H. M. Pulham, Esquire

by John P. Marquand

  I was able to give the cigarette case away but when it came to the letters, I thought of sending them all back to her, though at the time it seemed gratuitous, and she never sent mine back either. If you write a letter you ought never to be ashamed of what is in it. Certainly, I have never been ashamed of what I wrote to Marvin Myles; but when it came to burning up her letters there were several which I simply could not destroy and I have kept them ever since—in a furtive sort of way like secret sins, a difficult thing to do after you are married. When I hid them in the back of my desk they kept cropping up whenever I looked for my checkbook, so that I became afraid that Kay or one of the children might come upon them inadvertently, while searching for small change or postage stamps. At last I put them—the only two that I had left—on the upper shelves of the bookcase, between the pages of Volume Three of Plutarch’s Lives.

  One is the note that she wrote me when Father died, in that handwriting of hers which, though it looked difficult, was actually very legible. There is a good deal in it which no one would understand but Marvin or me, and perhaps most letters are like that.

  My dearest, dearest darling, I’ve been thinking of you all day long, and I’ll think of you all tonight even when I’m asleep. I keep wondering how you look and what you are saying and whether you are wearing your rubbers. I keep thinking of little things I could do for you. I never knew that you could get into my system like this—so that I don’t seem to be one person any more, but part of me always seems to be with you. In some ways I hate it like the devil, but I wouldn’t miss it for the world—belonging to someone else. So now when I talk about myself at a time like this you know, don’t you, that I’m really talking about you?…

  It’s such a terrible time. I went through it when my mother died. It’s so terrible to have someone go and just keep on thinking “I’ll have to tell him that when I see him,” and then know that never, never, here, will it happen again. Now, if you and I were ever to quarrel—and we never have quarreled, have we—we never have seemed to hurt each other the way other people do—why, if you and I quarreled and said we were never going to see each other again, why, I should always think, “Of course it isn’t so. Some day I’ll see him—right on the street or somewhere—and he’ll take his hands out of his pockets” (I wish you wouldn’t always keep your hands in your pockets and slouch), “he’ll take his hands out of his pockets,” I would think, “and then he would want to kiss me, except that he wouldn’t compromise me in public. And then I would tell him I was sorry, and everything would be all right.” I would always think that some day, somehow, I could get you back.

  You know, don’t you, that I’m only running on this way because I love you? And if you love someone and can’t do anything about it, it makes you awfully helpless. All I can do is to make you think, when you’re up there all alone, that it isn’t so bad if you know you have someone, someone forever and always, someone you can always come back to, dear, any time or anywhere. I love you so, and I don’t know why, and I don’t care. I think you’d better write me again as soon as you can. Don’t be too busy. Don’t get too lost.

  I know what she meant now a good deal better than I knew then, when it was impossible to see anything very clearly. It was hard to realize at first that there was no one else after Father’s death to handle responsibilities but me. Mother was splendid through most of it, except that when it came down to such details as the household bills and the lawyers, she did not understand, or try to understand. When they all kept coming to me, even about the routine of the funeral, I would find myself thinking that I could take it up with Father in the morning. At first I imagined that in a week or so, when the house had quieted down and when the lawyers had the details straight, I might reasonably get back to New York. Then I saw there was not a chance—that it would be a long while before I got away.

  It touched me that I had been made executor under Father’s will, although I found that there was not much for me to do, since the will had been drawn by the Pritchard office and the Pritchard office and I were to act together. Mary and I were each left a hundred thousand dollars outright, and after other bequests to the servants and to charities, the bulk of the estate was left to my mother for her lifetime, to be invested by the trustee. It seemed to me that old Mr. Pritchard worried too much about the state income tax and that his one idea was to avoid the tax by keeping all the investments in small state companies. I consulted with Mr. Wilding about it and he even went so far as to argue with John Pritchard, but there is no use going into the details now.

  I had intended to talk with Mary about it, too, the night I came back from the interview. We sat down to dinner by ourselves in the big dining room, which did not seem to be made for either of us. The room was ornate and shadowy and gloomy. Mary in her black dress, seated at Mother’s end of the table, so far away that I nearly had to raise my voice to speak to her, looked very small with the Empire sideboard and all the elaborate silver behind her. When Hugh came in with the soup Mary and I seemed to be like children, furtively pretending to be grown up.

  “Will you have sherry, sir?” Hugh asked me.

  First he had called me “Master Harry,” and now he called me “sir.”

  “Yes,” I said, “and I want to go over the wine cellar with you tomorrow. I want a list of what there is. There may not be any more.”

  It occurred to me that I sounded a good deal like old Mr. Pritchard when he had taken off his glasses and tapped them on his desk. Mr. Pritchard’s whole life had been devoted to saving things for people, because there might not be any more.

  “Harry,” Mary said, “I’d like to go abroad somewhere.”

  “You’ve been,” I said. “You went over with Fräulein.”

  “I’d like to go by myself,” Mary said.

  “You couldn’t do that, Mary,” I told her. “But perhaps in the spring someone will be going and you can join some party.”

  “I don’t want to join any party,” Mary answered. “I’d like to go alone and pick up people on the boat.”

  “You never want to do that, Mary,” I said. “You can’t tell what people are like on boats.”

  “Now, you needn’t try to turn into Father just because he’s dead,” Mary said. “Sometimes you can be the damnedest fool. I wish you’d please shut up.”

  We sat quietly eating while Hugh walked around the table. Then when the dessert was finished Mary pushed back her chair.

  “Let’s go into the library,” she said. “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  It occurred to me that in the last few days everyone had been talking to me in the library.

  “All right,” I said. “We won’t want any coffee, Hugh.”

  Mary walked up the stairs ahead of me and our footsteps made dull little thuds on the heavy brown stair-carpet. We seemed to be walking on tiptoe, so as not to disturb the silence of the house, but in the library when the door was closed you could raise your voice. Mary lighted a cigarette with a self-conscious flourish.

  “Sometimes you can be awful,” Mary said. “Why are you so poisonous tonight?”

  I told her I did not mean to be. I told her that I had a good many things on my mind, and this was true. I was usually thinking about something else when Mary was talking.

  “Sometimes you’re sweet and natural and then you’re so obvious that you drive me crazy,” Mary said.

  I saw as she puffed her cigarette that her lip was trembling.

  “You’re tired, Mary,” I said. “I don’t know why women think that someone can be sweet just to order.”

  “Oh, well,” Mary said, “I’ve got to talk to someone. Harry, I’m in love.”

  “In love?” I repeated.

  “What’s so queer about it?” she asked. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

  “Have you told Mother?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “of course not.”

  “Who are you in love with?”

  “You wouldn’t know him.”

  “What
’s his name?”

  “Roger Priest,” Mary said.

  “Priest?” I said. “What does he do?”

  “There you are,” she said. “What difference does it make? He wasn’t in the war and he didn’t go to Harvard, but he’s going to Harvard now. If you really want to know, he’s in the Harvard Dental School.”

  “My God,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of saying. I tried to think of dentistry as being an exacting and important side of medicine, but it did not seem to help. “He must be perfectly wonderful.”

  “Harry,” she said, “don’t tell anyone, will you? It’s so awful it’s funny, but I can’t really do anything about it.”

  “You know,” I said, “it might be a good idea if you did take a trip. There must be some girl you’d like to take with you, Mary. We’ll see about it in the morning, or you might go to Florida or California. I’ve always wanted to go to California. And you don’t need to worry about Mother. I’ll look after that.”

  “Harry,” she said, “you’re not laughing, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “Of course it isn’t as serious as you think it is. These things never are. When you get to California it will just seem—”

  I had thought that I was broad-minded, and instead it might have been Father speaking. “Couldn’t he stop being a dentist and turn into a doctor?”

  “I’ve asked him that,” Mary said. “He wants to be a dentist. Harry, he’s awfully proud.”

  “Well, it’s a hell of a life,” I said.

  “Now you’re being nice,” said Mary. “You’re really awfully nice.”

  Sometimes I have wondered whether Mr. Priest did not have a good deal to do with changing the course of my life. He was not in the least peculiar, and was the first person I ever saw who was obsessed with a scientific interest, but I have never been able to see why he wanted to be mixed up with incisors and molars. Yet I could not help being fascinated when he talked of the dental development of primitive man and the dental degeneracy of the human race, and since then I have read of the studies he made with certain eminent anthropologists. Roger Priest finally turned into quite a distinguished person. As soon as I saw him I knew that it would be just as well for Mary to see as little of him as possible. He was much too good-looking and amusing.

  Though I have often tried to blame the Priest affair for keeping me at home—and he was the only person who could listen intelligently when I talked about soap and suspenders—there were all sorts of other details. Mother and Mary depended on me too much for me to leave them, and then there was the problem of what to do about Westwood—whether we could continue to live there after the estate was settled or whether it would not be better to sell, and then there was Father’s property in the Northwest Wharf and Warehouse, in which I was made a director. Someone had to represent the family’s holdings. There were dozens of similar complications that seemed to wind around me, but I can think of them all as excuses now and none of them as real reasons why I stayed. I stayed because I was meant to stay.

  One afternoon when I was in the customers’ room at Smith and Wilding, looking over the news service reports, Mr. Wilding called me into his office.

  “How did Motors close?” he asked.

  “Strong, sir,” I said. “Up two points.”

  It was just as though I had never been away from Smith and Wilding.

  “All right,” said Mr. Wilding. “Tell them to give you a desk inside the rail.”

  “But I’m not working here, sir,” I said.

  “No,” Mr. Wilding said, “but you need a desk downtown. When you go out find the bootblack for me. He’s late.”

  First I had a desk, and then it seemed to me that everyone in the office took it for granted that I’d be sitting at it. Although nothing was said about employment, I kept going down there more and more, because I did not like to stay all day in the house and because it was easier to make appointments downtown. Then I began seeing everyone I used to know, running into them out on the street or at lunch, and the strange part of it was that a lot of them never seemed to realize that I had been away at all.

  Then I began making dates to play squash at the Club, and looking up people—all my friends who were married and who were living in apartments.

  I wrote to Marvin Myles one afternoon toward the end of January, from my desk at Smith and Wilding, on the Smith and Wilding stationery.

  It’s funny [I wrote], to be writing you, because you seem to be right here with me—right here at the desk where all the tickers are going and Mr. Wilding is looking out at me, drinking his glass of milk. I can’t stand not seeing you, but the way things are going I’m not able to get away, even for a day, and so I’m going to ask you something. I’ve always wanted you to see it here. We’ve talked about it so much. How would it be if you and Bill came up next week end? There’s lots of room and I can show you everything.

  I knew that she would understand about having Bill, since it would look more natural and casual.

  I told Mother what I had done when I came home that afternoon, adding it to all the other pieces of news that I usually gave her.

  “By the way, I’ve asked Bill up for the week end, and a friend of ours, a girl named Marvin Myles.”

  “Why, that’s splendid, dear,” Mother said. “It’s time that you began seeing people. You might take them to Westwood on Sunday. Who is Marvin Myles? I’ve never heard you speak of her.”

  “Just a friend of Bill’s and mine,” I said. “Mary’s met her.”

  XXI

  Good-by to All That

  Now and then, even as late as 1920, it was not difficult to hear someone humming “Where Do We Go from Here?”

  Songs like that used to have a way of running through my head for days at a time, falling into rhythm with my footsteps and actions, as this one did while I waited at the Back Bay Station for Bill and Marvin Myles.

  “Where do we go from here?” I was humming. “Anywhere from Harlem to a Jersey City pier.” The limits set by that song could not be measured by the words. They were like the limits of the known and the unknown world. Columbus might have sung it aboard the Santa Maria, and the truth is you are always going somewhere, even if it’s only to hell in a hack.

  It was hard to tell what car they would be in, downstairs in the Back Bay Station where the train paused for the shortest possible time. I was wondering what Marvin would be wearing and what she would look like when I saw her.

  “Anywhere from Harlem,” I was humming, “to a Jersey City pier.”

  Then I saw the light of the engine and I heard the bell, the light and the sound growing larger every second until they were all around me in a way which used to frighten me when I was young. Then the engine moved past with a hiss of steam and the firebox glowing, and then the baggage car and then the dining car, and then the whole place was full of steam and sulphurous smoke, and the porters were running and the doors were opening and the baggage was coming out. I saw Bill King down at the end of the platform, and then I saw Marvin getting off and speaking to him. She would be saying that it was dirty, but she looked as clean and brushed as though she had never been out of New York. She looked so much better than anybody else that I wondered how she had ever come on account of me. Bill saw me, and then Marvin was staring through the smoke as I ran toward her. Then right there in front of Bill and everyone on the platform she kissed me, threw her arms around me and held me tight.

  “Darling,” she said, “you look like a Teddy bear.”

  There was something definite about being kissed there on the station platform in front of Bill. I found myself wondering if anyone else could have seen me, and then I thought it did not really matter.

  “Did you have a good trip?” I asked.

  “Fine,” said Bill. “Boy, you’re looking fine.”

  Marvin squeezed my arm.

  “You look just the same,” she said. “Are you?”

  “Of course I am,” I answered.

  “Wel
l, where do we go from here?” she said.

  “Where do we go from here?” I repeated. “Anywhere from Harlem to a Jersey City pier.”

  “Come on,” said Bill. “Let’s push out of this. Oh, joy, oh, boy! Where do we go from here?”

  I saw people looking at us and I realized that we were making a good deal of noise. I saw Patrick take a quick look at Marvin when he stood by the door of the car holding the robe. Then inside the car Marvin linked her arm through mine again and I held her hand under the robe and we were all laughing and talking. Bill was explaining Boston to Marvin, pointing out the Library and Trinity Church. I had a feeling that we were all talking a little too much, as though we were afraid that something might happen if we did not all have something to say. I had thought so often of bringing Marvin home.

  “Will Hugh be waiting up?” she asked.

  “Of course he will,” I said.