Women and Thomas Harrow Read online

  In the last analysis there was a good deal to be said for that secondary school platitude about playing the game to the end. If you had been playing the game for a very long while, you became conditioned to it until you finally forgot embellishments and graces, and in the end facts were not so important as they used to be. Character in the end was about the only value left, and by disregarding fact, Walter Price had gained in character; yet he was meticulously reliable when it came to contracts and agreements—but then, he had to be.

  Tom Harrow looked across the table to the window over the garden. Everything outside was fresh and delicately green because it was the end of May. The gentle pastel tints of the trees and bushes were a sign of renewal reminding him of a speech which his first producer, Arthur Higgins, had once made when presented with a silver tray by a grateful cast on the three hundredth performance of a play.

  “This lovely gift,” Arthur Higgins had said, “will stimulate me to rededicate myself anew.” Although these awful words were not useful in themselves, they evoked anew a picture of Arthur Higgins, now deceased, which went to prove that the distillation of fact was all that mattered.

  It was spring. Decoration Day was just around the corner, and it occurred to Tom Harrow that this year he must positively make a visit to the family lot in the Upper Hill Cemetery. He would stand there looking at his parents’ graves and muse on the inescapable fact of mortality, which was one fact that could not distill itself; but he would not resolve to rededicate himself anew. It was too late, because you only dedicated yourself, once in a life time, and there was no such thing as rededication. And the worst of it was that you never really knew that you had genuinely dedicated yourself until long after you had done it.

  “There’s more coffee and bacon if you want them, Walter,” Tom Harrow said. “They are up there being kept at a constant temperature, like your friendship and mine. You are sure you don’t want some more?”

  “Oh, no thanks, Tom,” Walter said, “and are you sure you don’t mind my staying over tomorrow or the day after?”

  “It will be a pleasure, Walter,” Tom answered. “There will only be the family. But I hope you will excuse me for a while right now. I’ve got one or two things to do. I’m still worrying over finishing a third act, and I’ve got to call up Beechley in New York.”

  “I know that you and Ed are very close ever since the old Mort Sullivan days,” Walter said, “but it does seem to me, quite frankly, that Ed has been slipping in the last few years.”

  It was hard to tell whether or not Walter had heard something. You never knew exactly when you were on solid ground with Walter Price.

  “We are all slipping, I suppose,” Tom said, “in our small, individual ways.”

  It was pleasant to realize that he was including himself in the slipping group only through courtesy, but the moment would arrive sometime and there could be no concealment.

  “Are you sure Emily won’t be bored if I stay?” Walter Price asked.

  “You know very well Emily is never bored,” Tom Harrow said. “That’s the main reason why I married Emily.”

  “Oh, come now,” Walter said, “there were lots of other reasons.”

  The worst of it was that reasons were like the lilacs outside the window—they burgeoned and bloomed triumphantly and then went to seed. Villon had said something along those lines. Villon was a very able poet.

  “The capacity for not being bored was one of the main reasons,” Tom said, “and someone, out of compassion, had to take her off the stage. But the point is that Emily is going to love your staying here awhile.”

  His glance traveled again around the dining room. The room and the whole house were the result of his having been director and producer as well as a playwright. It was inevitable that the place should have the perfection and the atmosphere of a stage set. Suddenly, because thoughts moved oddly sometimes, he found his mind writing stage directions:

  The curtain rises on the Harrow dining room at a quarter before ten o’clock of a late May morning. The pale but glorious sunlight of a New England spring filters through window at L; through its small panes one glimpses dewy lilacs in bud and the fresh foliage of a copper beech. The dining room itself is austere New England of the early nineteenth century, as is accurately indicated by its delicate moldings and the truly beautiful mantelpiece at R. The wallpaper is authentic French pictorial, showing the conventional scene of shipwrecked Ulysses encountering Nausicaa and her maidens. The furniture, Chippendale, purchased in the great days of Christie’s, is worthy of this restrained and beautiful background, markedly the fine screen concealing the pantry door, and the hunting board acquired from an Irish castle. Hot plates for a comfortable breakfast stand on its meticulously waxed surface. Obviously the owner of this dining room has a sharp eye for detail. Seated, at the rising of the curtain, one discovers WALTER PRICE, corpulent, loquacious, in his mid-sixties; and his younger host, THOMAS HARROW, director and playwright, turned fifty—a spare man, carefully dressed, with an air about him showing that he is up from New York and not indigenous to this expensively acquired background. There is a sound of footsteps (the clattering of mules) on a staircase offstage at R. EMILY, third wife of THOMAS HARROW, ash-blond and plumply late-thirtyish, in a gold brocade housecoat, enters at R. Though it is only ten in the morning, she wears a number of exceedingly heavy gold bracelets, a diamond-and-sapphire clip, and three diamond rings. One gains the impression that Emily carries as much as she possibly can on her person in case things may become difficult again.

  Tom Harrow had learned never to discount coincidence. He could never remember whether the scenario had flashed through his mind before or after he had heard Emily’s mules on the stairs outside. But there she was, entering at R, with the housecoat and exactly the correct amount of jewelry, smelling of bath salts and Chanel No. 5, and with her hair done in the new way that she had picked up from that place in the Sixties, just off Park Avenue, run by that new little man about whom Rita had told her the last time Rita or someone else had come East from Hollywood.

  “Good morning, everybody,” Emily said. “And it is a good morning, isn’t it?”

  No one could have written a better entrance line. Tom pushed back his chair, crossed to the right and kissed her lightly.

  “Ummm, dearest,” Emily said.

  She had made the same humming noise the first time he had ever kissed her, and she still did it, and somehow the sound was never as perfunctory as it should have been.

  “Walter and I were both wondering where you were, dear,” Tom said. “We were hoping rather desperately that you would join us at breakfast—but better late than never.”

  “Oh, I would have, Tom,” Emily said, “except I do know when to efface myself, don’t I? I knew you and Walter wanted to have one of your good long talks. I can read all Tom’s expressions now, Walter. The thing to notice is that teensy-weensy wrinkle just above Tom’s nose. Whenever it deepens, I’ve done something wrong, and it deepened the last time I interrupted you and Walter, Tom, and why shouldn’t it have? I was being selfish. Tom is possessive about his old friends, Walter, just the way he ought to be.”

  “Walter is staying for a few days, dear,” Tom said.

  “Oh, splendid,” Emily said. “Then I will have a chance to see Walter, and so will Harold. Is Harold down yet?”

  “No, not yet,” Tom answered.

  Emily seated herself at the foot of the table. Her brocade housecoat rustled discreetly, and her bracelets, as she put her elbows on the table, made a comfortable, solid sound.

  “Stepmothers are always horrid, aren’t they?” she said, and her brown eyes turned appealingly to Walter Price. Her ash-blond hair and her brown eyes were the combination, as Arthur Higgins had often said, that got Emily through the outer office, and they still were so beautiful that they frequently made one forget the beginnings of her double chin.

  “I hate to be a prying stepmother, Tom,” she said, “but Harold came in very late last
night, and I don’t see what there is for him to do in this poky little town. Not that it isn’t a dear town.”

  “She means it’s dear because I lived here once, Walter,” Tom Harrow said, “and Emily’s middle name is Loyalty. Emily Loyalty Harrow. She added it the moment she dropped her maiden name.”

  “Why, darling,” Emily said, “you say the sweetest things sometimes, so unexpectedly, and you’ve never said that one to me before. He really hasn’t, Walter. There’s always something new every minute when you’re the handmaiden to a genius.”

  “Yes, dear,” Tom said. “Each day you must rededicate yourself anew, and let’s not mind about Harold’s late hours. Besides, it is very patient of him, and gracious, to be here with us.”

  “Darling,” Emily said, “I adore having Harold, and you know I always have, ever since he first appeared in my life as a gangling, pouty little boy from Groton.”

  “Don’t speak disparagingly of Groton, dear,” Tom Harrow said. “It’s one of Walter’s alma maters.”

  “Oh,” Emily said, “I never knew you went to Groton, Walter. You’ve never acted like a Grotonian. And coming from me, that’s a compliment, darling.”

  “He went there,” Tom said, “and he wore a nose guard.”

  Emily dissolved into soft laughter. Her laugh was still beguiling, and she usually knew when to use it.

  “Oh dear,” she said, “I never can tell when Tom is going to be funny. It still creeps up and pounces just the way it did the first time I met him at dear old Arthur Higgins’s apartment. Age cannot wither nor custom stale thy infinite variety.”

  “That’s a very apt quotation, Emily,” Walter Price said. “I’ve often applied it to Tom myself, but never out loud.”

  “She must have been browsing in the library, although the quotation is not quite correct,” Tom said, “and stumbled over a loose Bartlett. And I have another one for you, dear. If you keep reading Bartlett, ‘Get thee to a nunnery’—also William Shakespeare.”

  Emily laughed again.

  “Darling,” she said, “isn’t this a nunnery enough—being away in this poky old house for the next three months or so? I don’t mean that I don’t love it, and that I don’t love the creative improvements you’ve made on it. Sometimes I say to myself that it is one of your best stage arrangements. It’s almost like a revival of Berkeley Square.”

  He had never been able to get over feeling a sharp surprise when Emily startled him. The experience was still like running into a door in the dark.

  “That’s a very valid observation, dear,” he said, “and I know what you mean. But after all, we’re both in the theatre, and if you’ve been in the theatre long enough I suppose you can’t help becoming theatrical. I admit I’m theatrical, and Walter here is, too. Somehow you can’t stop attitudinizing, even when you’re at home.”

  “Oh, Tom,” Emily said, “I didn’t intend a single thing I said to be a criticism. I just love the whole house, and I know you do your best work here, and I know how you enjoy the atmosphere, and I’m beginning to enjoy it myself more and more each year—the cemetery and the streets and everything, and the small-town-boy-who-made-good part of it. But you will admit it is such a little puddle for such a big frog, dear, and you are big in any puddle.”

  There was no reason why Emily should have liked the house or the town, since she was unfitted for both by training and predilection. He was only irritated because she was obviously trying to solicit the sympathy of Walter Price. He wished that Emily would stop soliciting sympathy, but she always had—and from the most unlikely quarters.

  “It isn’t a puddle,” he said; “it’s an environment, my dear.”

  He was relieved when the pantry door opened, because Emily, once she started, always found it difficult to drop a subject. It was Alfred, the colored houseman, in his gray alpaca coat—a sign that it was morning. In the evening he wore a fresh white coat, and there was no reason why he should not have looked well on the wages that he and his wife were receiving as a couple. There were times when Emily expressed a suspicion that Ruth was not Alfred’s wife, but if Ruth went where Alfred went, so far away from town, her adaptability overcame possible moral turpitude.

  “Mr. Dodd asks if he might see you in the garden, Mr. Harrow,” Alfred said.

  The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People would have been delighted by Alfred’s voice, which had no hint of Dixie in it. Alfred was a highly educated man for whom Tom Harrow felt a personal and professional respect. If you wanted a scene in the White House, with a colored butler like the one who had appeared in a Sherwood war play, or, if you wanted a gentle colored professor in a sequence of quiet social significance, there was no reason to look further. Alfred had a fine, high forehead, deep-set, sensitive eyes, and the delicate hands of an artist. It was incredible that what Emily said she had discovered could be true—that Alfred and Ruth daily used up a fifth of bourbon from the liquor closet and that Alfred made two surreptitious calls to New York each day so that he could play the numbers. On the whole, Tom Harrow condoned both these facts, because Emily never had been able to get on with servants—but Alfred and Ruth were able to understand her.

  “Thank you, Alfred,” he said, and he smiled affectionately at Emily and Walter Price. “I’m afraid I’ll have to leave you two alone until lunchtime. There’s the garden and then there are some calls to New York.”

  “Tom, dear,” Emily said, “I wish you wouldn’t force yourself into this routine. We’ve hardly settled in and we never seem to have any time to do anything together.”

  “I know, dear,” Tom said. “I realize I’m always saying and hoping that I’ll have some leisure on my hands here, and then duty obtrudes itself; but I’m sure, this year, that things will quiet down.”

  “I know you have to keep on paying alimony,” Emily said, “to that Laura Hopedale, who doesn’t need it, and besides, you support Harold and …”

  Tom raised his hand deliberately. Emily never could learn the value of reticence or when it was time to stop if she had an interested audience, and possibly it paid her not to learn.

  “Tell Walter the rest after I’ve gone, dear,” he said. “Don’t be hurt with me, but I think I know what else you’re going to say.”

  He seldom needed to wonder what Emily was going to say. The unreality of the theatre world had descended heavily upon the breakfast scene. It was no wonder that people in the theatre found it hard to get on with outsiders and ended by clinging together in self-defense. Most of their lives were conducted in disproportionate make-believe, and dramatic effect was actually an unnatural phenomenon requiring years of cultivation. The gesture and the word that interested an audience across the footlights were peculiar deviations from ordinary life. A special talent was required to select such technicalities. No wonder the conversation in the dining room had been off the normal beat. No wonder the house was decorated with large, bold strokes, and no wonder he was not the man he used to be. He had lived so long with flamboyant personalities, had been obliged to cope so long with what was called artistic temperament, and had been compelled to deal so long and charmingly and patiently with actors’ and actresses’ stupidities, that of course his own character had changed.

  II

  It’s Always Fair Weather, Even without a Stein, When Good Fellows Get Together

  It was not consoling to realize that he had been a ham actor in his sequence with Emily at the breakfast table, bidding for laughs and sympathy from a nonexistant audience. And now Jack, of Dodd’s Arborists and Landscaping Service, was waiting for him in the garden. This fact in itself had its dramatic significance although it might be lacking in audience appeal. He and Jack Dodd, when in school together, had competed for the affections of the same girl, and he had often wondered what would have happened if Jack Dodd had not won the competition. It had been so long ago that they were now almost strangers, and yet you could not be wholly a stranger to anyone in a small town where you had once lived. The surfac
e of the town had changed as much as he had; the business had once been called Dodd’s Nursery. Now it was Dodd’s Arborists and Landscaping Service, but the undertones were there. A new pickup truck labeled Dodd’s Arborists and Landscaping Service stood in the driveway in front of the old stable, which had been turned into a garage many years before.

  It would have been a desecration to change any part of the garden, which had been designed just after the house was built in the first decade of the 1800s. He had only tried, as he had with the house, to put it back in its original condition. Everyone, including members of the Garden Clubs of America, had called the final result a notable achievement, and, in spite of the professional advice he had received, he could give himself most of the credit. He had always disliked a sloppy stage set and he was increasingly critical of the best stage designers. He had treated the weed-grown garden like a stage, yet with respect for the original architect, a Frenchman exiled by Napoleon, according to tradition. The summerhouse, or gazebo, not far from the crumbling brick wall, told more of that forgotten landscape artist than any of his box-bordered paths. Even in its ruined stage it had the spirit of the Regency and he knew from the moment he saw it that he must exercise great care in reconstruction. He had been uncompromisingly particular that nothing was planted that could not have grown there more than a few years after the sea-fight between the Constitution and the Java. It was the end of May and things would look better in a week or so, but spring would be gone by then. Now in the morning light the garden was full of hope, and though he was against pathetic fallacy, he could believe it was grateful to him for its renewal.

  There was only one thing about it that marred his satisfaction—the remark that Emily had made about Berkeley Square. The reconstruction had been too meticulous, too self-consciously removed from the present. It was not a formal garden; instead it was a horticultural museum, and now the discovery appalled him. What was it in him that made him desire to recreate something that time had erased? Obviously his desire for self-expression represented some form of escape, but still he could not understand from what he was escaping. If the effort represented an intense desire for order, he could not understand the compulsion, because his life had been orderly—or had it? Perhaps he had been seeking peace of mind, although he should have known that doing over a house and garden was a childish way to achieve it.