Those Harper Women (13 page)

Edith says, “Sometimes I think if you'd had a child. A child, you know, can hold a marriage together. Sometimes.”

“If I had a child, would that help me now?” Tears are hanging in her eyes again. “Oh, no. Thank God we didn't have a child.”

Edith considers this. “By
we
, whom do you mean?”

“Jimmy and me. It doesn't matter which, does it? But if only somebody could teach me—if only you could teach me, Granny—how to love—”

“But my dear,” Edith says, “how can I ever teach you that?”

Leona stares at her hands. “No,” she says at last, “I guess nobody can. I'm a mess, Granny. No, I'm not even that. I don't know what I am.” She stands up quickly and starts across the room.

“There's so much I'd like to talk to you about, Leona. About your plans, and—”

“Plans,” Leona says. “Oh, yes, I've got plans.”

“But—”

“I know. It's late.” She opens the door. “Good night, Granny.”

“Now wait!” Edith says. Leona's hand on the half-opened door seems suddenly symbolic, prophetic. This is the door, yes, that Edith has been waiting for Leona to open all along; Leona has opened herself, just a crack, perhaps, to Edith and now the door is about to close again, maybe forever. “Wait,” she says urgently, holding out her hand. “Don't go off like this, don't leave me with
this
thought to dream about—that you can't love anybody! I mean, real love is—it only happens once or twice in a lifetime, I think, and even then—”

“Then no wonder the rest of the time people can't even talk to each other. Right?” She smiles. “Good night, Granny. It
is
late.”

“Look,” Edith says, half-rising. “What difference does
late
make? We're both night owls, aren't we? Why don't you run in, put on your pajamas and robe, and come back in here. We'll have a brandy, a nightcap, how's that? And have a good talk right now. Would you like that?”

Leona seems uncertain. Then she says, “All right.”

“Good!” Edith says, suddenly excited. “Then hurry!”

Edith gets quickly out of bed and puts on her own robe. She fetches the brandy and the glasses from the dresser and sets them out, unstoppers the brandy, fills both glasses and, still holding the decanter in one hand, gives herself a giddy sip. Love? Well, there was precious little of that wasted in
this
family, she thinks. So where shall she begin with love? With the Frenchman? No, she thinks, pushing her feet into her slippers, the beginning goes back farther than that, back to Mama and Papa, and Harold and Arthur, and Cyrus in the cart, back to those early days when she was a girl growing up in St. Thomas—back to before Charles, to when Edith was younger than Leona is now, but when Edith was just about the same age as Leona when she was first married. And Andreas. Would Andreas do? Perhaps. Seeing him dimly, she asks him: Will you do? Come closer, anyway—closer, where I can get a good look at you. There were so many beginnings, so many branches to reach into and pick from, in that tree of years—for love.

Standing in the middle of her bedroom, she thinks: Diana! It's a pity you can't be here to listen to what I'm going to say!

It is a moment or two before she notices that there are no sounds from the direction of Leona's room. She goes quietly out into the hall and looks. Leona's door is open, and the light is on, and Leona is lying, still in her dress, across the top of her bed. The end of another cigarette is burning in a little ashtray placed on the floor by the bed.

Edith puts the cigarette out, and puts the ashtray on the table. Leona's breathing is in the soft, gulping rhythm of heavy sleep. Leona is too heavy for Edith to lift up, and undress, and put into bed, but Edith pulls the comforter up around Leona's shoulders and tucks it in at the sides. She is afraid to kiss her good night, afraid of disturbing her. She turns out both lamps, and goes to the door. “Good night, dear,” she whispers, and goes out the door, closing it quietly behind her.

Six

“Good afternoon, Miss Edith Harper. How are you today?”

“Very well, thank you.”

“And your daddy? He still make money?” Laughing, the old man would put his hands on the strings of his guitar and sing, “Oh, I wish I could make music like that man make his money.…” Edith would laugh and wave to him. The old man was always there, sitting in the same doorway, his battered guitar across his knees. She never knew his name.

Edith's mother would have been horrified to know that in the year 1907 her eighteen-year-old daughter had taken to wandering through the town, speaking to dark-skinned native men as she went. To Dolly Harper, all the St. Thomas Negroes were dirty, diseased, depraved. “Why are they dirty, Mama?” Edith remembers asking her once.

“We don't
know
they're dirty,” her mother said. “It's just that, with that nigger skin, we can't tell.”

Why did she do it, Edith wonders now? Why did she take those walks and make those curious, nameless acquaintances? Starved for company, she supposes, and yet there remains something a bit irrational about her behavior that year, like the time she had stolen all the bottles of French perfume off her mother's dressing table and emptied one bottle after another over herself as she lay on her bed, turning the air around her into a thick, sweet syrup, and ruining the dress she wore. Why? And each day, when her mother would take her second glass of wine from the lunch table and go upstairs to her room to rest, Edith would escape the house—free until six o'clock, when it was time to tap on her mother's door and wake her for dinner. She would go down the hill into Charlotte Amalie, walking slowly along the steep and narrow streets, past the old houses that leaned against each other like so many tipsy old friends, the afternoon sun turning their peeling stucco walls to gold, past archways and shuttered windows, little grilled balconies crowded with flowerpots, and sleeping cats on windowsills. She would try to imagine herself a part of this strange city. Naked children playing in the dusty streets would look up at her as she passed, holding out thin gray hands for coins, and, here and there, a familiar face would nod to her and say “Good afternoon, Miss Edith Harper. How are you today?”

It was on one of these walks that she met Andreas. He was standing in the street talking to a group of young men and, as she passed, he turned and spoke to her. “You're Edith Harper, aren't you? Do you remember me? Andreas Larsen?”

“Yes.”

She remembered him from years before, from the donkey-cart rides with Cyrus and the boys. His father was a Dane, a planter. But lately, she had heard, his father had sold his fields and gone into the insurance business. Andreas had been a towheaded youth when they had waved to him from the cart but now, at twenty-two, he was tall and slender, his shock of fair hair was bleached almost white from the sun, and his face and arms were the color of brandy.

“I often see you, walking by,” he said.

“Yes. I take walks.”

Smiling, he said, “May I walk with you, Miss Harper?”

“Yes,” she said, “if you'd like.”

By the end of that walk, foolish and romantic though it sounded to say it, she had fallen in love.

It was strange that, in over eleven years of living—for a part of each year, at least—on an island, it should have taken someone like Andreas to introduce her to the sea. Up to then, she had always associated the sea with the livid waters of the harbor that lapped under the wharves where the coal ships loaded and the lighters sat—still, smutchy waters full of off-scourings and teredo worms—the harbor that was always her first view of St. Thomas arriving, each autumn, on the old Quebec Line steamer from New York. She knew there were beaches, but her mother had warned her that the beaches were dangerous, that the worst sort of natives were encountered there, and that heaven only knew what tropical monsters swam offshore. So she had only seen the beaches from a distance.

She is sure Magens Bay is not the same today. She has not been there in years. She has not chosen to go there and watch boys and girls cavorting in their bikini suits, preferring to remember it when it seemed like Eden, a sloping beach that emerged from the cottonwoods, where the sand was always scattered with shells, leading down to the surprise of the water which seemed to run through every shade and variation of color, from the palest yellow to a delicate green, to sapphire, to purple. They shared Magens Bay, in those days, only now and then with a net fisherman or two, or a boat on the horizon. Otherwise, they owned it all, the water and the shore, the island of Brass Cay, far out in the Bay's mouth, and the rocks of Picara Point. Andreas taught her how to swim there. She remembers them lying side by side on their stomachs in the sand.

“What are you thinking about now?” Andreas asked her.

“What I always think about when I'm here. That I shouldn't be.”

“Why shouldn't you?”

“I should be home, with Mama. It's where Papa wants me to be.”

“She takes naps in the afternoons.”

“Yes. But if I told Papa that, he'd probably tell me to sit with her while she takes her nap.”

“Why would he want you to do that?”

“Because she's
ill
, Andreas—that's why.”

“A person who's ill should have a nurse.”

“It's hard to find a person he can trust.”

“Ah,” he said. “He wants you to nurse her because he trusts you. And because he trusts you, you can meet me here.”

She laughed guiltily. “Yes.”

“What do you do with your mother when she's awake?”

“Sometimes I read to her. Or we play cards. Rubicon Piquet. Écarté. Games like that. Then we have lunch.”

“Then she takes her nap. What's wrong with her, anyway?”

“It's—nerves,” she had said.

What was wrong with her mother was no longer any mystery to her, but it was a secret. It was never to be mentioned, never discussed, even though it had grown steadily worse since Arthur had been born. There had been more of the sudden tantrums followed by longer silences, more of the long, drugged sleeps. “It is
la saison furieuse
of a woman's life!” Mademoiselle Laric, the boys' governess, had exclaimed dramatically, rolling her eyes, and clutching her breast. And, when Edith had asked her what
la saison furieuse
was, Mademoiselle had explained it, and followed this explanation with an enthusiastic, and highly Gallicized, description of sex. (“At last he comes pouncing upon you,
ma chere
, his teeth biting into the flesh of your lips, his loins afire! With a thrust he possesses you …” and on, and on, with furious gestures of her hands—a surprisingly vivid account for a maiden lady.) Then there was the problem of the little glasses of wine which were now never very far from Dolly Harper's reach. The wine, she said, was the only thing that could ‘relax' her, or make her sleep. The word
alcoholic
was not in use in those days. There was only the uglier word
drunkard
, which no one had been cruel enough to use about Edith's mother either. And so her mother's drinking, like
la saison furieuse
, had become something one accepted mutely, without comment, a secret guarded closely within the family. She was ill. It was nerves.

“Why do you ask me so many questions about my family, Andreas?” she asked him.

“Because I know I'll never meet them.”

“You'll meet them. Some day.”

“Why not now? Why not today?”

They had talked this way before. Perhaps someday an answer would offer itself. Meanwhile, wasn't it enough that they loved each other? “If only there was someplace we could go,” she said. “I hate this island.”

“Hate St. Thomas? Why?”

“I miss winter! It's been eleven years since I've seen snow, and besides, this island hates me. You know that, Andreas. They laugh at the Harpers. But they really hate us. Do you know that when I was walking in the town the other day, a group of little Danish children came running up to me and stood in a circle around me, and sang a song about me? ‘Edie, Edie, skinny and greedy, how does your garden grow? With your daddy's rum and your silly old mum, and dollar bills all in a row.'”

Andreas laughed. “Next time they sing that song to you, here's what you should say to them.” He leaned over and whispered Danish words in her ear. “Say that, and watch their faces, Edie.”

“What does it mean?”

He laughed again. “I'll tell you when you're older!”

“And even that old man, the old man who's always sitting in that doorway in Christian Street with his guitar, and who sings
his
little song about making music the way my father makes money—he laughs, and smiles, but he hates us too. They all do.”

His face was serious now. “This is the price of being a rich man's daughter,” he said.

“But your father's rich! They don't sing songs about him!”

“Not as rich and powerful as your father, Edie. And besides—” He paused, scowling, pushing little wet mounds of sand together between his hands. “My father doesn't own people,” he said. “They say slavery hasn't existed here for sixty years, but your father has slaves. He owns people, human lives.…”

“Who does he own?” It had been a totally new thought to her.

“Otto Frère. His latest purchase.”

“Papa won that plantation in a tennis match!”

“He
bought
it. Cheap. Have you seen Otto Frère lately, Edie? Take a look at him. You'll see what a man who's sold his life looks like.”

She was silent then. “Well, you see, that's why they hate us,” she said.

He reached out and took her hand. His hand was warm and rough with sand. “Do you hate this island now, Edie?” he said. “This afternoon?”

She had smiled and told him no, she didn't hate it that afternoon.