by Anton Myrer
Emily recognized Jack Cleghorne instantly. She said, “Well, you can’t very well dance with us both, Joe Wheeler.”
“Hampton, ma’am. Wade Hampton, CSA. Yours to command.” But now he faltered. “I must confess myself faced with an impossible dilemma—two such charming ladies …” Susan giggled and he turned to her, offering his arm. “Would you care to do me the honor, ma’am?”
“Why, Gen’l, Ah’d be delaaaghted,” Susan cried in her broadest Georgia drawl, and rose.
Emily watched them go off across the floor, which the Filipino boys had coconuted to a rich, ruddy gloss. The orchestra was playing that Cole Porter tune “Anything Goes,” and she hummed along with it. Sitting there she felt curiously secure behind the mask. What a joy it would be to wear one always—all day and all night. Slip through life incognito and carefree … She sipped at her drink, a pink gin, replaced it on the little red Chinese table beside her with slow, fastidious ease. Her fourth. Yes, fourth. The trick was to exercise care: the utmost tactical care in sustaining that fine, reassuring stasis, where everything rocked in a soft luminosity and all threatful, demanding things were far away. She sighed. Her feet, which had begun to swell abominably out here in the islands, already hurt her, but the tight, dry burning high in her belly had receded, like a well-banked fire. Gastric ulcer. Was it? She had a gastric ulcer, then—but no one was going to know about it, not even Courtney. Especially Courtney. Because that would mean—
The band had shifted to “All of Me”; a raggedy-pants private of ’76 was dancing with the Manchu empress now, the Zouave was pirouetting with one of the Molly Pitchers, the Napoleonic marshal was with a slender woman in an Empire gown caught tightly under the breasts, a gold coronet and an upslanted blue mask adorned with brilliants: the Empress Josephine, obviously. Our dreams betray us. The woman’s head was back, she was laughing, her throat fine and white. Who was that? The constant dipping and swirling of the couples dizzied her and she closed her eyes. It was odd: she’d been married to Courtney for eighteen years—and yet when she thought of him she never saw him full face but always in profile: the long, very straight nose, the thin lips curved in faintly mournful, almost deprecatory amusement, the eye—it was always the right profile—narrowed and speculative, as though searching for something. Eighteen years in March …
They had met at a picnic at Bar Harbor the second summer after the war. Courtney had been staying with the Holways. She would always remember the moment she had first seen him with a quick little catch at her heart, half-attraction, half-fear: standing tall and slender against the pines, in a sweater and flannel trousers. He always looked taller than anyone else—he liked to say it was a matter of bearing. Eliot Holway was saying something about the French, what a Godawful mess their government was in, that traitor Caillaux, and Courtney had replied, “Yes, but you’ll have to admit they’ve done brilliantly with what they’ve had, for over a thousand years.”
“Oh yes,” she’d said flippantly. “You’re that army officer, aren’t you?”
He had smiled—a faintly disdainful smile that irritated her. “The very culprit, Miss Pawlfrey.”
“No, but I mean you’re sort of a perennial.”
“Unregenerate is the word.” The others on the porch had laughed.
She had disliked him violently at first: his quick, calm assurance, his wit, the almost casual ease with which he could turn his mind to any subject offended her Boston sobriety, her conviction that all rewards must be earned. But later she found herself attracted to him. At the picnic the following afternoon he swam farther and longer in the bitter, icy water than any of the others, even her brother Forbes. He didn’t know how to sail, coming as he did from New York State, but he caught on fast enough. Around the booming campfire later he sang a very funny London music hall song, and told stories about General Pershing, reviews and audiences with crotchety, lizard-faced French duchesses in draughty drawing rooms at Rambouillet or Saumur. His smooth dark hair was disheveled, his face ruddy in the firelight. He was such a change from the stalwart, straightforward manner of Forbes, or Eliot Holway or George Wainwright. Walking along the shore together, climbing over the furrowed granite, he had wanted to know what she was thinking.
“You’re not supposed to ask a girl that,” she’d retorted.
“Oh come now—if you want equal rights with men you’ve got to expect to be treated like them.”
She laughed. “That’s true, isn’t it? That’s what Father says: no authority without responsibility.”
“Yes. I’ve heard him.”
They both laughed, watching each other a moment. Then she said: “I was thinking how odd it is you’re not married.”
“Odd?”
“Well, a man of your—your experience …”
“My creaking old age, you mean.”
“Oh, heavens, no—but all you’ve seen and done.”
He moved a bit ahead of her, climbing a long, rough shoulder of rock. Spray from the surf blew over them. “No excuse, sir. As we used to say back at the Point. The fact is, there just wasn’t time for it.”
“No O-A-O?” She had picked up some of the slang from Ruth Holway, who had gone to dances at West Point.
“No One-And-Only. Life was real and life was earnest. I went right out to a platoon in the South. And then we entered the war. Isn’t it curious, though?” he mused, as though the idea had only just occurred to him. “I never once thought of it then. Romance and marriage.”
“That’s a tall one!”
“No, I mean it.” He reached down to her, took her hand and drew her up to him—a sudden proximity that made her heart leap; his eyes were sparkling. “The fact is, I simply haven’t met a girl who’s taken my fancy. Until now, anyway … ”
He visited the Pawlfreys in Boston a month later, and she took him to teas around the Hill or out on Beacon Street, or kept him all to herself. She was enchanted with him; she couldn’t think of anything else. Here he was—this handsome, brilliant officer with a glittering future (people said just that—glittering—it was one of the words that never failed to cluster around Courtney Massengale, all the extravagant words: brilliant, arresting, astonishing—he drew epithets the way a polished steel magnet picks up filings; even staid, crusty old Boston used some of them), and he was hers to display. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before.
He loved Boston, which surprised her: he liked to walk the narrow, crabbed streets in the raw east wind, looking up tablets and mementoes. Crossing the Common under the lordly elms, he asked her where Clinton’s troops had been quartered during the British occupation. Laughing, she said she didn’t have the faintest idea.
“But that’s terrible,” he rebuked her. “Here you are, surrounded by history—the very foundations of the country’s traditions—and you don’t know something like that?”
He was smiling, but he was serious: she’d learned to tell. He took her education in hand. They stood where the crowd had been behind the Old State House when poor Crispus Attucks fell under the British bayonets, they walked along the grassy ridge on Breed’s Hill (the battle had not been fought on Bunker Hill, he warned her, that was a myth unsupported by all historical evidence) where Prescott had slapped his trembling riflemen on their behinds with his stick, calling tightly, “Show the bastards, now! You show them!” He even dragged her up to a desolate clump of buildings near an abandoned football field in Dorchester which Washington’s troops had seized, and where they’d mounted the guns that had forced the hated Redcoats to evacuate the city.
“Do you know, my great grandfather Charles Massengale came all the way from Selkirk to fight here? And then went back in ’77 and commanded a regiment at Bemis Heights.”
“Where’s that?” she wanted to know.
He threw back his head in mock outrage. “My dear young girl, they obviously teach you nothing in the Hub. Nothing … Saratoga!” he cried. A woman passing by stared at him and he bowed and gave her his most charming smile before turni
ng back to Emily. “The great turning point! The supreme, triumphant moment after which nothing could ever be the same. Your father says you had an ancestor here at Dorchester Heights—so you could say our forebears fought shoulder to shoulder …” His eyes flashed, tawny against the gray northeast sky; his long white face looked eager and proud. She had never loved him more than at that moment.
Her brother Forbes was less enthusiastic. “Well—been out wandering down memory lane?” he inquired when they came in one afternoon.
“A harmless pastime.” Courtney regarded him tolerantly. “The trouble with you people is you’ve got so many traditions you don’t half value them anymore.”
“We don’t wave the gaudy flag over them, if that’s what you mean.”
“Oh Forbes, don’t talk rot,” Emily said. “You’re just jealous. Because you were too young to go to France.”
He started to laugh, and then his face set in that stolid, quizzical way that meant he was getting angry. “Well, now,” he said.
“Come on, Emily,” Courtney broke in. He never called her Em, or Emmy, the way the others did. “That’s hardly fair. We couldn’t all of us be heroes. Why weren’t you turning out doughnuts under a tent fly near St. Durance?”
“Because I was marching down Tremont Street in the suffragette parades,” she retorted gaily, and stuck out her tongue.
“Em!” Forbes protested, but Courtney threw back his head and laughed.
“Women’s rights! What makes you think you deserve any?”
“Any woman is as good as any man.”
“Demonstrably false.” His eyes were still twinkling. “The Periclean Athenians never let them out of the house.”
“No, of course not—they didn’t dare!”
“Possibly you’re right.” His smile was devastating; she had never in all her life met such a compelling man—she’d never known such a man existed. “I’ll bet I can learn to make a sauce Hollandaise before you learn how to drive an automobile.” His face seemed incredibly, dangerously close to hers. “You see?” he murmured. “And you said any woman is as good as any man …”
She was seized with a twinge of vertigo. The backs of her hands, her eyelids were tingling, and she laughed to conceal it—a laugh that was like a catch of breath. “Oh,” she cried softly, “but you’re not any man! …”
Her parents had been rather constrained when she’d told them. A hesitant conference in the long, silent room, somber with the tasseled cloth lamp shades and the curved interior shutters drawn; the birch fire hissed and snapped behind the grate.
“We don’t know an awful lot about him, dear.”
“Momma, he comes from a very good family, the Camberlins know them …”
“It’s not that.” Her mother’s face, usually so square and placid, looked troubled. “You’re rather young for this, Emmy.”
“I’m twenty.”
“You’re sure you’re not getting carried away?” her father asked. He was smiling but his eyes were quick and piercing over his bifocals. “The war’s over, you know.”
“Gracious goodness, I know that!”
“It’ll mean long stretches in out-of-the-way places. Army posts aren’t the most festive abodes on earth.”
“Yes, but there’ll be …” She faltered, but not for long; this was something she wanted very much. “I mean there’ll be money, won’t there? I’ll have some of my own …?”
Her parents exchanged a glance, and her father nodded and said, “Yes. Of course. I’ve told you that. But that isn’t everything, you know.”
“Anyway, that won’t be forever,” she said proudly. “It’ll be different with Courtney. He’s no run-of-the-mill Army product, you know—he’s a permanent captain, at twenty-four.” Their massed reluctance distressed her; this was her chance, the chance of her life, and she wasn’t going to fluff it: she couldn’t! “He’s been picked by General Pershing to serve on his personal staff. You’ll see—Courtney’s going to be a military attaché, and a general before anyone else in his class.”
“Maybe so.” Her father smiled at her again, fondly. “Just try to be sure about it, Emmy, that’s all.”
“It’s been such a short time,” her mother persisted. “Are you sure it’s what you really want?”
“Oh yes,” she said, “it is, I know it is! …”
She knew she was right: she knew it. Courtney would accomplish great deeds. He was going out into the world where things were happening—away from Boston, the tortuous little streets and Sunday afternoons, the dances at Mr. Papanti’s, the parochial encounters in bookshops, at Symphony, in the swept dirt walks of the Public Garden. He was getting away from all this! and so was she …
The tune—a dreamy ballad called “Deep Purple”—was over. She reached for her glass and saw it was empty; restrained the movement of her hand. The atmosphere in the club seemed warmer, caught in a humming rhythm. Out of it came the French marshal, his sideburns luxuriant and full, his collar adorned with golden acanthus leaves; a sleeve of the hussar’s jacket swung gently. With care she rose to her feet, bound in that slow surge of excitement and despair she’d known for years.
“May I have the pleasure?” he was saying.
“Certainly, noble sir.—Why me?” she protested as they moved over the ruddy mirror of the floor.
“Why not?”
“But—then everyone’ll know …”
“That’s just my strategy. To throw them off. Not a single man has danced with his wife tonight, to my knowledge.”
“How can you tell?”
“Oh, it’s easier than you think. I’ve made a little game of it—I’ve identified every man here but two or three.”
“And the women?”
“Ah, that’s even easier!” She missed a step, lurched a little; his hand at the small of her back stiffened. In the guarded tone she hated he asked: “How are you feeling?”
“All right. A little tired.”
“I wish you’d go over and see this new man, Dowe. He was trained at Johns Hopkins.”
“Perhaps I will.”
“I wish you would. Have you danced with old Pilchard yet? or Fahrquahrson?”
“Good grief, Courtney,” she exclaimed, “I don’t even know who they are …”
“I’ll point them out for you, then.” His voice was flat with sarcasm. While they danced he went on talking, about the importance of the dinner party they were giving Thursday, something she must remember to say to Colonel Swayzee; every now and then she murmured, but she had stopped listening. The band was playing “Yesterdays,” a tune that could stir her to tears, and her mind drifted away, thinking of the apartment in Paris overlooking the lovely little Parc Monceau, the still, green tidelands of Chesapeake Bay, San Francisco with its brisk white salt cubes of houses running down the hills in the smoky dawn light, and beyond them the vast blue sweep of the Pacific. Yesterdays. So many lovely places; so little hope, so little joy.
She had been excited by it all at first: the new quarters, the receptions, the new acquaintances, the courtly formalities—like Boston graced with a southern warmth—the paternal affection of the senior officers. He did not make love to her for several evenings, and this disturbed her vaguely; when he did she was shocked by the tempestuous force of it, the mounting flood of words, hoarse cries, the frenzy that frightened even as it inflamed, the pressure of this alien flesh that burned her own, the two hands that gripped her throat, squeezing and squeezing at her life until she thought her heart would burst. What was wrong? Had he gone mad? His hands had left her throat. He was weeping now, a dry, husky groaning. Was this what men did? It couldn’t be—! What was wrong?
“What’s the matter?” she whispered, caught in dread. “What is it, darling?” For a time he made no reply, merely went on sobbing like a weary, frightened child, while she absently stroked his head.
“… It’s been this way,” he murmured after a long silence. “I don’t know why …”
“But what is it, dea
r? Are you in pain?” She was trembling badly herself now; she had assumed he would lead in this, as he had in everything else, and the growing silence frightened her more than the abortive lovemaking. “Are you in pain?”
“No”—he gave a tight, exasperated laugh that was like a sob—“I’m not in pain …”
“What is it, then? Is there anything—” she hesitated—“…I can do?”
He shook his head wildly. “No. Nothing …”
Ejaculatio praecox. She had looked it up—later, much, much later—in a medical journal. A hateful, ugly phrase. She did her best; she tried to help him all she could, lent herself to all kinds of schemes—pathetic, shocking, bizarre: she forced herself to do them. For she did love him, with all her heart. She let him dress her in wild, provocative ways: she was an Indian princess, an Arab dancing girl, a Chinese courtesan. Occasionally they would succeed—such as the night he dressed her as a prostitute—but such moments were rare; she could never know. It went on and on, after the teas, the dinners, the pleasant, proper etiquette of receptions: a tense, humiliating ritual that left her whirling, drymouthed, quivering with a frustration that sapped her strength. Finally, one night, when she had given herself to a desperate expedient that revolted her utterly—still another occasion for failure, lying bound in mortification, strained beyond all endurance, listening to his taut, harsh sobbing, she cried: “God—think about me! Me! Can’t you—?”
He raised his head and gazed at her with cold, implacable reproach; got up and left the room. Weeping she ran to his study. The door was shut. She asked him if she could come in. There was no answer. She tried the door; he had locked it. Softly she called to him that she was sorry, she hadn’t meant it—only couldn’t he see, couldn’t he see what this did to her—? Waiting she shivered. There was only silence, an automobile horn bleating over on Pennsylvania Avenue, and the brisk, martial ticking of the clock in the living room.