H. M. Pulham, Esquire

by John P. Marquand

  “What have you got in there?” I asked.

  “Spiders,” Gladys said.

  “Well, let them out,” I said. “We’ve got enough to bother with without a lot of spiders.”

  Gladys looked as though she were about to cry.

  “It’s part of my Natural History,” she said.

  I wished that Kay were there.

  “All right,” I said, “but don’t tell your mother.”

  I never knew a boy who could sleep like George. I had to shake him and half pull him out of bed and then he began to complain. He said it was raining. I told him I didn’t give a damn if it was—he ought to get used to taking it. I told him it was like the war; it always rained in the war.

  “But we’re not going to the war,” George said. “We’re going to Boston.”

  “Never mind,” I said. “It’s like the war to me.”

  I had always believed in assuming that a motor trip with the children would be pretty bad, but actually that trip was worse. I was stopped by a state trooper outside of Portland and then Gladys was sick. I picked up a nail outside of Saco and had to get out and change the tire. I tried to be nice to the children, but they began to wear me down. They began playing alphabet games and picking letters off the signs; then, when Gladys went to sleep, George began telling of his social triumphs among his own contemporaries. I tried to be as nice as I could about it. The one thing I wanted was to get to Boston and to get a hot bath and a drink, but I kept telling myself that I was fond of the children.

  “When are we going to have lunch?” Gladys kept asking.

  “Yes,” George kept saying, “when are we going to get lunch? There’s a Dixie stand.… There’s a Tootsie stand.… Let’s have lunch at Joe’s Place.… Let’s have lunch at Daddy and Ann’s.… Let’s have some fried clams. Say, boss, don’t you want some nice fried clams?”

  In the slightly fetid air of the closed car, the thought of fried clams made me ill.

  “We’ll be at home in time for you to get something there,” I said.

  “Oh, gosh almighty,” George shouted, “we don’t want to eat at home.”

  “Don’t yell at me,” I shouted back. “You’ll eat at home and like it.”

  We got home at half-past twelve, still in the driving rain. I was wet from changing the tire and I was tired. The first thing to do was to get the children inside, then to unload the car. I found my keys and opened the front door, and when I did so, I felt a great sense of peace. I seemed to have been through a good deal and now life could begin again, the steady, sensible life of autumn and winter. Tomorrow I would be back at the office and I could start in again with squash. The house was fresh and clean, solid and comfortable. Ellen hurried into the hall.

  “Why, Mr. Pulham,” she said, “we didn’t expect you till evening.”

  “We started early,” I said. “It’s a great idea to get it over with.”

  Gladys was running upstairs quickly with her spiders before anyone could see them. I was telling George to take Bitsey around the corner. Ellen was saying there wasn’t any food in the house. Then I heard Kay calling down the stairs.

  “Harry,” she called, “why on earth did you come so early? Why didn’t you call up?”

  Her voice was sharp. I suppose I should have called her up. When I hurried upstairs, Kay was in the hall in front of the living room.

  “I had a hell of a time,” I said. “We picked up a nail outside of Saco and then Gladys was sick.”

  “Well, you might have telephoned,” Kay said. “Bill’s here.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Bill’s here,” Kay said. “He was just going to take me to the Ritz.”

  Then Bill came out of the parlor, and I was awfully glad to see him.

  “Why, Bill,” I said, “where did you drop from?”

  Bill smiled.

  “I’m indispensable,” he said. “When the boys need me, I just drop everything. Harvard—rah-rah—Harvard!”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “The Play Committee,” Bill said. “The Twenty-fifth Reunion. Our old friend Bo-jo Brown, he got me.”

  “Bo-jo?” I repeated. “Bo-jo said he didn’t want you.”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” Bill said, “but he wants me now.”

  Then Kay was speaking.

  “It’s pretty nice of Bill to come away up for that,” she said.

  “Why, yes,” I said, “it’s wonderful. It’s mighty good of you, Bill, to give them the time.”

  “Somebody had to do it,” Bill said. “Who else could they get? What are you laughing about?”

  “And you always said the Class gave you a pain!” I said. Just seeing Bill there had made me laugh.

  “Harry,” Kay said, “Bill and I were going out to lunch. It’s sort of mean of us running away, but you didn’t telephone.”

  “Oh, that’s all right,” I said. “You go ahead and I’ll take the kids out somewhere and then we can all have dinner, can’t we?”

  “Harry,” Kay said, “what are you laughing at?”

  “I just can’t get over it,” I said, “Bill’s getting himself roped into the Reunion!”

  I stopped, because Kay looked at me. It was one of those looks that meant that she would take up what I had said sometime later and would ask me how I could possibly have been so rude and stupid. I stopped, though I could not see what on earth I had said that was disturbing, except that I may have sounded a little forced and flat, because I was overtired and wet. Nevertheless, when I looked at Bill, I knew that I had certainly put my foot in it. I had always thought that Bill was able to stand a lot of good-natured give and take, and I had never minded—indeed, I had rather liked it—when Bill used to put me over the jumps in front of Kay. Yet Bill had a peculiar expression, not exactly annoyed, but as though he were really worried about what I might say next, when all I had done was to intimate that Bill was not particularly loyal to his Class. I still could not see what was wrong with it, since Bill had gone out of his way for nearly twenty years to make gibes at class spirit and at all our classmates who tried to do their part in making things go when we got together. It all made me feel confused, as though I had not come into my house at all, but into someone else’s.

  “What have I done now?” I asked.

  Then Bill laughed, as though he had seen the joke for the first time.

  “All you’ve done is get home in time for lunch,” he said. “You’re coming with us, aren’t you?”

  It was all right as soon as Bill began to laugh.

  “No, no,” I said, “you go ahead. Somebody’s got to feed the kids and I’ve got to get the things out of the car. I’ll take them somewhere down the street. No, no, you and Kay go ahead.”

  “You don’t think it’s mean of us, do you?” Kay asked.

  Making so much of going out to lunch began to make me a little impatient. I did not see why Bill and Kay seemed to be underlining everything, as though we weren’t old friends.

  “Of course it isn’t mean of you, Kay,” I said. “Now let’s not bother about it. By the way, I brought the ice-cream freezer. It’s tied on in back.”

  “What ice-cream freezer?” Kay asked.

  It surprised me that she seemed to have forgotten all about the ice-cream freezer, when we had been all over it only three days before.

  “What ice-cream freezer?” I repeated. “Why, the ice-cream freezer, that one we argue about every year. You don’t mean to say you’ve forgotten all about it?”

  “Oh!” Kay said, and she looked as though she remembered. “That was awfully sweet of you, darling. Did you all have a good time while I was away?”

  “No,” I said. “Come back pretty soon, won’t you? The kids are sort of getting in my hair. I don’t see how women stand it.”

  “You’re sure you don’t mind?” Bill said.

  “Mind?” I repeated. “Haven’t I been telling you, Bill, I don’t mind? I think it’s swell! You can have the car as soon
as I take the things out—and give Kay a good lunch. She deserves it.”

  “I’ll help you unload the car,” Bill said.

  It was nice of him to offer to do it, because Bill had never cared much about useful manual labor and he had on a navy blue pinstriped suit all nicely pressed.

  “Oh, no,” I said, “this isn’t your funeral. You’re not married.”

  Then I knew I’d said something else that was dull. I had completely forgotten that Elise was out at Reno and I hadn’t meant it that way.

  “Boy,” Bill told me, “that’s the truest thing you ever said. I am less and less married every minute.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Bill,” I said, and then I saw Kay watching me again.

  “Harry,” Kay said, “I wish you wouldn’t always bear down on everything. Bill, you don’t have to help him really. He’ll get everything out of the car in just a minute, and Harry knows where everything belongs. Harry loves to pack and unpack cars.”

  That was what Kay always said when someone else was around. She always said that Harry would love to do it. She was always telling Mrs. Jones or somebody not to let the hired man carry down the trunk or not to let the maid pick up the broken pieces of the goldfish bowl—that Harry would love to do it. She told me once that it was all unconscious on her part, that she only wanted people to see how nice I was. I went downstairs and opened the front door.

  “Ellen,” I called, “where’s Master George?”

  She didn’t know. He had gone away somewhere, which was not strange, because George always faded out when there was any work. I asked her where the chore-man was, but he was not around anywhere either. I had never known him to be, when anything really had to be done—but after all, I had not telephoned.

  I put on my raincoat and my hat and went out to the car. First I unlocked the luggage compartment and hauled out all the suitcases, finally getting into the rhythm of walking from the car and up and down the steps. I piled the suitcases in the hall and then I barked my knuckles on the ice-cream freezer. Then I hauled out a box of assorted canned goods, most of which we had brought up with us five months before, because Kay always wanted to have something in the house in case people dropped in unexpectedly. Then I lifted out a cardboard box, filled with half-empty tins of baking powder and spices and condiments which had been cleaned off the kitchen shelves. I had suggested to Kay that it might be just as well to leave them for Mrs. Meigs, but Kay had said we could use them ourselves—that we ought to try to save money. Halfway across the sidewalk, the bottom fell out of the box, and I had to spend several minutes gathering tins up in my arms. Even when I had finished, the sidewalk was covered with salt and cloves and cocktail wafers. Then I got out my account books and Kay’s box of jewelry and George’s radio and Gladys’ microscope and Bitsey’s rubber bone and comb and brush, two boxes of candles, an enema bag, a motion-picture projector, one rubber, a sneaker and three bars of Old Lavender toilet soap. George came up from somewhere down cellar.

  “Where in thunder have you been?” I asked. “Why didn’t you help me unload the car?”

  “Oh,” George said, “were you unloading the car, boss? I didn’t know it.”

  “Just who did you think was going to do it?” I asked. “What have you been doing?”

  “I was just down trying to find my electric train,” George said. “Say, boss, can we go somewhere to get hamburgers?”

  I did not answer his question. Instead, I called up the stairs.

  “Kay,” I called, “the car’s all ready now.”

  Kay came down, in a new coat, with fur around the edge, carrying a brand-new handbag. She looked very pretty and not tired at all. I was surprised that she had found time to do any shopping. Bill followed her. He might have been coming out of a club car after the porter had brushed him.

  “Fast work, boy!” Bill said. “You certainly brought everything except the kitchen stove.”

  “Harry,” Kay said, “what have you done to your face?”

  “What’s the matter with my face?” I asked her.

  “It’s all grease and black,” Kay said. “You’ve been rubbing your face with your hands.”

  Bill laughed.

  “Spit on your handkerchief and take it off,” he said.

  “Say, Mother,” George said, “when do we eat?”

  “Your father will take you out in just a minute, dear,” Kay said, “and Uncle Bill and I will be back pretty soon. We won’t be gone long, Harry,” and then they were gone.

  “Hey, boss,” George said, “when do we eat?”

  “When we get cleaned up,” I told him. “Now go upstairs and get washed and tell Gladys to get washed.”

  Now that I had arrived, with the car unpacked, North Harbor and the summer were slipping out of focus and blending in with all the summers I had known, and the reality of winter picked me up bodily in its arms. I had a comfortable sense that everything in the hall was in its place. The mirror, the table and the chairs were all fresh and clean, and exactly where they should be. Ellen was already arranging the silver on the sideboard in the dining room—Mother’s teaset in the center, ornate and overdecorated, on either side the two enormous bonbonnières that used to be on the dining room table in Marlborough Street, and in the back the candelabra and the two knifecases. The decanters were on the low serving table beneath the portrait of Kay’s grandfather, old Colonel Motford who fought in the Civil War, and between them was the silver pheasant. I was glad to see that the landscape by Henry Inman, which my grandfather had bought, was back from the gallery, freshly cleaned and varnished. Kay used to say that it was about the most stuffy dining room that anyone could find, that it was like living in someone else’s shell; and this was why she had bought the Chinese screen and had put in light curtains, to try and brighten it up. I saw it all in a single glance, the way you see rooms that you know.

  The stair carpet was very badly worn. It was one of those furnishings which we were going to change when the children grew up, but I was glad to see that it was all tacked tight. Up in the secondfloor hall, the wall paper was dingy. No matter how often Kay and I had told George and Gladys, they always rubbed their hands over it. But the parlor looked splendid. Kay called it our only successful room, for somehow all the possessions we had bought and inherited fitted together. The Persian rug, which came from Kay’s mother, was not too large for it and it went well with the Motford armchairs.

  The Inness was over the fireplace, a restful canvas of hazy, rolling country. As long as I could remember, Mother and Father had talked about the Inness and it was the only item from the house in Marlborough Street over which Mary and I had argued. We finally had agreed to match for it, three times out of five. The brasses in the fireplace were all freshly shined. The secretary desk that came from the Motfords was waxed and so was Kay’s piano, a baby grand. Neither of us was musical, but Kay always said that no room looked well without a piano—so there it was, for Gladys to practise on at two in the afternoon.

  There were fresh flowers in the boxes by the windows—cyclamen, ferns and begonias. It was really Kay’s room more than mine. Even with Kay out of it, I thought of her walking back and forth in it arranging this and that. The cushions on the chairs and sofas were all neatly plumped out and dusted, except for the sofa near the fireplace, where Kay and Bill must have been sitting when I arrived. One of the pillows had fallen on the floor and there were some cigarette ashes on the carpet. The other pillows were all bashed in.

  The library had been cleaned too. As always happened when the cleaning women got at the books, Thackeray was mixed in with Jane Austen and my college textbooks were in with the histories. I would have to straighten them out as soon as I had time, perhaps that afternoon. The flat-topped desk, which Kay had bought me once in England, was covered with all the second-class mail which had accumulated during the summer, mostly charity appeals—for Spanish orphans and blind children and Chinese victims of Japanese aggression and Jewish victims of German aggressio
n and homeless waifs and fallen women and cancer clinics and epileptic clinics. There was never any way to escape from that background of misery, all packed into neat envelopes.

  I actually just walked through the parlor and through the library, only a hasty detour on my way upstairs. Our bedroom was in the front of the house, a large room with comfortable twin beds and a chaise longue which nobody ever used, because Kay hated resting, and a highboy that had come from the Motfords and the bureau that had been my father’s and the dressing table that I had given Kay. All our tastes were mingled there into a sort of compromise. I was the one who had picked out the water carafe on the table between the beds and I had insisted on having two Currier and Ives prints of early locomotives. Kay was the one who had wanted two pastels of flowers in vases and the flowered chintz window curtains that went with the spread.

  Like all the rest of the house, the room was fresh and spotless, silently waiting for Kay and me, although Kay must have slept there. Yet as I looked around, I knew she had not. It was all just as the cleaning women had left it, without any of the little things that Kay always brought with her to change that look. Her silver traveling clock was not on the bedside table. Not even her combs and brushes were on the dressing table. The bag she had taken from North Harbor, the little overnight case I had given her for Christmas the year before last, was not on the chaise longue where she would have tossed it. At first I was only aware of a sterile sort of vacancy. In fact, I did not notice any of this until I had begun to change my clothes. It was just as though someone had played a bar of music that was off key. There was no untidiness—her slippers were not in the closet and her wrapper and dressing gown were not hanging on the hook on the bathroom door. The bathroom was just as impersonal as our bedroom, no toothbrush, no bath salts, no tooth paste. When I knotted my tie in front of the shaving mirror on my bureau I was sure of it. I was the first to come in the room. Kay had not been there.