XIX
It Had to Happen Sometime
As I have said, everything at that time in my life was moving very fast, but of course it had to end, even when I believed it never would. One morning at the office about two weeks later, Marvin was dusting the snow off her hat and there were little drops of water on her hair and face. Bill was sitting with his feet on the corner of his desk.
“They ought to do something nice for us at Christmas,” he was saying, and then Marvin said she supposed that I’d go home for Christmas, and then the extension telephone rang on my desk.
“Boston’s calling you,” I heard the switchboard operator say.
Telephone connections were not as good then as they are now. I could hear the precise, clipped voices of operators on the line saying that New York was ready and saying, “Just a moment.”
“I suppose it’s the family,” I said, “but they’ve never called me up before.”
I imagined that it would probably be something about Christmas, and then I recognized Mary’s voice in spite of the bad connection.
“Harry,” she said, “is that you? This is Mary.”
“Get nearer to the telephone,” I answered. “I can’t hear you.”
“Can you hear me now?” she asked, and I knew that something wasn’t right.
“Yes,” I answered. “Go ahead.”
“The doctors say you must come right away.”
“Is it Mother?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “it’s Father. Harry, they think he’s dying.”
Her voice went through my head without any particular meaning.
“What’s that?” I said. “What is it?”
“Can you hear me?” Mary asked. “It’s when he came back from shooting, Harry. He has pneumonia. The doctors want you right away.”
I pulled out the watch that he had given me; it was half-past nine o’clock.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll take the ten o’clock. I’ll be at the house around three. Tell him I’m coming and give him my love and—Mary—”
“Yes?” she said.
Then I could not think what to tell her. There were a dozen things I wanted to say and none of them made sense.
“Tell him I’m with him all the time.”
I hung up the receiver carefully and stood up.
“They want me,” I said. “Father has pneumonia. I guess I’d better be starting.”
Marvin did not say anything for a moment. Then she said:
“I’ll go up with you. I could stay somewhere.”
“There isn’t any need to do that,” Bill said. “I’ll go. Come on, Harry, get your coat.”
Somehow I still could not understand that anything had happened. I imagine, though, that Marvin must have seen it all without being able to say anything, without being able to tell me anything to do.
“Harry,” she said, “have you any rubbers? Well, then, stop at the station and get some rubbers.”
“All right,” I said.
“And call me up tonight,” she said, “any time.”
“All right.”
Bill put his hand on my shoulder.
“Tell Bullard, will you, Marvin?” he said.
“Good-by, Marvin,” I said.
“Harry, don’t say that. Don’t say good-by.”
That ride to Boston has never seemed quite real, in spite of the atmosphere of cold fact which always goes with trains—Stamford, and New Haven, and New London, definite, but difficult to notice. The truth was that I was so withdrawn inside myself that I seemed to be pulled beneath the surface of something like water, except for occasional moments when I emerged for light and air. At such moments I could hear Bill talking to me and I could follow for a while perfectly clearly what he was saying, and then my own thoughts would come over me and cut off his voice. He must have thought that the best thing was to keep my mind off everything by talking. I remember that he discussed a lot of books and plays while I tried hard to listen, because I have always tried to get the most out of it when Bill dealt with a worth-while subject. We walked up and down the platform at New Haven and talked about Yale and wondered why we were always prejudiced against it. You had to admit that they dressed better there than at Harvard. They had a better social sense and a better sense of reality. Bill said if he had a boy, though God knew he did not want to get married and tied up with a family, that he would send him to Yale if he had to earn his living afterwards.
“Harry,” he said, “you should have gone to Yale.”
I knew that he was joking, but the idea made me wince. I told him that I was certainly glad I had not gone there, that Yale men were always pushing and keeping their eyes on the ball, that they had no true cultivation, and that they were really not gentlemen. Bill kept on teasing me about it, just to get my mind off myself, and then I must have stopped listening. I was back again, wondering how ill Father was and what I should do if he were to die.
Somewhere around New London I was listening to Bill again. He was saying that in some ways he wished he were more like me, because I had a solid quality.
“Don’t say that, Bill,” I told him. “You know I’m awfully dull.”
He said that might be so, but I had tenacity and balance. Everything came too easily to him, so that he grew impatient with what he was doing and moved to something else. He said he was volatile and a light-weight.
“Don’t say that, Bill,” I told him. “You’re the cleverest man I know.”
That was because I did not know many clever people, he said, and cleverness was a curse—it made you discontented, and it made you selfish.
Somewhere around Westerly, while we were going through the great Rhode Island swamp, where they had fought a battle in King Philip’s War, I was listening to him again. He was talking about our mutual acquaintances at college and the girls we had met. Bill had a sharp, almost unkindly way of discussing them.
“Now, Joe Bingham is just one of your habits,” Bill said. “In my frank opinion he’s nothing more than a long cold drink of water. Water is the way to describe him—just a long cool drink.”
“Now, look here, Bill,” I said. “You get fond of people if you’ve been to school with them.”
“If I were to stick a needle in the seat of Joe’s pants,” Bill said, “it would take five minutes for the sensation to communicate itself to his brain. Even a dinosaur could do better than that and the dinosaurs died because they didn’t know the flies were biting them.”
“Now, Bill,” I said, “Joe isn’t as bad as that.”
“It gets a rise out of you, doesn’t it?” Bill said. “Well, I’ll tell you something else. Joe may have had a brain when he was born, but it’s just been polished down to a nub. He’s just been taught a book of rules—nice people do this, the right people do that—and that’s the trouble with all polite society. They may have had brains once, but they’re atrophied.”
“But what can you live by, Bill, if you don’t have standards?” I asked him.
“You can work out the reason for the standards,” Bill said.
“Bill,” I said, “do you believe in God?” I asked him because I had been thinking a good deal about God, and about prayer and divine mercy. I had been wondering if humbly I could make some sort of appeal to God.
“It depends on what you mean,” Bill said. “Do you?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wish I did. Did you ever pray to God to help you, Bill?”
“Once or twice,” said Bill, “but I imagine God has other things to think about. Why should you have an idea that God should care?”
“Why, Bill,” I said, “the whole Christian doctrine—”
“All right,” Bill answered. “A few simple rules would have changed the world, and what happened? The churchmen didn’t want them—the one about the camel going through the needle’s eye, for instance, and loving your neighbor as you would yourself, and the lilies of the field, and taking up the cross and following. They had to shave off th
e cross so that it would be light enough to wear on their watch chains when they turned their collars back. They began writing the rules all over to fit human circumstances. And that’s what most of religion is—a matter of compromises. I’d read the New Testament instead of the Book of Common Prayer.”
I did not answer and I seemed to be pulled under water again, until I heard Bill’s voice some time later.
“I can’t understand the biological urge that would make a girl like Kay Motford want to marry Joe Bingham. He’s a big cold drink of water.”
“I don’t see why not,” I said. “I don’t see anything so remarkable about Kay.”
Bill sat up straighter.
“You wouldn’t. I do,” he said.
“But you haven’t seen her,” I said, “since that dance at North Harbor, have you?”
“But I remember her,” he said. “It means something when I can remember anyone so long. She needs someone with imagination, someone who can show her things. God, she could dance!”
“I never thought she could,” I said. “She only cares about sailboats and dogs, and besides she’s rather plain.”
“Plain?” Bill said. “You call her plain?”
I was not listening to him any longer. I tried to put the idea out of my mind that Father might not be better. I could not recall that I had ever seen him ill, even with a cold, and now there would be trained nurses, and I should have to run things. I had never run anything, except that one time in the war when everyone else was shot.
We came into Providence, and the car grew dark and gloomy because of the train shed over it. Then it moved out into the afternoon and the cold rays of the sun came through the left-hand windows and I saw the state capitol. Once long ago when we had to change cars at Providence on the way to some place like Narragansett Pier, Mother had taken Mary and me into the capitol, and we stood in the rotunda, looking at the flags brought back from the Civil War. I might pass that building a thousand times without ever setting foot in it again.
“Come on, boy,” I heard Bill say. “Snap out of it. There isn’t anything we can do until we get there.”
“I know that, Bill,” I said. “I’m thinking about Marvin Myles.”
I had talked to him about Harvard and Joe Bingham and God, and now I was talking about Marvin Myles. It must have been because of the strain I was under, and later I wanted to tell him to forget what we had said, but we never mentioned it again. I was saying I didn’t know what to do.
“Keep your shirt on,” said Bill. “It will all look out for itself.”
The porter was kneeling in front of me, polishing my shoes. I have often wondered who thought of that type of service, for there is no reason why your shoes should get dirty in a parlor car.
“South Station or Back Bay?” he asked.
“Back Bay,” I told him.
“Boy, you’ve been a good long way from home,” said Bill.
A cold easterly wind was blowing, and the sun, which had been out at Providence, was lost in a gray sky. Heaps of snow along the street showed that it must have snowed that morning, as it had in New York, and now the chill in the air meant that it would snow again. Bill buttoned his overcoat tight and thrust his hands in the coat pockets.
“This place has the damnedest climate in the world,” he said.
Patrick in a black broadcloth coat with an astrakhan collar was waiting on Dartmouth Street with the car. The thick smoke from our train curled over the bridge above the tracks, making me cough. Just as soon as I saw the car Bill’s remark came back to me that I had been a long way from home.
“Patrick,” I asked, “how’s Father?”
“He’s been the same all day,” Patrick said.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go.”
From the way Patrick looked I knew that things were very bad. The iron and glass door of the brick house on Marlborough Street stood open and I could see the heavy curtains at the windows in the parlor and the rows of plants in front of them. Hugh opened the inner door before I could ring and Mother was standing in the hall behind him. I was surprised to see her there, because she was seldom downstairs. Yet there she was, just the way she used to be when I came home from School.
“Dear, you look awfully cold,” she said, and then before I could ask her anything she added, “The doctor’s just left. He’s a little better.”
“I want to see him,” I said.
“He’s been waiting,” Mother said. “He knows you’re coming.”
I looked at the heavy walnut stair railing and the handsome carved chairs that no one used and at the mirror and the table with the silver card tray on it. The door of the parlor was open, showing the big long room with the silver framed pictures on the table and the books which no one read. I had forgotten that Bill was with me until I took off my overcoat and handed it to Hugh.
“Mother, Bill came up with me,” I said.
I was glad that he was there, because Mother might have begun to cry if I had been alone with her. We should have said things which I would rather have kept silent about, although I knew that sooner or later I must say them.
“Hugh,” Mother said, “take Mr. King’s bag to the front guest room.”
“Oh, I’d better not stay,” Bill said. “I just came up with Harry.”
“Yes, Bill,” I said before Mother could answer. “Please stay.”
“Here’s your Uncle Bob, dear,” Mother said.
I saw her brother in the doorway to the parlor—stout, and good-natured, with the light gleaming on his bald spot.
“Your Aunt Frederica is in the parlor,” Mother said.
My Great-aunt Frederica, in black with a little ruffle of tulle about the collar of her high shirtwaist, sat on one of the stiff little sofas near the fireplace where a lump of cannel coal was burning.
“How you’ve grown,” Aunt Frederica said. “Don’t knock against the tables, Harry.”
I stooped and kissed her white wrinkled cheek.
“He looks like John,” Aunt Frederica said, “except he has your nose, May.”
Ever since I was first brought over to see her as a child, my one idea had always been to get away from Aunt Frederica as rapidly as possible.
“Perhaps I’d better go up and see Father,” I said, and I left them in the parlor talking to Bill King.
Up on the second floor beside the library I put my hand on the silvered glass knob of Father’s bedroom door and turned it very carefully. Even when the door was open a crack I could hear his heavy breathing. That room, where I had often watched him looking for gloves in the upper drawer of his tall bureau, was full of strange new objects. There were iron cylinders beside the bed and an oxygen tent. All his books and pipes, all the little odds and ends he liked to look at, had been taken away, and he lay in the center of his heavy mahogany bed, breathing in long painful gasps, his head and shoulders propped up among pillows. A nurse was at one side of the bed and Mary was at the other. When I came in, I could look directly into his face; his eyes staring straight at me showed no recognition at first, because all his energy and all his conscious thought were bent on breathing. Then he saw me and I took his hand and stared down at his face. Its self-absorption reminded me of faces in the war. His eyes met mine and his grip tightened on my hand.
“Hello, Father,” I said. “I just got here.”
I wonder if one always makes some such obvious remark at such a time.
“Don’t go away,” he said. He spoke with an effort, very huskily and slowly.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I answered.
Father moved his head in the pillows.
“It’s where you belong,” he said, “some man in the house.”
“Mr. Pulham,” the nurse said, “I wouldn’t speak any more.”
Father looked at me and frowned.
“Too damned many women—don’t let them run you.”
“No, I won’t,” I said. “That’s all right,”
The nurse put her hand on
his wrist.
“Mr. Pulham,” she said, “it only tires you out to speak.”
Father turned his head toward her with an incredulous sort of look. Then his eyes moved back to me and his whole attention was focused on me, and his grip tightened on my hand again.
“We never did get shooting.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “We’ll get there still,” but he would not let go of my hand.
“Don’t,” he said, “put it off. Do what you want to do.”
“Yes, Father,” I said.
“You know what I mean?” he asked. “What you—want to do.”
“Yes,” I said.
Then Mary stood up and took my arm.
“Don’t talk, Father,” she said. “Harry will be back in a minute. He’ll stay with you all the time if you don’t talk.”
Father did not answer. He seemed to have forgotten I was there.
Mary and I tiptoed out of the room, hand in hand like children, and down the hall to the library. I felt cold, as cold as ice.
The library was the room in town which Father liked best. It had the engravings of game birds and all his best books and the only comfortable chairs in the house. His desk by the window was untidy, just as he had left it, for no one dared to touch his papers.
“What’s the doctor’s number?” I asked.
“He’s just been here,” Mary said.
“Never mind,” I told her. “I want to see him.”
Suddenly Mary threw her arms around me and began to cry.
“It’s going to be all right,” I said.
It did no good to sit there waiting, and yet I knew there was nothing to do. I had known it from the first instant I entered the room and saw my father’s face.
XX
For I’ll Come Back to You
I threw away most of the things that Marvin Myles gave me long ago. It hurt me more to get rid of all those little bits which you can throw into the fire than it did to dispose of the gold cigarette case which she had given me, or the gold and sapphire cuff buttons which I never did care for anyway. Marvin never liked jewelry to be quiet. I suppose that Marvin got rid of most of what I gave her too. There was the white ermine party cloak, for instance, which I should not have thought of buying, if she had not been so anxious for it. I told her that it seemed immoral to buy such a thing for any girl, even for your wife; and I remember how much that remark amused her. She said I could never understand how she felt about clothes and that anyway she was not sure whether she was moral. Then there was a picture I bought for her, and a set of the Aldine poets and a chair which we saw in a window on Madison Avenue. On second thought, she may have kept them all, and I hope so, for chairs and books and pictures have personalities of their own which allow them to stand for themselves. It is only those little things that you bother about most—such as letters which our grandfathers and grandmothers tied up with ribbons and stored away in desks and attics. I think it is better to burn up all of that right away—all the letters and faded flowers and gloves and handkerchiefs. If you keep them too long they become hideous, for they may crop up sometime when you don’t expect to see them, or worse still you may see them and be unable to recall just what they were all about.
H. M. Pulham, Esquire Page 22