The Late John Marquand (19 page)

And yet, at the same time, the reader respects and pities Harry Pulham, who says, “I guess I've always been a straight,” and one of whose friends keeps referring to him as a “norm.” Like George Apley, Harry Pulham once tries to break away from the restraint of Boston and goes to New York and works for an advertising agency where, though his job involves extolling the dubious qualities of a laundry soap, he nonetheless feels alive, part of a team, and where he falls in love with the beautiful businesswoman, Marvin Myles. Marvin at first can't decide whether he is “dumb or clever” but soon is perceptive enough to see that he is neither. She tells him, “You're just yourself. I've never seen anyone like you.” And looking at the photographs of the Pulham family that are arranged on Harry's dresser top, she says to him, “All of you is there, isn't it? All that you're going back to? It must be queer, being in two places at once.” And so, of course, did John Marquand think of himself as being in two places at once; he was at one and the same time the wanderer who loved independence and women and travel, and also the man who talked wistfully of putting down roots in peaceful and quiet and changeless old places like Newburyport, Curzon's Mill, and Beacon Hill. When Harry Pulham brings Marvin Myles back to Boston for a visit, he cannot help noticing that she is by far the best-dressed woman there. This means that she does not and cannot ever belong.

Just as it did George Apley, Boston reclaims Harry Pulham, and he returns to a life where, as his father explains it, “I can't recall ever wanting things to happen. I've spent all my life trying to fix it so that things wouldn't happen.” He gets a job selling bonds and with a terrible innocence says, “I don't want to sell bonds.” “My boy,” says a member of the bond firm, “no one wants to, but that's the way we live.”

Of the pathetically small number of people who pass through Harry Pulham's life, he understands Marvin Myles the best, perhaps because she is the beautiful alien, and he says, “I know the whole secret of Marvin Myles—that she wanted things to belong to her, because what belonged to her gave her a sense of well-being.… Once something belonged to her, she would give it everything she had. I know, because I belonged to her once.” He admires this spirit in Marvin Myles, and he also admires and envies the rootless and unfettered existence—going from girl to girl—of his friend Bill
King. These two become Harry Pulham's windows into the world that lies beyond State Street and Beacon Hill. At the same time, both Marvin and Bill see in Harry a figure of stability, strength, and truth to his code, quite different from most of the men encountered in their own topsy-turvy worlds.

Seeing the inevitability of the path Pulham's life will take, Marvin says to him, “It makes me frightened when I see you do things that I can't do. They take you away from me, all those little things.” One of those little things is Kay Motford who, when Harry Pulham first meets her, strikes him as a “lemon.” He cannot understand why his friend Bill does not think Kay is a lemon. Again, she is a type too familiar to Harry Pulham, but to Bill she is an exotic. Of Kay, Harry's mother says that she is one of their kind, “a dear, sensible girl. She's one of those girls who doesn't think about herself, or think about her looks. She thinks of other people.” She does not, like Marvin, want things to belong to her. After Harry's return to Boston and the bond business—Marvin writes, “Darling, aren't you coming back?”—Harry Pulham and Kay Motford show up at the same dances and teas and debut parties, appear as usher and bridesmaid at the same weddings, and it is soon apparent to everyone that Harry will marry his lemon; there is absolutely no one else for either of them. On their honeymoon, Kay has a small favor to ask him. Could he please stop saying “Of course?” Harry Pulham replies, “Why, yes, Kay. Of course.”

And so
H. M. Pulham, Esquire
becomes a story of love and marriage based on compromise, where there is little point in looking back on what might have been. Of course, one does look back, but one is always brought up to the realities of the present and such matters, trivial but persistent, as whether the dog has been let out or whether the pilot light is working properly on the kitchen range. One is sustained in such a life only by adhering to a certain code, a certain set of values. At one point, toward the novel's end, Harry Pulham enters his house and hears through the closed parlor door his wife's and his friend Bill's voices, and Kay saying bitterly, “Let's not go all over it again. We can't go back.” For the briefest moment, Harry Pulham wonders: Is there something between Bill and Kay? But he pushes this unchivalrous thought out of his head immediately, thinking that such an idea is unworthy of him. After all, Harry reminds himself, “Bill King was my best friend, and besides
he was a gentleman.… As I say, I was ashamed of myself. It made me feel like apologizing to both of them when I opened the parlor door, and I told myself I must never consider such a thing again—not ever.”

Harry opens the parlor door, and what follows is one of the tenderest and yet funniest scenes in all of John Marquand's novels. Harry asks Bill solicitously if he has everything he wants, and Bill replies harshly, “That's a damned silly question, and you know it, boy. Nobody ever has everything he wants.” Because Kay looks so distraught, Harry concludes that she has been “doing altogether too much lately,” and, because her hands are cold to the touch, he suggests a hot water bag. “Anything,” Kay says, “anything but a hot water bag!” Harry helps Kay to her feet and she kisses him, which he thinks is “very generous” of her. The ironic point is swiftly and brilliantly made that in Harry Pulham's ignorance is his only awareness and only happiness. Only ignorance, in Harry Pulham's world, can make that world even remotely tolerable. He is a man who must say “of course” to life.

Kay, at the same time, suffers from a similar lack of perception. When she discovers, years later and by sheerest accident, that her husband had a love affair with Marvin Myles, she cannot imagine what a woman such as the glamorous Marvin could possibly have seen in a man as dull and ordinary as her husband.

It was probably inevitable that critics should have drawn a comparison between
H. M. Pulham, Esquire
and
Babbitt
, the 1922 novel by Sinclair Lewis, since both novels are about men in ruts unable to get out, who go through life wearing blinders. It was said that Marquand's satiric novel was like Lewis's but “without the bite.” Actually, it might have been pointed out that Marquand's satire was much more subtle, much more delicate, written with much more feeling, without Lewis's stridency and harshness and generally tin ear for human speech. Compare the husband-and-wife confrontation scenes which close both books. When George Follansbee Babbitt and his wife, whom he calls by such names as “old honey,” and “you old humbug,” intended as terms of endearment, are reconciled at her bedside (Mrs. Babbitt is to be rushed off for an emergency operation, a convenient device with which to end the book), she says, “I was wondering what was the use of my living. I've been getting so stupid and ugly—” Babbitt replies, “Why, you old
humbug! Fishing for compliments when I ought to be packing your bag! Me, sure, I'm young and handsome and a regular village cut-up and—” Lewis writes, “He could not go on. He sobbed again; and in muttered incoherencies they found each other.”

Against the “muttered incoherencies” we have the quiet dignity, almost elegance, of Kay and Harry Pulham's reconciliation. “So we have to be kind to one another always, don't we?” Kay says to her husband. “We're all alone. There's only you and me.”

Meanwhile, John Marquand and Carol Brandt had no intention of turning Carl Brandt into a Harry Pulham, or of deceiving him about the change that had occurred in their relationship. All three, after all, were sophisticated people, and the only civilized and decent thing to do was to tell Carl what had happened. Adelaide was something else again. She had already begun to suspect John of having affairs with other women, and his tendency to philander had become—as it also had with Christina—one of the problems facing their marriage. The Bill King side of his nature was, to John, something he accepted about himself and thoroughly enjoyed. He had, in fact, since Harvard days. Christina had been unable to accept it. Neither, now, could Adelaide. She was suspicious of every trip he took away from her. She was sure that something was going on between John and each new secretary, and quite often there was. John found it very difficult to sympathize with Adelaide's jealousies. He had been born, after all, in that “tail-end of the Victorian era,” and he believed in a double standard. But from the beginning it was agreed that Carl should be told. “John and I talked it over,” Carol Brandt recalls, “and decided that I should tell Carl as soon as possible after he got back from Silver Hill. I also thought that John should tell Adelaide. It seemed fairer. But John said he couldn't bring himself to do that. I didn't want to be bothered with all the lies and deceptions of trying to lead a double life. But John knew the kind of scenes Adelaide was capable of making, and he simply was terrified of telling her.”

It is always pleasant to suppose that at crisis points in life, or when circumstances abruptly change, all of us can rise to occasions, accept inevitabilities with dignity and courage and even a bit of grace, and carry on. In actual fact, though, few of us find ourselves equipped to do so, and most of us can be counted upon to
behave quite badly. And so Carl Brandt's reaction, when he had taken it in—that his friend who was also his most productive client was now his wife's lover, and that Carol and John both wanted to continue the affair, that it was much more than a casual interlude that could soon be forgotten—was crucial to both John and Carol, to the future of their respective marriages. “When Carl came home from Silver Hill, we had dinner at the St. Regis,” Carol says, “and I told him what had happened. His first reaction was anger—not at me, but at John. He took the attitude of ‘How can my best friend do this to me?' which has always struck me as a very strange way for a man to behave. After all, if a woman is to have an affair with a man, isn't it likely that it will be a friend of her husband's? As for me, Carl knew me very well. He knew that I was a woman who, if I wasn't sleeping with my husband, had to sleep with someone. He knew that since the trouble in our marriage had come up there had been other men in my life. But he also knew that, in any choice between another man and Carl, Carl would always come first and that I would never leave him.

“And so, after he had accepted what had happened, I telephoned John, who had gone back to the apartment on Beekman Place, and told him of Carl's and my conversation. Then Carl talked to John. They talked very quietly and sanely, and both men agreed that they didn't want the triangle of our friendship broken. Carl also urged John to tell Adelaide, so that all four of us could spread the situation out on the table and look at it as grown-ups. But John said no, that was out of the question, he couldn't do it, and that was that.”

That was almost that, but the new and perhaps strange plateau upon which the Brandts' marriage, and the relationship it bore with John Marquand, had moved needed, in Carl Brandt's mind, some sort of definition from him. He wanted to put it in writing, and so, alone one night soon after their dinner at the St. Regis, he penciled it on a few sheets of yellow foolscap and addressed it to his wife. It is an extraordinary letter from an extraordinary man, who was certainly no Harry Pulham:

Darlink:

Don't please feel you ought to defend anyone, John or me or you, but believe me with all your power that I am being exactly honest with you. If you ask me how I feel, what I am thinking, I'll tell you,
all on the primary basis that I am alone at fault. But no matter the grievous sin, the bastardly actions, the man can still be hurt even by his own blows. I would like to be different, I'd like in a certain way to be completely abject, but if I were I would be, I suspect, lost not only to myself but to you.

I'm going to say this once and for all time. Wild horses will never again, god helping me, drag it out: If you insist I'll simply say I've buried my dead in this grove of statement … R.I.P.

So:—

John knows in his deepest heart that he did me a bastardly trick—it is in his nature to have the strength of the weak for a very long time, and then to crack and do the easiest and most pleasant (to him) thing. It is in his acquisitiveness, his parsimony, his snobbishness, born all of these out of his early frustrations and rejections. He has made me ashamed of my weakness coming from my real love and admiration for him, in believing that he was my friend and
our
friend first. And, having all faith in that, I gave him utter trust. I can accept and have accepted the blame that he could justify his taking advantage of that affection and trust. I cannot force myself to
feel
unhurt that he did a Pearl Harbor instead of declaring war.

But it is gone and over the mill. I will not ever let him know either that I have felt this way, or that, despite my heinous behavior, I have any pride or dignity left.

I will, out of my great gratitude to you for wanting to keep the pattern, and out of my love for the guy which is unchanged, go the whole hog in the rearrangement of his life … and I'll not let you down.

Any future that we may have as a trio will be a healthier one and a happier one because I will not be the prisoner of my simplehearted trustingness. I have become more civilized, more sophisticated, and consequently harder in my own fashion. But whatever should not eventuate I can take because I will be able to fight for my own side, or not fight as it seems wisest.

I repeat in all solemnity that I have had my say. I have been honest with you, and that I feel as I do (that I
can
feel as I do) is what remains to me of my manhood out of a self-devastated ruin. I'll put all this into the deep unconscious forever and aye—and I can do it
because
I see it and can bring it into the light. Back it goes, kerplunk.