Those Harper Women (42 page)

“I came,” Gordon says, leaning toward her, “because you sounded as though you were in some kind of trouble, and needed help. And I'm sure Breed here came for the same reason.”

Jimmy, slumped in his chair, shakes his head. “No,” he says. “I came because I was curious. I came to see what was up. Which I still don't know.”

“I was about to burn another bridge behind me,” she says, “and I suddenly didn't know why. I've always been a bridge-burner, without knowing why.”

“And now,” Gordon says, “you're wondering if some of those bridges can be re-erected.”

“No,” Leona says. “It isn't that exactly. It's that I suddenly thought perhaps the two of you knew more about me than I knew myself. It's as simple as that. This afternoon, for instance, Jimmy said I was stubborn and determined—”

“
Willful
would be my word,” Gordon says. “Rash. Impetuous. Rushing into things without examining them first. No self-discipline. One might even say spoiled, because there's always been someone to pull you out of your jams as soon as you've got into them.”

“But I wouldn't have come,” Jimmy says, “if I'd known this was going to be a group-therapy session.”

“Not that there's anything wrong with group therapy, of course,” Gordon says.

“I also want to know,” she laughs a little helplessly, “why all my marriages went wrong. I think it must be my fault—somehow. And who can really tell me but the two of you?”

“In other words,” Gordon says, “you want, before you turn over a new leaf, to examine some of the old leaves. You want to return to some point in the past and start over. It's a sensible enough idea, Leona—except for one thing. As Shakespeare said, you can't go home again.”

Jimmy, who has been making some sort of pattern on the tablecloth with paper matches torn from a folder, says, “It wasn't Shakespeare. Anyway, that's a lot of nonsense. Who says you can't go home again?”

“Have you ever tried it, Breed?” Gordon asks a little sharply. “With any success?”

“But—” Leona tries to interrupt.

“Go home all the time,” Jimmy says. “For weekends, Sunday dinner with the folks. It's a lot of fun. Don't you ever go home to see your mother, Gordon?” He clicks his tongue, and returns to his match design.

“Of course I go home to see my mother!” Gordon says. “I was speaking of home in a larger sense. As I'm sure Leona is not too dense to understand.”

“If I were going to try to change—” Leona begins.

Gordon cuts her off again. “Another misconception,” he says, and she wishes that he would not always be so flat, so pedantic. And a dark thought scurries through her head:
Was
this all a terrible mistake, as Granny said? “People never change,” Gordon says.

“More damned nonsense,” Jimmy says. “People change all the time. They change for the better, and they change for the worse.”

“Not basically,” Gordon says.

“Look at me. I've changed. I used to be a playboy, now I'm a stockbroker—whether that's for the better or for the worse I don't know. I'm not saying Lee's changed, though,” he says, looking at her with a slow smile. “Or,” he says quietly, “that she really needs to change much, except—”

“Except what?” she asks him.

“Except to stop looking at herself through a microscope all the time. If someone's a louse, and starts trying to find out
why
he's a louse all he ends up doing is
proving
he's a louse!”

“Are you trying to say Leona is a louse?” Gordon demands.

Looking steadily at her, Jimmy says, “What happened before—you were only eighteen. Things like that happen when you're eighteen. It's that simple. Don't try to make things complicated, Lee.”

“What happened before, as I recall,” Gordon says, “was that you showed signs of becoming a habitual alcoholic.”

“Now just a minute—” Jimmy begins.

But Gordon turns to Leona again. “You see,” he says, “you've always run away from things. You ran away from boarding school, as I recall. You ran away from Bennington with—” he nods in Jimmy's direction “—him. You ran away from me, and for a pretty silly reason. My main thought for you, Leona, if you want to understand this pattern of yours, is that you should see a psychiatrist. I went to see one, after our divorce.”

“Did you, Gordon?” she says. “So did I. But it didn't help.”

“It didn't?”

“No,” she smiles. “I don't know why, but the whole time I went to him—it was only a couple of months—I kept feeling I had to entertain him. He used to look so bored. And the facts of my life seemed so dull and ordinary that I started making things up. Lurid dreams that I hadn't really had. But the trouble was, he never seemed to know the difference between what was true and what I was making up.”

“You were blocked,” Gordon says. “If you'd continued the treatment you would have unblocked.”

“But he never seemed to
care
whether I was telling the truth or not. It began to seem so pointless.”

“It is not his job to care whether you tell the truth.”

“Well, what's the point of going to an analyst, then,” Jimmy interrupts, “if it isn't to get at the truth?”

“The doctor is interested in truth in the larger sense.”

“Baloney!”

Leona thinks that food might help but they have been ignored since sitting down at the table. They have not even been given menus. She looks around the room, trying to catch a waiter's eye.

“What was your doctor's name?” Gordon asks her.

“Hardman,” she says. “Gordon, see if you can get us a waiter.”

“I've never heard of him,” Gordon says. “My man's name is Doctor Edmund Zauner—I'll give you his card. Marvelous man, and an enormous help to me. It occurred to me that the divorce thing might have been my fault. Well, as it turned out in the analysis, it wasn't. Of course, in analysis, things are never that clear-cut—there's no such thing as anything being anybody's fault. But Ed Zauner dug up some pretty interesting things about me, and I think one of them might pertain to you. It seems I had a deep-seated and unconscious fear of failing. Of inadequacy. Actually,” he laughs modestly, “it turns out that the basis for it was the fact that I was never circumcised.”

Jimmy, who has been busy with the torn-out matches, suddenly says, “Jesus! What a thing to have to live with! Gosh!” he says, smiting his forehead with his big square hand. “I can see it—all the other boys giggling when Gordon came into the shower room. And for twenty-five bucks you could have had it fixed! I need a drink after that one.” Turning in his chair, he says, “Where are the waiters in this place?”

“Well,” Gordon says quickly, ignoring Jimmy's outburst, “it turned out that I had this fear of failing and that, in compensating for this, I was unconsciously projecting myself into situations were
I had to fail
. Do you see my point? Well, in terms of yourself, Leona, this running-away business is probably an expression of the same anxiety neurosis, and—”

“Now wait a minute,” Jimmy says. “Are you trying to say Lee's crazy?”

“Waiter!” Leona cries, waving forlornly to the back of a disappearing white jacket.

“Running away is a highly neurotic pattern. It indicates—”

“Please,” she says. “We promised—no arguments—”

“I want to hear what this uncircumcised nut has got to say! Go on with your story, Mr. Paine, and with what it's got to do with Lee.”

Gordon looks at him. “I see, Breed, that you are also something of a bully.”

“Gordon—Jimmy—stop this, both of you.”

There is a long pause. “Please explain,” Jimmy says, “what you mean by
also
something of a bully.”

“I mean that in addition to being a lush and a no-good, you are also something of a bully.”

“Just a minute,” Jimmy says. “
Just a minute!
Repeat that, what you said.”

“I said,” says Gordon smiling, “that in addition to being a lush and a no-good, you are also something of a bully. And also a noisy roughneck.”

On his feet, Jimmy says, “Why, you lousy little Dartmouth stuffed-shirt prig, do you think I'm going to let you get away with that? You're also a goddamned bigot. You're an anti-Semite, you're a—”

“Stop! Just stop!”

“It's not a defenseless woman you're speaking to now, Breed.”

“You're goddamned right I'm not, you dirty little wife-stealing shyster. Sniffing around my apartment and taking out my wife behind my back.”

“Your back was usually planted on a barroom floor.”

“Stop!”

“Would you care to step outside?”

“I damn well would!”

“Oh, please—please stop this!” Leona begs. She tries to pull both of them into their seats again, but they push her hands angrily away. She turns to the room at large. “Please—somebody stop them!” But all she sees are, now, too many waiters and a restaurant full of bored, disinterested faces turned upward from dinner plates and cocktails to observe the commotion at the corner table.

“You said let's go outside. What're you waiting for? Have you changed your mind?”

“I have
not
changed my mind!”

“Well …”

“Oh, come on!” Leona says. “This isn't
about
anything!”

The two men start rapidly for the glass door which leads from the dining room out onto the terrace, and Leona runs after them.

On the terrace, the two men face each other. Leona turns once more to the restaurant and calls, “Can't somebody stop this?” But now the bored and somewhat less disinterested faces have moved to the door and to the windows to watch. Leona hears:

“The big one'll flatten him. Look at the size of that bastard's shoulders …”

“Don't be too sure. The little one looks pretty wiry.”

“What's it all about, anyway?”

“The little one's a Jew. The big one made some crack about Jews.”

Gordon and Jimmy remove jackets and ties and toss them in a heap on the terrace. Gordon removes his wrist watch and Jimmy, grateful for this suggestion, removes his also. Then they face each other again, crouched this time, rocking on the balls of their feet.

“For the last time, I'm telling you to stop,” Leona says.

At the first blow, both men stagger apart, stumble, and fall on their hands and knees on the terrace. For a moment, they approach each other, on all fours, panting. Then they are up again, swinging, and for several minutes the air is filled with the cracking of fists, and the grunts, and groans, and gasping breaths of the two opponents. They fight in these guttural voices, uttering no words, and shirts rip, and suddenly they are both on the ground again, rolling over and over across the terrace, pummeling each other as they go. Jimmy is certainly the heavier one, but Gordon, as that observer observed, is wiry, and keeps himself in shape with squash and handball. It is so ludicrous, seeing them tumbling about on the terrace and punching each other like schoolboys, that Leona almost laughs. If they were even fighting over her she would laugh. But instead she begins to cry. “Oh, you damn fools!” she says. “Damn fools!” She turns and runs back into the restaurant.

To reach the front door, she must pass through the bar again. As she pushes through the crowd, a man's hand reaches out to detain her. “Hey,” he says, “is that ruckus out there over you?”

“Arch,” she says, “will you help me break it up?”

“Are you kidding? I don't want to get mixed up in it. I've got something for you,” he says, reaching in his pocket. “From this morning's paper.” He hands her a small clipping.

“What?”

“Thought you might be interested,” he says. “Well, see you around.”

“Yes,” she says.

Standing under the orange light by the front door, she reads:

Rumor has it that one of the nation's top business weeklies will explode this week with a story on the wheeler dealings of that enigmatic Wall Streeter, Harold B. Harper. Details are still unknown, but sources say the story will make the fur fly at Harper Industries, Inc. H. B. Harper is the son of West Indian sugar baron Meredith Harper and uncle of socialite Diana Gardiner. His grandniece is ex-deb Leona Harper Ware, popular and much-married Jet-Setter, presently the Countess Edouardo Para-Diaz.…

“Are you all right, Miss Harper?” the doorman asks her.

“Please get me a taxi.”

Eighteen

Five years ago, in the winter of 1959, Nellie came to Edith to tell her that a Miss Mary Miles was here to see her. It was a minute or two before Edith connected the name. She went downstairs, and there she was—a little old lady, much wrinkled, wearing a beige suit, beige shoes, and a little beige hat. “Did they ever get a decent girl for your mother?” was practically the first question she asked.

“It took some finding, after you left. Mama had her ups and downs.”

She clicked her tongue. “Exactly as I feared,” she said.

“She had a series of little strokes. They were what finally made her stop. Those strokes scared her just the way you used to scare her, Mary.”

“When did she pass on?”

“In nineteen fifty-one.”

“Well, that was a nice long life, wasn't it—considering? And your father? Gone too, of course …”

They went into the sitting room for tea. Mary Miles still worked as a nurse, she said, but she was on holiday. She had taken herself on a Cunard winter cruise, and the cruise had a free day in St. Thomas.

“And your baby?” Mary said. “Grown and away, I suppose.”

“Grown and away. Here's a picture of her I ran across in a magazine.”

“Gracious!” said Mary Miles, looking at the picture. “Isn't she elegant? Hard to think I was the first person to take her in my arms.”