Superior Women (6 page)

“Well,” Lavinia says, with the smallest frown, and the slightest blush, “well, I’d never had anyone in love with me like that. You know, before him I just knew
boys.
So I sort of fell in love with him too, although now I think I was mainly in love and excited by the way he felt. Anyway, it kept on like that all summer, this literal barrage of flowers, and these letters, and then I’d go into town, to meet him. It turned out that he had a suite at the Shoreham, he lived there. So, after dinner we’d go up to his room, and, uh, neck. Well, I must say, his technique was really smooth, his being older and all. Well, I’m just lucky I’m still a virgin. But we certainly did everything else.”

Megan is barely aware of the food that she is eating—although the sandwiches are very good, and the frappe thick and sweet and cold—so enthralling does she find Lavinia’s story, and so
right:
perfect that a rich older man should be insanely in love with Lavinia (Jane and Mr. Rochester!)—and all those flowers, those heavy
letters. A suite at the Shoreham, where every night they would “do everything else,” probably on a bed.

“But then when I went back to school last fall,” Lavinia goes on, “I still thought I was in love but it got sort of embarrassing, all those letters. Sometimes two special deliveries a day. It was so
conspicuous.
And he wasn’t someone I could tell anyone about, like the boys everyone else was writing to. He wasn’t some freshman at Princeton (although he did go to Princeton, a long time ago). Or a senior at St. Paul’s.”

She looks at Megan: a question—how is Megan taking this? Seemingly satisfied, she continues. “I saw him when I went home for Christmas, and there certainly was all that old excitement, but then at some parties I heard a couple of things about him. People were getting a little suspicious about all that money. I mean, he didn’t
inherit
it, not any of it. Even if he did go to Princeton.

“You know, basically Washington is a very small town, people know everything. And I began to think that if there was something even the tiniest bit wrong about his money, and if my father found out, well, actually if anyone found out—well, I began to think that I had to get out of it somehow. For one thing, I didn’t want to come up here to college with something like that going on in my life. So, I began to hint that I thought I was too young to be so serious, corny stuff like that, and how I was going to need all my time at college for work. Well, that’s a good laugh, isn’t it, baby Megan?”

“Uh, I guess.” But Megan cannot help feeling a little sad for poor Harvey.

“Well, I was saying stuff like that. And he would not listen to one word I said. And then instead of letters I began to get these crazy long telegrams. He must be spending a fortune.”

Megan finds that she has finished her sandwich and her frappe, although she was not aware of eating. Lavinia has hardly touched her food, but then she has been doing all the talking. Now, as Megan watches, Lavinia takes a reluctant bite from her sandwich, a small sip of her frappe. “I guess I don’t really feel like eating,” she complains. “But I really should. Gordon says my bones stick into him,” and she laughs.

Initially relieved about not having to go to the Ritz (money, and the problem of what to wear), Megan is now experiencing considerable regret about not meeting Harvey; for one thing, obviously he would have paid for the lunch. And in this cooling weather she could have worn her one good suit (a birthday present from Florence, from Joseph Magnin, the best store in Palo Alto; blue, really nice); everything would have been okay. Mostly though she is aware of the most intense curiosity about Harvey: the knight (ah! Mr. Knightly!), the perfect figure of romance. And a millionaire, or almost, probably.

“What does he look like?” Megan asks.

“Gordon? But you met him, silly Megan. Honestly, you do live in a dream world. How could you forget the handsomest man at Harvard? Honestly—”

“No. Not Gordon, Harvey.”

“Well.” Surprisingly, Lavinia looks both uncomfortable and displeased; she might almost be on the verge of saying that Harvey’s looks are none of Megan’s business, except that Lavinia is never so overtly rude. But she seems then to come to some sort of decision; the frown disappears, and in a confiding way she leans toward Megan. “Well, he’s blond, and rather handsome, if you see him sitting in a restaurant, just his head and shoulders. But I guess he had polio or something, we never talked about it and I couldn’t ask, but he’s really crippled. Even on crutches he can hardly walk. And that’s something that really scared me off. I mean, of course I never saw his legs, we never went that far, I told you, but the very idea—Really, I wasn’t sure that I actually could—”

Lavinia’s tone has been deeply, genuinely troubled, and sad. But then she shrugs, and the tone shifts. “Oh!” she cries out, “if he’d only leave me alone! Why won’t he catch
on!
”

Megan is wholly concentrated on absorbing the fact of crippledness, Harvey’s legs. And her mind has made a connection, which she would like to reject, between crippledness and romantic extremity; she thinks, and she wishes that she did not think, that of course (and maybe only) a crippled man would fall in love like that, and especially with Lavinia, so tall and blond, so
perfect.

And she further makes another, highly unwelcome connection, this time between crippled and fat. She thinks of herself, fat Megan, and “madly in love” with George Wharton, who in his way is also perfect. She thinks of her own obstinate refusal to “catch on” to the fact that George Wharton does not love her.

Escaping back to Harvey, she sees too that he would have to be rich; otherwise, a cripple, he would not have dared, would not even have aspired to Lavinia. (Would George love her if she were rich?)

And: of course Lavinia would have to break it off, eventually. Even being seen with a crippled man must have been acutely painful to her, actually more painful than rumors of financial insecurity, irregularity. Megan starts to say, You know, really you’re still a virgin because of Harvey’s crippled legs. But of course she does not say that.

“Oh,
shit,
” then says lovely Lavinia. “I’ve forgotten my billfold. Darling little Megan, would you pay? I’ll get it next time, okay?”

“Of course.”

“I just don’t know,” Lavinia’s mother, who was once a fabled golden Southern beauty, is saying, vaguely, fuzzily, to her daughter. “I just don’t know,” Mrs. Harcourt repeats; she smells of lavender, and of sherry. “If this boy is coming all the way down here, I just don’t see—” As so often happens, she then forgets what she is talking about, beyond a distant sense that she was about to say something important.

Lavinia’s stomach knots in a familiar way, and she thinks as she has a thousand times before, Thank God, I don’t even look like her.

She tries then to remind her mother of their earlier conversation, to bring her back. “But we always used to have Christmas at Fredericksburg,” Lavinia states, “and I thought it would be so nice. It has nothing to do with Gordon.”

That last was a total lie. The fact is that Lavinia is anxious, desperately anxious, that Gordon not visit them in Georgetown, in the huge house in which she and her mother now sit, in what is called the breakfast room, although no one has ever eaten a breakfast there. The Fredericksburg house is big too, but it is simpler; it can be passed off as a farm, and so it is called, by the Harcourts. But this Georgetown house, set back from P Street, with its weight of marble, and family portraits and delicate French antiques and ponderous draperies—this house could intimidate anyone, and especially Gordon, with his strong feelings about being Boston Irish, his father a policeman, living in Dorchester. In a house that Lavinia has never been allowed to see.

The irony of this fear, this anxiety about the impressiveness of her family house, is not lost on intelligent Lavinia; it is very ironic that she who has always loved her house so much should now be worried about its effect. She has even thought of it as her perfect setting (Harvey used to say, “It’s the perfect house for the childhood of a princess. Now I’ll have to get you an even bigger house, and don’t think I won’t.” Well, probably he would have). And prior to the advent of Gordon in her life, Lavinia also saw her house as her perfect refuge; it kept people away, it put off those whom she chose to be put off. And now, for her to worry that Gordon, whom she absolutely loves, in this setting will love her less—well, it’s very funny, very funny indeed—but whom could she tell?

“Well,” says Mrs. Harcourt, blinking pale blue eyes in the general direction of some feeble Washington winter sunshine, just visible through one narrow leaded window, “well, I suppose you’d better talk to your father.” And then, with one of her odd lurches into clarity, sobriety: “And in that case I’ll start my packing.”

The prospect of introducing Gordon to her mother is of course a further source of anxiety to Lavinia, but if her plan of Christmas
in Fredericksburg, at “the farm,” succeeds, that too will be resolved: Mrs. Harcourt so dislikes the country, and particularly that house, its wrap of river mists, its drafty rooms, that she generally takes to her bed and stays there, during long family stays in Fredericksburg. With luck, her mother will not even appear for meals, Lavinia calculates; Mrs. Harcourt subsists at such times on bouillon and soft-boiled eggs, which the maid takes up on trays, at intervals. She can easily be described to Gordon as “not very well,” which is, God knows, the truth.

Another virtue of Fredericksburg is just that, the maid situation: at Fredericksburg there is only one, the inconspicuous brown Bessie. Whereas in town, along with Bessie, there is Clarissa and her husband, Oscar, who is not actually a butler, but he looks and acts like one, in his formal black suits, serving dinner. (Well, at least all of them are Negroes, none of them Irish, Lavinia suddenly thinks, wanting both to laugh and to cry at the very thought of Gordon confronted with Irish help. Jesus, with her luck they would turn out to be his distant relatives. At which Lavinia does laugh a little, to herself. She wishes Kitty were around.)

Six months of exposure to Boston have instructed Lavinia in certain social truths: while “Gordon Shaughnessey” sounded, at first, so romantic and glamorous to her, and sounds so still—so redolent of kings and castles, Irish poetry—in Boston it is not a “good name.”

But she does not care anymore about those distinctions, those family-money-position badges that used to mean so much to her, about which she has always been so finely acute. None of that is important, of course it is not; she is so much in love with Gordon, and only love is really important. Only love.

Besides, Gordon is a National Scholar, and he belongs to the Fly Club, despite his name, and the Fly is really tops.

Lavinia looks like her father, the same gray eyes, same delicate, fine nose, and longish chin. And perhaps this striking resemblance is one of the things that makes her father adore her; more and
more he adores his mirror, this increasingly beautiful young woman, his only child. Middle-aged, almost fifty at her birth (her mother, the beauty, was twenty-five years his junior), Mr. Harcourt’s self-image has been kept young by his daughter, almost atoning for such disappointment with his wife. He is not old and gray and paunchy; he is young!

But he does not always yield to the whims of his beautiful daughter; of course not, he won’t spoil her.

And so he now says, “But you know your mother, she isn’t happy at Fredericksburg, Lavinia.”

He looks at her sternly, and Lavinia returns the look. She does not say, however: Mother isn’t happy anywhere. Neither of them says this, but the sentence lies there between them; it is the truth.

Mr. Harcourt sighs. “Well, we’ll have to see,” he says.

Knowing that she has won, they will spend Christmas at Fredericksburg, Lavinia retains a sad smile: it would not do to show triumph over an issue that will surely make her mother unhappier yet.

But.

“My mom’s that upset,” says Gordon over the phone, that night. “She’d planned on me being here all the time. And when I said Washington—”

“Oh,
darling,
” Lavinia cries out, at this announcement of Gordon’s that he is not, after all, coming down to Washington. It seems the worst thing that has ever happened to her: things gone all wrong, for almost the very first time. “I’ve missed you so much!” she cries out, uncontrollably.

“I’ve missed you, kid.”

But something is wrong, Lavinia can hear it in his voice. Is he embarrassed to be giving in to his mother, a man of nineteen? Or could there be something else? Gordon has sometimes mentioned an old girl friend, Marge, whom Lavinia has understood to be his parents’ choice for him. Is Marge around, is she, too, home for the holidays? Is Gordon more interested in her than he has admitted? This possibility causes Lavinia genuine pain, along with quick
murderous impulses; however, at the same time she knows that it is extremely important, always, to pretend to believe whatever a man is saying. She figured that out a long time ago, on her own: never accuse them of lying. And so now she says, “Well, darling, maybe I could get my parents to let me come back a day or so early. We could have fun in Boston. Just see each other. You could meet me at South Station.”

“Oh, great. Say, that would be terrific.”

Something
is
wrong; his voice is wrong. However, she will not let herself think about it; that would be fatal. She will go back early to Boston, and when he sees her again everything will be all right, Lavinia is sure of that—sure of her power, in that way. Her beauty.

“I’ll let you know when I’m coming,” she says to Gordon. “Darling, I can’t wait to see you.” She will get all new clothes, everything new and beautiful, herself all beautiful and new. New lovely underclothes.

“Kid, me too,” says Gordon.

It is quite true that she can’t wait to see him again. To kiss him, to be kissed.

There is no point, then, absolutely no point in going to Fredericksburg for Christmas—and no point either in Lavinia’s not taking moral credit for this shift in plans.