Those Harper Women (34 page)

“I don't know,” she sobs into the hollow of her arm. “All at once I don't know what's going to happen to me, Arch. I don't know where I'm going to go, or what I'm going to do.”

“You've got a long way to go, buddy. Plenty of things to do.”

“I used to be a nice girl, Arch. Honestly I did. Oh, please … oh, please.… Oh, can't somebody help me?”

Sitting beside her, his hand on her shoulder is motionless now. “Yeah,” he says softly, “I know. You need help from somebody. But I'm not sure it's me, buddy. No, I'm not sure it's me.”

Fourteen

If it were possible to go back, Leona is thinking, where would she go back to? Last night, when Granny said that she wanted to ask Gordon to come, Leona might (could, should) have said, “All right—if we ask Jimmy to come too.” Because he had as much right to be here certainly as Gordon … or Edouardo … if that was the point of inviting someone: to try to reexamine things, to reconstruct things. What's more, she thinks, Jimmy would probably have come. Gordon would have been suspicious. He would have telephoned first, full of solemn, throat-clearing questions. (“Is Leona in some kind of trouble?” “Is it anything I can handle from New York?”) Jimmy would stuff a clean shirt in his suitcase and hop on a plane … probably.

Whenever Leona thinks of Jimmy Breed she sees him standing at the foot of a staircase in that house on Long Island—at that party, the night they ran away together. It is as though she had taken a photograph of him standing there, on the bottom step of the stairs, his head above the other heads, in his dinner clothes, a drink in one hand, his other hand twisting his black bow tie. That tie, always set at a slight tilt, had been one of Jimmy's trademarks. (“Don't want to look like every other jerk,” he used to say to her with a wink.) The tie and its angle gave the healthy-looking face above it an expectant, bemused look, which had nothing to do with the man behind the face. (Or boy. Because, at the time this mental snapshot was made, Jimmy Breed had not reached the years of man's estate; he was only twenty.) That tie went with him—like his habit of wearing red suspenders under his dinner jacket, or hitching up his tuxedo trousers to reveal a pair of the flashy Argyle socks that the Princeton boys were all wearing that season. It was as much a part of him as the way he had of raising his eyebrows as high as they would go and looking at you with a wide-eyed, open-mouthed stare of surprise when he saw you—as though you were the last person in the world he expected to find at the same party. Or the engaging habit he had of smoothing the top of his head when he spoke to you … bending his head toward you, listening, stroking his shaggy dark hair. He was tall and thick-set—too big, really, for the little red car he drove, the car they ran off in that night, heading for the Triboro Bridge, getting lost trying to find the New Jersey Turnpike. Leona has other private pictures of Jimmy, of course. But this one, this composite, composed of these attitudes, is her favorite.

“He proposed to me on the dance floor …” This is the way Leona now tells the story of that night. Actually, it was a little different. They danced together, yes, but he didn't ask her to marry him then. He only asked if he could take her home.

Later—perhaps two hours later—there was an impromptu parade through the house. Jimmy and a group of his friends had gone into the cloakroom, put the girls' fur wraps over their shoulders and, carrying lighted candelabra from the dining room, had marched solemnly through the rooms, in and out among the dancers on the floor—Jimmy at the lead, wearing a leopard jacket, brandishing a silver candlestick high above his head. The procession moved out through the French doors, down across the wide lawns, and went around and around the lighted swimming pool while everyone from the party gathered on the terrace to watch and applaud.

Leona's mother had been at the party too. “I understand Jimmy Breed has asked to take you home,” Diana Gardiner said.

Leona nodded. “Yes.”

“He's intoxicated,” her mother said. “I don't want you going home with him.”

“Don't worry, Mother. I'll take care of it.”

“Do you understand, Leona? Find someone else to take you home. If necessary, Perry and I will drive you.”

“Excuse me, Mother,” she had said. “I see somebody I know—”

“Leona?” Her mother called after her, but Leona had separated herself from her, and lost herself in the crowd. She found Jimmy. “Take me home,” she whispered. “Now.”

In the front seat of the car he put his arms around her and kissed her heavily, smelling of whisky. That was when he asked her to marry him.

“Where … when …?” she asked him breathlessly.

She heard him mumble “Baltimore,” and the little red car headed off into the night toward the bridges and the parkways.

It used to seem to her as though Jimmy were really two distinct and different people. He fascinated her, and confused her. It had to do with the way he had of being alternately self-assured and self-indulgent, a mixture of opposing personalities. She was never sure of her ground with him, of which Jimmy she was with, and this was how he dominated her. He would be silly one minute, strong the next. Just when she had decided that he was the most responsible man in the world, he would do something gay and wild and irresponsible. He could be affectionate and tender. He could also be scathing and bitter and hard. Two natures were at war within him, and when the reliable, formal, polite side of him would give way to the reckless, anarchic side, she would try to seize him, hold him, shape him into some single, recognizable character. But it was like trying to keep a sand castle erect against the tide. His changeableness dismayed her, and his energy and vitality left her out of breath. From Baltimore, the little car headed west, for they were runaways now—running away, they both agreed, from all that crazy life before, from colleges, from parties, from parents. They were saying good-by to all that forever, and wherever the future lay it had to lie as far from all that as it was possible to go—in the West. The pattern of their days began to be one of rise and fall, a tidal pattern. They would go from stormy, tearful quarrels—over such trivial matters as which fork to take on the highway—to passionate reconciliations, in lovemaking, in the dark little rooms of motels where traffic moaned outside their window all night long like the sound of distant vacuum cleaners. They had one thing in their favor: they would never have money worries. They each had an income then; they had that in common. They figured it out very quickly once on the back of a menu: Together they had an income of twenty-five thousand a year.

But they had already, even in the first few days, begun to talk of “If this doesn't work out … if it turns out we've made a mistake.…” If it didn't work out, they could always get a divorce. Divorce was easy when you both had an income. It would be a friendly divorce, of course, a mature divorce, with no misgivings or recriminations. And yet, after some of their most violent quarrels, Leona would wake in the morning and look at his sleeping face on the pillow beside her, at his bare arm flung across her stomach, and think that no man in the world would ever be able to make her as happy as this man. And, in a way, she had been right.

They crossed the Mojave Desert in the blinding autumn heat. The sun was so brilliant, so intense, that it sent a shimmer into the air—diffuse, streaked light, rising like sheeted waves in front of them as they drove. It was like driving through gauzy mirrors. The light and the heat had a texture and a substance, spreading and pouring around the red car, seeming to pull it through a tunnel of heat. And the light distorted the shapes of everything, the cactus and century plant on the roadside. Even the mountain ranges in the distance were blurred, half-dissolved, their outlines smudged and muddied in the heat. They drove with the windows closed, for the warmth generated by the two people in the small closed sports car seemed less oppressive than the sizzle of the air outside. They stopped the car once, to change drivers—to let Leona drive while Jimmy napped—opening and shutting the doors quickly as they switched places. The road was straight and flat and empty, and she drove fast through those shifting, distorting bands of light while Jimmy, knees up, wedged in the seat beside her, slept. But it is the cheating light she remembers best, and the straightness and flatness and emptiness of the road, and the speed.

She had turned the radio on. The song it was playing—queer, the details which stand out—was …

“
Does

your mother

know

You're out
,

Ce-seel-ya …?
”

She was humming the tune the radio played under her breath to keep her mind off the heat. She had unbuttoned all the buttons of her blouse to try to be a little cooler, pulled the tails of the blouse out of her skirt, pulled her skirt up almost to her waist, but still every inch of her was damp. Dampness clung to her, trickled between her breasts, pricked the roots of her hair, and she had to keep wiping the damp corners of her eyes with the tip of her finger to clear her vision as she drove; in that hideous, unending glare; humming that tune.

“
Why

should

we

two

go on wastin' time
…”

And then, it was so sudden, out of nowhere (“Out of nowhere,” she used to whisper to Jimmy later, “Out of nowhere, he just materialized!”)—the little boy, a dark-skinned boy. A Mexican boy, perhaps, or perhaps a young Indian (from the reservation?). What he could have been doing there, at the side of the road in the middle of the desert, in that treacherous light, like part of a mirage himself, she could never imagine. He seemed (she remembers) to raise his arm as if to signal the oncoming car, and then to step toward it. She jerked the wheel sharply, and he seemed to step in front of the car—or perhaps, in that terrible moment, she jerked the wheel the wrong way, it is so hard to remember it clearly, it was over so swiftly. The impact on the fender of the car was so slight, so glancing—just a touch, really—that the moment it was over it was hard not to believe that she had imagined the whole thing. The whole time her foot was on the brake, pulling the car to a bumpy stop, half on the shoulder, half on the road, she made herself believe that she had imagined it, while huge, blind, shapeless prayers were delivered upward into the glittering sky. But when she looked back through the rear-view mirror there was the dark crumpled figure lying far behind her in the road. She sat very still in the stopped car in that blazing heat. She had forgotten that Jimmy was even with her. When she remembered, and turned to look at him, he was not asleep any longer, but had turned and was looking back at the road. “Oh, God,” he whispered. “Oh, my God.…”

His hand was on the handle of the door.

“No!” she cried, starting the car. “No!”

“Stop,” he said under his breath. And then, grabbing for the wheel of the car, “Stop—you've got to stop!”

She fought his hands from the wheel as he car gathered speed again. “No!” she sobbed. “No, it wasn't anything!” She pressed her foot hard on the accelerator, trying to see the road that seemed to appear and disappear ahead of her now through her tears.

“My God, Leona! Stop. You've got to stop!”

“How can we stop?” she screamed at him as the speedometer needle climbed across the white face of the dial. “We've run away from home! We're under age! If they find us—if we've hurt him—they'll take us back, they'll arrest us! We'll ruin the rest of our lives.”

He leaned forward against the dash, and she had only a glimpse of his moist, pale face. “My God … my God … you've got to stop …” he breathed.

But she didn't stop. They drove on, out of Arizona; into California, then north, into Nevada—the runaways.

Stopping at a filling station for gas, he looked at her while the attendant filled the little red car. He looked at her, his face still ashen and stricken, and said nothing. She did not look at him.

Early the next morning they entered Idaho. They were discovered there that day, recognized checking into the Sun Valley Inn. They were made to pose, arm in arm, smiling, for the photographers. Then there were the headlines:
ELOPING HEIRESS FOUND
.…

There was never anything that she could find, in any of the papers (and the Sun Valley papers carried other Western news), about a young boy—a dark-skinned boy, perhaps an Indian from the reservation, perhaps a Mexican—found on an Arizona road. She has used this argument—that she could find nothing in the papers about the accident—to convince herself, from time to time, that the boy was only slightly hurt. But she has always known, secretly, that he was killed instantly.

How could much “work out” for the two of them after that? They had tried, perhaps, by rubbing the picture from their minds. Sometimes, from the bed where she lay, watching him examine his morning face in the mirror, she would try to draw them back to one of the old places. But they had escaped from these places too thoroughly. They returned to New York, where they took a small hotel apartment on the East Side. Jimmy began coming home seldom then, and when he did appear it was usually with the smell of cocktails on his breath. This was when Gordon Paine began his furtive courtship.

Yes,
furtive
is the word. He would telephone her, saying “Just checking in,” and—just in case she was concerned, he said—he would keep her abreast of Jimmy's whereabouts, and what he was doing. “I saw Breed at the Algonquin bar today,” he would say. Or, “Your husband turned up at the Tysons' dinner last night. He was in pretty bad shape.” Or, “He's been drinking at the Princeton Club all morning, and he seems in
pretty
fair shape—in case you're concerned. He's talking about going back to college for the spring term. Did you know that?”