Those Harper Women (40 page)

“Leona,” Edith says very rapidly and softly, “I didn't come here to scold you or to ask you to come back. I simply came to see whether there was anything you needed.”

Then Leona opens the door again. She throws her arms around her grandmother and immediately bursts into tears. Edith steps into the room and closes the door behind her.

“Leona,” Edith whispers. “Leona—this has got to stop.”

“Yes,” she sobs. “Yes, yes, yes.…”

They sit on the bed, Leona's arms around her. Leona has on a man's raw-silk robe, and the bed is unmade. The Venetian blinds are down and the curtains are drawn, and the room is quite dark. They sit, letting Leona cry, and outside the closed window the sound of a springboard pounds from the pool.

“What's going to happen to me?” Leona asks. “What's going to happen to me?”

“Nothing at all,” Edith says. “Nothing at all. Will you come home with me now?”

“Yes.”

“John's outside with the car. I'll wait for you there while you dress.”

“All right.”

“Leona—you're all I have. Really all. Why didn't you let me know where you were?”

“I couldn't, Granny. I was afraid of what you'd say.”

“Oh, Leona. Afraid of me?”

“This is the worst thing I've ever done, isn't it?” Leona says. “The worst. It's the worst thing anybody's ever done.”

“Oh, Leona, I've done much, much worse things than this,” Edith says. “You just don't know.” Edith stands up. “Now hurry. Don't be too long. I'll be outside in the car.” She leaves the room and walks to the elevator again.

A few minutes later, when Leona comes spinning through the wide glass doors and starts down the steps of the hotel, her head high in the yellow sunshine, her white skirt blowing in the breeze, her purse on her arm, she looks so radiant and young that Edith almost forgets that Leona has ever done anything to hurt her. Edith's chauffeur steps smartly out of the car, clicks his heels, tips his cap, and holds open the rear door for Leona. When they are enclosed at last in the back seat of the automobile, Edith leans forward and rolls up the glass partition between them and the driver. The car turns slowly down the long, curved drive, away from the hotel, and Edith says, “I've—learned that Mr. Winslow still plans to go ahead with his story.”

“Yes.”

“You weren't able to persuade him otherwise?”

“No.”

“But you did try.”

“I tried and it didn't work. I'm sorry, Granny.”

“Well,” Edith says with a sigh, “that's still no reason to run away for two days. When I heard you were here, I was afraid you were trying a more—physical approach to him. But I'm glad it wasn't that.”

“No, it wasn't that.”

“We shall just have to sit tight, then, and prepare ourselves for the worst—from Harold. He'll be furious with us both if a story appears, and it may delay my getting the money to you for your gallery. But you'll get it, don't worry—though it may take a little longer. I'll see that you have it.” Then she adds, “And with no letters to Gordon. I'm sorry about that. It was a bad idea.”

“No, it was a good idea, Granny;” Leona says. “I've thought about it, and I've written to both of them.”

“I beg your pardon?” Edith says. “Both who?”

“Both Gordon and Jimmy. I've asked them to come.”

“Gordon and
Jimmy!
Are you out of your mind? Whatever
for?
”

“It didn't seem fair to ask one and not the other.”

“
Fair!
You talk about fair after this—this God knows what that you've been up to with some man? You mean Gordon and Jimmy both here at the same
time?
Do you intend to use my house for this? To hold a
convention
for all your old husbands? Oh, how can you do such stupid things! It's one thing after another with you, isn't it? Not that I think there's a chance in the world they'd both ever come!”

As the large black limousine descends through the streets of Charlotte Amalie, through the heavy noontime crush of bicycles and traffic, Edith says, “
Now
why are you crying? I merely said I don't think there's a chance in the world they'd both come. Do
you
think they'd come? Oh,
please
stop crying, Leona!” Gripping the woven handstrap at the side of the door in her gloved hand, Edith says, “Oh, how much longer do we have to go on having these tempests, Leona? I'm spent from them, Leona—do you hear me?
Spent.
”

Seventeen

“And now, if you can believe it, Sibbie,” Edith is saying, “they
are
both coming. Jimmy Breed telephoned last night, and there was a letter from Gordon this morning. Why in the world would they agree to such a thing?”

From the top of the stepladder where Sibbie Sanderson stands, her mouth full of picture wire, Sibbie says, “The whole thing is completely nutty, sweetie. It makes no sense at all.” Four days have passed, and Sibbie has arrived to hang her new picture. She has decreed that it be hung in the small sitting room in place of the Inness, which has been taken down and now stands in a corner, its face to the wall.

Sibbie climbs down from the stepladder, and surveys her work. “You know,” she says, “the more I look at it, the better I like it. Yes, if I do say so myself, sweetie, it's pretty damned good.”

“You don't think it's too large for that spot?” Edith asks.

“No, it's perfect there. The only thing it needs is better light. It should be lighted from the top, with a museum light.”

“There's one over Papa's portrait in the library.”

“Let's switch it,” Sibbie says.

“But the bulbs are burned out.”

“Got any fresh ones?”

“Look in that little drawer.”

Armed with fresh light bulbs and lugging the stepladder, Sibbie leads the way into the library. She places the stepladder in front of the Sargent and mounts it.

“Hello, Papa,” Edith says softly. And then, looking up at the two of them—the tall, thin, intense-eyed man in evening clothes and the large woman in the ballooning dirndl and copper bracelets who lean toward each other, face to face, almost nose to nose—their combination is so bizarre that she has to laugh. They look as though they are about to dance.

“What are you laughing at?” Sibbie asks, screwing in bulbs.

“Be careful Papa doesn't come crashing down on you.”

“Boy,” Sibbie says, “what I wouldn't give to own this picture, sweetie.”

“Would you like it, Sibbie?” Edith asks. “I could leave it to you in my will.”

“When I think of the prices Sargent gets—”

“Well,” Edith says tartly, “I'm certainly not going to give it to you if you plan to sell it. Anyway, it should probably stay within the family.” Then, looking up at Sibbie on the ladder, she says, “The only explanation could be that they're both still in love with her.”

“Well, I wouldn't even try to look for an explanation if I were you, sweetie. It's all too nutty. Besides, I don't believe in love. Not with these young people. All it is is sex. Here, hold this for me,” she says, handing down a burned-out light bulb.

“But what am I going to
do
with them, Sibbie—this husband-convention I seem to be having? Where am I going to
put
them all?”

“When do they get here?”

“Jimmy arrives this afternoon, and Gordon will be here by dinnertime.”

“How's she coming with her art gallery thing?”

“It's—progressing,” Edith says.

“Hmm,” Sibbie says. And then, “Now try the switch.”

Edith flips on the switch, and the portrait lights up.

“My God,” Sibbie says, standing back so abruptly that she almost topples off the stepladder. “My God, what a man!”

“Yes.”

Sibbie stares at the picture for a moment, and then says, “Run get me a screwdriver, sweetie, so I can get this bracket off.”

But Edith, looking up at her father's illumined, hard-jawed face, says, “No. Let's leave him with his light. He needs his light. It's good for him …”

The imminent arrival of Gordon Paine and Jimmy Breed has posed, for Edith, something in the nature of a hostess' dilemma. She has, she realizes, let things slide a bit around the house in recent years—particularly in the area of mattresses and pillows, sheets and bedding. Curtains too, in some of the upstairs rooms, have disintegrated and have never been replaced, and a number of the smaller bedrooms are simply no longer habitable—certainly not in fit condition for receiving guests. And so, Edith has somewhat reluctantly concluded, the best solution is to give Gordon her own room. Naturally it is a nuisance to have to move out, but this—after saying good-by to Sibbie—is what Edith and Nellie are doing now: emptying dresser-drawers and closets, preparing the room for Gordon, and carrying Edith's things to one of the bedrooms in the back of the house. As for Jimmy, he will simply have to put up at a hotel. It will put a better appearance on things if the two are not under the same roof, and it will also reduce the chances of any friction between them. Whether either man knows that the other is coming is something Leona has neglected to mention.

One hopes that Jimmy will behave himself. Edith's most enduring picture of him was obtained in a motion-picture newsreel she happened to see a few years ago. The film showed a New Year's Eve crowd scene in Times Square, but one young man stood out from the crowd. In white tie and tails, he was seated cross-legged on the roof of a taxicab that was moving slowly down the street, and the young man—it was unmistakably James Machado Breed—was very carefully pouring a magnum of champagne over the windshield of the taxi, while the taxi's windshield-wipers beat furiously at the froth.

“Do you remember the night you poured champagne over the car?” Leona asks him. “That was how you celebrated your New Year's Eve. I celebrated mine in the hospital, miscarrying our baby.”

“Ah, bitter, bitter,” he says. “How can I be blamed for not being around for something I was never told was happening?”

The afternoon sun has left the beach, and most of the afternoon swimmers with it. They have the beach to themselves, the sand pocked with the indentations of hundreds of feet, and as they walk they add their own to the existing craters—craters which the tide and the trade winds will have erased by morning. Jimmy still wears the city clothes he wore when she met his plane—arriving, as she had guessed he would, with only a slim brief case for luggage—but he has left his jacket in the rented car, along with his shoes and socks, and he walks in his shirt sleeves and bare feet, his trousers rolled up above his ankles. Leona has removed her shoes too. Jimmy stops now to nudge a piece of rockweed with his big toe. “Ah, the lure of tropic islands,” he says. “I might have known this was where you'd be. You always come winging back here, don't you, Lee, like a boomerang.”

“I'm glad you came, Jimmy.”

“Well, a letter like the one I got from you made it kind of a command performance. The age of chivalry is not dead, in spite of what you read.”

They continue along the beach: “Gosh,” he says wonderingly, as though bewildered and delighted by the thought, “but I did use to drink a lot, didn't I? I don't drink like that any more, though, and it's too bad. They were kind of fun, those drinking days.”

“I never liked you when you drank. It changed you.”

“Well, that was the point, for God's sake. I was sowing my wild oats. But you can't blame me for that either, Lee. You've sown a few yourself, I understand, since I saw you last.”

“I know.”

“But then one day I realized that no matter how much or how fast I drank, the distillers of America could always make the stuff faster. I saw I couldn't win. That's why I cut down. I was being outdistanced by the distillers of America. Besides, I'm not a kid any more.” He bends his head to her. “See the bald spot that's the envy of all my friends? And neither are you, I might add, a kid any more, Leona.”

“I know that too. That's why—”

He cuts her off. “When are you going to tell me what's up? Why the command performance?”

“I want to wait till Gordon gets here.”

He stops dead, looking at her. “Gordon?” he says. “Gordon Paine, the squash player? The man you married—Gordon Paine?
He's
coming? Jesus, Lee—what is this? A double post mortem? When's the next plane out of here?”

“Please, Jimmy—it's important to me to talk to both of you. I had a dream—”

“A dream!” He snorted. “You had a dream. Oh, Leona, come
on!
”

“I'm quite serious. I thought if I could talk to both of you—”

“It
is
a double post mortem. You, me, and Gordon Paine. Jesus, Lee!”

“Please try to be nice to Gordon when he gets here. He was nice to me once—when you weren't being quite so nice.”

“
Nice
to him? Why shouldn't I be nice to him? I'm crazy about Gordon. Gordon's a prince. He's like a brother. He's a damned stuffed shirt and a horse's ass and you know it. Besides,” he adds, “there's no question of my being nice to him because I'm not even going to see him. I'm leaving. To hell with your fun and games.” He turns and walks to the water's edge.

“Please,” she says. “It isn't fun and games. It's the most serious thing I've ever done.”

He stands with his back to her, looking out at the water, his hands in his pockets, and says nothing.

She crosses the sand to him and touches his sleeve. “Please, Jimmy.”

“It's always the same with you, isn't it? Fun and games.”

“Not this time, truly. I thought if we could meet—on neutral territory—”