Those Harper Women (21 page)

Softly Leona says, “I have the basis here for my first two one-man shows, Rovensky and Knecht. Suzy Kirkpatrick I think I'm going to turn down.” Looking up at Edith she says, “It's going to be a wonderful gallery, Granny! You see, I've got to do
some
thing. I can't just—exist.”

“Forgive me if I don't understand the paintings. But I do understand what
you
want.” And then, to try to bring Sibbie back into the conversation, Edith says, “And just think—some day you may be showing Sibbie's paintings in your gallery!”

The minute the words are out, Edith knows they were a mistake. There is another heavy silence in which Leona cuts into her pear with her spoon, and the conversational ship sinks a few feet further, listing badly.

Edith says, “Sibbie's had shows in some of the best galleries in the world, haven't you, Sibbie?”

Sibbie now, finished with food, is puckering over a cigarette. “Actually, no.” She clears her throat. “I've never believed that galleries were good for the artist, you see. I've never prostituted my art by turning it over to the flesh-peddlers. I believe that if my art is good, it will find its audience naturally.”

Leona folds her napkin beside her plate, and the silence now seems both unbearable and unbreakable.

“Sibbie means—” Edith tries to begin, but it is hopeless, and she leaves the sentence unfinished. At least the dinner is over.

Leona pushes back her chair. “I have to make a phone call,” she says. “Granny, would you mind if I went out for a little while? There's someone I want to see.”

“Of course not, dear,” Edith says, almost with relief.

“I won't be late. Good night, Granny. Good night, Miss Sanderson.” She moves toward the door. “It's been so nice …” Then Edith and Sibbie are left staring at each other across the table and the candles and the wreckage of empty plates.

“It was my fault, sweetie,” Sibbie murmurs. “I'm sorry.”

Edith rings for Nellie to clear. “It was equally mine.”

Sibbie blows out a sharp stream of smoke. “Rovensky!” she says. “Knecht! I just couldn't help it.”

“Were any of them any good, do you think?”

“Crap. Absolute and utter crap. If there's one thing I know about, it's art, and I know crap when I see it. The only one who had an ounce of talent was the one she didn't like—the woman. But that was still crap.”

“I'm inclined to agree.” Edith sighs. “But this, you see, is exactly the way things have been going lately.”

“Don't try to understand the younger generation, sweetie. It's enough to do to know your own.”

“I don't know my own generation, Sibbie. I just know some people my own age.”

In the drawing room again, over the coffee cups and brandy glasses, Sibbie's voice takes on the faintly querulous note it always assumes when she talks about her own career. “All the greatest painters were discovered after they were dead,” she says. “Botticelli … Titian … Leonardo. But I'll be discovered one day, wait and see. My pictures will be valuable some day—except I won't be around to see it happen. Oh, the awful thing about these people, sweetie—these whats-their-names Leona was showing us—the
criminal
thing is the prices they're probably getting for their crap. What do you suppose? One thousand—two thousand—for a single picture? Imagine it! Two thousand dollars for a smear of brown paint—while I, while I.… Oh, I just don't know where my money goes. I save and save, make my own clothes, don't spend a cent! And what have I got to show for it? A stack of bills. The electrician, the plumber—that's who I'm painting for these days.”

“I want to give you a little check before you go,” Edith says.

“Just a loan, sweetie, just a loan. You'll get it all back. I've been keeping track. There's a man in New York right now, very interested in me. Oh, he's
many
times a millionaire, and I've got him nibbling at the hook. He's a great collector. If I mentioned his name, you'd know it right away … It's
so
much better to be in a good collection than in someone's funny gallery.”

“Let me give you the check right now before I forget.”

Edith goes to her desk, takes out fountain pen and checkbook, and writes out a check while Sibbie continues talking. “I expect to hear from him any day now,” Sibbie says, “maybe even tomorrow.…” Sibbie takes the check and folds it in half without looking at the amount, and puts it in the pocket of her peasant blouse. “Just a loan, just a loan, sweetie. And, as security, I'm going to bring you over my newest picture tomorrow.”

“Oh, Sibbie, please don't bother. I've got so many of your pictures already—I just don't have the wall space to hang them.”

“It doesn't matter. They'll be worth something some day—after I'm gone. You just hang on to them.” She stands up. “This new one may not be my
Arbeit
, but it's good. It says all it needs to say.”

“What's the subject this time, Sibbie?”

Sibbie smiles, a little ruefully. “The sea. The sun in the palm trees. Life,” she says, and laughs.

They both laugh. And, taking Sibbie's comfortable arm, the two women walk out onto the veranda. It is enough, for Edith, to have this woman as her only woman friend in St. Thomas, and it doesn't matter, doesn't matter at all, that the relationship is based on a continuing series of exchanges, loans of money for loans of pictures. Isn't there in every human relationship a trade involved, something for something else? None of us gives of ourselves freely. Besides, it is their secret.

All the lights of Charlotte Amalie glitter at their feet from the veranda, cascading down the hill in little drops and clusters, ending in a crescent of lights at the harbor's edge. Some are moving, in slow roller-coaster curves, as auto headlights move slowly along the winding roads. Others are fixed stars. There is something about the air here, a texture, that makes the farthest lights seem to wink; on the most distant hills now, the tiny lights wink, wink, wink at them as though some lunatic electrician were flipping hundreds of little switches off and on, on and off, and there is a glittering carnival quality about the night view that makes Edith think that this is what she would prescribe if she were put in charge of the design of heaven.

“Wait Disney couldn't do it better, could he?” Sibbie says. And then, opening her arms wide, with considerable drama, she says, “Your father's island!”

“Oh,
stop
it, Sibbie. You know it wasn't my father's island at all. He was just as much an outcast here as—as he was anywhere else, and as I am now.”

“Oh, pish-tush.” She kisses Edith lightly on the cheek. “Good night, sweetie. And don't worry about the younger generation.”

She turns and goes slowly down the steps into the winking darkness, and Edith watches her out the gate, hearing the retreating sandaled footsteps slap-slap-slapping down the hill. Instantly she has an idea, and makes a mental note to call her lawyer about it in the morning. She will add another codicil to her will, and leave Sibbie her Chrysler.

The lights from the town wink their congratulations to her on the niceness of this thought.

Once a woman tourist, eating a sandwich, walked past Edith Blakewell's house and dropped a crumpled travel folder in the street which Edith spotted, fetched, and read. “The city of Charlotte Amalie,” she read with amusement and some surprise (
city
indeed!), “has taken the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Algiers, the gaiety of Paris, and the El Greco coloring of Spain, and rolled them into one. At night, from the fashionable hills above the town, the string of lights around the harbor resembles nothing so much as a string of pearls.…”

Nine

Pearls. Edith's meeting Charles Blakewell began with the pearls. And so, in a sense, did the whole Louis Bertin occurrence. (Because that was what Louis was, really—not a lover but an occurrence.) The pearls, a triple strand with a diamond clasp, had been presented to her by her father, that summer of 1908, on their return trip from Paris, the second day out. Why he should have suddenly decided to give her an expensive necklace, following his behavior toward her during those Paris months after Andreas, was a mystery—unless, as she instantly supposed, he was trying to buy his way back into her good graces.

All through the Paris months there had been her punishment. The first thing he had done was cancel her checking account, removing any chance of her running away. As a little girl, she had been punished by being locked in a closet. Now, in effect, she was locked in the Paris house because she had no money with which to take herself anywhere else. When her father was home, he refused to speak to her. She had tried demanding of him “Where is Andreas? What did you do?” He would not answer. Or, sarcastically, she would say to him, “My sunburn is gone. Where are the drawing rooms of Paris that I was going to be laughed out of?” There was no reply, and there were no drawing rooms for her. It was easily the loneliest, most desperate time of her life, and every avenue of escape seemed closed. Her nineteenth birthday came and passed. And her father's most painful reprisal of all, perhaps, was to take away from her her duties of caring for her mother. An Englishwoman, Miss Mary Miles, had been hired as a nurse and companion for Dolly Harper. (And, to Miss Miles' credit, some headway was made, through constant surveillance, toward controlling the drinking.) There were no more little card games. “What do you want me to
do?
” she had begged of her father. “What reason have I got to exist? Tell me!” And then, “
Do
I exist? Do I exist at all?” But if he knew, at the time, the answers to these questions, he did not tell her.

There were other changes in the Harper household during that summer. Mademoiselle Laric, who had been, in her time, one of Edith's few confidantes, had resigned with the surprising announcement that, at the age of fifty-two, she intended to be married. A sturdy German girl, Fraülein Heidi Schiller, had been engaged as governess and tutor for the boys. And, by the end of July when they were ready to sail for America again, there had been added to this international retinue of employees (based on Meredith Harper's notion that the English made good nurses and the Germans good disciplinarians for small children) a French couple, Louis and Monique Bertin. By the time of that summer crossing, the function of the Bertins was not clear to Edith. She assumed, though, that it was inferior, since they were traveling in second class. She had not set eyes on either of them. When they were referred to at all, it was as “the Frenchman and his wife.”

And now, all at once, there was her father standing, looking almost contrite, in the doorway of her stateroom on the
Mauretania
—watching her as she lifted a pearl necklace from a Cartier box.

“I don't want them. I don't want anything from you—now or ever. Take them back.”

“They are for your birthday, Edith. From me.”

“My birthday was eight weeks ago!”

“The clasp was specially designed. It had to be set.”

The pearls were surprisingly hard to break. Tough little knots separated the individual beads. But pulling at the necklace, folding it and refolding it and twisting it in her fists and tugging it apart, she flung the broken necklace on the floor, and pearls rolled about the carpet of the stateroom, this way and that.

Meredith Harper looked at her with curious interest. “Why did you do that?” he asked finally, and knelt, on his hands and knees, and began picking up the pearls.

“Why don't you pay attention to Mama, who needs you, and leave me alone? I like it when you leave me alone.” And the sight of him, crawling about on the floor picking up the pieces of the broken necklace, struck her suddenly as so absurd and uncharacteristic of him that she laughed out loud. “You look exactly like a ragpicker, Papa!” she said.

He stood up then, his face full of fury. “I've always taken care of your mother. I married her, didn't I? When she came to me, sniveling and begging and saying that she was four months pregnant with you, didn't I
marry
her? You ought to be thankful to me that you've even got a name!”

Down the corridor, in her own stateroom, Edith's mother was lying on her chaise, having tea with Mary Miles. There was a hospital odor now, a smell of remedies, that traveled with Dolly Harper wherever she went—the smell of the stomachics and antiseptics, syrups and salts that reposed on the table by the chaise in bottles and jars, stoppered and unstoppered. Seeing Edith at the door, Dolly Harper's thin hand flew to her mouth, and the sleeve of her rose-colored gown cascaded down her bare arm. “
What happened?
” she cried. Edith threw herself across her mother's legs and sobbed, “He gave me pearls! I broke them!” And Mary Miles, as though accustomed to having such passionate outbursts take place in her presence, picked up her knitting. Her needles clicked while Edith wept.

Under the deep folds of the gown, Dolly Harper's knees stirred and shifted. “I had a dream,” she began in her quivering voice. “That one of the boys fell overboard! I thought that was what you came to tell me!” With one hand she touched Edith's head and neck and shoulders with small, restless ministrations. “Go to your papa.… Tell him you're sorry.”

“I hate him!”

“Beautiful pearls,” Dolly Harper said. “I saw them. He wants to … forgive. He was going to take you to dinner tonight. Just you and he.”

“He said terrible things! Terrible things!”

“You hurt him. Just remember … he can hurt you … even more.”

“He can never hurt me any more, Mama!”

“Just do—” Dolly Harper began, suddenly choking on her words, “—what he wants!” She put her head back on the pillows of the chaise, her hands falling to her sides, and began to cough—deep, rattling, terrible coughs that shook her whole body and brought tears to her eyes. “No … solution,” she said between gasps. “Happy again … in Morristown.…” Quietly, Mary Miles arose and poured red syrup into a spoon. “Here you are, lady,” she said. She supported Dolly Harper's shoulders while Dolly struggled to accept the spoon in her gulping mouth. Then, the coughing over, there was silence. Mary Miles threw Edith a critical look and picked up her needles again.