Those Harper Women (17 page)

“Andreas,” she said, “I didn't mean apologize! But—couldn't you at least have told me?”

“Why? Why should I?” Then his voice changed. “This changes everything, doesn't it, with you?”

Suddenly she ran to him across the dark road. “No,” she said urgently. “It doesn't change a thing. I don't care. I'm going to marry you anyway! We'll run away. Andreas, I don't care!”

“It will be the end of your life—the end of everything you've known.”

“I can't bear my life! I love you.”

“Promise me that?”

“I promise you.”

“We'll have to run away,” he said in a dead voice. “I'll have to see if I can get a boat, and some money. Perhaps to Tortola. Go home now and get some sleep. I'll see that I can do.”

Early the next morning, her father came into her bedroom. “You've been seeing the Larsen boy” were his first words. How he had found out she did not know.

“No, Papa.”

He stepped quickly toward the bed where she lay and struck her hard across the mouth. “Don't lie to me!” he said.

“Yes, Papa! I have.”

“Juel Larsen's son. Did he spoil you? Did he try to give you one of his filthy nigger babies? Did he—”

What happened after that is now a little jumbled in her memory; the details are blurred for everything that happened after that happened very quickly. She remembers screaming at her father, “No—but we're getting married, Papa! And you can't stop us, Papa! Isn't it wonderful that you can't stop us, Papa? Because you can't. Nobody can. Because nothing you say or do can stop us, and isn't that nice, Papa dear? Isn't that lovely, Papa dear?” She remembers that the experience of speaking to him like this exhilarated her, and that she went on and on, lying there crouched on her bed, screaming at him, waiting for him to strike her again, begging him, “Hit me, Papa! Hit me again, Papa dear! Because even that won't stop me! Hit me, Papa.” But he didn't. He merely stood looking down at her for a moment or two, smiled, turned, and walked out of the room.

She got out of bed and dressed hurriedly. She scribbled a little note and gave it to one of the maids to deliver to Andreas, telling her to wait for a reply. When the girl came back with the answer, it said simply, “Come to my father's house after ten tonight. Perhaps he can help us.”

She remembers that leaving Sans Souci that night was an odd sensation, very odd. Because no one did try to stop her. Her father had been out of the house most of the day and had not come back. She went down the stairs unhindered and unquestioned, feeling lightheaded. The rooms were empty, and she noticed for the first time how large they were—how large without point of purpose for being large. Her father had designed this house himself, an edifice suitable to his proportions and to the scale of his dream. Empty, the rooms seemed like painted friezes—huge backdrops with bits and pieces of gold-painted paper pasted against them to resemble furniture. The rooms were stage settings for dramas that would never take place, in which no human action would ever occur, and with this new vision she saw her father's dream as his delusion.

She went down the drive and out into the road. Being free was now almost an anticlimax because none of the scenes she had expected had materialized. She had foreseen restraining hands, imprecations, accusations, entreaties. Instead, she walked quietly along the dark road down Government Hill, and had gone some distance toward the Larsens' house before she began to realize that something might have happened.

The Larsens' butler looked alarmed when he opened the door and saw her. But he let her inside the lighted hallway, and asked her to wait there. Presently, Andreas' tall and beautiful mother, whom she had never seen before, started down the stairs. Halfway down she stopped. She looked very frightened. “What are you doing here?” she said.

“Where is Andreas?”

“Get out of here—please. You can't come here. Get out—quickly.”

“What's happened?” Edith said. “Where is he?”

“Please!” the woman said. “Get out of here. Just go.
Go!
You stupid girl, you can't come here, you're not wanted here—get out.”

“Where is he?” Edith repeated. “Just tell me where he is.”

She remembers the tall woman standing there in a long black dress, gripping the carved banister, screaming for the butler. “Billy! Billy! If this girl won't go, you'll have to throw her out! Just get her out of here! I can't endure it!” she sobbed. She turned and ran back up the stairs, and Edith remembers the butler, Billy, smiling apologetically, bowing, making little pushing, shooing motions with his hands, advancing toward her, saying, “Please … you go now, Miss Edith Harper? Yes. Please, Miss Edith Harper … you go now? Yes?”

The next morning they had all gone. The Larsens' house was closed, its shutters drawn and locked. Andreas' father's office was also closed. The whole family had vanished. There had been typhus in the household, someone told her, and they had all had to leave the island. But of course this wasn't true. Somehow, her father had removed them all.

The family would leave for Europe earlier than usual, her father informed them curtly at a family meeting. They were to be ready to leave for San Juan in two days, and they would sail from there to Cherbourg.

On the boat Edith sat in a deck chair beside her mother, who looked particularly ill and tired under the steamer rugs. “It was the only way,” she said at last. “Your papa did the right thing. Try to understand.”

Edith said nothing.

“He was only after your money—only that.”

“That isn't true.”

“Of course it's true. It will always be true. You are Meredith Harper's only daughter.”

“What do you mean it will always be true?”

“Edith, I should have told you before. Unless a girl is beautiful—”

“Which I am not.”

“Unless a girl has—exceptional endowments, a man does not want to marry a plain girl. If the girl is rich, however, the money will—compensate. Do you understand? This can be both a blessing and a handicap, my dear. The blessing is that you will certainly someday find a nice husband—and not be one of these poor souls who never marry. The handicap is that you are the natural prey of fortune hunters. I didn't make these rules of human nature. They just exist! No matter what else a man likes about you, the money will always be his first consideration. Once you accept this about yourself, my dear, you can be happy.” She covered Edith's bare hand with her gloved one. “And remember—time heals all wounds.”

Edith was out of the deck chair and running to the rail of the ship. Her mother came after her, and for several minutes they struggled there in violent silence, their feet sliding together on the polished deck, making absolutely no sounds until Dolly Harper began to scream, “Steward! Steward! Steward!”

This is how Edith remembers that April crossing that year, when her nineteenth birthday was just a month away.

On the beach at Morningstar, Leona sits in the sun, oiled and polished, scanning faces. A blond young man waves to her. “Hiya, Leona baby!”

“Hi. Have you seen Eddie Winslow?”

“Nope. He should be along, though.”

She lies back on her towel, her face upward, arms at her sides, eyelids closed and trembling against the sun's red glare. It is important, in the sun, to keep one's face composed and unsquinting because there are such things as wrinkles. And twenty-seven is not young, no matter what anybody says. No, it is darned near middle-age. What
is
, technically, middle age anyway, she asks herself? Well, if threescore years and ten is the normal human lifespan, then middle age is precisely thirty-five. Thirty-five for her is just seven and a half short years away. They will pass as swiftly as the last seven and a half have—and the last seven and a half have scooted past her on roller skates.
Over
her. A whole roller derby of days has passed over her, and those hard little wheels have hurt. No use trying to move middle age, as some women did, to forty, and then, with another discreet nudge, to forty-five. It would be on her before she knew it, her life half over. And yet, she thinks, figuring this way means that her grandmother's life ought to be wholly over which, of course, it isn't. And so, perhaps.…

Someone's foot jogs her bare toe, and she opens her eyes and looks up. He stands, a foreshortened shadow, over her. “Ah,” she says, sitting up, “I was waiting for you.”

“Hello.”

“Come,” she says, spreading out her towel, “sit down.”

Squatting tailor-fashion on the towel beside her, he gives her a bitter smile.

“Eddie, I'm sorry about last night. Are you still mad at me?”

“No,” he says. “I never was, as a matter of fact.” Cupping his hands over his eyes he looks out at the glittering water of the bay.

She touches his bare knee. “It was all so sudden, as we say.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I guess it was.”

“You really should give a girl a little time to gather her wits after you say things like that.”

“Sure. Sure.”

Gently, she says, “Eddie—dear Eddie. I am awfully fond of you, you know that.”

“Sure. You think I'm perfectly swell.”

“Listen, Eddie, don't you understand? After my last divorce I promised myself that I simply wouldn't rush into anything again. Next time, I've got to be terribly sure. That's all.”

She smiles at him, but his dark, good-looking face is still scowling at the sea. “Just give me a little time, Eddie, to think about all the things you said.”

He nods.

“And don't go running off on me. I had a low blow today about my gallery. It's going to be more important to me than ever to have a friend with the press.”

“Sure. I'm always here. Good old reliable Eddie.”

“Don't say that!” she says quickly, because these are the words, of course, with which she has always thought of him. “And don't think that what you said didn't make me terribly pleased and flattered and—yes, honored, Eddie. Because it did.”

They sit in silence for several minutes. Then Leona says, “I had a rather quaint evening after you left. Who is this Arch Purdy, anyway?”

“A smart customer. I did a story on him once. Got to know him pretty well.”

Leona shakes a cigarette from her pack and lights it. “An odd man, I thought. I'm not sure I liked him much. He was full of questions—all about my marriages, and things like that.”

“Well, if you're worth ten million dollars you can afford to be odd,” he says. “Just the way you can afford to get divorces.”

“That was a mean crack. And quite untrue, by the way. But I'll overlook it. At least he bought me dinner—after you abandoned me.”

He says nothing to this.

“Eddie,” she says, “I talked to Granny last night about your story. She's changed her mind. She doesn't want to be quoted on anything.”

“Oh?” he says, turning to look at her. “Oh, is that so?”

“Yes. I want you to forget the whole story, Eddie. The family's always been that way about publicity. I should have known.”

He continues to stare at her. “What are you asking me to do?”

“Cancel the whole thing. Forget about the Harpers. Granny's really awfully upset, and the whole family's getting into a tiz. I'm going to be right in the middle if they don't like what you write, and the Harpers can be pretty nasty when somebody does something they disapprove of. So please, for me. Write about something else.” When he says nothing, she says, “Look, the real, honest-to-gosh truth about the Harpers is that they're just ordinary dull, stuffy, grubby businessmen. There's nothing colorful about them at all.”

“I see,” he says quietly. “I see.”

“Will you, Eddie? For me?”

“The magazine's paid my way down here, they're paying for my hotel.”

“Well, perhaps we could—”

“Let the
Harpers
pick up those tabs?” he says sharply. “Is that what you're saying?” He jumps to his feet and stands over her. “Is it?”

“Eddie,” she says, “you said you loved me. Won't you do this as a favor for me?” She reaches out for him. “Please? For me?”

But he turns abruptly and starts away from her across the beach.

“Eddie!” she calls.

But he had abandoned her again.

Edith's brother Arthur, always her favorite of the two, has a pronounced limp from a wound he received in the Italian Campaign, during the Fifth Army attempt to cross the Rapido River. (Right after Pearl Harbor, at the age of thirty-nine, Arthur enlisted in the Army as a private; when he came out he was Major Arthur Harper, wearing the Silver Star.) When he first came back from overseas, the limp was not particularly noticeable. But, in the years since, as he has grown older and somewhat heavier, walking has become more painful to him. And this is too bad because, once, just as Leona dreams now, Arthur dreamed of there being something else, something besides being a Harper. (
Something else … something else.…
It seems to Edith to be a recurring echo from Harper voices.) For Leona, there is still a chance that she may find what that something else is. Arthur, when he thought he found it, let it go. Three or four years ago, when Arthur came to St. Thomas for a visit (he came alone because his wife, Hannele, dislikes the tropics), he and Edith talked about it.

“You know, Edie,” he said, “the Army saved my life.”

“I know,” she had said, thinking he was referring to the hospital weeks when they pieced his leg together.

“I don't mean what they did in the hospital,” he said. “They saved my life in another way.” They were sitting on Edith's veranda having a drink, watching the sun set. “I guess it taught me something in terms of people, and in terms of what life is about. You see, you and I—”