Those Harper Women (7 page)

The others nodded again. Edith sat very still and closed her eyes.

“Edith,” he said, “you are independent now. You might take a little trip. There are plenty of places you could go, war or no war. The Morristown house is staffed and furnished. You could go there, or—”

“I want to stay here.”

“It seems an odd choice,” he said.

“I have my house here.”

“I can't force you to go anywhere, of course.”

“I'm going to stay here, Papa. Till Charles comes back.” Of course she did not expect him to come back. And he had not come back.

Remembering this scene now, which Harold's call has brought to mind, Edith sits at her large desk in her quiet house, searching through the drawers and cubbyholes trying to find her will. It is exasperating and thoroughly incomprehensible how—in a desk where everything, for years, has been so perfectly organized that the things she wanted were always at her fingertips—this one document should have now decided to vanish, and somehow this too seems Harold's fault. She knows exactly what it looks like—a thick, many-paged affair, paper-clipped with a great many little notes and memoranda to herself, and notes attached to other notes with common pins: reminders of the disposition of certain pieces of jewelry, a ring to this one and a necklace to that, and special bequests to certain servants whom she had overlooked when the will was drawn. She has been working on it lately, going over it in careful detail before taking up the small additional matters with her lawyer and having codicils added.

The will is also liberally sprinkled with Harold Harper's name; it appears in paragraph after paragraph, like a small, ugly worm. It is essential that it be there, Mr. Morris, her lawyer, told her; though Harold is not a beneficiary, he is her trustee. Well, Edith has at last decided that his name shall not be there. If she should predecease her brother, which is a possibility, she is not going to have Harold taking charge of Leona the way he has been in charge of Edith all her life—certainly not after his remark this evening that everyone had given up on Leona. No, she will insist upon it: Harold's name must be removed, deleted, expunged.

Now the will unearths itself from under a pile of letters (What was it doing
there?
) and Edith unfolds it carefully and reads:

THE LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

Of Edith Bruce Harper Blakewell, resident of the City of Charlotte Amalie, of Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands (Territory of the United States of America) having as a place of business Number One William Street, New York City, New York, c/o Harold Bruce Harper, made and published this twelfth day of August, in the year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Fifty-Seven. In the Name of God, Amen. I, Edith Bruce Harper Blakewell.…

The position of Harold's name, between her name and God's, strikes her tonight as sinister. She is tempted, in fact, to take a pen and cross him out here and now. “Just stick to your charity work,” she can hear him saying, “and everything will be all right.”

But one does not say “everything will be all right” unless there is a distinct possibility that everything will be all wrong. The house around her, as she considers this, grows even quieter. “Very well, Harold,” she says in a soft voice, “what is going on? Your business is my business too, young man.”

She refolds the will carefully and places it in its proper spot in her desk. Then she picks up her pen and a sheet of her stationery and quickly writes:

Leona
—

If it's not
too
late when you come in, will you
please
knock on my door and wake me? I
must
talk to you!

E.B.H.B
.

She folds the note and goes upstairs, and places the note on Leona's pillow where she will be sure to see it.

Three

At nine o'clock, Nellie brings Edith her glass of hot milk. Edith picks up her book, sipping the milk, and tries to read, but after reading a dozen pages realizes that she has no idea what any of it is about, and puts the book down. She is listening for Leona to come in, and her head is a jumble of thoughts. She is remembering what Alan Osborn said, that being a Harper meant something, and she is thinking of all the things that being a Harper means, and through it all she cannot seem to rid herself of Harold's voice, recalling all the old unpleasantnesses of years ago, all the old stories.

There was Diana's wedding, a winter wedding in 1934, at St. James's in New York. It was supposed to be the wedding of the year, or so someone said. They came out of the church into Madison Avenue, and the street was crowded with people, and there were newspaper photographers with exploding flashbulbs. Diana was smiling. Edith looked blank at the cameras. Then she smiled. A woman broke through the police cordon and spat at Diana. Diana went on smiling. That evening the headlines said
BRIDE AT $100,000 WEDDING LAUGHS AT HARD TIMES
, and the story continued:

“Let them eat cake—wedding cake,” seemed to be the motto of beautiful Diana Harper Blakewell at her marriage today to society playboy John Hamilton (“Jack”) Ware. While hundreds of guests waited to greet the happy couple in a glittering receiving line, hundreds of thousands of Americans across the country waited in bread lines. The bride, a granddaughter of the late Meredith D. Harper, West Indian sugar baron, is the daughter of Mrs. Charles M. Blakewell and the late Mr. Blakewell. The groom is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Lucius G. Ware of New York, Fairfield, and Palm Beach. The bride's mother, who has maintained homes in Morristown, N.J., and Paris, currently resides in St. Thomas, V.I.

For the reception, reliably reported to have cost in the neighborhood of $100,000, the Morristown Club was transformed into a replica of the Petit Trianon. The only thing that could have dampened the poor little rich girl's spirits today was the fact that the sun did not shine. Wedding guests included.…

No, Edith remembers, the sun did not shine; it snowed buckets.

There are many snowy scenes, some happy, some not. She remembers best the snows of Staten Island, where she was born, and where she spent the first eight years of her life. She remembers the sundial in the yard outside her window, and watching it rise, like a cake, in a fresh snowfall. Meredith Harper was in the wholesale hardware business in Staten Island before he made his money in these more prosperous islands. In her bedroom Edith Blakewell keeps a picture (only a reproduction, not the original) called
Tracks in Winter
, by Francis Speight. It is not a pretty picture, but Edith is fond of it. It shows railroad tracks running parallel, and footprints in the snow that have shuffled across the tracks toward a gaunt looking house. A great deal of ugly smoke rises from a pair of smokestacks on the horizon. No people are in the picture. Though there is no resemblance, when she looks into it Edith can see Tottenville when she was a girl, before everything that there is now came to be. Leona thinks little of the picture. “It looks like bad nineteen-thirties realism,” she said. “It's dull and old hat, Granny.”

Leona seems to prefer the moderns, the spatter people. Edith told her that this was a famous painting and that the original hangs in an excellent New York collection, but Leona was unimpressed.

“It's Depression art,” she said to Edith. “And what in the world do
you
know about the Depression, Granny? You came sailing through.”

“Sailing. But with my jib backed to windward.” But it was not the Depression Edith was talking about. Pointing to the picture again, she said, “Your background, Leona.”

“Then you should be proud that great-grandfather Harper made enough to take us away from that sort of place.”

“It was sheer luck. Seventy years ago my father accepted a handful of leases on a couple of unknown Danish islands in settlement of a debt. He had no idea the leases were for cane fields and rum distilleries.”

(“Darling Edith!” she remembers her mother saying to her one snowy morning, coming into her room and lifting her out of her sheets and hugging her. “Your Papa has become rich!
Rich!
”)

“But Granny, he had factories all over the place.”

“Eventually, yes. It's easy to buy up factories once you've cornered the West Indian rum market.”

(“My husband got his
start
in spirits,” Dolly Harper would explain carefully, years later. “But his real interests were in bringing certain industrial techniques, which he had studied in Europe, to the United States.” There was always, to Edith's mother, something undignified about the liquor business.)

“You always rather run him down, don't you?” Leona said. “I should think you'd be kind of grateful for all his money.”

“Grateful?” Edith cried, despairing. “Why? Are
you?
”

Being a Harper was what Meredith Harper made of it. “I want you to be a princess!” he would say to her, and he would lift her by her armpits high into the air. She was still a little girl, and he was becoming an industrialist. She was his princess, and he was her king. “Touch the ceiling!” he would say. “Reach way, way up—try to touch it. Remember that to be a princess you must always be trying to touch the ceiling. If you can touch it, then the ceiling's too low, and you must order them to build you a taller castle with higher rooms.” And, when he had built this house for Edith and her husband and had taken them to see it on the afternoon of their wedding day and handed them the key, he had said, “I had the ceilings built high. Are they high enough, Edith?” smiling at her over their old joke, his eyes shining with tears.

People often ask her for impressions of her father. “How would you sum him up—in a word?” someone will say. There are so many words, some delicate and pretty, some stained and embarrassing. “Majestic,” she often says. “He liked kings.” But another thing about him was that he wept well. His ability to cry at will must certainly have been a business asset, for tears created an instant illusion of honesty about him. Edith remembers one old friend, one of the few who had known him as a youth, describing the weeping phenomenon. “He used to deliver ice, you know, in the neighborhood before he bought the hardware business,” this woman said. “He brought it to our house three times a week, on a cart behind his bicycle. He must have been sixteen or so, and very handsome—those enormous black eyes—and terribly polite, and he worked so hard. He was so ambitious, and he was such a gentleman—we knew he'd go far, even then. But I remember one afternoon when he came to collect for the ice, and I was short of money and asked him if he could possibly wait until next week. He said yes, of course, but those great black eyes looked so sad—I thought he was going to cry. So I rushed right into the house and got the money for him—and even tipped him a little extra.”

Everyone speaks of those manners. “Your father was so polite,” Edith's mother once said to her. “When he asked me to marry him, my parents were against it, of course. But your father was so insistent, and begged me in the sweetest way—I didn't have the heart to turn him down.” (A few years later, however, Edith was to hear a somewhat different version of his proposal scene.)

He never mentioned parents. They were a closed subject. Where did the manners come from? Biographies of him have always given his place of birth as New York City, and perhaps, after all, he was born there. But Edith has long suspected that he was Canadian, and may have entered the United States illegally. Once, during one of their quarrels, she heard her mother say to him, “Why don't you go back to
Canada
, where you came from!” And she remembers the terrible look her father gave her. She thought he was going to strike her mother. Later, after he died, they would sometimes discuss him. “Where do you suppose he came from, really?” someone would ask. “He just materialized,” someone would say—materialized, with his handsome face, his manners, and a sense of his destiny, Edith supposes.

At nine or ten Edith would spend whole afternoons in front of her mirror, mourning over her brownish-blondish no-color hair, wondering why it grew all different lengths and wouldn't curl. She made up her mind that she was ugly, and decided that only some tragedy would make her memorable. If only half of her face should become hideously scarred—then she would have to wear a black veil over the ravaged half, and no one would mind that the half that showed was plain. This was in the days when her father was building all the houses—the house at Sans Souci, and the house in Paris, and the one in Morristown. The schedule was devised; they would divide their year between the three places. (And contrary to what that newspaper said, Edith never maintained houses anywhere but in St. Thomas; she only lived in them. Nor did Diana's Depression wedding cost more than a quarter of the $100,000 figure “reliably reported.”) Wherever they went there was a smell of wet plaster and paint, of sawdust and new wood. Edith would decorate her ears with the curled shavings from the carpenters' planes—a princess with pine ringlets.

At Sans Souci, the room behind his study was Meredith Harper's office, and Edith and her father used to meet there to go over her accounts. For her twelfth birthday she had been given a bank account. Regular deposits went into it, and she was authorized to draw checks. Her father lectured her about the importance of managing money, about interest rates, and how to keep a checkbook balanced. Nothing mattered more, he said, than understanding money. There was an element of secrecy about their meetings because her mother was not supposed to know about the checking account. Dolly Harper had no such luxuries. “She wouldn't know how to handle it if she had one,” her father said—not having been trained in the intricacies of finance at an early age.

Edith would tap on the door and be admitted to the office, and would sit there quietly while he opened his large ledgers and went over the bookkeeping entries of the week. He would explain how many tons of sugar had been harvested, how many had been sold, how many barrels of rum had left the distillery, and what the shipping and labor costs had been. He explained the intricacies of the Danish export tax on sugar and the various import duties of northern ports. Then he would show her comparative balances for other sugar harvests of other years. “I see no reason why a woman shouldn't be able to run the sugar business,” he said. “The only thing you need to be is hard—hard and strong, and never listen to the complaints the natives make. Is it impossible that a woman should run this business someday?” he said looking at her intently. “Why shouldn't it be possible?”