Those Harper Women

by Stephen Birmingham

  “Would you, Jimmy?”

  Smiling at Edith, Jimmy asks, “Am I invited, Mrs. B?”

  “Well—” Edith hesitates. She is certainly not going to give up her own room for Jimmy Breed. And yet she has already moved out of it. There are other rooms, to be sure. She starts to ask: Do you really think this is wise? Then she says, “There’s a slight problem of sheets and pillowcases.”

  “In the Navy, I slept between the same pair of blankets for five weeks.”

  “Well, I suppose I can do a little better than the Navy,” Edith says.

  “Oh, thank you, Granny,” Leona says. “Nellie?” she calls. “Will you phone Smith’s Fancy and tell them Mr. Breed won’t be staying there? Ask them to send Mr. Breed’s things over here. Oh, isn’t this nice?” she says to Jimmy.

  Edith looks at both of them under raised eyebrows.

  Then there are things to do—to try to put another of the back bedrooms into as decent shape as possible, and get Jimmy settled there. Then it is two hours later, and quite dark, when the three of them gather in the sitting room again—Leona bathed and changed—and, since the two of them have still refused her offer of a drink, Edith has fixed another for herself which is beginning to have the desired effect: it is putting her in a better mood. The sound of another car is heard stopping outside the house, and Leona goes to the window and says quietly, “Yes—it’s Gordon.”

  “You have your quorum,” Edith says, adding a tot of whisky to her glass. “Hooray.”

  “Hello, Gordon,” Leona says as Nellie ushers him into the room.

  Gordon is shaking hands with Leona now, but he is looking at Jimmy Breed. Gordon is a very erect young man, not as tall as Jimmy and more compactly put together. He stands very straight, and his tailor does well by him in emphasizing the straightness of his spine. Edith has never seen the two men together before, and it is interesting to see how Gordon’s chiseled neatness contrasts with Jimmy, who is big and loose-limbed and whose general attitude is sloped and lounging. Well, Edith admits, at least Leona has always chosen good-looking men for her husbands. They are both that. The two men face each other now. “Bit of a surprise to find you here, Breed,” Gordon says.

  “Life,” Jimmy drawls, “is full of surprises.”

  “May I ask what you’re doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same question,” Jimmy says. “And get the same answer. She asked me to come.”

  There is a long silence then. Leona stands very still.

  Then, nodding in Leona’s direction, Gordon says, “Our friend here looks well, doesn’t she?”

  “Yes, she does indeed.”

  Wishing, briefly, that Gordon would not refer to her as “Our friend here,” Leona says, “You’ve both got to be very nice to each other. It’s one of the rules.”

  “Oh, we have rules for this?” Gordon says.

  “Have a drink, Gordon!” Edith says, in a voice that is louder than she intended.

  He shakes his head. “No thank you.” To Leona he says, “I only meant that from the tone of your letter I expected to find you at death’s door.”

  “Well, I’ll have another,” Edith says, and starts toward the cellaret which, for some reason, seems a little nearer to her than she thought it would be. She bumps into it, rattling all the bottles and decanters. But fortunately no one seems to notice.

  “It’s good to see you, Edith,” Gordon says, the only one of Leona’s husbands permitted to call her by her first name.

  “And it’s nice to see you, Gordon.”

  Gordon sits down carefully in one of the straight chairs. Looking around the room, he says, “Now all we need is the Spanish count.”

  “Oh, we certainly don’t need him!” Edith says.

  Jimmy taps out a cigarette from his silver case—a case which, Leona suddenly remembers, she gave him long ago. Standing in the center of the room, she says, “Actually we probably should have Edouardo here. I thought of it. But he’s in Alcalá and he seemed difficult to import.”

  “Oh, Leona! Not that dreadful man!” To Gordon, Edith says, “His mother stole her diamond earrings!”

  “I heard he gave you quite a run,” Gordon says.

  “Oh, quite a run,” Leona says. “The quickest, fastest run I’ve ever taken in my life. I’ve still got a stitch in my side from it.”

  “Not to sound smug, but I warned you, Leona,” Gordon says.

  “Of course you did,” Edith says.

  “Poor Leona.”

  “No. Don’t say ‘Poor Leona.’ None of you really knows anything about Edouardo. Oh, dear, he was—”

  “Don’t let’s talk about him,” Edith says.

  Slowly moving across the room, Leona says, “Why not? I don’t mind. On the beach at Torrevieja, we had a quarrel. And, to get even, Edouardo took his little speedboat and, right in front of everybody, picked up Alfonso, the little fairy beach boy, and ran off with him. They were gone till the next morning. It was a strange way for him to get even with me.”

  “Disgusting,” Edith says.

  “And the quarrel was strange too. It started because a little boy came galloping along the beach on a horse, and the horse kicked one of Edouardo’s water skis that was lying there, and nicked it. Edouardo was furious. He went chasing down the beach after the boy. He yanked the boy off the horse and began cuffing him. He dragged the boy back—just a little boy, no older than eight or nine—and Edouardo insisted on calling the police. ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said. ‘Just over a nicked water ski. What difference does it make?’ But the water skis were a new pair—”

  “Purchased by you, I’m sure,” Edith interjects.

  “—and the paint was chipped, and Edouardo called the police. The police came and took the little boy away—the police in Spain are such terrible-looking creatures, I could have wept. ‘Soy el Conde de Para-Diaz,’ Edouardo kept saying. ‘I am Count Para-Diaz.…’”

  Gordon shakes his head. “A bad actor from the start,” he says. “I knew it the minute I laid eyes on him.”

  “But he was beautiful. Beautiful to look at.”

  “The pretty-boy type,” Edith says to Gordon. She moves cautiously to the cellaret again, adds a little whisky to her drink, surveys its level critically, then adds a little more.

  “There was a cruel streak in Edouardo that was very puzzling,” Leona says. “Once he said to me, ‘Let’s go out and gaff some turtles.’ So we went out in the boat to a place near the mouth of a stream where we’d seen some sea turtles swimming, and sure enough, there they were—their heads above the water, very handsome Roman-looking heads. I drove the boat and Edouardo stood in the stern with the gaff, and he’d shout to me, ‘There’s one!’ And I’d try to head for it, and he’d try to get the gaff into it. ‘What are you going to do with the poor thing if you catch one?’ I asked him. He shrugged. The point was to catch one. But fortunately the turtles were quicker than Edouardo, and every time out boat came racing at a turtle, he’d just sink, like a big green grand piano under the water, and Edouardo would stand there, cursing and screaming. Cruel—”

  “The dirty Spik,” Gordon says.

  Leona looks quickly at him. “Don’t use that word.”

  “I’m sorry, Leona. But—”

  “I don’t care. I don’t like that word. Don’t use it again, please. He was my husband. I married him. It wasn’t his fault he had a cruel streak. He was descended from cruelty on both sides.”

  “You’re well rid of him,” Edith says.

  Leona’s eyes are gauzed, meditative. “He was a member of the human race,” she says.

  From the chair where she has seated herself, Edith says, “Oh, brother!”

  Suddenly everyone is looking at her. “Why, Edith,” Gordon says, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you smoking.”

  “I hardly,” Edith says, carefully holding the lighted match to the end of the cigarette, “ever do.”

  Then they are all silent for a while. Jimmy, who has said almost nothing sin
ce Gordon’s arrival, sits folded on the sofa—like all big men on sofas, his knees stick up—his eyes studying the ceiling. Gordon breaks the silence. “Well, when’s the inquisition start?” he says. “Or whatever it is that this is supposed to be.”

  “It’s not an inquisition,” Leona says. “It’s discussion. I’m taking you both out to dinner—to Bluebeard’s. Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Oh,” Edith says. “I thought you could all have dinner with me tonight. A party.…”

  “Do you mind if we don’t, Granny?” Leona walks to where Edith sits, bends, and kisses Edith lightly on the cheek. “Remember,” she whispers in Edith’s ear, “this really was your idea—basically.”

  Watching them go out the door, Edith thinks: Well, perhaps Leona is being very modern. But what is to be accomplished by this? What has been accomplished thus far—aside from the fact that she has gotten herself a little squiffy from all the drinks with which she had tried, without much success, to bridge the gap between generations. A little hiccius-doccius, as the British say. She gets out of her chair and moves slowly through the rooms to the stairs, mounting them carefully, her hand gripping the railing. When she gets to her bedroom she stands for a moment, eyeing the murderous little Oriental runner in front of her bathroom door. The evil yellow swastikas of its design catch in the lamplight, echoing their old colors, and seem to squirm. Yes, perhaps this is why the rug has turned against her: it is old, fifty-four years old; old and crabby and tired of doing what it has always done. Too late, it has decided to rebel, just as most of us decide to rebel too late. She does not dare walk across it now, in her present condition, not even as an endurance test. She makes a wide, careful circle around it, into the bathroom. The bathroom smells of fresh flowers. Then she remembers that, for the time being, it is not her bathroom. It is Gordon’s.

  The three of them sit at a candlelit corner table in the restaurant at Bluebeard’s Castle. Purified, Leona is thinking, having glimpsed, when they came through the bar, Arch Purdy at a table with another girl. It was an act of purification that she performed with him. Why is it possible to walk through mud and come out feeling cleaner on the other side? Yes, she is almost tempted to go over to Arch’s table and tell him that she is happy—happy he has found a warm, compliant girl to share his tender evenings with. Because he wasn’t so bad—not mud at all, though she had thought it would be mud when she first stepped into that room with him. He wasn’t so bad and, purified by him, she wishes him well. In retrospect, nothing was so bad. She has never felt so sure of herself before. “Now remember this is my evening,” she says. “I don’t want any arguing over the check when it comes.” She looks around for a waiter. Smiling, she says, “I’m afraid Granny had a little too much to drink tonight.”

  “I thought it politer not to mention that,” Gordon says.

  Turning back to them, tracing the rim of her water glass with one red fingernail, she says, “Poor Granny. She tries so hard to get to know me, but I’ve never really let her. I don’t know why.” Then she says, “Now tell me—both of you—what made you come? I wasn’t at all sure you would.”

  “I came,” Gordon says, leaning toward her, “because you sounded as though you were in some kind of trouble, and needed help. And I’m sure Breed here came for the same reason.”

  Jimmy, slumped in his chair, shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I came because I was curious. I came to see what was up. Which I still don’t know.”

  “I was about to burn another bridge behind me,” she says, “and I suddenly didn’t know why. I’ve always been a bridge-burner, without knowing why.”

  “And now,” Gordon says, “you’re wondering if some of those bridges can be re-erected.”

  “No,” Leona says. “It isn’t that exactly. It’s that I suddenly thought perhaps the two of you knew more about me than I knew myself. It’s as simple as that. This afternoon, for instance, Jimmy said I was stubborn and determined—”

  “Willful would be my word,” Gordon says. “Rash. Impetuous. Rushing into things without examining them first. No self-discipline. One might even say spoiled, because there’s always been someone to pull you out of your jams as soon as you’ve got into them.”

  “But I wouldn’t have come,” Jimmy says, “if I’d known this was going to be a group-therapy session.”

  “Not that there’s anything wrong with group therapy, of course,” Gordon says.

  “I also want to know,” she laughs a little helplessly, “why all my marriages went wrong. I think it must be my fault—somehow. And who can really tell me but the two of you?”

  “In other words,” Gordon says, “you want, before you turn over a new leaf, to examine some of the old leaves. You want to return to some point in the past and start over. It’s a sensible enough idea, Leona—except for one thing. As Shakespeare said, you can’t go home again.”

  Jimmy, who has been making some sort of pattern on the tablecloth with paper matches torn from a folder, says, “It wasn’t Shakespeare. Anyway, that’s a lot of nonsense. Who says you can’t go home again?”

  “Have you ever tried it, Breed?” Gordon asks a little sharply. “With any success?”

  “But—” Leona tries to interrupt.

  “Go home all the time,” Jimmy says. “For weekends, Sunday dinner with the folks. It’s a lot of fun. Don’t you ever go home to see your mother, Gordon?” He clicks his tongue, and returns to his match design.

  “Of course I go home to see my mother!” Gordon says. “I was speaking of home in a larger sense. As I’m sure Leona is not too dense to understand.”

  “If I were going to try to change—” Leona begins.

  Gordon cuts her off again. “Another misconception,” he says, and she wishes that he would not always be so flat, so pedantic. And a dark thought scurries through her head: Was this all a terrible mistake, as Granny said? “People never change,” Gordon says.

  “More damned nonsense,” Jimmy says. “People change all the time. They change for the better, and they change for the worse.”

  “Not basically,” Gordon says.

  “Look at me. I’ve changed. I used to be a playboy, now I’m a stockbroker—whether that’s for the better or for the worse I don’t know. I’m not saying Lee’s changed, though,” he says, looking at her with a slow smile. “Or,” he says quietly, “that she really needs to change much, except—”

  “Except what?” she asks him.

  “Except to stop looking at herself through a microscope all the time. If someone’s a louse, and starts trying to find out why he’s a louse all he ends up doing is proving he’s a louse!”

  “Are you trying to say Leona is a louse?” Gordon demands.

  Looking steadily at her, Jimmy says, “What happened before—you were only eighteen. Things like that happen when you’re eighteen. It’s that simple. Don’t try to make things complicated, Lee.”

  “What happened before, as I recall,” Gordon says, “was that you showed signs of becoming a habitual alcoholic.”

  “Now just a minute—” Jimmy begins.

  But Gordon turns to Leona again. “You see,” he says, “you’ve always run away from things. You ran away from boarding school, as I recall. You ran away from Bennington with—” he nods in Jimmy’s direction “—him. You ran away from me, and for a pretty silly reason. My main thought for you, Leona, if you want to understand this pattern of yours, is that you should see a psychiatrist. I went to see one, after our divorce.”

  “Did you, Gordon?” she says. “So did I. But it didn’t help.”

  “It didn’t?”

  “No,” she smiles. “I don’t know why, but the whole time I went to him—it was only a couple of months—I kept feeling I had to entertain him. He used to look so bored. And the facts of my life seemed so dull and ordinary that I started making things up. Lurid dreams that I hadn’t really had. But the trouble was, he never seemed to know the difference between what was true and what I was making up.”

 
“You were blocked,” Gordon says. “If you’d continued the treatment you would have unblocked.”

  “But he never seemed to care whether I was telling the truth or not. It began to seem so pointless.”

  “It is not his job to care whether you tell the truth.”

  “Well, what’s the point of going to an analyst, then,” Jimmy interrupts, “if it isn’t to get at the truth?”

  “The doctor is interested in truth in the larger sense.”

  “Baloney!”

  Leona thinks that food might help but they have been ignored since sitting down at the table. They have not even been given menus. She looks around the room, trying to catch a waiter’s eye.

  “What was your doctor’s name?” Gordon asks her.

  “Hardman,” she says. “Gordon, see if you can get us a waiter.”

  “I’ve never heard of him,” Gordon says. “My man’s name is Doctor Edmund Zauner—I’ll give you his card. Marvelous man, and an enormous help to me. It occurred to me that the divorce thing might have been my fault. Well, as it turned out in the analysis, it wasn’t. Of course, in analysis, things are never that clear-cut—there’s no such thing as anything being anybody’s fault. But Ed Zauner dug up some pretty interesting things about me, and I think one of them might pertain to you. It seems I had a deep-seated and unconscious fear of failing. Of inadequacy. Actually,” he laughs modestly, “it turns out that the basis for it was the fact that I was never circumcised.”

  Jimmy, who has been busy with the torn-out matches, suddenly says, “Jesus! What a thing to have to live with! Gosh!” he says, smiting his forehead with his big square hand. “I can see it—all the other boys giggling when Gordon came into the shower room. And for twenty-five bucks you could have had it fixed! I need a drink after that one.” Turning in his chair, he says, “Where are the waiters in this place?”

  “Well,” Gordon says quickly, ignoring Jimmy’s outburst, “it turned out that I had this fear of failing and that, in compensating for this, I was unconsciously projecting myself into situations were I had to fail. Do you see my point? Well, in terms of yourself, Leona, this running-away business is probably an expression of the same anxiety neurosis, and—”