Free Those Harper Women by Stephen Birmingham

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.
    â€œIt’s Depression art,” she said to Edith. “And what in the world do you know about the Depression, Granny? You came sailing through.”
    â€œSailing. 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.”
    â€œThen you should be proud that great-grandfather Harper made enough to take us away from that sort of place.”
    â€œIt 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! ”)
    â€œBut Granny, he had factories all over the place.”
    â€œEventually, 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.)
    â€œYou always rather run him down, don’t you?” Leona said. “I should think you’d be kind of grateful for all his money.”
    â€œGrateful?” 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