“Nope. Want another drink,” he says thickly. “This place is fascinating. Full of fruits and nuts. You should see the people that have been coming in and out of this place. They’re either queers or whores. You wouldn’t think that the queers and the whores would hang out in the same place, would you? Fascinating. It’s a fascinating—sociological study.”
Leona sighs.
“Now where was I?” he says. “Oh, yes. You asked me what I’ve been doing. Well, aside from drinking, and wondering about Henry Quarters, I’ve been working. Yessir. Working. Phone rings in the room when I’m working, I don’t answer it. Get lots of messages that way. Damm editors keep calling me up from New York to see how I’m coming with it.” He gives her a sideways look. “With the Harper story.”
“I see,” she says.
He accepts his new drink and leans forward again, one hand curled around the glass, his elbows on the bar. “Yeah,” he says.
“And how are you coming with it, Eddie?” she asks him.
He stares at her for a moment, then says, “It’s all done. Want to read it?” He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a folded sheaf of yellow foolscap and hands it to her. “Here,” he says. “Read it.”
“Read it and weep?” she asks with a bitter laugh. Carefully, she lights a cigarette. Then she unfolds the typewritten pages. “Dear me,” she says, riffing the pages, “it’s awfully long, isn’t it?” She begins to read.
She asks him only one question during the reading of it. “What does ‘possible suspension of trading’ mean?”
“Maybe take the damn stock off the market.”
She nods, and continues reading. When she has finished it, she holds the manuscript pages in her hands and looks at him.
“You thinking of tearing it up? Go ahead. Tear it up.” He gives her a crooked smile. “I’ve got a carbon copy in my room.”
“You can’t print this, Eddie. It will ruin us. If any of this is true.”
He says nothing. The piano has switched to “Twelfth Street Rag.”
“I’ll say this for you, Eddie,” she says. “You’ve got guts. You realize that if this story appears Uncle Harold will sue you, and your magazine, for every cent you’ve got.”
“Let him sue.”
“You’ve bitten off more than you can chew, Eddie. You don’t know Uncle Harold. I do.”
“Listen,” he says, “there’s no law against printing the truth. I’ve spent three months working on this. These are facts. I deal in facts.” He taps his forehead. “Facts.”
Leona bites her lip. She looks down at the pages again. “And it seems—it seems as though you’ve gone out of your way to say everything in just as nasty a way as you possibly can. Is this just to hurt me, Eddie?”
He shakes his head. “No. It’s not just to hurt you.”
“You can’t do it!”
He is silent for a moment, and then says, “Look. What difference does it make to you? He’s only your great-uncle. It doesn’t affect you.”
“It affects me very much! My gallery!”
“Gallery?” He begins to hum, tapping out the rhythm of the song with his finger on the bar. “‘It seems to me I’ve heard that song before.… It’s from an old fa-mil-iar—’”
“Stop it! Granny’s offered to give me the money for the gallery! If you ruin Uncle Harold you ruin Granny, and if you ruin Granny you ruin me!”
“I get it. A chain reaction. Boom, boom, boom.”
“Stop it! Stop treating this as though it were all a great big joke! You can’t do this to me, Eddie!”
He turns slowly on the stool and faces her. “If I don’t send in this story, will you marry me?”
“What a dirty thing to say! I think your—your friend was named Eddie Winslow, not Henry Quarters!”
“I’m sorry,” he says, lowering his eyes. “I didn’t mean that. I meant it—no kidding—I meant it in a different way, Leona.” He sips his drink. “What I meant is,” he says slowly, “that I have a choice. A choice.”
“What sort of choice?”
“I showed you that story for a reason. Let me give you a little bit of the background, okay? Background. I’m way out on a limb with this one. Way out. About three months ago, I went to him, my boss in New York, and said I think there’s a story in the Harper empire. ‘Think so?’ he said. ‘Well I don’t.’ So I argued. Finally I won, I sold him. So he said, ‘Okay, go ahead. Take some time. If it’s as hot as you think it is, maybe we’ll give it a cover.’ Now it’s three months later, I’ve got my story, and I can either send it in and be pretty sure of a nice fat raise. Or”—he pauses, giving her a hard look—“or I can not send in the story. Tell them, sorry, but there isn’t any story. Three months’ work, but I couldn’t find out anything. Sorry, pal, but Eddie struck out. And I’d probably get fired. Now you tell me. Which should I do?”
“You certainly know what I want you to do.”
“Tell me. Just tell me. Which should I do? It’s not just a moral decision for me. It’s a financial one too. So tell me, Leona.”
“Tell them there isn’t any story.”
He says nothing. Then he nods. “Yeah. That would be what you’d say to do.”
“You asked me!”
He looks at her for a moment through narrowed eyes. “Aw,” he says, and then, scooping up his drink in one hand, he turns his back to her. “Rich kid,” he says. “Lousy rich kid. Yeah, why should you care? Why should a rich kid care if some poor jerk loses his job. Jesus! Why did I have to fall in love with a lousy rich kid? Aw, you rich kids are all alike.”
Leona jumps to her feet. She stands for a moment staring at his back. Then she crumples up the pages of his manuscript into a ball and tosses it on the bar beside him. “Here!” she says. “Use your carbon copy!” She turns and, looking neither to the right nor left, she walks quickly out of The Stick of Dynamite.
Edith is still at her desk when Leona comes into the house. “Ah,” she says. “Here you are. Now come. Sit down. Let me tell you about my little notion.”
But Leona does not sit down. She stands with one arm resting on the side of the door, and says in a tired voice, “What is it, Granny?”
“I’m going to let you have the money, and I’ll turn it over to you as soon as I get the check from Harold. But I’m going to give it to you on one very small condition.”
“Condition—”
“Yes. I’m going to ask you to let me write that letter to Gordon—asking him to come down. Maybe nothing at all will come of it when he gets here, but at least I will have tried and you will have tried. You see, dear, I’m not getting any younger, and I think you’ll agree that you’ve been a little—rash—with your money in the past. Just a tiny bit rash. That’s why I want, if I possibly can, to see you settled—with someone substantial, someone suitable, someone who will take care of you. Someone who has a business head, like Gordon, who can help you. So you may have your gallery money, but with that one little proviso.”
Leona stands very still. “A deal, Granny?”
“Well, if you want to put it that way, yes. A deal.”
“A deal. Everybody wants to make a stinking deal!” She runs her fingers upward through her hair. “Oh, God!” she cries. “Oh, God!”
“Now Leona. It isn’t much I ask.”
“You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours! Oh!” She turns, pulling the yellow cardigan from her shoulders and swinging it in her hand. She starts across the hall. “No!” she cries. “No deal, Granny! I don’t want the money—keep it! I don’t want the gallery! I don’t want anything!”
Edith rises from her chair and follows her. “Now steady down, Leona! Steady down. After all, I think that I’m entitled—”
“Entitled! Oh, no! No—go away!” She starts up the stairs, Edith behind her. “Everybody,” she sobs, trailing the yellow sweater behind her on the stairs, “everybody go away!”
“Now see here—”
“Shut up! Go away!”
“Don’t yo
u speak to me that way, Leona!”
They are in the upstairs hall now, and Leona is almost running—a little knock-kneed run in her slim yellow skirt—toward her bedroom door.
“I have a few rights with you, Leona. If I’m going to give you fifty thousand dollars I’m entitled to see to it that you don’t spend it on another gigolo. I have a few—”
Leona slams the door.
Edith approaches the door. “Don’t you slam doors on me, young lady! Open that door!” She hears the key turn in the lock. “Open it!” She raps her knuckles sharply on the panel of the door. “I have a few things to say to you, young lady. I’d like to know exactly who you think you are! You’re not to tell me to shut up, young lady! I’ve heard a little bit about your activities lately. Stories travel pretty quickly here, and Alan Osborn’s told me a little bit about you—sitting up half the night, night after night, with your men friends—one man after another! Just who do you think you are? What kind of reputation are you trying to get? You seem to forget—” She raps hard on the door again. “Open this door!”
Edith pauses, listening. The only answer is the rapid click of high heels across the floor of the room beyond.
“This is my house, Leona,” Edith says. “This is my hospitality you’ve been enjoying—a fact which you seem to have forgotten. Now do as I say! Unlock this door.”
Faintly, from beyond the door, she hears again: “Go away.”
Leaning against the door, Edith says, “If anybody tells anybody to go away around here, it will be I who tells you. Do you hear me? I can very easily tell you to pack up your traps and get out of my house, young lady! Do you hear? If you aren’t willing to behave like a guest in my house, you can pack up your traps and get out!”
The answer now, from the room beyond, is only silence.
Edith stands outside the locked door for several minutes, waiting. Then, pressing her cheek against the panel, she says, more gently, “Leona—I didn’t mean any of that. Please open the door.”
But there is still no answer.
Twelve
Money. It towered over all their lives. It governs the present just as it controlled the past. Everything that has ever happened to any of them, Edith sometimes thinks, has been shaped by the heavy weight of Meredith Harper’s fortune, and everywhere they have ever gone they have simply been guided along the money’s tortuous path.
“We won’t let the money get hold of us, will we?” Charles had asked her once. “There’s such a godawful lot of it. Sometimes money seems to have a life of its own.”
She had assured him that the money would not get hold of them. But of course it had. There was more of it then than there is now, but its grip is every bit as strong.
Charles had come to St. Thomas that winter on the old Quebec Line steamer from New York. The island fascinated him. He loved the brown, hard angularity of the hills, the jagged profile of West Mountain, dry and bereft of trees, and the soft green contrast of the valleys and the yellow shore. He loved the violence of the surf off William Head. Hardness, toughness, sharpness—those were the qualities that appealed to him about St. Thomas. He used to say that it astonished him to see how humanity had been able to carve any sort of an existence out of it. There was a love of adventure in Charles, the future soldier taking root within him, and of all the places he had ever seen St. Thomas seemed to him to contain the most possibilities for adventure. He wore old clothes. They walked and they rode. (And yes, she remembers tenderly, they slept together, on certain furtive nights … the door opening, then quickly closing, the quiet footsteps approaching across the dark room.) He had asked her again to marry him, and this time she had said yes. She no longer worried whether her feeling for him was love or desire. It didn’t seem to matter any more; she wanted him too much.
She told him about Andreas. “He ran away,” she said. “I suppose he was too weak to stand up to Papa” (for this was how she had begun to think of Andreas then).
“Was that the awful thing that happened to you before I came to Morristown?”
“No.”
“Then there was another man. Between Andreas and me.”
She nodded. He didn’t ask her more. It was another of the things, at the time, that didn’t seem to matter.
“Your father and your mother think I’m marrying you for your money,” he said once.
“Did they say that?”
“They don’t have to say it.”
“I’ll tell them it isn’t true!”
He laughed at her. “It doesn’t matter what they think. Let them dream on. You and I have our secret …”
Once, on one of their walks, they stopped to watch as the silhouette of a mountain suddenly eclipsed the setting sun, the sun leaving only a bright aurora around the mountain’s cone. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “your father goes with this place. He doesn’t belong in a place like Morristown. He belongs here. This island suits him. I wonder if he realizes it?”
Edith said nothing. She had begun to wonder whether her father really approved of Charles. Though outwardly cordial, her father had begun referring to Charles as “your New York aristocrat.” “Your New York aristocrat seems to be enjoying himself,” he would say to her.
There was a party, late that month, to announce the engagement. Dolly Harper was never happier, and St. Thomas society turned out for it. Afterward, Charles sailed for New York, but he was to return to St. Thomas in April, for they had agreed to be married then. One day after Charles left, shopping with her mother in Charlotte Amalie, they encountered Louis Bertin. “Congratulations, Edith,” he said.
“Thank you,” both women replied. Edith was surprised to find how easy a thing it was to speak to him, and congratulated herself.
“Crust,” her mother said as they walked on. “Calling you Edith. That man is no gentleman.”
It was in April, when Charles returned, that Edith first learned that her father had offered Charles a job as manager of one of the sugar plantations. And she also learned that a sum of money was changing hands—a gift to Mrs. Thomas Blakewell.
“Compensation,” she said to Charles. “For the comedown of having her son marry me!”
He laughed at her for that remark too. “No,” he said, “it has nothing to do with that.”
“What is it then?”
“You have to understand my mother,” he said. “She’s a woman who’s always had to be taken care of. If it wasn’t by my father, then it was by my Uncle Julius—or someone else. She’s a woman who has to be cruised on yachts, and entertained in ballrooms, in big houses. When she can’t provide those things herself, someone else provides them. Your father is just doing the sort of thing for her that people have always done. It’s the world she lives in.” Then, smiling, he said, “And thank God it’s not my world. It has nothing to do with you or me.”
“The thing you said about money getting hold of us,” she said. “Isn’t that what’s beginning to happen?”
“No,” he insisted, “of course not.”
“But what about the job?”
He frowned. “I don’t know. I haven’t decided about that yet.”
And then, late one night, just two weeks before they were to be married, he had come to her room again in the old house at Sans Souci. He had risen from her bed, wrapped himself in his robe, and crossed the room to the window where he stood looking out at the dark tropic night. From the bed she watched his dark shadow against the open window. “Living in New York,” he said in a soft voice, “would mean having a house in town. I’d put on a stiff collar every morning and go downtown to practice law with all my father’s old partners. You would invite the partners’ wives to tea—”
She lay there, her eyes on the still shape of him framed by the curtains that stirred in the warm breeze.
“Do you know what this place is like for me?” he said. “When I was eighteen, the summer I finished school, I took a trip to Maine with two other boys. We climbed Mount Katahdin. It was one of the best
times I ever had. We weren’t experienced hikers, but we had plenty of provisions, and we shot small game along the way, and we took it slowly. At night we slept out, with a fire going. One night bears came into the camp. Another time we were sure we were lost. But by the time I got to the top of Mount Katahdin I knew there was something else for me besides reading law in my father’s office. I guess that’s why I didn’t want to go on to college, because whatever it was I knew I wouldn’t find it there. Do you see? That’s what this place is like for me. Like Mount Katahdin.”
“Remember that there are people who hate him here,” Edith whispered. “You’d be working for him.”
He laughed. “I can handle him,” he said. “I can handle his daughter, can’t I?” He turned toward her across the dark room.
“Oh, Charles,” she said, holding up her arms, “am I a very bad woman to be letting you make love to me like this—before we’re—”
“Yes,” he whispered, settling himself beside her and nuzzling her throat. “A very bad woman … very bad for me.”
Later he said drowsily, “Look at the moon. Diana—off on her hunt.”
The next morning Edith’s mother said to her, “I think it would look better if Charles moved to the Grand Hotel until the wedding. For appearances’ sake, you know. I realize the Grand Hotel is not at all grand, but it’s the only hotel we have. And your father keeps some rooms there, you know, for business purposes.”
The suite of rooms her father rented at the Grand Hotel was customarily at the disposal of Monique Bertin. It struck Edith as odd, and even in a perverse way amusing, to think of her future husband occupying quarters that had been temporarily vacated by her father’s mistress. But naturally she did not mention this to Charles.
They were married, that April of 1908, in the Anglican Church of All Saints in Charlotte Amalie. As they left the church, native girls threw flowers in the street in front of them, a touch her father had provided. Edith remembers that. And then there was the drive up Government Hill with Papa, who wanted to show them the thing that was to be his surprise.
Those Harper Women Page 23