Free Those Harper Women by Stephen Birmingham Page A

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