The Trespassers (4 page)

Yet he certainly seemed to resist and even hate the big and successful people. Though he dealt with them almost exclusively, he always was scornful of them, always ridiculed them.

She knew of his early days; Ann Willis had told her of them, with more amusement than sympathy, just after Ann had introduced them at a party. His father had started as a neighborhood plumber, had prospered enough to start a partnership with a small manufacturer of bathroom fixtures. They called the new business Crown Bathrooms, Inc., because they thought it sounded elegant.

“Old Crown was swept along on the Great Tide of the American Bathroom,” Ann had said, “and made mints—as well as toilets.”

When Jasper got to prep school, he had, even among those little boys of well-to-do families, too much money, too many sweaters, too much conceit. He showed off his belongings, and they were always better than anybody else’s, better ice skates, better tennis rackets, better everything. The other boys didn’t respond, and Jasper hated them for it. They hated him back, soon nicknamed him “Plumber Crown,” changed to “Terlet Crown,” and finally improved that to “Can Crown.” The name stuck. “Can” made up more vicious names for the others, but they never caught. Even at Princeton, where he was also unpopular and unsought, he was always “The Can.”

Perhaps that habit of hating rich schoolboys and college mates had carried him as a man to a dark, neurotic hatred of his successful friends and wealthy bosses. Hate—and its impulse for some devious revenge—had it, by obscure routes, finally veered him to “the little people”?

Her own beginnings had been so different from his.

Without her knowing it, with incomparable grace and speed, her mind now put aside the intangible volume marked
Jasper and I
and opened another much older book, its pages half hazed over with time and forgetting.

She rarely thought back to her childhood in any consecutive line. When she dipped into it, she found it mostly a happy time, with little money but with no sting of privation either. She was born in 1906, in Baldwin, Long Island. Her father was a chemist, and worked in a large chemical plant in near-by Freeport. Peter Marriner was a brilliant chemist, he might have gone to the top in his profession, but he was always preaching to the men wherever he worked, organizing them into unions, and his employers always called him a troublemaker and said he would never be “management material.” At home, the excitement of his rebellious political ideas always mingled a brew of aliveness in the house.

He was an American citizen and had been since 1893 or so, yet he still spoke with a faint accent that betrayed his foreign birth. He had been born in Prague; originally his name was Marhyunar. He had come to America in 1888, a boy still in his teens, had come because he believed so in America and loved the idea of being free to develop as he wanted, instead of being shoved into the army, doomed later to live the struggling restaurant-keeping life his parents had always lived.

Somebody in the steerage coming over, or perhaps it was some official at Ellis Island, had told him how to spell Marhyunar in English, the way it sounded, and he thought that was a sensible thing to do. Once here he had gone right to night school, and later to night classes at Pratt Institute, and finally won his degree as a graduate chemist.

It was during his second year at night school that he fell in love. All the pupils adored and admired Miss Castle, their young, pretty teacher. She was interested in all of them in return. But the fiery young Peter flung himself into his work with such hunger and insistence that she was more aware of him than of anyone else in all that eager class of “Advanced English for Foreigners.”

Mary Castle was to him the essence of America. She
looked
so American, she gestured and spoke in such an American way. One evening they left the school building together and he asked her to stop in for coffee at a small café. Then he asked her about her being so American, and she laughed.

Before the nineteenth century her mother’s family had come over from England. Even then they were all mixed up of a dozen different bloods. There had been some Irish ancestors, and two Welshmen and one Spanish Jew, and heaven knew what besides. Her father’s family had been mostly thrifty Scotch in Europe and once here had quickly become even thriftier New Englanders. Since then each family had intertwined with other bloods, so that the mixture grew rich with such ingredients as Pennsylvania Dutch and New Orleans French and a great deal of plain Middle West or New England American.

By the time she, Mary Castle, sat in a small, poor restaurant having coffee with Peter Marriner, her family lines were all intermingled, blended into a good average American family that reached back into this country’s life for six or seven generations. There were some farmers, and some businessmen, a handful of ministers and many teachers, and now she herself a teacher, helping foreigners to become Americans.

Peter Marriner proceeded to fling himself into her life with as much fiery insistence as he had into her English class. In three months they married.

David was born a year later, and then fifteen years went by before their next baby came. They named her Vera, after the grandmother in Prague.

Until she was twelve, Vera lived the enchanted life of a little girl pampered and loved by a big brother and adoring him in return. David was her personal hero, to imitate and worship. Then he married and she was alone in the house with her parents, who were in their middle forties and seemed unreliably old and removed from games and fun. Soon she entered high school; she made new friends and was happy once again, though when she was nearly fifteen the miserable fights started with Pop, about her dream of going away to college instead of to training school for teachers. David came into that fight too, on her side, though there was that terrible day—but no use going into that any more. She won a state scholarship and then had to delay for a year to earn some money. But at last she went off to Cornell. Again she made friends, won her numerals on all the girls’ teams, went to dances, and had the joyful sense of being liked and wanted.

After college, she had begun to look for a job. It was in 1926, and like some of her classmates, she went the rounds of the big department stores in New York. She worked at Macy’s for two years and did very well, first as salesgirl and then as assistant buyer in the Accessory Department—purses, costume jewelry, neckwear, and the like.

She met Ned Stamford on a vacation at Nantucket. (The volume with its fading pages closed and the slim gray one opened in its place.) Ned was a broker, well dressed, an incredibly good dancer and tennis player. He was fun to be with, and he fell in love with her in three days. For the next year he proposed marriage almost every time he saw her, and Vee always said she didn’t want to get married to anybody, not now, not yet. She couldn’t hurt him by confessing she had always dreamed love would be a crazy, beautiful tempest in her heart, and that this was not.

All her college friends were marrying, their babies were beginning to arrive. Her steady procession of days at the store, going “into the market” on Seventh Avenue, discussing merchandise with the advertising department—all this was exciting in some ways, but never truly important to anything inside her. Like every other girl she knew, except some bent on a “career,” she wanted a husband, a home, a baby.

The spring of 1929 came and Ned was planning to go abroad for a three-month swing around France, England, Italy. He pressed her to marry him and make it a honeymoon; he talked about finding a pretty place to live and starting a family…

They married that June. She quit her job without a thought, and they honeymooned all summer in Europe. If there was nothing storybook in the amount of her happiness, there was also nothing problem-play in the amount of her disappointment at what marriage turned out to be.

It was a pleasant way to live; one always had a companion, the days were full of swimming and tennis and long cool drinks at dusk, the nights new with intimate, lovely things like nakedness without embarrassment, and making love and laughing and talking afterward. Maybe when they were back in New York, and settled in their own home, she would discover more fully about love and the mystery of happiness.

Waiting for them in New York were the fall and winter of the stock-market crash. Ned was worried, restless; he felt that it would be folly to have a child with his income slithering away. They rarely had an evening at home, unless some of their friends came to spend it with them. Ned never read books, he contented himself with magazines and newspapers. He hated it when she suggested going to any music; he was fond of the theater, but they couldn’t afford to go very often now. The market would go up a bit and his spirits with it. But then both would slump once more. His earnings fell off more sharply; they could not meet their bills.

One day, without telling Ned of her plan, she went to Macy’s to ask for her job back, but they refused. The handsome new building for Ralsey’s was just completed on Fifth Avenue, and though Vee had little experience in the world of such expensive merchandise, she boldly applied there for the job of Head Buyer of Accessories. In relation to how other Fifth Avenue stores were faring during the depression, Ralsey’s was a quick success. And among the most successful departments were those run by the young Miss Marriner.

She seemed now to have a flare, a certainty about every decision, that she had never suspected in her first job. Quite unintentionally she began to design, offhandedly making a suggestion one day to a big manufacturer of purses, only to discover that he took it seriously, tried it, had a new success in his line. She was pleased with her job, and yet she always withheld some secret inner spirit from it. Each evening, she went home eagerly. Perhaps Ned would be happier tonight.

And then, in 1931, came the end of her marriage. Ned had been distrait for many weeks, staying downtown often for dinner, making out-of-town trips “to try to get into some other line of work.” When he finally told her that he was in love with another woman and wanted a divorce, part of her shock, part of her bitterness lay in the double discovery that he could have been a liar; the other part that she could have been the naïve dupe of a liar.

But she knew, intellectually knew, that she was relieved to be done with the mediocrity of her marriage. Even the breaking up was mediocre, the shabby lies, the loving telegrams sent her from Washington or Boston, all the while he had been traveling with his new love. But this was intellectual acceptance only; emotionally there was an apparently endless time lag of shock, of the pain of sudden aloneness, the need for some real substance in her life. She turned to her work with new intensity, not out of ambition, but because it was a shield against thinking.

She was twenty-five. Before too long, her emotions did catch up with her mental estimate of the divorce, and the next year was more a drab sadness than a positive unhappiness over this failure. She began to see many people again; when she was twenty-eight she found a love affair that was sparkling and delicate, with little depth but with equally little capacity to hurt her. But as year followed year, she knew emptiness and fear, and her deepening security at the store did little to allay either.

And then last September she had met Jasper Crown.

From the moment they met, she found a vital, explosive interest she had never known. Instantly he seemed to mobilize his powers to attract her and instantly she responded. At the end of the first week they had spent five evenings together, and she knew there was something strong and perhaps cruel in him that could one day smash at her. She kept herself wary, protected.

During the whole week, he never courted her. He talked incessantly of himself and his radio project, how he had, after college, bought stock in the two most promising radio companies and gone to work in that infant field himself. He had prospered in the same fantastic way that radio itself had in the twelve years since then, and now he was ready to start on his own. He did not court her, but his driving talk of himself and his needs was a direct assault upon her. On the last evening of that, week, they went to bed together and she knew that at last she had found a relationship which might be a thousand things but would never be flabby and pale.

The next six months carved new patterns for her, patterns of a complexity that bewildered her. He was a man of shifting moods, of a dozen contradictory facets. When she left New York for this Jamaican vacation, she left almost as one seeking refuge—from him as well as from the nervous city. But even here, on this heat-glazed beach nearly two thousand miles away, he could hold her, puzzle her with doubts and confusions.

Into her thinking and remembering came the voice of the portable radio on the sand.

When she began to walk, she had no plan beyond finding some relief for her feelings. For almost an hour, she kept on walking. Except for the war in Spain, no foreign news had ever roused her so sharply. Only in the last three or four years had she begun to stir deeply to politics in any world sense; sometimes she thought that her father’s constant tirades had set up a barricade in her mind against too much emotional involvement in “world problems.” But the barricade had been crumbling…

Finally she made her way back to the hotel. It was still early. She would get into tennis things and find a game, with the “pro” if necessary; she did not want the amenities of beach life just yet.

At the desk, she stopped.

“If I should decide”—she began, hesitating—“if I should suddenly want to go back to New York—my return’s for the twentieth—how much notice should I give to get a seat to Miami?”

“I called Pan American this morning, Miss Mariner, for another guest; they’re booked solid for two weeks.”

“Oh.”

In her room, she kicked off her beach clogs in some obscure irritation. Then, without changing from her bathing suit, she lay down on the bed. It was, after all, too sultry for tennis. Presently it would rain, one of the quick tropic rains that came up so suddenly down here and were, as suddenly, gone, leaving the earth relaxed and at peace. She stared at the slatted windows, their shades drawn against the dazzling morning, and drifted off into a heavyhearted haze of sleep.