H. M. Pulham, Esquire

by John P. Marquand

  “Oh,” I said, “all right. I’ll go up and get it.”

  “The gray bag,” she said, “in my upper drawer—and a handkerchief—and, Harry, wait a minute. My compact—it’s on the dressing table.”

  “Anything else?” I asked.

  “No,” said Kay, “that’s all. I wouldn’t have forgotten if you hadn’t kept calling to me. Why do you always keep pacing around and calling?”

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll get them.”

  We were going out to dinner.

  I sat at Beatrice Rodney’s left at dinner. Mrs. Thomas East was on my left, the wife of Dr. East, the child psychiatrist. Then there were the Patterns. He had some sort of a tenuous connection with the Harvard Business School—not on the faculty, but in round table discussions on how voluntarily to decrease production. Walter Pattern had asked me to one of them once, but he had never asked me again. His wife usually discussed what she had read in the last Consumers’ Research bulletin about electric refrigerators or razor blades, and she always explained that she couldn’t say much about it, as the information was confidential, intended only for members of the Consumers’ Research. It was awfully nice of the Rodneys to have asked us, for the dinner was obviously carefully planned for interesting talk by interesting people.

  Kay and I must have been included because Beatrice considered that I was utterly characteristic, completely true to type; once she called me a norm, but I am not entirely sure what she meant, and perhaps she did not know either. I do know that, if I had wanted, I could have told all those people a good many things about themselves which might have surprised them. Beatrice thought that I was a norm, and I thought that she was a norm. It may have been that both of us were right.

  I don’t know why it was always an effort for me to go to the Rodneys’. Although I had always known Phil Rodney—we had been to St. Swithin’s and to Harvard together—we never had enough in common with each other to be comfortable, and another difficulty was that they and their friends were always so gaily sure that they had the right answer to everything. They were always doing interesting and unusual things, such as experimenting with raw vegetables or studying glacial striae. They always had difficult views, and once they had had dinner with Mr. Hopkins in Washington, and they knew all about the Tennessee Valley Authority.

  “Everything’s so interesting now, isn’t it?” Beatrice Rodney said.

  “If you mean everything’s in a mess, you’re certainly right,” I said.

  Beatrice laughed musically, and I knew that I had said something characteristic.

  “It isn’t really a mess, Harry dear,” she said. “It’s only the confusion attendant upon change. It simply means that your class is not wanted any more.”

  We were eating fried chicken and candied sweet potato with marshmallow on top. I had eaten the same thing several times before at the Rodneys’.

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘my class,’” I said. “If stocks don’t pay dividends you and Phil won’t have any chicken.”

  “Not this kind of chicken,” Beatrice said, “but of course we’ll all get along. We’ll be able to sell little things. We’ll all take part in small industries. Phil and I are working on an industry now.”

  “What sort of an industry?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s sort of a project,” Beatrice said, “for the whole community. Phil has bought a loom. He has it in the garage.”

  “What does he do with it?” I asked.

  “We’re learning how to weave,” Beatrice said. “Everyone in the neighborhood comes out on Sunday for lunch and we have doughnuts and coffee and we weave. You must try it sometime. You must come out and bring Gladys, or George at Christmas vacation.”

  Upstairs after dinner all the men were talking about collective bargaining and about farm allotments. I could think of a great many obvious answers to nearly all their arguments, but my answers sounded hollow, like something in a textbook which was out of date. In the parlor later Phil Rodney asked us if he could get us Scotch-and-soda or beer or ginger ale, and I sat listening to myself and listening to the rest of them. Of course most of it was beyond my depth, because I never seemed to have time to read much, but we were all simply paraphrasing what we had read somewhere, and the one who had read the most books was the best talker. I heard Kay quoting what I had supplied her from the headlines of the paper that morning, as though it were all original and new.

  Beatrice had leaned back her head and was talking with her eyes shut. It was a habit of hers which had always made me nervous.

  “If I could only write,” she said. “If I could just set down everything that came into my mind.”

  “Anyone can write,” said Dr. East. “Harry here can write.”

  “He could only write about the furnace,” Kay said, “or to the gas company when the stove leaks.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Harry’s been asleep,” said Dr. East.

  “Harry,” Kay said, “what is the matter with you?”

  “I was just thinking with my eyes closed,” I answered.

  “Kay says you could only write about the furnace,” said Dr. East.

  “Well,” I said, “there was a girl in New York once who used to think that I could write.”

  “What girl?” Kay asked.

  I found myself the center of attention. They were all looking at me. They were all amused, but Kay must have known whom I meant.

  “Come to think of it,” I said, “I have to write my Class life pretty soon.”

  “I’d like to read it,” said Dr. East, “it would be a human document.” And everybody laughed.

  “I’m afraid we’d better be going home,” Kay said. “Harry’s always cross in the morning if we don’t go home early.”

  We stood in the front hall with the front door open. Kay had on her rabbit fur wrap and I had found my scarf, and Kay had rescued her bag from where it had fallen behind the parlor sofa.

  “Good night, Beatrice,” I said. “I had a swell time. I had a swell time, Phil.”

  When the doors of the car were shut and the lights were on, Kay and I were shadows in the dusk. Sometimes I have wondered if driving home from dinner would not be easier if the interior of all cars could be lighted. Then perhaps even though you were tired you would not say exactly what you thought. Even before Kay spoke I could tell from her silence that I had not behaved.

  “Perhaps I’d better drive, Harry,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I like to drive.”

  “Well,” Kay said, “most wives seem to drive their husbands home. There’s usually a reason.”

  “I only had one cocktail,” I said, “and a little weak whisky and water after dinner.”

  “You were the only man who took a highball after dinner,” Kay said. “All the other men just had water or ginger ale.”

  “Well, never mind all the other men,” I said. “If I hadn’t had that whisky I’d have gone to sleep.”

  “I don’t know why you can’t get out of the habit of drinking after dinner,” Kay went on. “I’ve told you again and again, Harry, again and again and again, that it makes you stupid. Your eyes were glazed. You almost went to sleep when Mrs. East was talking to you.”

  “If I hadn’t had that drink,” I said, “I’d have gone to sleep. Why didn’t they play bridge?”

  “Because just for a change,” Kay said, “we happened to be talking with interesting people.”

  “All right,” I said. “Can’t we talk about something else?”

  Kay did not answer. I was thinking about the day and the day moved uncomfortably in my memory. I had been sleepy after dinner, but if you work hard perhaps it is natural to be sleepy. Now Kay and all the women were different. They did not have to get up at eight in the morning and they could take naps in the afternoon.

  “Harry,” Kay said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Didn’t you think Beatrice was attractive?”

  “Yes,” I sai
d, “of course.”

  “She made that dress herself. What did you and Beatrice talk about? I heard her laughing at you.”

  “About weaving things,” I said.

  “What did you and Mrs. East talk about?”

  “About sex,” I said. “I don’t see why we have to talk about it at the dinner table.”

  “Her husband’s a psychiatrist,” Kay said.

  “What difference does that make?” I asked.

  “You never like women,” Kay said. “Harry, you’ve always been afraid of women. I believe you’ve always had a secret guilty feeling of inadequacy.”

  “Who were you talking to after dinner?” I asked.

  “I was talking to Dr. East,” Kay said. “He was saying that very few women are really satisfied, particularly the women in our generation.”

  “Sometime,” I said, “I’m going to tell him what I think of him.”

  “Oh, Harry,” Kay said, “don’t be so silly.”

  I did not answer.

  “Harry,” Kay said. I did not answer.

  “Don’t be so stuffy, Harry.”

  I was thinking of Bo-jo Brown and the Class Reports. I was trying to remember whether I had ever heard of the Charles Mason Hilliard whose life I had read: Occupation, lawyer; Address, Mortgage Building, New York; Home, Mamaroneck, New York. The words went by me in little flashes, like the lights on the street outside, and like the lights of the cars that whirled past us. “After leaving Law School I joined the firm of Jessup and Goodrich in New York. Five years later I was employed by the firm of Jones and Jones. I am now a partner in the firm of Watkins, Lord, Watkins, Bondage, Green, Smith and Hilliard.”

  “Harry,” Kay said, “what are you thinking about?”

  “About my life,” I said. It wasn’t entirely true. I was wondering what Marvin would have looked like, if I had seen her.

  “Oh, all right,” Kay said, “if you’re going to be cross.”

  Now if I were to write my own life it would sound a good deal like Charles Mason Hilliard’s. “I am an Episcopalian and I bowl occasionally and sometimes play golf. In politics I am a Republican, hoping that the day will come when Mr. Roosevelt leaves the White House.” There was nothing wrong in that. Charles Mason Hilliard was marching with all the rest of us through a term of years, marching with Marvin Myles, and Bo-jo Brown, and Kay and me, with all our friends and enemies, out into nowhere.

  “Harry,” Kay said, “you haven’t answered my question.”

  “What question?” I asked.

  “Are you happy?”

  “Yes,” I said, “of course.”

  I had never allowed my mind to wander in exactly that way. I was just considering how amazingly easy it would have been not to have married Kay. Of course I had realized that it was the sensible thing to do and the sort of thing of which my family would approve, but there were a dozen other girls that it would have been equally sensible, to marry. If I had not been feeling the way I had, if I had not gone to a house party at Northeast Harbor, if I had not been asked to take Kay sailing, I might just as well have become engaged to May Barrister, or to Ruth Quiller, or to one of my sister Mary’s friends.

  “Harry,” Kay said, “is there anything bothering you?”

  “No,” I said, “of course not, Kay. What makes you ask?”

  “Because you’re so peculiar,” Kay said. “I speak to you and you don’t answer.”

  “Isn’t it all right,” I asked, “if I sometimes just sit and think?”

  “You must be annoyed about something,” Kay said. “What was it I said to make you this way?”

  “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  “Because I know you, Harry,” Kay said.

  There was every reason why she should have known me, but I was not sure that she did. I was not sure that I knew her either. We had simply experimented and finally arrived by hit or miss at a method of getting on together. We walked up the steps and I found my keys. There were a lot of keys on my ring which should have been thrown away, but I could always find the house key in the dark.

  “Will you call the garage and have them send for the car?” Kay asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And don’t forget to take Bitsey out. Ellen may have forgotten.”

  “No, I won’t forget,” I said.

  “And if I’m asleep when you come up will you undress in the bathroom and try not to stumble over things?”

  “All right,” I said. “Good night, Kay.”

  “Good night, dear,” Kay said, and she held out her arms to me, and we kissed in the front hall. There was still that slight smell of gas. It might have been that one of the pilot lights on the kitchen stove had started leaking.

  I switched on the lamp above the desk where I sat sometimes to pay bills or to work on the income tax. The library was gloomily quiet and comfortable. Bitsey was asleep on a corner of the sofa, and Gladys had left a pile of cut-out papers before the fireplace. The radio was on a corner of the desk, and I turned it on.

  “And so it remains to be seen,” the commentator was saying, “what steps England and France will take to curb this pressure. What small nation of Central Europe will be next? How far can this continue before the democracies take a stand? Is war inevitable? I wish that I might tell you, but instead I must say good night.”

  I switched the radio off, and I opened the upper drawer and took out a sheet of paper.

  “Name,” I wrote: “Henry Moulton Pulham.”

  BORN: Brookline, Mass., December 15th, 1892.

  PARENTS: John Grove Pulham, Mary Knowles Pulham.

  MARRIED: June 15th, 1921, Cornelia Motford.

  CHILDREN: George, May 29th, 1924; Gladys, January 16th, 1927.

  DEGREES: A.B.

  OCCUPATION: Investment counsel.

  It looked, as I wrote it, like something on a tombstone. Once Bill King, when he had had a good deal to drink, had told me that anyone might have an arresting gift of self-expression. He said just write about your life, that anyone’s life is a good story. If I were just to put down everything that had happened to me that day …

  “Harry,” Kay said.

  I had forgotten that I had left the library door open until she spoke. She was standing there in her green dressing gown.

  “I went to sleep and then I woke up,” Kay said. “What are you doing? Take Bitsey out and come to bed.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “You never do sleep well if you drink after dinner,” Kay said. I put the paper in my desk drawer and closed it. There was no use arguing that my sleeplessness had nothing to do with drinking. When Kay went upstairs I took the paper out again and looked at it. It stared back at me blankly. Once I had won a prize for an essay at the school and later I had written advertising copy and commercial reports, but I never possessed the literary gift that came naturally to a man like Bill King. Instead all my phrases were too formalized and too flowery and the thoughts that moved me most deeply remained a secret in my mind—impossible to transform into sentences and paragraphs. My name on the top of the paper still looked like something on a tombstone.

  V

  The Golden Age

  I was born on our old country place, called Westwood, near the west boundary of Brookline; and most of my childhood summers were spent there, except for a month between the middle of July and the middle of August, when my sister Mary and I and a nurse or governess were all packed up and sent to Maine. Westwood consisted of sixty acres of woods and fields, purchased by my grandfather. Across the road opposite the front drive my great-aunt Frederica Knowles lived on a place nearly as large. I can remember when we looked from the window of the little room, where Mary and I customarily ate our supper with Fräulein, that we would often see the pheasants come out of the woods at the far end of the lawn, and twice we even saw a deer.

  Only a few days ago, when it was necessary to take Gladys to a birthday party, I found myself driving past the old front entrance, and I turned u
p the drive just to look at it. It gave me a very odd feeling, a feeling that I had been drawn, as they say ghosts are, to familiar places, but very little I saw was familiar. The high granite gateposts were still there and some of the great elm trees. A good many of the silver and copper beeches and some of the great white pines had been blown over by the hurricane, but others had been cut down to make room for the houses of a real estate development. These buildings, set in their own little gardens, in what was called Westwood Park, were all replicas of brick and wood colonial architecture and closely resembled magazine advertisements for asbestos roofs or southern cypress or white lead paint. Our house, built out of brownish stone, with a mansard slate roof and a Gothic porch, had entirely disappeared—it must have been a job to take it down—and so had the stable and so had the gardens and the terraces. The only building left was the superintendent’s cottage near the gate, and a boy and girl played in its yard who might have been Mary and I.

  “Daddy,” Gladys said, “weren’t there any other people living here when you did?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, why don’t we still live here?”

  “Because we didn’t have the money to keep it up,” I said.

  “But what happened to the money,” Gladys asked, “if your father kept it up?”

  “There isn’t as much money as there used to be,” I told her.

  “But where did it go to?” Gladys asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I had stopped the car and I was staring at another world, and I could never explain that world to Gladys.

  “Some day,” I could hear my mother saying, “you will be very rich, Harry.” I recalled the talk I had heard of “the lost generation,” and I realized that I and my contemporaries were part of it, and the life we had learned to live was gone, like Westwood. Then I wondered if we had not given our children very much the same sort of life. It might be the fate of children always, to be brought up in an idealistic, antiseptic world. The only difference was that the schools now took our children away from us and taught them some inaccurate facts about the home life of the Eskimo. Perhaps the result was just the same.

  When my father used to start for town in the morning Mary and I would look through the banisters of the second floor down on the wide front hall. Patrick and the dappled grays would be waiting beneath the copper beech on the drive and my father would come out of the room which was known as his “den.”