Those Harper Women (41 page)

“Neutral territory! This is about the most un-neutral territory you could have picked—your own private little island hideaway. Remember how you used to threaten to go to Saint Thomas?” He mimicks her. “‘I'm just going to go to Saint Thomas, where people are
nice
to me.'” He kneels, still with his back to her, looking out at the sea. “You don't seem to realize how stubborn you used to be,” he says, “how determined. Being married to you was like being married to an institution. Like being married to the First National City Bank.”

“I'm different now. I'm broke now. The institution is on its last legs. Please don't go till I've said what I want to say to you both.”

“Hell,” he says quietly, trailing his fingers in the scurf of a wave, “I'm already here. I might as well stay.”

“I've got you a nice room at Smith's Fancy. Granny says she doesn't have room for you both—only for Gordon But I've got you a pretty room.”

“Granny,” he says, still not looking at her. “She never changes either, does she? Good old Granny.” He stands up and dusts his palms on his trouser legs. “Well, let's go say hello to the old dragon.” He starts back along the deserted beach to where he has left his car.

“Actually,” Leona says, to fill the awkward silence that follows, once the hellos have been accomplished, “this was really all Granny's idea.”

“Ah,” Jimmy says, nodding gravely. “The wisdom of the elders.”

“Well, I wouldn't say that, Leona,” Edith says hastily. “No, it wasn't my idea at all.” They stand in the small sitting room, and Edith says, “Well, sit down. Let's have a drink. What'll you have, Jimmy? What is it you young people say? Name your poison?”

Jimmy smiles, passing a hand across his mouth. “Nothing, thanks. Not right now.”

“Hm,” Edith says. “That's not like you, Jimmy. Well,
I'm
going to have a drink.” She goes to the cellaret and splashes whisky in a glass. “No,” she says. “My father was always holding little family meetings. I'm not sure they ever accomplished much.” Then she says, “I'm sorry I can't ask you to stay at the house, Jimmy. But I think, under the circumstances—”

“Don't give it a second thought, Mrs. B,” he says. “I'm all checked in at Smith's Fancy.”

“Not to be Mrs. Grundyish, but I just don't think it would
look
quite right if both you men were staying here.”

“Of course,” Leona says thoughtfully, “since Jimmy's the first one to get here, he really should be the one to stay at the house, shouldn't he? Would you stay here, Jimmy, if Granny'd let you?”

“It's not a question of
letting
him, dear.”

“Would you, Jimmy?”

Smiling at Edith, Jimmy asks, “Am I invited, Mrs. B?”

“Well—” Edith hesitates. She is certainly not going to give up her own room for Jimmy Breed. And yet she has already moved out of it. There are other rooms, to be sure. She starts to ask: Do you really think this is wise? Then she says, “There's a slight problem of sheets and pillowcases.”

“In the Navy, I slept between the same pair of blankets for five weeks.”

“Well, I suppose I can do a little better than the
Navy,
” Edith says.

“Oh, thank you, Granny,” Leona says. “Nellie?” she calls. “Will you phone Smith's Fancy and tell them Mr. Breed won't be staying there? Ask them to send Mr. Breed's things over here. Oh, isn't this nice?” she says to Jimmy.

Edith looks at both of them under raised eyebrows.

Then there are things to do—to try to put another of the back bedrooms into as decent shape as possible, and get Jimmy settled there. Then it is two hours later, and quite dark, when the three of them gather in the sitting room again—Leona bathed and changed—and, since the two of them have still refused her offer of a drink, Edith has fixed another for herself which is beginning to have the desired effect: it is putting her in a better mood. The sound of another car is heard stopping outside the house, and Leona goes to the window and says quietly, “Yes—it's Gordon.”

“You have your quorum,” Edith says, adding a tot of whisky to her glass. “Hooray.”

“Hello, Gordon,” Leona says as Nellie ushers him into the room.

Gordon is shaking hands with Leona now, but he is looking at Jimmy Breed. Gordon is a very erect young man, not as tall as Jimmy and more compactly put together. He stands very straight, and his tailor does well by him in emphasizing the straightness of his spine. Edith has never seen the two men together before, and it is interesting to see how Gordon's chiseled neatness contrasts with Jimmy, who is big and loose-limbed and whose general attitude is sloped and lounging. Well, Edith admits, at least Leona has always chosen good-looking men for her husbands. They are both that. The two men face each other now. “Bit of a surprise to find you here, Breed,” Gordon says.

“Life,” Jimmy drawls, “is full of surprises.”

“May I ask what you're doing here?”

“I could ask you the same question,” Jimmy says. “And get the same answer. She asked me to come.”

There is a long silence then. Leona stands very still.

Then, nodding in Leona's direction, Gordon says, “Our friend here looks well, doesn't she?”

“Yes, she does indeed.”

Wishing, briefly, that Gordon would not refer to her as “Our friend here,” Leona says, “You've both got to be very nice to each other. It's one of the rules.”

“Oh, we have rules for this?” Gordon says.

“Have a drink, Gordon!” Edith says, in a voice that is louder than she intended.

He shakes his head. “No thank you.” To Leona he says, “I only meant that from the tone of your letter I expected to find you at death's door.”

“Well,
I'll
have another,” Edith says, and starts toward the cellaret which, for some reason, seems a little nearer to her than she thought it would be. She bumps into it, rattling all the bottles and decanters. But fortunately no one seems to notice.

“It's good to see you, Edith,” Gordon says, the only one of Leona's husbands permitted to call her by her first name.

“And it's nice to see you, Gordon.”

Gordon sits down carefully in one of the straight chairs. Looking around the room, he says, “Now all we need is the Spanish count.”

“Oh, we certainly don't need him!” Edith says.

Jimmy taps out a cigarette from his silver case—a case which, Leona suddenly remembers, she gave him long ago. Standing in the center of the room, she says, “Actually we probably should have Edouardo here. I thought of it. But he's in Alcalá and he seemed difficult to import.”

“Oh, Leona! Not that dreadful man!” To Gordon, Edith says, “His mother stole her diamond earrings!”

“I heard he gave you quite a run,” Gordon says.

“Oh,
quite
a run,” Leona says. “The quickest, fastest run I've ever taken in my life. I've still got a stitch in my side from it.”

“Not to sound smug, but I warned you, Leona,” Gordon says.

“Of course you did,” Edith says.

“Poor Leona.”

“No. Don't say ‘Poor Leona.' None of you really knows anything about Edouardo. Oh, dear, he was—”

“Don't let's talk about him,” Edith says.

Slowly moving across the room, Leona says, “Why not? I don't mind. On the beach at Torrevieja, we had a quarrel. And, to get even, Edouardo took his little speedboat and, right in front of everybody, picked up Alfonso, the little fairy beach boy, and ran off with him. They were gone till the next morning. It was a strange way for him to get even with me.”

“Disgusting,” Edith says.

“And the quarrel was strange too. It started because a little boy came galloping along the beach on a horse, and the horse kicked one of Edouardo's water skis that was lying there, and nicked it. Edouardo was furious. He went chasing down the beach after the boy. He yanked the boy off the horse and began cuffing him. He dragged the boy back—just a little boy, no older than eight or nine—and Edouardo insisted on calling the police. ‘Don't be silly,' I said. ‘Just over a nicked water ski. What difference does it make?' But the water skis were a new pair—”

“Purchased by you, I'm sure,” Edith interjects.

“—and the paint was chipped, and Edouardo called the police. The police came and took the little boy away—the police in Spain are such terrible-looking creatures, I could have wept.
‘Soy el Conde de Para-Diaz,
' Edouardo kept saying. ‘I am Count Para-Diaz.…'”

Gordon shakes his head. “A bad actor from the start,” he says. “I knew it the minute I laid eyes on him.”

“But he was beautiful. Beautiful to look at.”

“The pretty-boy type,” Edith says to Gordon. She moves cautiously to the cellaret again, adds a little whisky to her drink, surveys its level critically, then adds a little more.

“There was a cruel streak in Edouardo that was very puzzling,” Leona says. “Once he said to me, ‘Let's go out and gaff some turtles.' So we went out in the boat to a place near the mouth of a stream where we'd seen some sea turtles swimming, and sure enough, there they were—their heads above the water, very handsome Roman-looking heads. I drove the boat and Edouardo stood in the stern with the gaff, and he'd shout to me, ‘There's one!' And I'd try to head for it, and he'd try to get the gaff into it. ‘What are you going to do with the poor thing if you catch one?' I asked him. He shrugged. The point was to catch one. But fortunately the turtles were quicker than Edouardo, and every time out boat came racing at a turtle, he'd just sink, like a big green grand piano under the water, and Edouardo would stand there, cursing and screaming. Cruel—”

“The dirty Spik,” Gordon says.

Leona looks quickly at him. “Don't use that word.”

“I'm sorry, Leona. But—”

“I don't care. I don't like that word. Don't use it again, please. He was my husband. I married him. It wasn't his fault he had a cruel streak. He was descended from cruelty on both sides.”

“You're well rid of him,” Edith says.

Leona's eyes are gauzed, meditative. “He was a member of the human race,” she says.

From the chair where she has seated herself, Edith says, “Oh, brother!”

Suddenly everyone is looking at her. “Why, Edith,” Gordon says, “I don't believe I've ever seen you smoking.”

“I hardly,” Edith says, carefully holding the lighted match to the end of the cigarette, “ever do.”

Then they are all silent for a while. Jimmy, who has said almost nothing since Gordon's arrival, sits folded on the sofa—like all big men on sofas, his knees stick up—his eyes studying the ceiling. Gordon breaks the silence. “Well, when's the inquisition start?” he says. “Or whatever it is that this is supposed to be.”

“It's not an inquisition,” Leona says. “It's discussion. I'm taking you both out to dinner—to Bluebeard's. Come on. Let's go.”

“Oh,” Edith says. “I thought you could all have dinner with me tonight. A party.…”

“Do you mind if we don't, Granny?” Leona walks to where Edith sits, bends, and kisses Edith lightly on the cheek. “Remember,” she whispers in Edith's ear, “this really
was
your idea—basically.”

Watching them go out the door, Edith thinks: Well, perhaps Leona is being very modern. But what is to be accomplished by this? What has been accomplished thus far—aside from the fact that she has gotten herself a little squiffy from all the drinks with which she had tried, without much success, to bridge the gap between generations. A little hiccius-doccius, as the British say. She gets out of her chair and moves slowly through the rooms to the stairs, mounting them carefully, her hand gripping the railing. When she gets to her bedroom she stands for a moment, eyeing the murderous little Oriental runner in front of her bathroom door. The evil yellow swastikas of its design catch in the lamplight, echoing their old colors, and seem to squirm. Yes, perhaps this is why the rug has turned against her: it is old, fifty-four years old; old and crabby and tired of doing what it has always done. Too late, it has decided to rebel, just as most of us decide to rebel too late. She does not dare walk across it now, in her present condition, not even as an endurance test. She makes a wide, careful circle around it, into the bathroom. The bathroom smells of fresh flowers. Then she remembers that, for the time being, it is not her bathroom. It is Gordon's.

The three of them sit at a candlelit corner table in the restaurant at Bluebeard's Castle.
Purified
, Leona is thinking, having glimpsed, when they came through the bar, Arch Purdy at a table with another girl. It was an act of purification that she performed with him. Why is it possible to walk through mud and come out feeling cleaner on the other side? Yes, she is almost tempted to go over to Arch's table and tell him that she is happy—happy he has found a warm, compliant girl to share his tender evenings with. Because he wasn't so bad—not mud at all, though she had thought it would be mud when she first stepped into that room with him. He wasn't so bad and, purified by him, she wishes him well. In retrospect, nothing was so bad. She has never felt so sure of herself before. “Now remember this is my evening,” she says. “I don't want any arguing over the check when it comes.” She looks around for a waiter. Smiling, she says, “I'm afraid Granny had a little too much to drink tonight.”

“I thought it politer not to mention that,” Gordon says.

Turning back to them, tracing the rim of her water glass with one red fingernail, she says, “Poor Granny. She tries so hard to get to know me, but I've never really let her. I don't know why.” Then she says, “Now tell me—both of you—what made you come? I wasn't at all sure you would.”