H. M. Pulham, Esquire

by John P. Marquand

  But I never guessed that I was following a line from which I could not turn. If anybody had told me when I met Cornelia Motford first that I was going to marry her I should have been very much surprised. I met Cornelia at the Junior Bradbury Dances, the second series that started close to the cradle and ended in the vicinity of the grave. In fact, only two years ago Cornelia and I were asked to subscribe to the Senior Bradbury Supper Dances. If we had accepted we would have seen the same faces that we had seen at the Baby Bradburys almost thirty years before.

  “Don’t you remember,” Kay asked me, “what a good time we had at the Junior Bradburys?”

  “I never had a good time,” I said.

  “You always looked awfully cross,” Kay said, “and you had two pimples on your forehead and one on your chin.”

  Then I laughed, although it was not entirely courteous.

  “I was cross,” I said, “because I had to dance with you. When Mrs. Pringle caught me, I couldn’t do anything else, could I? ‘Isn’t some nice boy going to dance with the little Motford girl? Where’s a nice boy? There’s a nice boy,’ and then Mrs. Pringle caught me.”

  “I always had everyone I wanted to dance with,” Kay said.

  “Mrs. Pringle fixed that up,” I told her. “You were sweet, but no one wanted to dance with you.”

  Mrs. Pringle was large and heavy, in a black dress with spangles, and she had a black ostrich fan and diamond earrings and a prehensile sort of nose. Mrs. Pringle headed the committee for the Junior Bradburys and you could not get in if Mrs. Pringle did not want you.

  I suppose that hall must still be the same with the boys’ coatroom on one side of the entrance and the girls’ coatroom on the other and the supper room beneath in the cellar. You were not allowed to stay in the coatroom long, because Mr. Pringle was sent every fifteen minutes or so to clear out the boys and Mrs. Pringle did the same for the girls.

  The hall was a great rectangle of polished oak on which they sprinkled granulated wax just before the evening started. Its ceiling was decorated with paper ribbons and paper bells. There was a piano in one corner and some small chairs and racks for the musicians and down at another corner was a group of gold chairs, technically known as the dump, where you left your partner after the number was ended. Along one wall, placed upon a strip of carpet, were several more comfortable seats where Mrs. Pringle sat when she was not busy with other arrangements, as did also Mrs. Halstead and Mrs. Jennings and two or three other members of the committee. Above the entrance door there was a balcony the front rows of which were occupied by the girls’ mothers and behind were paid chaperones and behind these were governesses. The boys stood under the balcony, some in blue suits and some of the more sophisticated in tuxedos. There was a certain amount of camaraderie and small talk among us and we used to discuss in undertones the various advantages of the girls and to classify them vulgarly as Peaches or Lemons or Pills. It was fashionable to assume an air of boredom, as too much interest made you conspicuous.

  I remember the evening very well, because it was the first time that I fell in love, and I remember all the tunes that were played from “The Red Mill” and “The Dollar Princess.” I was standing under the balcony with Joe Bingham and some of the other members of my form at school.

  “Hello, there, Harry,” Joe said. “Been having a nice vacation?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “How many times have you been to the theater?”

  “Four times.”

  “I’ve been five times.”

  “Well, I’m going tomorrow afternoon,” I said.

  “Who’s taking you?” Joe asked.

  “The Abbotts.”

  “Oh,” Joe said. “I bet they don’t give you anything to eat afterwards, except an ice cream hen in spun sugar. Have you been to Fox’s Joke Shop?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You can buy tin bedbugs there, and look what I bought.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Joe pulled a miniature chamberpot from his pocket on which was written in gold letters “Go ’way back and sit down.”

  “Put that away,” I said, “or you’ll get fired out of here, Joe.” Joe put it away.

  “We’ll show it later to some of them in the coatroom,” he said.

  “You can. I won’t,” I said. Joe glanced knowingly about the room and buttoned his white gloves.

  “Quite a bunch of pills tonight,” he said, “quite a bunch of pills.”

  The girls sitting across the room were dressed in pink or blue or white. They wore long white gloves and black silk stockings and low-heeled patent leather slippers and their hair was not quite up and not quite down.

  With the first strains of the music we started across the room, walking fast, but not running. Someone pushed me and I slid into Joe and I saw Mrs. Pringle frowning at me, and then I was standing in front of a girl whom I had never seen before. She was sitting there with her hands folded and the orchestra was playing “My Hero.” She wore high heels and her hair was entirely up, faintly reddish, all done in little coils. Her eyes were deep violet and her lips and cheeks were much redder than the other girls’, which makes me wonder if she used lipstick and rouge, but on the whole I do not believe that this could have been possible.

  “I don’t think we ought to dance,” she said, “because I haven’t met you,” and then she added something that was charming, “but we might pretend we’ve met each other.”

  She stood up and I put my arm around her, gingerly, supporting the small of her back with my gloved hand. Her left hand rested on my shoulder in the approved defensive attitude and our other hands met beneath our gloves. She smelled of perfume. No other girl I had ever danced with had smelled of perfume.

  “What’s your name?” she asked. “Mine is Betty Wayne. I come from New York.”

  “I didn’t think you came from here,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Do you come from here?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “I go to St. Swithin’s School.”

  “That’s a nice school. Do you know a boy there named Joe Bingham?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  It was shocking that his name should have been brought up when I considered the object in his pocket. We bumped into another couple hard. It was Joe Bingham.

  “Joe is a very bad dancer,” I said.

  “Do you like to talk when you dance?” she asked. “I always talk, or else I sing. Would you like to hear me sing?”

  “All right,” I said.

  “My hero,” she sang, “my heart is true.”

  It was not like the Junior Bradburys. It could not be the Junior Bradburys.

  “I knew you didn’t come from around here,” I said.

  She did not answer, but hummed mysteriously beneath her breath.

  “New York is a fine place,” I said.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “I’ve been there, of course,” I said.

  “Yes,” she answered, “of course.”

  And then the music stopped and she dropped my hand and I took my glove away from the small of her back.

  “Well,” I said, “thank you very much.”

  “Thank you,” she said, “Harry,” and then it was too late to ask her where she was staying. I never spoke to her again nor have I ever seen her. I walked away from the dump and was standing dazedly thinking of her, when the music began again, and that was how Mrs. Pringle caught me.

  “Here’s a nice boy,” Mrs. Pringle said and seized my arm. “No one’s dancing with Cornelia Motford and no one’s having supper with her.”

  “May I have this dance?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Cornelia said. Her hair was straight and black and tied up behind with a blue bow. She was in a white starched dress and her hands were too large. Her nose was turned up, her eyes were brown and her face was white.

  “Where do you go to school?” she asked. The orchestra was playing, “Old New York where the peach crop is always fine.”

&
nbsp; “St. Swithin’s,” I said.

  “Do you like dogs?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I’ve got a dog,” Cornelia said, “a cocker. His name is Floppsy. Don’t try to slide so much and keep time to the music—one, two, three; one, two, three.”

  After that we said almost nothing, and yet there I was, dancing with the girl I was going to marry. I might have married any girl in that room except Betty Wayne.

  Kay spoke to me about it once a long while afterwards.

  “Do you remember when I first met you,” she asked, “at the Junior Bradburys? We didn’t say much, did we?”

  “No,” I said, “not much.”

  “It’s funny we ever got married. Don’t you think it was romantic that we met at the Junior Bradburys?”

  IX

  Adventures in Companionship

  I always say that Harvard is the most democratic institution in the world, but secretly I do not believe it, because all my friends, with the exception of Bill King, were the friends I made at school. For instance, even today when I see a man who is too carefully groomed my emotions move in an old instinctive groove. Again, if I meet a man who is too anxious to please I feel that he is trying to “suck up.” There was nothing more undesirable back at Harvard than to be someone who “sucked up.” You did not have to do it if you were the right sort of person.

  Joe Bingham and I roomed together all through Harvard. We were in Randolph during our freshman year and other members of our form at St. Swithin’s lived in the same entry. Bo-jo Brown and Sam Green were right across the hall and they used to pass a football to each other every morning. Sam, even when he studied, used to balance a football in his hand. That was why his forward passing came to be phenomenal in his last two years at college. Steve Rawley was in that entry too, and was the sort of person the book agents were always after. He bought Balzac’s Droll Stories and The Human Comedy bound in silk and sets of Fielding and Smollett and Edgar Allan Poe. He used to hide in our room when the book agents came to collect their installments. Then there were Bob Carroll and Pink Stevens. Bob had been the funny boy of our crowd. He used to wrap himself in bath towels and recite “Horatius at the Bridge” and how the Highwayman came riding up to the old inn door and how Gunga Din hoped you liked your drink. He could also play all the songs from “The Pink Lady” and “The Quaker Girl.”

  It is rather startling to go to Harvard now and see what has happened to Mt. Auburn Street. I wonder if the street Arabs scramble for pennies any more. The old eating places are gone and most of the shops are changed. Harvard’s bright color has faded in my memory. It has been washed out like my childhood, very flat.

  What I remember best about it is Bill King, and Bill too is entirely different now. It has always amazed me that I ever got to know him, that is, very well. I was alone in my room one autumn afternoon our freshman year, finishing my daily theme for English A, when he knocked. The door was opened by a thin boy in a gray suit who was a complete stranger. It was unusual for strangers to appear in our entry. His clothes were perfectly all right and so were his soft shirt and tie. It must have been his manner that told me he had not gone to one of the larger schools.

  “Is your name Pulham?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Oh, well, to hell with it,” he said. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  I did not mind if he sat down, exactly. Yet at the same time I did not know what good it would do. He was not my type of person.

  “Did you want to see me?” I asked.

  He kept looking at me as if he could not find an answer. We were both half grown up then and correspondingly inadequate.

  “No,” he said. “I’ve been looking for people whose names begin with P for two hours, and to hell with it.”

  “Oh,” I said, “you mean you’re out for something.”

  “That’s what they call it, isn’t it,” he answered, “‘out for something’? They say the way to get to know people here is to go out for something. I’m asking everybody whose name begins with P if he’d like to act in the Dramatic Club.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that,” I said. It seemed to end the conversation, but he still sat there.

  “You don’t mind if I sit here, do you?” he asked. “I just want to talk to someone. I’ve been around here for two months and no one’s spoken to me.”

  “Where did you go to school?” I asked.

  “In New Jersey,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said, “New Jersey.”

  “Well, what the hell’s wrong with that?” he asked.

  “Aren’t there any other people from your school?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said, “not anybody. And I’ve always heard what a good time you had at college.”

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “King,” he said, “Bill King.”

  “It’s just that you don’t know anybody,” I said.

  “Well, what I’m asking you,” he answered, “is how I get to know anybody in this place? Will you come in town with me and go to dinner?”

  Before I could answer he continued speaking, quickly.

  “I know a lot of places in town. I spend a lot of time down in the North End. There’s an old hotel where they have a parrot and a dog in the dining room. Listen, is there anything wrong in my asking you to go down there to dinner? Well, never mind. I just asked you.”

  Then something in the way he said it made me ashamed of myself.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’d like to go.”

  He stood up.

  “That’s nice of you,” he said. He paused and swallowed. “You’re the first person I’ve seen here who isn’t a nickel-plated son of a bitch.”

  I had an uneasy feeling that I was doing something out of the ordinary, that I was associating with someone dubious, but still I was pleased.

  Joe Bingham came in a moment later and looked at Bill King distrustfully, just as I had looked at him.

  “This is a friend of mine, Mr. King,” I said.

  “Oh,” Joe said, “hello.”

  Then Bo-jo Brown came in.

  “Hello, you bastards,” he began, but of course he stopped when he saw Bill King.

  “This is a friend of mine, Mr. King,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Bo-jo, “I thought it was the book salesman. Are you any relation to Kinkey King?”

  Bill King shook his head.

  “All right,” Bo-jo said. “I didn’t think you were. Who the hell are you anyway? I’ve never seen you anywhere.”

  Then Steve Rawley came in, and Bob Carroll. They both looked at Bill King too, but I don’t think they ever knew that I did not really know him, for now it was too late to tell them.

  I had never known anything exactly like that evening with Bill King. We went to a part of Boston that was entirely new to me, off Scollay Square and through the crowded streets of the North End. Once he was there Bill seemed entirely at home. The New England House, which has disappeared long ago, was downtown beyond the dimly lighted market district. Downstairs where they had sawdust on the floor men were drinking ale in soiled butchers’ aprons, and upstairs in the dining room an old lady sat in a corner behind a desk with a gray parrot hanging above her, and a fat, mangy dog sniffed at you. There were long tables with bread and butter and jars of pickles in the center, and big waitresses who shrieked orders down the dumbwaiters into the kitchen. I had never seen anything like it, but Bill King seemed to know it very well. Afterwards we went to a place where we drank ale out of pewter mugs, and after that we went to a moving picture and vaudeville show, where there was a man who did tricks on roller skates and where the audience joined in singing popular songs.

  Bill could get on perfectly well anywhere, even when I took him home to Sunday dinner. The anxiety of my parents to meet my friends often caused me a profound embarrassment, for I knew how I felt about most of my friends’ parents when I saw them. They were almost invariably peculiar, presenting a display of uncouth
mannerisms and inanities of thought. I did not want anyone to feel that way about my family, but Father and Mother kept insisting that I bring some friend home for Sunday lunch. My main reason for bringing Bill King must have been that he did not know anyone and that his opinion would be harmless.

  I took him to the house on Marlborough Street, after the family had moved in from Westwood for the winter. Hugh opened the door and smiled at me and said, “Good morning, Master Harry,” and then he added in a tone that had certain implications, “You look tired. You must have been studying hard all week.”

  I knew that I looked tired, because I had been on what was known as a “party” with Pink Stevens the night before. I had not been able to eat my breakfast and I had no appetite for lunch.

  “I’m not tired,” I said.

  “You’d better have some spirits of ammonia before your father sees you, Master Harry. You have no idea how you look, a horrible sight,” Hugh said.

  I took Bill into the downstairs parlor, where the Inness landscape hung over the mantelpiece and where the French chairs always stood in uncomfortable rows.

  “Hugh is always that way,” I said to Bill. “I don’t look badly, do I?”

  I often wished that the family did not have a butler. It was too ostentatious, too much like the parlor. Bill and I stood there, looking at the little tables and the pictures, and then I heard steps on the stairs. Mother came in first in a billowy purple dress with a very high neck.

  “Kiss me, dear,” she said. “Harry darling, you look so tired. Sometimes we really think that Harry tries to conceal us from his friends, Mr. King. Do you try to conceal your mother from your friends?”

  “My mother’s dead,” Bill said.

  “Oh,” Mother said, “oh,” and she sat down on the settle beside the fireplace where the cannel coal was burning. “Sit beside me, Harry, and do sit down, Mr. King. Do you think Harry works too hard?”