Those Harper Women (24 page)

Then, a few days later, her mother said, “I am considering inviting Mrs. Blakewell to tea.”

“Oh, Mama!” Edith said. “Why do you put yourself up against such things?”

“Against what things?”

“Against the humiliation of having her turn you down flat, in the most snubbing way possible.”

“Hmm. Is that what you think will happen?”

“I know it will happen.”

“She may need me more than I need her,” her mother said with a cryptic look.

“Nonsense. I'll make you a wager that she never even acknowledges.”

Her mother considered this. “Very well, what do you wager?”

“My pearl necklace.”

“No, I won't wager you that. I'll make you a ladylike wager of one dollar. I'll wager you one dollar that she not only accepts, but accepts rather promptly, and that by the end of our tea she has asked me to call her Nancy.”

“Dream on, Mama.”

“Because her son, you see, has already accepted my invitation for the weekend.”

“What?”

“Charles Blakewell is coming to Morristown to visit us the weekend after next. After that weekend, my invitation will go out to his mother.”

“Why did you ask him here?”

“For you, of course. He liked you. He asked you to dance.”

“Mama, will you stop trying to run my life?” Edith had walked out of the room and seized, angrily, her bag of golf clubs from the rack in the hall and walked out the door onto the summer lawn.

Her first ball arced straight and high against the sky and sank far beyond the curve of the lawn. The excellence of the shot had exhilarated her and pushed all her hot anger at her mother into the past. Lugging her clubs, she walked down across the grass, which fell in a series of sloping terraces away from the house, in search of the ball.

When she got to the spot, behind a clump of poplars, where she believed the ball had landed and was walking slowly, poking with her club through the taller grass that grew there, she all at once found herself staring down upon—indeed, almost stepping upon—the prone figure of a man lying in the grass, and she screamed.

He rolled over immediately and sat up. Her first impression of him was that he looked very rough and unshaven, wearing a faded blue shirt and denim trousers, and that he must be a tramp or drunk who had wandered onto the place. She dropped her bag of clubs, and began to run.

But he called after her, “Are you Edith?”

She stopped and looked back at him. He was standing now, and smiling. “Are you Edith?” he said again. And there was something in the way he pronounced her name that made her guess that this must be the Frenchman who, with his wife, she had been told, had been given quarters in the gatehouse.

“Are you Papa's Frenchman?” she asked him.

He laughed, stooped and picked up her golf bag, and walked toward her. “I am Louis Bertin,” he said.

“How do you do,” Edith said, and the formality of her words sounded foolishly hollow there in the tall grass. “Yes, I'm Edith.”

“I startled you.”

“And I startled you,” she said, “—Monsieur.”

He yawned. “I was taking a nap. I'm a very lazy man. May I carry this bag for you?”

They started back up across the grass toward the house. He was a small man, scarcely taller than she, but wirily built. He slung her gold bag over his shoulder with ease and hooked an arm through the strap. He was, she guessed, in his middle or late thirties, but his step was springy and youthful, and his face was altogether extraordinary. It was a face that was somehow instantly familiar, and yet totally strange to her—a thin, almost sallow face, with heavy-lidded gray eyes. His cheekbones were high and prominent and he was not, she saw now, ill-shaven, but his cheeks were hollow and dark. It was an ascetic face, a monkish face.

“I was looking for my ball,” she said. “But I guess it's gone for good.”

“Where did you shoot from?”

“Up there, from the edge of the terrace,” she pointed.

“Not a bad shot. You're not a bad golfer.”

“I'm sorry my instructor couldn't see it. If I tell her about it, she won't believe it. Are you comfortable in the gatehouse?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “Oh, yes, we are comfortable,” he said.

“What sort of work do you do for my father, Monsieur Bertin?”

“I am his tennis opponent.”

She had laughed. “Tell me the truth!”

He stopped and looked at her curiously, the hooded eyes almost closing. “I play tennis with him,” he said. “That's my job. Your father is a very good tennis player, and so am I. It is important to him to keep up the physical end.”

“Have you always been a tennis player?”

“I have always been a tennis player,” he said, and laughed as though the answer to her question was so obvious she should not have asked it. Then he said, “Your father is good, but there are things I can teach him. And it keeps the wolf from the door. As I say, I am a lazy man.” He gave her a droll look. “But don't tell your father that, Edith.”

They walked on toward the house.

“Well, I hope you're happy in this country,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “But it's lonely here. At times.” At the edge of the terrace, he handed her her bag. “Do you go to school?” he asked her.

“No.”

He looked thoughtful. “Your father is an interesting man,” he said. “In many ways.”

“Well, thank you for carrying my bag. I'm sorry I disturbed your nap.”

He took the hand she offered. “Good-by, Edith,” he said.

She went into the house, thinking what a pleasantly peculiar man Louis Bertin seemed to be, and how odd it was of her father to employ a tennis player—a personal tennis player—to help him keep up “the physical end.” And yet perhaps it was not so odd. After all, her father was a man, she had been gradually discovering, who modeled himself on the behavior, the attitudes, the manners, the values and examples of other people—other men whose successes he admired. The lives of great men were all he read, the only volumes on his library shelves; biographies of United States Presidents, of kings, of generals, of the great American industrialists, the works of Julius Caesar, of Napoleon, of Nietzsche. From all the champions and would-be champions of the world, living and dead, he had culled bits of advice, traits of behavior, and assembled them into the composite that was himself. She put her golf clubs in the rack and paused in the hall, thinking about it. He was nearly fifty years old now. He needed a strong body to contain all the lives he had digested.

Her small brothers were kneeling on the window seat when she came into the house, and now they came running across the hall to her. “You were talking to the Frenchman!” they cried. “We saw you!”

“Yes, what of it?”

“His wife is a witch! A real witch! Fraülein Schiller says so.”

“Did Fraülein Schiller tell you that?”

“Yes!”

“Well, she should be ashamed of herself—and you can tell her I said that. There are no such things as witches, and you know it.”

“But every night in the gatehouse an upstairs light stays on! Late. Sometimes it stays on all night long,” Harold said.

“What does that mean? Lights in this house stay on all night too. It means the Bertins like a night light.”

“It doesn't mean she's a witch and cooking witches' brew?”

“It certainly doesn't. Now run along and stop talking about such things.”

And yet, that night, unable to sleep, Edith got out of bed sometime after three and crossed her room to her window from where there was a distant view of the gatehouse. And, to be sure, there was a single yellow light, flame-colored, between the trees.

Lying in her cool bed in St. Thomas now, reconstructing that other night so many miles and years ago, Edith remembers how she had found a position on her bed from which she could watch that tiny yellow light. Something had come over her since that night on the boat when she had danced with the prince and smoked the Murad—a change, or a determination for a change. She wanted to be wicked. She was ready to be wicked and just looking for a chance to prove to everyone just how wicked she could be. All this she had made her mind up to before meeting Louis Bertin. And now, at last, here he was.

Meanwhile, all the changes in the temper of the times had not gone by her unobserved—only unexperienced. The twentieth century was well under way. Though the technical “emancipation” of women was not to come until more than a decade later, many women were already quite emancipated. That foolish prince, in a queer way, had emancipated her. It was the year Alice Lloyd was singing “Stockings on the Line” and “Never Introduce Your Bloke to a Lady Friend,” and Blossom Seeley was shouting “Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey!” and Eva Tanguay was bouncing around, showing her legs, and singing “I Don't Care.” Everybody was “Doing the Toledo” and having dance marathons, and young men in Morristown were showing that they were on the
qui vive
by calling, “Oh, Lady, Lady!” and “Hot Dawg!” and “You ain't heard nothin' yet!” to each other, and Lillian Russell was a has-been. All these things Edith had heard, and observed, and read about, and was ready to know more about. And Doctor Freud was a figure in her generation too, a fact Leona—who considers him her generation's exclusive property—would have a hard time comprehending.

She had danced with a prince and smoked a Murad, and the prince had said he would like to have an adventure with her. Edith had examined herself. Though she might not be beautiful, she had decided that she was certainly attractive. Besides, there were other qualities that appealed to a man besides a pretty exterior. Wisdom. Companionship of the mind. Humor. Usefulness. Sensitivity. Most of all, she had decided that she was sensitive. Wickedness and sensitivity, it seemed to her, did not need to cancel each other out. She could possess both. Her eyes, whenever she opened them wide before her mirror, hinted at dark pools of feeling underneath, pools of sympathy and understanding and passion. Couldn't a man know that here at last was a woman who could share his innermost thoughts, his hopes and fears? “Somehow, I always knew” he would say to her, “that somewhere in the world there had to be a woman like you, Edith.” And there she was, quietly waiting, grown up since Andreas—grateful to him, almost, perhaps (“If you'd been strong you wouldn't have gone!” she had begun to tell him sternly), for having lifted her to this new plateau from which she could view the world both cynically and serenely.

How quickly he had begun calling her Edith. That monkish face was a poetic face, with something dark, a little sullen around the corners of the mouth, a little broody around the hooded eyes, a face that spoke to her of suffering as she lay on her bed and looked out the window at his light; of suffering and longing. Methodically, she erased from her mind all the trivial things he had actually said. (“Do you go to school?”) Those words were camouflage for his secret thoughts. Across the dark night she made him be thinking of her, asking himself: Why didn't I dare speak to her of what I really thought? Was it because she seemed so aloof and rare? Was it simply because I work for her father, and live in the gatehouse while she lives in the big house on the hill? Could the impossible ever be possible—that she would care for me?

“Lover,” she whispered aloud. “Ah, lover!” And he answered her, and tomorrow, strolling in the poplars or wherever he strolled, perhaps he would meet a man friend, and perhaps her name would come up, as perhaps it often did among men (perhaps he would be the one to bring it up), and perhaps the man friend would look at him quizzically, and Louis Bertin would turn his head away quickly, abashed, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, by the agony of his desire. She had slept on that thought like a pillow.

Edith Blakewell smiles now, remembering. Wasn't it wonderful to be young? Wonderful and terrible?

The air-conditioned cocktail lounge of the Virgin Isle Hotel is doing a good business, and little low lamps glow from the centers of little low tables. The music is New Yorky, fast and slick. But Arch and Leona have found a table outside, on the open terrace, where only the fringes of the music reach them.

“You've told me a lot about husbands one and two,” Arch says, “but not a word about number three.”

“Edouardo.”

“Yes.”

“When I fell in love with Edouardo—” she begins. (Love? Was it love? No. And it is certainly not true, as a friend of hers suggested afterward, that she had wanted to save him—save him from his … affliction … whatever you wanted to call it. Saving him had not entered her thoughts at all. Many women adjusted themselves to the idea that their husbands slept with other women. Many women too, she supposes, can adjust themselves to the idea that their husbands sleep with other men. Which is harder to adjust to? It doesn't matter, neither is easy.)

“When that happened,” she continues, “Gordon insisted on having the Scott Fitzgerald scene. That's what Eddie Winslow called it when I told him about it. It's the scene where the girl and the girl's husband and the girl's new boy friend sit down and talk the situation over. ‘I think the three of us should sit down and talk this over, Leona,' Gordon said. ‘After all, we're all three mature human beings, not emotional children.' So we sat down to talk it over. It was funny—it
would
have been funny if it hadn't been so bizarre. Poor Gordon doesn't speak any Spanish, you see, and Edouardo—
he
didn't want to have this get-together, of course—he got so nervous he forgot all his English! Gordon would say things like ‘I understand, sir, that you have formed a strong attachment to my wife, and that my wife has formed a strong attachment to you, and that the two of you are considering marriage.' And Edouardo would just say ‘
Que? Que?
' It was—unbelievable. I tried being interpreter for a while. Finally I couldn't stand it any more. I ran out and left them there—those two mature human beings, bumbling along, each one trying to figure out what the other was talking about. Jimmy, at least, bless his heart, would never have insisted on making a scene like that.”