Those Harper Women (11 page)

Then, perhaps, Edith sleeps. For she is all at once skating—skating arm in arm with Diana across a high, shimmering lake. The wind makes them laugh and they twirl like children on their skates. Then smoothly Harold glides toward them and takes Diana away on his arm. “I'm in charge, Edith,” he says. “You're not in charge!” she cries, and her eyes fly open in the dark bedroom, and she knows that she will not sleep again.

“And so, then, for a few weeks, I sat in New York doing the telephone bit,” Leona is saying, her bare arm trailing out the open window of the car, in the wind, as the car climbs slowly up into the dark hills. “‘Hello! How are
you?
I'm fine. Don't you know who this
is?
It's me, Leona—yes, it's
me!
Well, I'm fine.… Yes, I'm divorced, you heard right. Happy? Oh Lord, but I'm happy. Well … we really ought to see more of each other, it's been so long. Yes, we must get together, Will, Harry, Oscar, Mike, whatever your name is—we really must. Oh, yes, I'll be here for a while—I guess! Well … why don't you call me one of these days? Yes, I'm in the book. No, I'm not unlisted any more.
Yes
. I'm
listed
. Yes … well, it's been nice talking to you. Good-by.' You hang up. Then you pick up the phone again and call another old number, another old friend, and try again. ‘Hello! How are
you …?
' It's known as the telephone bit, as trying to get yourself back in circulation, and it's not a great deal of fun.”

Beside her he says, “You're a nice-looking girl. Hell, you're actually beautiful. I should think a lot of guys—”

“There was always Eddie Winslow, my old reliable. Tonight he—”

“Tonight he what?”

“Never mind. I'm talking too much. Anyway, it was then, after doing the telephone bit for a while, that I suddenly thought—dear God, there's got to be something
else
. And then I thought, yes, something else like an art gallery. Something to
do.
”

His hand falls on her knee, just lightly enough so that it could be accidental. “I see,” he says.

“And so, after about three weeks of going to every gallery in town and living on a diet of tiger's milk and peanut-butter sandwiches, I decided to come down here, to Granny's, and finish making all my plans.”

“And fate threw us together.”

“Yes,” she says. And then, pointing, “That's the house—ahead on your right. That big stone gate.”

He stops the car in front of the gate, switches off the headlights, and turns to her across the darkness. “You feel better now?”

“Oh, much.”

“You see? Old Doc Purdy's home cure really works.”

She laughs, her hand on the handle of the door. “Thanks,” she says. “And I'm sorry you had to use it.”

“It was my pleasure. You just had a little too much of great-granddaddy's rum on an empty stomach. You see, I'm not such an s.o.b. after all.”

“No, I guess you're not.”

“Where are you going now?”

“Inside, up the stairs, and into my little bed.”

“Going to ask me in?”

“I can't, Arch. Granny's home.” She opens the car door and slides out across the leather seat.

“Hey—wait a sec.”

Closing the door, she leans in through the open window. “What?”

“Haven't you forgotten something?” He opens the door on his side, gets out, and walks around the car toward her.

Leona checks for her bag and gloves. “What is it?”

He starts up the walk toward the gate.

“You can't come in. Honestly. It's awfully late, and Granny's—”

“I'd just like to take a look at this place.”

She hesitates. In the darkness she cannot see his face. “Well—you can come into the garden, but just for a minute. But not in the house.”

She unlocks the gate with a key on a velvet ribbon.

“This is quite a place,” he says.

“It's one of the last of the big old places. And when Granny goes—”

He moves after her through the dark garden where, lying on the dry grass, someone has left a set of lawn bowls. “Ouch!” he says, as his foot strikes one of the bowls.

“Ssh! Granny's sleeping.”

“You really care about this old lady, don't you?”

“Once, years ago, she did something awfully kind for me. That's enough, isn't it?”

“Yes,” he says. “That's always enough.” His arm circles her waist, and he pulls her to him.

Arching her back against the pressure of his hand she faces him across the darkness and shakes her head very rapidly back and forth. “No,” she says. “Please, no. There's nothing for you here. There's nothing for anybody. I'm sorry. Please—”

But he continues to hold her and then, his other hand cupping the back of her head, he pulls, rather roughly, her face to his and presses his mouth against hers.

Mutely, while he kisses her, she goes on shaking her head, back and forth, keeping her body rigidly stiff and her lips unyielding. And, for some queer reason, she is now thinking for the second time today of Edouardo Para-Diaz. She had banished him to the moon, but he would not stay put. What was his one kind thing? She tries to remember. Her mind fills with the doorways of the villa at Alcalá de Chisvert, and he enters through the Moorish archway, a figure slim and emphatic in his white shirt and tight black trousers. He stands there, and all the other details immediately supply themselves: the purple Mediterranean air, the juniper-scented wind, mimosa and talisman roses in a gold bowl on the piano by the door, the sour-plum tree outside the window, the rustle of waves on the beach. Neither of them is aware any longer of the man who is kissing Leona. Edouardo stands there, smirking at her, but he will not speak.

Edith has heard voices in the garden, and gotten out of bed and gone to a window. What she sees, in a very unsatisfactory glimmer of moonlight that comes through the trees, is Leona in her pale flowered dress, and a thick-set man in a blue blazer and white canvas trousers. The man is unfamiliar to her; it is certainly not Mr. Winslow. They move about the garden, where the lawn bowls have been left out, scattered in all directions on the grass. Edith hears Leona whisper something, and the man puts his arm around her, pulling her to him. Edith does not want to watch, but does watch, and the man kisses her while Leona stands very still, her arms at her sides, her head tipped backward.

Now a few more words pass between them, and the man releases Leona. She begins walking up and down and back and forth, slowly across the grass, between the scattered lawn bowls. She seems totally intent on this odd task, weaving a path in and out among the bowls. She moves gracefully and silently, without pausing. The mood between them has changed.

“What're you doing, buddy?” Edith hears him ask her.

“It's a game. Don't you know this game? It's called go in and out the windows. You go in, and you go out. See? In … and out. And you mustn't touch—”

“You know,” the man says, “you're a cool girl. But just don't let yourself turn into an iceberg. Watch out for that.”

But she does not acknowledge hearing this remark, and continues her slow, zigzagging path. The breeze smells of dew, and the night smells of nicotiana and jasmine, and in the middle of all that dark and scented tropic quiet, Edith thinks of the streets of large cities in the icy cold, of newspapers and crumpled Kleenex blowing through the canyons between old buildings, of the steamed windows and smoky lights of restaurants with the smell of beer emanating from their doorways, of empty apartments in the reflected glare of street lamps. Oh, what will become of her? she thinks. She sees the man turn quickly and walk out of the garden. She hears the gate close behind him, and his car start and drive away. Leona is alone.

Then, as Edith watches, Leona does a strange thing. She suddenly falls to her knees on the lawn and, bending over, her dark hair tumbling across her face, she digs the fingers of both hands hard into the dry grass. Clutching and pulling at the grass she rips up two handfuls, then lets them fall. Then her fingers claw and tear at the grass again, pulling it up by the roots, clenching it in two more small hysterical fistfuls, then scattering the grass, with a sob, again.

Edith puts her hands on the sill and calls softly out to her. “Leona—come to bed now.”

Leona sits dead still, then lifts her head. Her hair falls back and her pale face looks up at Edith. “Why are you spying on me?” she cries. “Why can't you leave me alone? Why can't everybody leave me alone?”

Five

Edith Blakewell returns to her bed in the dark room, a convicted spy. But you have always been a spy, she reminds herself: always. The electric clock, its hands respectfully bowed at half past three, purrs on her bedside table and emits a faint, sulphurous glow. Looking at the clock, Edith is suddenly presented with an astonishing thought—astonishing because it is cheap and unworthy and yet, like all unpleasant things, there is something fascinating about it. She toys with this nasty, charming notion. Suppose she told Leona she is dying?

Could she, she wonders, bring herself to employ a trick like that? And yet, if she did, wouldn't Leona at least be willing to talk to her a little, open up to her a little? Wouldn't Leona come to her, take her in her arms, and say, and be—And be what?

“And become my property again.” Is that the answer? No. “And come to your senses, young lady, and start acting your age.”

Spying
was the word Leona used. Years ago, with her father's old field glasses slung over her shoulder, Edith would go for long walks up Signal Hill, on the pretext of bird-watching but sometimes to meddle, vicariously, in the affairs of her household. She would perch herself on a flat rock on the hillside, and survey the house down there among the coconut palms and the sea-grapes: Nellie, at the kitchen door—past sixty, poor thing, but still with the faith of a girl in her charms—flirting with a grocery boy, often letting him kiss her passionately and touch her intimately, sometimes asking him in. Or she would watch Cyrus, an old man now and now one of her gardeners, put down his trowel and stretch out on his back under a tree, scratching his stomach with a slow, disinterested hand. Or, for a change of scene, she would train the glasses on her bedroom windows to watch her laundress tiptoe in, open the cedar closet, and take Edith's stone marten cape off its hanger and put it on, dancing and posing with it barefoot in front of the pier glass.

She did not always spy. Sometimes she would simply watch the sea, and the huge clumsy pelicans rising from the water and curving through the sky like boomerangs, and the ducks rocking on the waves in the lagoons, and the pigeons, at dusk, rising from their feeding-places in the woods to their nests in the mangrove trees. And once, turning her glasses from the birds to survey the harbor, she had suddenly seen the Frenchman, Louis Bertin. He was sitting on the pier of the old West India Company coaling wharf, smoking one of his small cigars. She could see Louis in every detail; the thin nose, the hooded gray eyes. Then a curious thing happened. He raised his head, shaded his eyes with one hand, and looked directly at Edith. With a gasp, she lowered the glasses. He was now invisible; she could barely make out the outlines of the coaling sheds. But when she raised the glasses again his eyes still met hers, and their look had been so exact, so appraising, that she couldn't believe that he was not watching her, though it could not have been possible. At the time, the experience unsettled her. It was as though there was no such thing as privacy, no places where snoops such as she could hide.

But about two months before Leona arrived Edith had a fall. The fall frightened her more than anything Alan Osborn has told her about what is going on inside her, and the fall did not happen, thank goodness, or a hillside but in her own house. A perfectly ordinary and familiar little Oriental runner that extends from her bedroom to her bathroom door suddenly and without warning betrayed her, and moved. That was it. The rug moved. She lay for a number of minutes on the floor where she had fallen, certain that her hip was broken, and seeing with dreadful clarity the brittleness of the bones that held her poor body together. Then, when she decided that the hip was perhaps not broken, she got to her feet and managed to get to a chair where she sat, feeling ill. She never mentioned the fall to Alan or to anyone else, even though, in the weeks after it, the most she could do was move painfully from chair to chair, and the stairs presented a twice-daily Everest, down in the morning, up at night. Now, whenever she approaches the treacherous rug, she stares at it. She has not moved it, or removed it, since the fall, but she and the rug now eye each other with mutual suspicion and distrust. From an old friend it has become a capricious enemy. Since the fall, there have been no more spying walks with the field glasses.

I spy, she thinks to herself in the dark bedroom, only on what pertains to me, Leona. Furthermore, from spying I always find out something.

There is, she realizes now, a ritual quality to these thoughts of hers; she has been reciting them to try to figure out exactly what she feels about Leona now, after seeing her down there, on her knees, gouging up the lawn with her fingernails. Edith finds herself mentally walking a very thin line between pity for Leona and indignation. An extremely thin line separates sympathy from exasperation, sorrow from anger. Edith is certainly sorry that Leona had a bad time of it with her last husband, and she is sure that getting a divorce has its harrowing side. But plenty of other people get divorces and manage to survive; movie stars get divorces the way other people get colds. For Leona to be upset is one thing; for her to give in to emotional self-indulgence is quite another. We Harpers, Edith reminds herself, do not succumb to moods and melancholy like that because our roots reach down into hard, dry West Indies soil, and our hides have been toughened by the endless sunshine, which is why we—we Harper women, especially—are long-lived. Yes, she has a good mind to tell Leona this. We Harper women, allowing for exceptions, are not softies. We do not dissolve to jelly at a crisis. Our flesh may ache, but it doesn't tremble. We do not let down the side, even when we are all alone. We endure the pain rather than swallow the pill. “The tropics do strange things to some people,” she remembers her father saying. “But not to the strong. Only to the weak.”