to you, and that the two of you are considering marriage.’ And Edouardo would just say ‘Que? Que?’ It was—unbelievable. I tried being interpreter for a while. Finally I couldn’t stand it any more. I ran out and left them there—those two mature human beings, bumbling along, each one trying to figure out what the other was talking about. Jimmy, at least, bless his heart, would never have insisted on making a scene like that.”

  “Jimmy, bless his heart,” Arch repeats. “Well, that story tells me some more about Jimmy and Gordon, but still not much about Edouardo.”

  “Perhaps that’s intentional,” she says quietly. “Perhaps I really don’t want to talk about Edouardo.”

  “Fine,” he says, grinning at her. “We’ll delete his name from the conversation then.” He makes a sweeping gesture with his hand. “He’s gone. So long, Mr. Paradise.”

  Leona laughs. “You’re really very funny in a funny way.”

  He lifts his glass to her and winks. “Thanks. I’ve always been funny in a funny way, buddy.”

  “I’m trying to decide. Do I like you calling me buddy all the time?”

  “If you don’t like it, say so, and I’ll quit.”

  “No,” she says, still laughing, “I don’t mind it. Don’t quit.”

  “Okay, buddy.”

  “Arch,” she says, leaning forward, “can we be serious for just a minute? You said you liked the painters I have lined up. Do you think you might be interested in putting some money into my gallery? I’m trying to raise fifty thousand dollars, Arch. It would be a good investment. I’d love it if you’d do it, Arch. If not the whole fifty thousand, at least a share of it. You’re a businessman, and a smart one too from all I hear. And I can show you all the details, all the plans, the things I’ve—” She stops, seeing that he is looking at her in a very odd, appraising, even hostile way. “I can demonstrate that it’s a very sound business proposition for you,” she adds lamely.

  He continues to gaze at her in that unfathomable way, not unsmiling and yet not smiling either. He makes a thoughtful steeple of his fingers. “Did I know this was coming?” he asks. “Never mind. First let me ask you a—a business question. Why do you want to run an art gallery?”

  “For only one reason,” she says, looking directly into his eyes. “To make money.”

  “Good answer. I take it, then, that while the rest of your family is loaded with dough, you yourself are not quite so loaded. Right?”

  “That,” she says, “is absolutely correct. I also want to do something worthwhile. But that’s only a secondary reason.”

  “I see,” he says.

  “If you’re not interested, please say so and I promise you I won’t bring it up again.”

  “Now wait a minute. I didn’t say I wasn’t interested. You interest me. Now tell me another thing. How badly do you want this gallery?”

  “Terribly badly. Des—”

  “Desperately. You’re a lady in distress, as I said before.”

  “Desperately badly.”

  He leans toward her and covers her hand with his. “Look,” he says, “fifty thousand is a lot of money, even from a—okay, call me a multimillionaire. I’ve been called that before. In print—by your friend Winslow, among others. I made a million dollars before I was twenty-five, and I’m proud of that. But fifty thousand dollars is a lot of money.”

  “I’m trying to recruit various investors,” Leona says in a voice that was intended to sound matter-of-fact and businesslike, but which she is suddenly afraid sounded childlike and frightened.

  “I like you,” he says, still looking steadily at her. “I’d like to know you better. Much better. I could advance you the money, sure, just because I like you. But I’m still a businessman. Do you understand? If I let you have the money, I think I’m entitled to ask what’s in it for me?”

  “Part ownership of an art gallery!”

  Smiling, he says, “I mean besides that. I said I like you. One good turn deserves another, doesn’t it? You see? The battle lines are now drawn, buddy. I’m putting my cards on the table. I’m setting my terms. I want to go to bed with you. Desperately badly.”

  She disengages her hand from his grip, and stands up. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I misjudged you. I thought you were a nice person. But you’re a miserable bastard. Will you take me home, or shall I call a taxi?”

  Still seated, still smiling at her, he says, “Call a taxi.”

  Ten

  “There must be an end to these walks with the Frenchman, Edith,” her mother said. “It will not do.”

  Edith had discovered the pattern of his afternoons, and would meet him in the middle of his walks. His walks were circular. From the gatehouse he would begin along the edge of the lawn, across the drive, keeping to the edge where the mowers stopped, where the tall field grass began, and the pine trees and poplars that surrounded the house. “Why do you always walk next to the trees, but not under them?” she had asked him.

  “Afraid of hailstorms,” he had said.

  “You’re a curious man.”

  She had also, through a bit of questioning here and there, found out certain things about his wife. Mary Miles, it turned out was an expert on Monique Bertin.

  “She’s a hussy, that one,” Mary had said. “Light on in the house at night? Why it’s him waiting up for her, of course! When the light stays on all night, it means she hasn’t come home at all. In any civilized country, he’d divorce her. But that’s the Roman Catholic of it I suppose, and the French of it as well.”

  “Where does she go, do you think, when she’s out?”

  “Well, now I don’t know, Edith. But I can guess. Poor chap, I feel sorry for him. He’s got his cross to bear.”

  “Is she pretty, Mary?”

  Mary Miles had sniffed. “Pretty? Well, I suppose some might call her pretty. Pretty in a tarty way.”

  To Edith, Monique Bertin had been only a distant flutter of bright dress once or twice, glimpsed through the trees, and always—as Mary Miles had said—departing. On their walks, Louis Bertin had never specifically mentioned his wife—which, of course, merely confirmed Edith’s growing opinion of the woman and their marriage.

  Now, to her mother, she said, “Why won’t it do, Mama? I enjoy talking to him. He’s a gentleman, and he’s offered to give me a tennis lesson.”

  “Really? I hardly think your father will approve of that, Edith, and I’m sure Mr. Bertin realizes it. He’s a paid tennis player, and he has been hired only to play tennis with your father.”

  “What does his wife do?”

  “I have no idea.�
��

  “Well, I still don’t see why I can’t talk to him.”

  “Because he is an employee of your father’s. He is a married man. And he is not a gentleman. Do you want to get yourself gossiped about? No, you are forbidden to speak to him again.”

  “Forbidden?”

  Her mother had paused. “I am sure your father would be most annoyed if he found out about it,” she said. “If he found out, I promise you the consequences would be quite unpleasant.”

  “I liked you better when you were drunk, Mama.”

  Dolly Harper sat very stiffly, her hands folded tightly in her lap. “Don’t think you can hurt me with a remark like that,” she said. “That remark doesn’t hurt me. It doesn’t hurt me at all.”

  And Edith had continued to meet him on his walks, but from then on she was more careful, planning the meetings only when she knew her mother was out of the house or napping in her room. It was awful, but she had begun to wish that her mother would have more of her relapses. There had been only one since the “cure” that Mary Miles had begun in Paris. And so great had been Mary Miles’ wrath at finding Dolly Harper drunk in her bed, that, literally, Mary Miles seemed to have frightened her out of trying it again. “You want to get yourself a place in society, don’t you?” Edith had heard Mary screaming at her. “You want to help your daughter find a nice husband, don’t you? What society would ever take a second look at you in the state you’re in? What man would ever take a wife whose mother gets herself in a state like this? Take a look at yourself in your mirror, lady! Drink that coffee, lady! Sit up straight, lady, and drink that coffee! Lady! Oh, I have half a mind to bring your two little boys in here to look at their mother in the state she’s in!”

  On her walks with the Frenchman, their talk was oddly impersonal. Edith was never sure, when she met him, whether he was happy to see her or not, though he always smiled with those heavy-lidded eyes and said, “Well, here is Edith. What have you been up to since I saw you last?”

  “Trying to figure out what to do with a young man my mother has invited for the weekend.”