Those Harper Women (12 page)

Now Edith hears Leona coming up the stairs, and moving along the upstairs hall. “Leona!” she calls. But there is no answer. She hears Leona's door open, then close with a click. “Leona!” she calls again. “I want to speak to you.” Perhaps Leona hasn't heard her. Well, then she will find the note and be in in a minute. She gives Leona a minute by the glowing clock to find the note, read it, and come in. Then two minutes; then three. Is it possible, she then asks herself, that Leona is simply going to
ignore
the note? “
Leona!
”

“Please leave me alone,” Leona whispers to her empty bedroom. She picks up the note on her pillow, quickly reads it, and crumples it up into a tight, fierce ball.
E.B.H.B
. What does that first
B
stand for, she wonders? Borgia, perhaps. She tosses the crumpled note on the bed and goes to her dressing table and lights a cigarette.

“
Leona!
”

“Please,” she repeats softly to the mirror. “Not now.” She puts the cigarette down in a tiny ashtray. Then she returns to the bed, smooths out the note, and reads it again. She goes back to the dressing table, picks up her cigarette, and stands there for several minutes, deciding.

Hearing Leona's tap on the door, Edith sits straight up in bed, and says “Come in!”

Opening the door, Leona says, “Hi, Granny.”

“Now see here, Leona,” Edith says to the dark silhouette in the doorway. “I was not
spying
on you! If I hear strange voices in my garden at three-thirty in the morning, don't I have a right to get up and see what's going on? If I see a strange man in my garden at this hour, don't I have the right to wonder what he's doing there and who he is? Who is he? May I say I didn't like his looks? Do you realize I've been waiting up half the night to talk to you? And what makes
you
think you can come in, and bring strangers in, at all hours of the night? I do not run a hotel, Leona. Come in here and close the door. I want to talk to you.”

“Granny, I—”

“And what were you
doing
down there, on your knees like a washerwoman pulling up my grass?”

Leona's hand rests on the door frame. “I dropped an earring,” she says. “I was looking for it.”

“I
see!
And who was that man? What was he doing here?”

There is another pause. “He's a friend of mine. He's interested in old houses,” Leona says finally. “I was showing him the garden.”

“I
see!
” Edith says again. Interested in old houses, she thinks, and also in young ladies. “Baloney!” she says, reaching up and snapping on the lamp beside her bed. “Now come in. There's something I want to tell you.”

Leona closes the bedroom door and leans against it. “I'm sorry, Granny. Oh, please don't be mad at me. I've had so many people mad at me tonight,” and she laughs a little helpless laugh.

“This is not a laughing matter, Leona,” Edith says. “I'm very upset.” She slaps the bed sharply, twice. “Sit down. And, as my mother used to say, ‘Being sorry doesn't help.'”

Carrying her cigarette, Leona crosses the room and sits down on the edge of Edith's bed. “Use this,” Edith says, lifting her empty milk glass and extracting the saucer from under it. “I don't have any ashtrays in here.”

“I didn't mean to yell at you, Granny. But you startled me.”

“Never mind that,” Edith says. “Your Uncle Harold called tonight.”

“Oh,” Leona says.

“Yes. I wonder if you have any idea what he called about?”

Leona shakes her head.

“It was about your young friend Winslow. Whom you had me see.”

“Oh,” Leona says, with an odd little sidelong smile. “So we come full circle.”

“You seem to think there's something
amusing
about this!” Edith says, her voice rising, “Well, if
you'd
been given the rough edge of Harold's tongue the way I was, you wouldn't smile. I should not have seen that young man, Leona! You should not have
asked
me to see him. That man had no right—”

“Granny, please, I—”

“Let me finish! I want you to go to Mr. Winslow tomorrow, and tell him that he is to write
nothing
—not even a word—about any of the Harpers. Tell him I have changed my mind about everything I said. Do you understand that, Leona? Do you?”

Leona sits very still, her shoulders hunched, on the edge of the bed, and Edith wonders if perhaps she has been too harsh with her. Now that Edith's eyes are becoming accustomed to the light she studies Leona's face, which looks flushed and smudged, the features somehow blurred, and Leona's eyes look tired. Leona's cigarette has gone out now and, in the silence that follows, Edith watches as Leona tries to get it going again. The match wavers out, and Leona tosses it into the wastebasket—a careless habit she has—and she strikes a second match, and Edith has an odd thought that this may be her most enduring picture of Leona: not young, not laughing, not glowing out of Degas, but frowning, hunched, occupied with a cigarette. Then she remembers that, after all, it
is
late, Leona probably
is
tired, and certainly wherever she has been she has had a cocktail or two. Normally, Edith thinks a cocktail improves Leona—as one tends to improve most people. But tonight Leona looks almost unwell. She has the cigarette lighted now, and she inhales deeply.

Edith pushes the saucer a little closer to her across the bed and says in a gentler voice, “It was no fun, dear, being spoken to the way your great-uncle spoke to me tonight. But unfortunately he's right. We do not want publicity. There are plenty of things Mr. Winslow could say about us that wouldn't look well in print. My father wasn't exactly a saint, you know. And what about your mother and Perry? Or yourself? What if he chose to say something about your divorces?”

“Granny,” Leona says, “that isn't the story he's after.”

“Which brings me to my next question. What
is
he after?”

“It's a story about—Uncle Harold, I guess.”

“Is Harold in some sort of
difficulties
, Leona?”

“Granny, I don't
know
. Honestly I don't. Eddie seems to think so—that's what he wants to find out!”

Edith takes a deep breath. “Financial difficulties, Leona?”

“That's what Eddie seems to think.”

“That's impossible!” Edith says. “Your Mr. Winslow could be sued for saying things like that! How could Harold be in any financial difficulties? He couldn't!” And then: “Could he?”

“Granny, Eddie told me all sorts of crazy things—about the business—about—”

“Then we've got to stop him! Tell me what he said. If there's something funny going on with Harold and the business I have a right to know.”

“Oh,” Leona cries, “who
cares
about Uncle Harold! I'm so
sick
of talking about him. To hell with Uncle Harold!”

“Harold is
Harold,
” Edith says sharply, leaning forward and gripping Leona's arm. “He's my brother! He's a powerful man. He controls—”

“I
know
. He controls all the
money!
And where would this family be without the lousy money!”

“
Lousy money?
” Edith cries, shaking Leona's arm. “Do you realize that Harold's the trustee for my share of my father's estate? And my custodian for practically everything else I
own?
I'm an old woman, Leona—I don't intend to die in the poor-house! And do you realize that when I die everything comes to
you?
What's mine is going to be yours someday. You can say to hell with Uncle Harold when I'm dead, but not before!”

“Granny, please … stop!”

“And what about your mother's lousy money? And Arthur's? And Arthur's and Harold's children? The business is the family, and the family is the business—that's what my father used to say, and it's still true, my dear young girl—”

“Oh, stop!”

“And you!” Edith says. “What lousy money do
you
live on, pray? The same lousy money that the rest of us do! And Harold's in charge of it. Somehow I can't see
you
enjoying the poorhouse, Leona!”

“Who said anything about the
poorhouse
, for God's sake, Granny?”

“I can't see you as a member of the working classes, either! Have you ever earned an honest nickel in your life, my dear?”

“Oh, stop!” Leona cries, trying to pull away from Edith's grip.

And suddenly Leona screams, and Edith, seeing what has happened, answers Leona's scream with a shriek of her own, for Leona's lighted cigarette has flown from her fingers and dropped on Edith's bed. “Oh, for heaven's sake!” Edith cries as they both lunge for the cigarette together, chasing the small smoldering cylinder that rolls like a mad live thing back and forth across the sheets. “We're all going to go up in
flames
, Leona!” Edith sobs. But at last Leona reaches the cigarette, and brushes furiously at the bedclothes, wildly scattering the ashes, and then, all at once, they are in each other's arms, locked in a violent embrace, weeping and moaning together. “Dear God, we must have wakened every servant in the house, Leona,” Edith says, patting her shoulder, and then, in a whisper, “It's just that there mustn't be any scandal! There must not be any stories.” Then there is silence.

Edith's knees, under the bedclothes, make a mountain, and Leona's head rests heavily against this slope. “I did this,” Leona says in a choking, muffled voice into the blanket. “I got you into all this, Granny.”

Edith strokes Leona's dark head. “Well, so you did,” she says. “But I wouldn't worry about it, dear. I'm sure it's not as serious as we're making it. Harold himself said everything would be all right.”

“I have a knack for messing things up, don't I?” Leona says. “It's practically the only knack I have.”

“There, there,” Edith says, stroking, stroking Leona's soft hair. “We both got a little—overstimulated.”

For several minutes there is no sound in the room except the low hum of the electric clock; its hour hand has dipped toward four. Quietly, Edith says, “You say that these are not exactly things that Mr. Winslow
knows
about Harold, but things he would like to find out.”

Against her knees, Leona nods.

“There was a man who ran a newspaper here in St. Thomas once,” Edith says. “He wanted to write a story about Papa. It was a story Papa thought would be embarrassing to him. Papa gave the man some money. The story was not printed.”

When Leona makes no immediate reply to this, Edith says, “What are Mr. Winslow's personal financial circumstances, do you know?”

Leona sighs. “Ah, Granny.…”

“I just wondered, dear,” she says, stroking Leona's hair.

Leona lies very still. She still holds the lighted cigarette in one hand, and, as Edith watches, a long, looping ash forms. Leona's hand, Edith sees, still quivers slightly as though her body, even in repose like this, knew no peace. Smoke curls upward into the quiet air. Edith forces herself to watch with equanimity as the long ash falls. Then, suddenly wondering whether Leona has fallen asleep, she reaches out and very gingerly takes the cigarette from between her fingers and stubs it out in the saucer.

Leona stirs slightly. “Thanks, Granny,” she says.

“I thought you were asleep. Do you care for him, Leona?”

“Care for whom?”

“Mr. Winslow.”

Again, there is no answer right away. Then she says, “He's just a good friend.”

“He cares for you, though. He as much as told me so.”

Into the blanket, Leona says, “Yes, I know. He told me tonight he loved me.”

“Then,” Edith says gently, stroking Leona's hair, “you must tell him to leave us alone.”

Leona sits up now and looks straight at Edith, her eyes wide and thoughtful. Edith smiles. “If he's fond of you, that shouldn't be hard to do,” she says. “He'll do it as a simple favor.”

“No,” Leona says. “It won't be hard.”

“Well, then,” Edith says.

“No, it won't be hard,” Leona begins slowly. “Because he loves me, and I don't love him. I've never loved anybody.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“When you asked me that—did I care about him?—I suddenly thought, have I ever cared about anybody?”

“Oh, Leona—”

“And it's true. I've never cared about anybody, Granny! Not anybody! Did you love your husband, Granny?”

“Well of course. Very much!”

“And anybody else? Ever?”

Edith laughs. “Well, there were a couple of others. One or two. But—”

“But not me. I didn't love the men I married—I just married them. All of them. I let them make love to me, and I
loved
their making love to me, but I didn't love them. Granny, why can't I
love
someone?”

“But you
will
, my dear,” Edith says, a trifle uneasily, turning her eyes from Leona's intense look. “You're young, you're beautiful—”

“I'm
tired
of being beautiful! Why do people keep saying that, as though it made everything else all right? Is that all I am—beautiful?”

“Of course not, dear. But meanwhile—”

“But meanwhile, why can't I love someone? I'm afraid I never will because I'm afraid I don't know how. Do you know what I feel like sometimes?” she asks in a distant-seeming voice. “I feel as though I were frozen. The man I was with tonight—he saw it right away:
ice!
I'm like a centerpiece, Granny—one of those pieces of frozen ice sculpture in the middle of a party. Only the party's over—there's no one there but me, frozen in the center of the room.”