Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Stop this, Edith.”

  “Oh, there’s something very wrong with your thinking, Charles. Yes—I keep wondering: What about you? Why won’t you go to Papa and tell him he’s behaving like a fool and destroying Mama in the bargain? Are you afraid? Are you as much a coward as the Frenchman?”

  An hour later they were still arguing. “The woman is an insult to my mother,” she said, “and the man is an insult to me.”

  He looked at her sharply. “To you? Why?”

  “He—he gives me sly looks whenever I pass him on the street,” she said quickly. “He knows I know about them.”

  “Then look the other way. Don’t you know how to handle ‘sly looks’?” Then, in a weary voice, he said, “Haven’t I got enough to worry about? You, me, our baby, my job—”

  “Your job! What kind of job is it? Five years of being another of Papa’s lackeys—that’s your job! What ever happened to Mount Katahdin?”

  He stared at her for a moment. Then he turned on his heel and walked quickly into the library, closing the door behind him.

  “Charles, please,” she whispered, her face pressed against the door. “I didn’t mean that, Charles. It was seeing Mama this morning that upset me so. Forgive me, darling. Please open the door.”

  And when there was no answer she cried, “All right, stay in there! I don’t care. I can get rid of the Bertins myself.”

  Remembering this, Edith’s eyes fly open. She stands up stiffly from the chair where she had been dozing and walks slowly through the quiet rooms of the house. It is growing dark. All day long she has tried not to think about Leona, but now she cannot help asking herself again: Where is she?

  In the bar at the Virgin Isle Hotel, Leona says, “Did you notice the couple that just walked in, Arch? Their name is Rafferty. They recognized me. I’m sure they’re saying, ‘There’s Leona Ware. She looks as though she’s just moved in with that man.’”

  Arch laughs. “Well, in a sense they’re right, aren’t they?” he says. “But look—would you rather go somewhere else?”

  “No,” she says, “I guess it doesn’t matter. There’s only one person here I don’t want to see.”

  “Ed Winslow?”

  She nods. “He’s staying here too, you know. Or was.”

  “I saw some messages in his box,” Arch says. “So I guess he’s still here.” He is grinning at her. “If we see him, we’ll just hide under the table.” Then he says, “Now, seriously—don’t you think you’d better call your grandmother?”

  She shakes her head. “No. I can’t quite—face that yet.”

  “Suppose she calls the police?”

  “She won’t do that.”

  “I’d offer to call her myself—and tell her you’re okay. But something tells me she wouldn’t exactly appreciate hearing from me.”

  She makes a little face at him. “You’re absolutely right.”

  “Well,” he says easily, “you know, don’t you, buddy, that the longer you put off telling her where you are, the tougher it’s going to be to do it.”

  With an effort, she smiles at him.

  His ruddy, heavy-featured face has no expression. For a moment he says nothing. He lifts his drink and looks at her over the rim of the glass. “What about tonight?” he asks her. “You want to stay with me a little longer?”

  “Arch—I just don’t know. I don’t quite know what I should do.”

  “You’re welcome to stay, if you’d like.”

  “Would you—like me to?”

  His gaze at her is steady. “It’s up to you,” he says. “It’s all been up to you, you know. All along.”

  “Well—” And what difference does it make, she wonders? One night, more or less, what does it matter? All caring has gone out of her now, and practically all feeling. A hundred years from now, or even next week, who in the whole starry universe will care what she did tonight? What will it matter, now that the initial commitment has been made? Yes, it has been up to her all along, he is right, and now her involvement with him—under its own terms, within its own limitations—is as total as it will ever be. It is impossible to be partially involved with a man this way, she supposes, just as it is impossible to be partially in love. “There’s a slight problem of clothes,” she says finally. “I didn’t bring anything but what I’ve got on my back.”

  “Spend the night here, and tomorrow I’ll go out and buy you a whole flock of new clothes.”

  “That would really make me a kept woman, wouldn’t it?”

  “Actually,” he says, “I get a kick out of buying clothes for women. I used to do it a lot—for Marie, my ex-wife.”

  “Oh, Arch!” she laughs. “You’re a funny man—you really are. But no—I’m not going to let you buy me clothes.”

  He leans across the table toward her. “You know something?” he says. “You’re changing already. Up to tonight you were all kind of nervous. Nervous, jumpy, drinking like a fish—but tonight you’re calmer. You know that?”

  “Calmer? Really?”

  “Calmer. All cool and collected and nice. You’ve dropped one of your little veils. But you’ve got six more to go.”

  She reaches for a cigarette, and he lights it for her. “And you know something else? I’ll bet I’m the guy who’s making you change like this.”

  “And do you know something?” she says in the calmest voice she can muster, concentrating on her cigarette, “I do believe you’re right.”

  He glances around the room. “Look,” he says, “this place is getting too damn crowded. They’ve got a great little invention in this hotel. It’s called Room Service.”

  Standing alone on her veranda, looking out into the warm night, Edith is still thinking of all the locked doors of her life. The lights of Charlotte Amalie are coming on below her, just as she has watched them do for so many years. “Your father’s island,” Sibbie Sanderson had said. But even the island has always been, to some extent, locked to her.

  That was the beginning of Charles’ destruction, that evening she had shouted those terrible things to him. After taking his pride away, what was left for her to take away from him but his life? They had never discussed Monique Bertin again. They had gone on, but, after that, it had never been quite the same; he had begun to lock her out. He continued to work hard in the sugar fields, but some of the spirit had gone out of him.

  “Charles,” she had called to him from the veranda, “it’s getting dark. Don’t you think you’d better come in now?”

  “As soon as I finish planting this rose bush, Edith.”

  Going down the steps to him, she put her arms around him. “Charles, I love you so. Do you love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Governor’s wife was here for tea. She said that she thought ours was the prettiest garden in St. Thomas. Isn’t that nice?”

  “That’s very nice.”

  “I told her, ‘It’s all my husband’s doing. He did it all.’”

  “Thank you, Edith.”

  “Charles,” she whispered. “Come to bed now.” And then, “Do you remember those nights in Morristown, and then at Sans Souci, when you used to come into my room at night? Let’s pretend it’s like that again. It’s been so long.” And when he said nothing, she said, “Don’t shut me out like this! You keep shutting me out.”

  Then, because he still said nothing, she had shivered in the chilly night air and said, “Charles—what are you thinking about?”

  “About the war. America’s bound to get into it sooner or later. It’s bound to happen.”

  Behind Edith now, from the doorway, Nellie’s voice is speaking. “Dinner is served, Miss Edith.”

  “Think you, Nellie.” She turns toward the house.

  It is after midnight now. Moonlight, and light from the bright street lamps that line the long curving avenue leading up to the hotel come through the upturned blinds and mottle the darkness of the fourth-floor room. Light shifts and stirs in the dark room like the shapes of fish seen moving th
rough deep water. Leona hears his quiet footsteps returning from the bathroom where he has been running the tap.

  “Look,” he says, “come on. Look, I brought you a drink of water. Snap out of it, buddy.”

  His weight joins hers on the bed. “Come on,” he says, “drink this.”

  With one hand he strokes her back, between her shoulder blades. “Look,” he says gently, “you’re just having an old-fashioned crying jag. Try old Doc Purdy’s cure. Have a drink of water. Have a cigarette, buddy. Okay? Okay?” And then, stroking her shoulder, “Ah, buddy, what’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” she sobs into the hollow of her arm. “All at once I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, Arch. I don’t know where I’m going to go, or what I’m going to do.”

  “You’ve got a long way to go, buddy. Plenty of things to do.”

  “I used to be a nice girl, Arch. Honestly I did. Oh, please … oh, please.… Oh, can’t somebody help me?”

  Sitting beside her, his hand on her shoulder is motionless now. “Yeah,” he says softly, “I know. You need help from somebody. But I’m not sure it’s me, buddy. No, I’m not sure it’s me.”

  Fourteen

  If it were possible to go back, Leona is thinking, where would she go back to? Last night, when Granny said that she wanted to ask Gordon to come, Leona might (could, should) have said, “All right—if we ask Jimmy to come too.” Because he had as much right to be here certainly as Gordon … or Edouardo … if that was the point of inviting someone: to try to reexamine things, to reconstruct things. What’s more, she thinks, Jimmy would probably have come. Gordon would have been suspicious. He would have telephoned first, full of solemn, throat-clearing questions. (“Is Leona in some kind of trouble?” “Is it anything I can handle from New York?”) Jimmy would stuff a clean shirt in his suitcase and hop on a plane … probably.

  Whenever Leona thinks of Jimmy Breed she sees him standing at the foot of a staircase in that house on Long Island—at that party, the night they ran away together. It is as though she had taken a photograph of him standing there, on the bottom step of the stairs, his head above the other heads, in his dinner clothes, a drink in one hand, his other hand twisting his black bow tie. That tie, always set at a slight tilt, had been one of Jimmy’s trademarks. (“Don’t want to look like every other jerk,” he used to say to her with a wink.) The tie and its angle gave the healthy-looking face above it an expectant, bemused look, which had nothing to do with the man behind the face. (Or boy. Because, at the time this mental snapshot was made, Jimmy Breed had not reached the years of man’s estate; he was only twenty.) That tie went with him—like his habit of wearing red suspenders under his dinner jacket, or hitching up his tuxedo trousers to reveal a pair of the flashy Argyle socks that the Princeton boys were all wearing that season. It was as much a part of him as the way he had of raising his eyebrows as high as they would go and looking at you with a wide-eyed, open-mouthed stare of surprise when he saw you—as though you were the last person in the world he expected to find at the same party. Or the engaging habit he had of smoothing the top of his head when he spoke to you … bending his head toward you, listening, stroking his shaggy dark hair. He was tall and thick-set—too big, really, for the little red car he drove, the car they ran off in that night, heading for the Triboro Bridge, getting lost trying to find the New Jersey Turnpike. Leona has other private pictures of Jimmy, of course. But this one, this composite, composed of these attitudes, is her favorite.

  “He proposed to me on the dance floor …” This is the way Leona now tells the story of that night. Actually, it was a little different. They danced together, yes, but he didn’t ask her to marry him then. He only asked if he could take her home.

  Later—perhaps two hours later—there was an impromptu parade through the house. Jimmy and a group of his friends had gone into the cloakroom, put the girls’ fur wraps over their shoulders and, carrying lighted candelabra from the dining room, had marched solemnly through the rooms, in and out among the dancers on the floor—Jimmy at the lead, wearing a leopard jacket, brandishing a silver candlestick high above his head. The procession moved out through the French doors, down across the wide lawns, and went around and around the lighted swimming pool while everyone from the party gathered on the terrace to watch and applaud.

  Leona’s mother had been at the party too. “I understand Jimmy Breed has asked to take you home,” Diana Gardiner said.

  Leona nodded. “Yes.”

  “He’s intoxicated,” her mother said. “I don’t want you going home with him.”

  “Don’t worry, Mother. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Do you understand, Leona? Find someone else to take you home. If necessary, Perry and I will drive you.”

  “Excuse me, Mother,” she had said. “I see somebody I know—”

  “Leona?” Her mother called after her, but Leona had separated herself from her, and lost herself in the crowd. She found Jimmy. “Take me home,” she whispered. “Now.”

  In the front seat of the car he put his arms around her and kissed her heavily, smelling of whisky. That was when he asked her to marry him.

  “Where … when …?” she asked him breathlessly.

  She heard him mumble “Baltimore,” and the little red car headed off into the night toward the bridges and the parkways.

  It used to seem to her as though Jimmy were really two distinct and different people. He fascinated her, and confused her. It had to do with the way he had of being alternately self-assured and self-indulgent, a mixture of opposing personalities. She was never sure of her ground with him, of which Jimmy she was with, and this was how he dominated her. He would be silly one minute, strong the next. Just when she had decided that he was the most responsible man in the world, he would do something gay and wild and irresponsible. He could be affectionate and tender. He could also be scathing and bitter and hard. Two natures were at war within him, and when the reliable, formal, polite side of him would give way to the reckless, anarchic side, she would try to seize him, hold him, shape him into some single, recognizable character. But it was like trying to keep a sand castle erect against the tide. His changeableness dismayed her, and his energy and vitality left her out of breath. From Baltimore, the little car headed west, for they were runaways now—running away, they both agreed, from all that crazy life before, from colleges, from parties, from parents. They were saying good-by to all that forever, and wherever the future lay it had to lie as far from all that as it was possible to go—in the West. The pattern of their days began to be one of rise and fall, a tidal pattern. They would go from stormy, tearful quarrels—over such trivial matters as which fork to take on the highway—to passionate reconciliations, in lovemaking, in the dark little rooms of motels where traffic moaned outside their window all night long like the sound of distant vacuum cleaners. They had one thing in their favor: they would never have money worries. They each had an income then; they had that in common. They figured it out very quickly once on the back of a menu: Together they had an income of twenty-five thousand a year.

  But they had already, even in the first few days, begun to talk of “If this doesn’t work out … if it turns out we’ve made a mistake.…” If it didn’t work out, they could always get a divorce. Divorce was easy when you both had an income. It would be a friendly divorce, of course, a mature divorce, with no misgivings or recriminations. And yet, after some of their most violent quarrels, Leona would wake in the morning and look at his sleeping face on the pillow beside her, at his bare arm flung across her stomach, and think that no man in the world would ever be able to make her as happy as this man. And, in a way, she had been right.

  They crossed the Mojave Desert in the blinding autumn heat. The sun was so brilliant, so intense, that it sent a shimmer into the air—diffuse, streaked light, rising like sheeted waves in front of them as they drove. It was like driving through gauzy mirrors. The light and the heat had a texture and a substance, spreading and pour
ing around the red car, seeming to pull it through a tunnel of heat. And the light distorted the shapes of everything, the cactus and century plant on the roadside. Even the mountain ranges in the distance were blurred, half-dissolved, their outlines smudged and muddied in the heat. They drove with the windows closed, for the warmth generated by the two people in the small closed sports car seemed less oppressive than the sizzle of the air outside. They stopped the car once, to change drivers—to let Leona drive while Jimmy napped—opening and shutting the doors quickly as they switched places. The road was straight and flat and empty, and she drove fast through those shifting, distorting bands of light while Jimmy, knees up, wedged in the seat beside her, slept. But it is the cheating light she remembers best, and the straightness and flatness and emptiness of the road, and the speed.

  She had turned the radio on. The song it was playing—queer, the details which stand out—was …

  “Does

  your mother

  know

  You’re out,

  Ce-seel-ya …?”

  She was humming the tune the radio played under her breath to keep her mind off the heat. She had unbuttoned all the buttons of her blouse to try to be a little cooler, pulled the tails of the blouse out of her skirt, pulled her skirt up almost to her waist, but still every inch of her was damp. Dampness clung to her, trickled between her breasts, pricked the roots of her hair, and she had to keep wiping the damp corners of her eyes with the tip of her finger to clear her vision as she drove; in that hideous, unending glare; humming that tune.

  “Why

  should

  we

  two

  go on wastin’ time …”

  And then, it was so sudden, out of nowhere (“Out of nowhere,” she used to whisper to Jimmy later, “Out of nowhere, he just materialized!”)—the little boy, a dark-skinned boy. A Mexican boy, perhaps, or perhaps a young Indian (from the reservation?). What he could have been doing there, at the side of the road in the middle of the desert, in that treacherous light, like part of a mirage himself, she could never imagine. He seemed (she remembers) to raise his arm as if to signal the oncoming car, and then to step toward it. She jerked the wheel sharply, and he seemed to step in front of the car—or perhaps, in that terrible moment, she jerked the wheel the wrong way, it is so hard to remember it clearly, it was over so swiftly. The impact on the fender of the car was so slight, so glancing—just a touch, really—that the moment it was over it was hard not to believe that she had imagined the whole thing. The whole time her foot was on the brake, pulling the car to a bumpy stop, half on the shoulder, half on the road, she made herself believe that she had imagined it, while huge, blind, shapeless prayers were delivered upward into the glittering sky. But when she looked back through the rear-view mirror there was the dark crumpled figure lying far behind her in the road. She sat very still in the stopped car in that blazing heat. She had forgotten that Jimmy was even with her. When she remembered, and turned to look at him, he was not asleep any longer, but had turned and was looking back at the road. “Oh, God,” he whispered. “Oh, my God.…”