“They won’t fall out the windows,” Mrs. Harder said. “This isn’t the first time they’ve been here, and they haven’t fallen out yet. I raised three children in this apartment and none of them ever fell out the window.”
“I know, but...”
“You shouldn’t have brought them anyway. This is no place for children. Not when we’re discussing—”
“Mama, there was nowhere I could—”
“May we see the telegram?” Larry interrupted.
“Where’s the telegram, Alex?” Mrs. Harder said.
“On the table, I think.”
“Lois, get the telegram.”
Lois rose from the piano bench and walked silently into the hall. It was difficult to tell from her face exactly how she felt about her twin sister’s rather impulsive action. Instinctively, she knew that a double wedding would have been more acceptable to the family, and she somehow wished Linda had taken her into her confidence. But at the same time, she realized this would not be treated as another cute twinnish prank, and so, cautiously, she watched and waited. Picking up the telegram, she brought it back into the living room and offered it to her mother.
“Give it to Larry,” Mrs. Harder said, waving the telegram aside impatiently, as if it were crawling with vermin.
Larry took the telegram and read it:
DEAR MAMA AND DADDY. MARRIED THIS AFTERNOON. DELIRIOUSLY HAPPY. SEE YOU ALL SOON. LOVE. LINDA AND HANK.
Larry handed the wire to Eve.
“Deliriously happy,” Mrs. Harder said, as if that sentence of all the others had particularly annoyed her.
“The telegram was sent from New York,” Larry said.
“Yes. That doesn’t mean a thing. It was sent at nine P.M. They could have been married anyplace.”
Eve looked up, puzzled. “What difference does it make where they were married?”
“Linda’s only seventeen,” Mrs. Harder said. “In New York State, you’ve got to be eighteen. That’s the law. That much I know. I don’t know what it is in other states. But if she got married in New York, we can have it—”
“Why don’t we talk to the girl first, for Pete’s sake!” Mr. Harder said. “You’re already getting the thing annulled, and we haven’t even—”
“She’s only seventeen!” Mrs. Harder said, and she began to weep.
“She’s almost eighteen, Patricia,” Mr. Harder said.
Mrs. Harder did not answer. She sat in her chair weeping into a small lace handkerchief.
“Do Hank’s parents know about this?” Larry asked.
“They received an identical telegram,” Mr. Harder said. “I spoke to Mr. MacLean last night. He seemed like a sensible man.”
“What does he care?” Mrs. Harder said. “Is it his daughter? His son hasn’t even been in the Army yet. Suppose he gets drafted? What does Linda do then? Become a camp follower? She’s just a baby.” She turned to Eve suddenly. “Eve, she’s just your baby sister.”
Eve nodded. Watching her mother, looking beyond her mother to Lois, she felt like weeping herself. Everything suddenly seemed so confused and puzzling, and she did not want to be a part of it. And yet Linda was her sister and had always been her favorite. But sitting opposite Mrs. Harder, Eve told herself, I don’t want to get involved. I mustn’t. And she felt like weeping.
“Did you call Sam?” Mrs. Harder asked.
“I called Sam,” Mr. Harder said.
“Well, where is he?”
“This is Saturday. Even lawyers take a day off every now and then.”
“Is he coming?”
“He said he would.”
“When?”
“As soon as possible.”
“Will he know the state laws?”
“He’s a lawyer. I imagine he will know the law.”
“How could she do this to me?” Mrs. Harder asked. “How could she do a thing like this?”
The way Linda Harder could do a thing like this was relatively simple.
In a sense, though Mrs. Harder was the staunchest objector to the marriage, she had been in no small part responsible for it. She had raised Eve to believe that a girl should enter her nuptial bed a virgin. Eve had chosen to ignore her mother’s advice, but Mrs. Harder remained blithely ignorant of this fact. In her eyes, she had done an excellent job with Eve and so she turned to the twins with the same vigor and the same admonitions never to sit on a boy’s lap. If the warnings were wasted on Lois, they were not wasted on Linda. Mrs. Harder had successfully drummed into her the concept that a good girl waits until she is married. And so, watching her rising passion with Hank, Linda was faced with the dilemma of either becoming a bad girl or becoming married.
Her dilemma was enforced by Hank MacLean’s attitudes on the subject. He was in many respects much like Mrs. Harder — a comparison he would not have particularly relished. In his mind there were good girls and bad girls and you didn’t marry the bad girls. He had no desire to transform Linda Harder, the girl he loved, into a bad girl. Cautiously, both he and Linda had sounded out their parents on the topic of marriage. In both families, the response had been identical.
“Wait. You’re still kids. Linda isn’t even out of high school yet. Hank may be drafted. Wait.”
Well, they couldn’t wait. It was as simple as that.
On Wednesday morning, August twenty-first, Linda Harder left the cottage at Easthampton. She had told her mother she would be spending the next few days with a high-school chum named Sissie Carlisle in the city. Mrs. Harder had not objected. Girls visiting girls was a commonplace she had come to accept as the mother of two teenagers. She knew that Linda was a good girl who could be counted on to keep out of trouble. She kissed her daughter warmly, and, suitcase in hand, Linda left. Mrs. Harder didn’t know it but the next time she saw her daughter it would be on almost equal terms of womanhood. Indeed, even when she left the cottage that day, Linda looked more womanly than she ever had. Full-breasted, ample-hipped, wearing a tailored suit, with brown calf pumps, her hair back off her face, she seemed far older than seventeen.
She met Hank in New York and together they started the trip to Elkton, Maryland.
Hank had wondered whether a loose interpretation of the Mann Act could make it seem he’d transported her over a state line for immoral purposes. They seriously decided between them that marriage could never be considered an immoral purpose, and then the conversation swung around to the bottleneck again — and the bottleneck was Linda’s age. Marriage in New York had been out of the question. The state was a stickler for observing the letter of the law, and they were certain Linda would be asked for a birth certificate. As the train sped southward, they weren’t even sure that Linda wouldn’t be questioned in Elkton.
“How old do I look?” she asked him seriously.
“Eighteen, at least.”
“Nineteen?”
“Maybe.”
“Twenty?”
“I guess.”
“If I say I’m eighteen, they’re sure to ask me for proof. But if I say I’m twenty, maybe they won’t think I’m lying. Who would lie by three years?”
“I guess you’re right,” Hank said.
“Well, it’s really only two years and two months.” She paused. “We could wait the two months, if you like. Then there wouldn’t be any trouble. I’d really be eighteen. Do you want to wait?”
“No. Do you?”
“No. I want to marry you.”
They discussed the Maryland state law as it had been transmitted to them piecemeal by people they knew who’d eloped and been married there. As they understood it, they had to be twenty-one and the girl eighteen. If they were not they needed written and notarized permission from their parents before a marriage license would be issued. The state required no blood test but would not perform a ceremony before a forty-eight hour period of residence had been established. The ceremony, by state law, had to be a religious one. Sitting side by side on the train, their suitcases on the rack overhead, they talked in whispers, plotting the perjury Linda would commit.