Those Harper Women (28 page)

“Lord! She can't even
draw!
”

Edith hesitates. “I thought the figure, the nude in the corner, was rather nice …”

Leona laughs. “Well, I suppose it's all right—if you're a raging lesbian like the woman who painted it! Well, I've got to rush, Granny.”

“Now just a minute, Leona!” Edith says sharply. “Sibbie is a very old and dear friend of mine. I won't have you speaking like that about her. Sibbie's just a little mannish, that's all. Now come in here a minute and sit down. There's something I want to discuss with you—an idea I have.”

“Will it wait, Granny?” Leona says. “Please? I really want to go out now and start combing the town for Eddie Winslow. I'm worried. I haven't heard from him. His hotel room doesn't answer.”

“What do you need to see him for? I thought that was all over.”

Leona frowns. “It isn't like him to leave without even calling me to say good-by. I'd just like to find him, to say good-by.”

“And end it on a pleasant note? Well, all right.”

“I won't be late, Granny. But it may be after dinner. We'll talk then.”

“All right,” Edith says.

Leona pauses in the doorway. “You haven't—changed your mind about the gallery, have you, Granny?”

“No,” Edith says carefully. “No, it isn't that.”

“Well, I'll see you later, then.” She blows Edith a kiss, and is gone.

Edith returns to the album pages.

“When Edith was a very little girl,” Edith remembers her mother saying as she held a shell-thin teacup, “I tried to explain to her why it was necessary for us to move to St. Thomas. How old were you then, dear? Seven or eight?” They sat in the drawing room of Mrs. Blakewell's house, a brownstone on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 36th Street. It was not a large room, but it was elegantly furnished, all in pale cream and gold. Ailanthus leaves from the trees on the street outside dappled the windows and created a green shade.

With her teacup poised, Dolly Harper mused. “Let's see, my husband acquired his West Indian sugar interests in ninety-five, and it was a few months after that—yes, Edith would have been about seven, and I tried to explain to her why we had to go, and Edith kept saying, ‘But Mama, why do we have to move? Why do we have to go and live with the Indians?' Indians! Imagine! And I said to her, ‘But Edith dear, your Papa has made a little money in rum, and so we must go to the West Indies to help him make his rum.' And little Edith looked up at me and said—” Dolly Harper made a long face in imitation of the way Edith had looked at her “—and said, ‘Mama, what is rum?' Oh, my! Isn't that a funny story? ‘Mama, what is rum?'” Dolly Harper laughed gaily, and sipped her tea.

Mrs. Thomas Blakewell smiled at Edith. “Poor little waif,” she said in her throaty voice, “you must not have known what to make of it.” Then, turning to Edith's mother, she said, “Edith is your eldest child, Mrs. Harper?”

“Yes. The two boys were born—later.” She laughed again. “By that time, you knew what rum was, didn't you dear?”

Her mother went on. “Now to be sure,” she said, “Edith absolutely hated St. Thomas at first. It was so much unlike what she'd been used to, you see. But now, of course, she absolutely adores it, don't you, Edith?” Without waiting for an answer, she continued, “Your dear son really must visit us down there, Mrs. Blakewell. Honestly, I cannot tell you what a pleasure it was to have that nice young man as our houseguest last weekend in Morristown. Edith and he got on so well together, and my husband and I enjoyed him too. I do hope he'll be able to visit us again—so we can get to know him even better. But Charles and Edith had so much fun together, didn't you, dear? They rode, they walked. Of course we keep horses in St. Thomas too. Do you think, Mrs. Blakewell, that your son would like to visit us this winter at Sans Souci?”

Mrs. Blakewell had a rattling laugh. “Well, Mrs. Harper, that would be entirely up to him,” she said. “He's very much his own man. I wouldn't dream of predicting what he'd like to do.”

“Oh, but I'm thinking, Mrs. Blakewell, of how you must need him here. Especially now, these days, since your dear husband passed on.”

“I refuse to tie my son down,” she said. “He is to have his own life, and not be saddled with me.”

The woman was handsome, Edith thought, in a curious and perhaps not so formidable way. There was much of her in her son's face. She looks, Edith thought, the way she talks: cynical, bitterly witty, mocking, self-assured, dry.

“The only thing I cannot adjust to in St. Thomas is black servants,” her mother was saying. “I simply cannot get used to being waited upon by black faces. They look so fierce. And there is an element among them that is really quite dangerous, you know, and they cause my husband no end of trouble in the canefields. One tries to weed out the bad element when selecting people for the house. But of course they all steal, and they're lazy. But,” and she laughed, “what can one do?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Blakewell said.

“That's why I'm personally glad my husband has so many other business interests, and that the sugar and the spirits part of it have become relatively minor. Still, we must all have sugar, mustn't we? Why, I imagine there may be a bit of our sugar right there in that exceptionally handsome sugar bowl of yours.”

“I shouldn't be at all surprised.”

“Well,” Dolly Harper said, putting down her cup, “we really must be going, Edith. And I can't tell you, Mrs. Blakewell, what an enormous pleasure it has been to meet you, after meeting your charming son. And I shall certainly issue him an invitation to come to Sans Souci this winter, and hope that he'll be able to accept. And perhaps, in the meantime, I shall be able to persuade you to visit me in Morristown?”

“I should enjoy that, Mrs. Harper,” Mrs. Blakewell said.

While the maid was helping them into their wraps, Mrs. Blakewell stepped over to Edith and smiled. “You've kept admirably mum while we two old ladies chattered,” she said. “I congratulate you.”

“Thank you. I've enjoyed—just listening.”

Mrs. Blakewell put her face close of Edith's and tilted her chin up at her. “Tell me,” she said in her hoarse whisper, and Edith could feel the warm, dry breath against her cheek, “do you like my son?”

“Yes.”

“He's a nice man, don't you think? A good person?”

“Oh … yes. Yes, I do think so.”

Mrs. Blakewell laughed. “You are a little waif,” she said. “But I like you.”

“I can't thank you enough again, Mrs. Blakewell,” Edith's mother was saying. “You were too nice to have us.”

And Edith heard Mrs. Thomas Blakewell say, “Please call me Nancy, dear.”

In the car, going home, her mother said thoughtfully, “They say that when she travels she goes by private railway car—someone else's car. She takes a house in Newport for the season. A borrowed house. She doesn't have a fraction of the money I have, but she's one of the great social leaders of New York. Royalty beats a path to her door. She doesn't do it with money. She does it with something else—a
je ne sais quoi.…
”

The following weekend Charles arrived in Morristown again. Edith was standing on the back lawn, with her golf clubs, practicing her chip shots, and she saw him come out into the terrace. Seeing her, he leaped over the azalea hedge and came running down the lawn to her—running with that particular, unemphatic grace he always had right up until the end. “There's a conspiracy against us,” he said when he reached her. “They're marshaling their forces—the older generation.”

“What do they want us to do?”

“We're being put together. If we're not careful, before we know it we'll be man and wife.”

“Oh,” she said casually. “Do you really think so?”

“Come on, let's walk.” They started slowly across the grass. Glancing at her briefly out of the corner of his eye, he took her hand. “You charmed the pins off my mother. Did you know that?”

“I think you simply told her to be nice to us.”

He winked at her. “You think too much,” he said. “The point is, she liked you. She wouldn't say so if she didn't.”

They walked in silence for a while. “Well, what about it?” he asked. “This conspiracy.”

“I don't know.”

“Your mother asked me to St. Thomas this winter.”

She nodded.

“I could refuse the invitation. Do you want me to refuse it, Edith?”

She hesitated. “No,” she said. “I don't want you to refuse it.”

“Do you want me to accept it, then?”

“Yes.”

He pointed. “Let's go this way.” He led her behind a huge copper beech with spreading branches. “Nobody can see us here,” he whispered, taking her shoulders, and turning her to face him.

She touched his sleeve. “Why should you want to get involved with me? Meredith Harper's daughter.”

“I've thought about you all week long,” he said. “Have you thought about me?”

She looked up at him anxiously. “Yes.”

“Well, then?” He drew her closer.

But something, some movement in the distance, caught her eye, and she turned. “Oh,” she said, pulling away from him.

His look followed hers. “Who—him? He can't see us, can he? Who is that fellow, anyway?”

“Just—just a man who works for my father. A Frenchman.”

“You're shivering.”

“Let's walk back this way,” she said. They turned and walked back slowly toward the house.

And then, when their return to St. Thomas was just a week away, Mrs. Thomas Blakewell came to tea in Morristown, and Charles came with her to spend the weekend. Edith's father joined them, and the five sat on stiff little gilt chairs in her mother's drawing room while her mother, in a silk brocade from Molyneux, poured.

There was a boyish exuberance about Charles that seemed more and more striking to her, the better she got to know him. It had nothing to do with silliness, but was a way his strong-jawed face had of going quickly from repose to animation, a quickness of response. He seemed to take small, spontaneous joys from the reactions of other people. Clearly, he was enjoying the tea. He had a way of holding up his hand, leaning forward eagerly to interrupt the conversation when he wanted to make a point; he interrupted, that is, without really interrupting—by sitting forward with that hand raised until he was given a chance to speak. Edith, watching him make a gesture like that, found that it took her breath away and made her a little dizzy, and she decided it was easier not to watch him. She listened as he laughed, very heartily, at the end of her mother's Mama-what-is-rum story, and, when she sensed that his eyes had turned to look at her, her eyes were on her teacup.

After tea, her father said, “You ladies can amuse yourselves for a while, I imagine. Mr. Blakewell and I would like a talk.” Charles looked up, startled, and then nodded. The two men went into the library and the doors were closed. Edith's mother continued talking animatedly to Mrs. Blakewell, and Edith excused herself and went out into the garden.

She sat on the edge of the unplumbed fountain, where the three bronze nymphs played in nonexistent splashes. The days were growing shorter now. The sun was already low in the sky.

Charles came out of the house, about half an hour later, and found her there. His face was grave. He sat down beside her without speaking.

“What did you and Papa talk about?” she asked him.

“I probably shouldn't ask you this—but I'll ask it anyway,” he said. “Your father. Is he—sane?”

“Why, I don't know!”

“The business about all the money he's made. I've never heard anybody talk about money that way. I'll say this for your father—he doesn't believe in hiding his light under a bushel.”

Edith had laughed. “No,” she said. “But I think he's sane. He's just—Meredith Harper.”

In a different voice, he said, “There'll be no objection if we marry.”

She said nothing.

“Queer. The queerest position I've ever been in. Having him offer you to me before I'd even asked you. I did plan to ask you, you see.”

She continued to sit very still in the growing darkness, her hands in her lap.

“Will you marry me, Edith? I love you.”

“But I'm not sure I love you,” she said.

And it was true. She wanted to add, now, “I'm afraid it's only passion.” But the words sounded so foolish, so pompous, as they formed in her head that she couldn't utter them. Mademoiselle Laric, in her day, had talked to Edith a good deal about passion, explaining its difference from “love.” The two things, she had said, were incompatible forces; one was misleading the other true. And Edith had begun to think that her feeling for Charles must be passion, the false one, and she wished ardently that someone like Mademoiselle could be there to help her decide. She had thought a great deal, in the past weeks, about her feelings for Charles, and surely there was something rather unseemly, a little primitive, about the way she had begun to think of him. She had had a thoroughly primitive dream about him, and certainly this was a sign. The books were all there, she had found them in her father's library, and she had searched through all of them for a clue. But Doctor Sigmund Freud, whom everyone had begun saying had answers to everything, had hardly a word to say on the subject of passion. And though Doctor Freud had a number of things to say on a number of matters, she might have wished he would be a bit more specific about certain things. She had thought, again and again, of speaking to her mother, or to Mary Miles. But, too timorous and squeamish, she had not done so. “Is there such a thing as a woman having too much passion?” she wanted to ask someone. But she had asked no one anything at all.

“Well,” Charles said quietly beside her, “you go back to St. Thomas next week. Will you think about it? And perhaps, when I come—”