Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Is this a young man you like?”

  “I don’t care about him one way or the other. But my mother makes such a fool of herself trying to pair me off with people.”

  He shrugged, either in agreement or disagreement. Once she had tried speaking to him in French, but he had interrupted her rather curtly, and said, “Speak English. Your English is better than your French.”

  “Are you going with us to St. Thomas?” she had asked him.

  “I imagine so. Travel is one of the benefits of this job of mine.”

  She had started to describe St. Thomas to him, but he had cut her off, saying, “I’ll see it when I get there.”

  “Some day I’m going to run away from home, Louis,” she had told him.

  But he had not seemed particularly impressed. “We all have to run away from home some day. ‘Adventure begins when you run away from home.’ Thomas Carlyle.”

  “You’re well-read.”

  “Not really.”

  “I might even run away today.”

  “Today? I doubt you will.”

  “I might.”

  They had come to the end of their walk, to the path that led between the posts of the iron fence and, behind the fence, a boxwood hedge, to the gatehouse. It was four o’clock, and the sun slanted through the leaves of the trees overhead. They stood in a green pool of mixed shade and sunlight. A soft breeze stirred the leaves and the grass.

  “I’ve never been inside the gatehouse,” she said. “What is it like?”

  He leaned back against the iron fence, folded his arms, and smiled.

  Remembering the brazenness of that remark, she is astonished that she was ever able to utter it. Certainly these are two different women, the woman remembered and the woman remembering. Yet they are one and the same, though they no longer look alike, and they greet each other, as differing reflections in the dark room and recognize, and accuse each other.…

  His rooms in the gatehouse had appalled her. She does not know now what she had expected, but it was not what she found. Up a narrow flight of stairs and through a stained-wood door which he opened with a key. They were in a small, dark sitting-room that was clearly a kitchen also. A primus stove stood on a table in one corner and, next to it, a deep wooden sink was draped with dishtowels and filled with dirty crockery. There was a single window, its panes filmed, its shade torn, and from the shade on a wooden hanger hung a woman’s shift, freshly laundered but still seeming soiled. The room also contained a very worn-looking sofa and two straight chairs. There was an odor in the air of stove-oil and cooking and dust. He smiled at her and shrugged. “The place needs cleaning,” he said.

  “Would you like me to come and clean it for you some day?” she had asked, which was hardly the most tactful rejoinder.

  He laughed. “You American girls. Always wanting things clean. What do you know about cleaning a house?”

  “I used to help my mother clean. I’m not that pampered,” she said. And then, stepping to the window, “Oh, and it has a lovely view.” Standing there, in his denim trousers and blue shirt, he followed her with his eyes. She stood in silence, looking out. The view was of her house. When she turned back to him, he was still smiling.

  “The view,” he said, “I never look at it.”

  Then they were both silent again. The air in the room was penetrating, heavy and still.

  “Would you like a cup of tea?” he asked her.

  “I thought only Englishmen took tea.”

  “I’ll heat some water.”

  A fat tortoiseshell cat with pink-rimmed eyes lay on the sofa. As she sat, it stretched its paws, yawned, and kneaded its claws into the sofa cushion. “It’s name is Clemenceau,” Louis said. “You know—the Tiger of France.” Stooping over the table, he was heating water in a saucepan and putting teacups in saucers, whistling under his breath as he set out the dishes.

  “Hello, Clemenceau.”

  The cat washed itself.

  He took the water from the stove and filled two cups over a tea-strainer. “Sugar?” he asked her.

  “No thank you. Just plain.”

  “No milk?”

  “No.”

  With a spoon, he ladled two helpings of sugar into his cup. Then he took a pitcher of milk, poured a little into the spoon, and, kneeling on his haunches by the sofa, he offered the spoon of milk to the tortoiseshell cat. When the cat had licked the spoon clean, Louis put the spoon into his cup and stirred his tea. Again the air was heavy and still. The cat purred. And Louis Bertin-sat on his haunches in front of her, a questioning look in his deep eyes. Over the teacup, those eyes studied her.

  “So,” Louis said, “you came to see me.” He sipped his tea. “Does your mother know you’re here?”

  “No.”

  “Nor your father, of course. How long before someone goes out looking for you?”

  “I’m independent,” she had said. “I can come and go as I please.”

  “Can you? And now you’ve come to the gatehouse. My house.”

  “Yes.”

  The cat hopped off the sofa, stood for a moment surveying its surroundings, then jumped up on the wooden sink.

  Edith sat there and, simply because he was smiling at her in such an odd way, she felt she had to smile back. But her smile was a stiff and frozen-feeling smile. At least it’s a smile, she thought.

  “How old are you, Edith?”

  “Nearly twenty.”

  “Nearly twenty,” he repeated. “And very grown up. What do you know about men?” In the bottomless silence that followed this question, he rose and sat on the sofa beside her. Finally he said, “Not very much, I guess.”

  “No …” And suddenly, in a burst, she started to tell him about Andreas. She told him the beginning to the end.

  “So,” he said, “your father sent the boy away. And what do you suppose he’d do to me if he knew you were here, Edith?” he said. “He’d have me arrested. Perhaps even killed. You ought to know these things, because I think you have come up here to find out about men. I’m forty years old, Edith.”

  “Perhaps,” she had said softly. “I’d better go.”

  “Yes. Perhaps you’d better.”

  But she didn’t go.

  “So. You’ve decided to stay. I don’t make you stay.”

  “No. You don’t make me stay.”

  “We’re all alone. We’ll be alone here for a long time. Except for Clemenceau.” He stood up and picked up the cat, carried it to the window, and set the cat outside, where it crept away across the roof-tiles. “Good-by, Clemenceau,” he said, and closed the window. He pulled down the shade. When, in the half-darkness, he sat down beside her again, he put his arm around her. “So,” he said, “you’ve come to find out about men.”

  Quickly she said to him, “You said you were lonely. I’m lonely too, Louis!”

  With five fingers on her chin, he tilted her face toward his. “Yes, Edith,” he said. “You don’t have to explain.” With his other hand he began, very slowly and carefully, unbuttoning the top buttons of her shirtwaist.

  “Louis!” she said, putting her arms tight around him and hugging him close to her to blot out everything that was happening to her. “Louis, you know what you’re doing … but I don’t! Remember that I don’t know anything at all.”

  She closed her eyes then. She wanted it to be brief. She thought of pain—“Exquisite pain!” Mademoiselle Laric had said. And to keep from thinking about pain she forced her mind on a precipitous journey through a long unlighted tunnel to other times and places. With her eyes tightly shut she made herself think of green trees and forests, of the curve of Picara Point, and of places she had never seen. Taking her hand in his, he made her touch something fierce and fearsome, but it didn’t matter; she made it not matter because she was busy in other hemispheres, other landscapes. And then, rather gradually, the trees and forests seemed to have been replaced by something quite different, but equally foreign, something so extraordinary that she almost sa
id aloud, “How extraordinary!” She heard him say, “You like this, don’t you?” But when she tried to moan a reply, his mouth covered hers and she was unable to utter a sound. Then, quite selfishly, she forgot him, and concentrated on the new territory that was closing in around her, gathering, looming. “Isn’t this nice?” he whispered.

  She cried out once, seizing him. As if from a distant clifftop she heard him murmuring words in French which she couldn’t understand.

  “… revanche.…”

  “What?” she heard her own voice gasp. “What?”

  And as she clung to him shaking and sobbing she heard him whispering, “Revenge … we’ve got our revenge. Now … both of us. We’ve punished him. Because this … this now … is what your father does to my wife every night. Now we’re punishing him … ah, and isn’t it nice? Isn’t it fun …?”

  It was a long time before she could open her eyes. Then she opened them wide, and his eyes were a faceless glitter above hers. His head moved upward, away from hers, and he looked down at her, smiling. “Bitch … little bitch,” he whispered. “You and I are just alike, aren’t we? We wanted the same revenge. And wasn’t it fun—having our revenge?”

  And she was back again, in that hideous room, with the smells of oil and cooking, and the sun poking in dustily through a tear in the windowshade, and the woman’s shift suspended crookedly from the hanger, and their two half-filled teacups standing on the table, alone with her father’s Frenchman.

  “Do you ride, Mr. Blakewell?” she asked him.

  “Some. You’re a fine horsewoman, I hear.”

  “I ride,” she said.

  “Perhaps we’ll ride some day then?”

  They were walking through the rooms of the Morristown house. He had arrived that morning at the wheel of a Packard touring car, causing quite a stir. All the servants had run out of the house to look at the shiny black machine that was parked under the porte-cochere, so much more spectacular than her father’s massive Daimler because it was, in the vernacular of the day, more “up-to-dick.”

  “This is a fantastic house,” Charles Blakewell said. “Everything I’ve heard about it is true.”

  “Really?” she said sharply. “What had you heard about it?”

  “That it was—exactly what it is,” he said. He approached one of the large paintings that hung in the hall—the hall Edith’s mother insisted on calling the orangerie. “Fragonard,” he said.

  “In a sense,” she said. “It’s a Fragonard copy. All the paintings in this house are copies. I’m sure you were smart enough to realize that my father does not own the real Raphael Madonna. I suppose this is what you mean when you say this house is fantastic, Mr. Blakewell.”

  He looked at her briefly. “No, that isn’t what I meant, Miss Harper,” he said. “Will you show me the garden?”

  They went out the French doors and across the grass terrace to the garden where a large Italianate fountain, supported by three cavorting bronze nymphs, was in charge of things. It was the hour before lunch, during which, as Edith’s mother had put it, “We’ll leave the young people to their own devices and let them get acquainted,” and Edith could not wait for the hour to be over. “The fountain doesn’t work,” she said. “It hasn’t been connected yet. Everything here, you see, is very new. Have you seen enough?”

  “Look,” he said quietly, “can’t we be friends?”

  She said nothing.

  “Couldn’t we be friends at least for the weekend?”

  “I’m wondering why you accepted Mama’s invitation,” she said.

  “Because she made it sound attractive, and I had nothing else to do. And because I’m sorry about what happened that night on the boat. I wanted you to know I was sorry.”

  “I think you came here just to laugh at me—and the way we live.”

  He smiled at her. “Well, you’re wrong,” he said. “Why are you so angry? Angry at everything, aren’t you? Angry at this fountain, angry at this house, angry at the fake Fragonard, angry at me, and of course my mother. You’re the angriest girl I’ve ever met.”

  She stared at him.

  “Some day I’d like to find out what’s made you so angry. But I’ll tell you a secret. Only brave people are angry people.”

  “I’m not sure how brave I am,” she said.

  The dark eyes in his good-looking face were humorous. “Of course you’re not,” he said. “Nobody ever knows when he’s being brave.”

  He had a habit, she noticed, of tossing off short, oblique observations like that. She said nothing for a moment, and then, “Well, it’s true. I do hate this fountain. I do hate this house.”

  “Make a list of all the things you hate,” he said. “It’s good for you.” Smiling at her he said, “Can’t we be friends? Can’t we just try?”

  “All right. Let’s try.”

  “May I call you Edith?”

  “Yes.”

  “And please call me Charles.” They moved toward the house.

  Remembering those days, Edith often wonders how they ever managed to eat so much—five-course luncheons, with dishes such as terrapin and canvasback duck. Before lunch, her father and Charles were served a Jack Rose cocktail, and then there were wines with the meal. After lunch, it was customary for family and guests to retire to their rooms to rest; one needed a rest after all that food.

  Later that afternoon she and Charles met again. “What are you going to do with your life?” she asked him. “Besides be very, very brave?”

  “I’m spending most of my time these days trying to straighten out my father’s affairs,” he said. “For a good lawyer, he left things in kind of a mess. When his things are settled, I’m going to have to decide whether to go into his firm or not.”

  “I imagine you’d make a good lawyer.”

  “There’s a place for me there if I want it,” he said absently. “But I don’t know.”

  And, on Sunday morning, they rode. They took the long path up into the pine hills behind the house. The horses were skittish and wanted to run, but they kept them at a walk. “Do you usually go to church Sunday mornings?” Edith asked him.

  “Not since I was in school.”

  “Mama was afraid you’d disapprove of us for not being churchgoers. I never went to a real school,” she said. “Where did you go?”

  “I had a proper gentleman’s education,” he said with a smile. “At St. George’s in Newport.”

  “Mama’s dream is to have a house in Newport.”

  “Tell her not to bother.”

  “Do you mean she wouldn’t be accepted there?”

  He was laughing now. “Where do you get all these ideas about being accepted and not accepted? Are these your ideas or your mother’s?”

  “Sometimes I don’t know whose ideas I have.”

  They rode in silence for a while. Then he said, “The kind of justice they tell you exists in church doesn’t exist.” It was another of his odd, indirect remarks. “I learned that when my father died.”

  “I gather you were fond of him.”

  “Yes.” They were on an old lumbering road that led between tall stands of white pine scattered with birch. Fallen needles made a thick carpet under their horses’ hoofs. The trail led them up a little rise, and then to a level stretch. The morning air had a chill to it. Though it was still August, there was enough of a hint of fall in the air to remind her that they would be leaving for St. Thomas again in four more weeks.

  “Let’s canter,” he said.

  “All right.”

  She dug her heels into her horse’s sides. “Feel the wind!” she called to him. And then, holding out her hand, “Oh, look, Charles!” A doe and her fawn stood directly ahead of them, briefly frozen, their heads up in alarm at the sound of the approaching horses, and then, in an instant, they leaped together into the trees and disappeared like a passage of light across water.

  The road curved downward, and they slowed their horses to a walk again, and at last the road ended at a s
plit-rail fence.

  “This is where our property ends,” Edith said.

  “I don’t believe in property lines,” he said. “Let’s jump it.”

  She sat still, looking at the fence; it was not more than three feet high. “I’m terrified of jumping,” she said finally.

  “Then try it. Try being brave.”

  She studied the fence. Then she said, “All right. Let’s try.”

  She turned her horse and carefully addressed the jump. Tensed, her knees tight, shoulders forward, head up, she hesitated for a moment. Then she lowered her head, pressed her heels into the gelding’s flank, and started for the fence. Holding her breath, she felt herself rise, clear the rail, and land perfectly on the other side. Charles followed her across the fence, and when he turned toward her again she had laughed a little wildly and said, “Charles? Do you know something? That’s the first time I’ve ever jumped without my father watching! Without him forcing me to do it, pulling me over! Do you know—I think I may be brave after all!”

  They had both dismounted then. Grinning broadly, he led his horse toward her. “It was beautiful,” he said. “You are brave.”

  “You’re good for me!” she laughed.

  “It’s just because I got you off your father’s property,” he said. “You’re free now.” With one finger, he reached up to brush an excited tear from the corner of her eye, and all at once he was embracing her. “Oh!” she cried, and clung to him. He kissed her mouth, fumblingly at first, his lips groping for hers and then, pulling her tightly to him, held her with her head pressing against his shoulder. And instantly she felt herself approaching that unmapped sexual territory. But it was not at all the same as with Louis because the feeling this time was different, more poignant. Apparently the suddenness and intensity of feeling startled him as much as it did her, for he quickly pushed her away from him, held her at arm’s length, and looked at her, his face anxious and bewildered. “My God,” he whispered, “we’ve got to be careful, you and I—don’t we? We’ve got to be awfully careful, Edith.” And they had looked at each other, flushed, embarrassed, and confused. Finally they had both laughed nervously. He released her. “We’d better be heading back,” he said in a quiet voice, and bent to pick up the reins of the two grazing horses from where they had fallen in the grass.