Many Mansions

by Isabel Bolton

  The way Mary used to air her opinions. How she liked to shock, astonish, always bringing the underprivileged into the discussions, and her belief in trade unions. What other weapons had the poor industrial workers but their collective strength? she’d ask. And she’d usually turn to Miss Playfair. Did she have any idea of the conditions under which the clothes she had on her back were manufactured? No, she’d bet she didn’t. And Miss Playfair turning a very cold shoulder would try to incite Mrs. Canfield’s indignation, the poor bewildered little lady nodding her head or shaking it as she thought most expedient, muttering “Dear me,” “Yes,” “No,” “I never did,” and Mr. Langley who knew every root and branch of Mary’s family tree (was she not a Morrison, one of the Morrisons?) expressing unutterable consternation, looking at Miss Leonie as though to implore her to show Mary the front door at once.

  With Eva there was something else—jealousy. Eva had somehow sensed from the first that there was a kind of kinship between herself and Mary. “I don’t like her,” she’d say, “she frightens me. I don’t see how you can be so fascinated by her. I think she’s dreadful.” She’d denied it. No, she’d said, she wasn’t fascinated. But Eva had guessed it right. She’d loved her from the first. However, it had taken that friendship a long time to declare itself; and it caused her the profoundest remorse to remember how when Mary used to say to her, “Come along with Morty and me to one of our meetings,” she’d sneak out after dinner hoping nobody had seen her go with them. The meetings were dreary enough in all conscience, held in smoky rooms and among what had seemed to her the most unrefined and unattractive people. There they’d sit, smoking, discussing, organizing, and Mary and Morty so familiar with them. Pretty lacking in glamor it had been when she compared it to the hours spent in Eva’s company at the Metropolitan.

  Poor Miss Leonie was rather at her wits’ end, for Mary’s mother was an old friend and she’d promised to keep an eye on the wayward girl. She kept the place in perpetual ferment. Miss Playfair was always declaring ultimatums, “Either I go or they depart.” Such a pair endangered the repute of the house. Why, Mr. Morton visited Mary in her room. They smoked cigarettes together! It was an outrage. As for her effect on the other young women in her charge, well, that was Miss Leonie’s lookout. If she didn’t write to Miss Sylvester’s grandparents she would undertake to do so herself.

  Finally Mary and Morton solved all the problems by simply lighting out together one fine day in the second winter after her arrival. Heavens, what a to-do. Miss Playfair made a big scandal out of it even though the first thing they’d done on leaving was to go directly to a justice of the peace—imagine it. She wouldn’t give a snap of her finger for such a marriage. They were living in open sin, and a good thing it was for Miss Leonie, bringing down the repute of her house and everybody in it by keeping such a pair beneath her roof. But gracious, how sadly she and all the rest of them had missed dear Mary. Nobody to shock and scandalize, to make the very breath of life begin to circulate around that stuffy dinner table. Even Eva felt at a loss, having to listen every night to Miss Leonie and Mr. Langley exchange genealogical data, putting up with Miss Playfair’s pretensions and Mrs. Canfield’s subservience.

  And as for herself there had been a hollow in her heart—that suppressed anticipation at the thought of seeing Mary every night at dinner now extinguished. There had been the queerest void. Even her music began to wear a trifle thin. An intimation that there was in Mary’s gift something that might stand her in better stead than that very reedlike voice about which Signor Locatelli raved so extravagantly began to announce itself as actual fact. How she had missed her! And when she turned up one evening with Morty and invited her to go out with them, “Come along with us on a spree,” what joy she’d felt! How exhilarating she had found it to brave everybody’s disapproval and start boldly off with them. That was the night that dated for her the actual beginning of their long and steadfast friendship, that sense that Mary’d had of her as of a poor benighted creature in need of just exactly what she had to offer somehow declared itself that winter night—it became a warmth within her, sweetness, joy.

  For who can say, thought the old woman. The love that fills our hearts has its tides and overflows mysteriously, disperses itself in so many and such varying channels. One’s passion for art, for nature, beauty; and always, always that feeling one has for life itself with its insatiable hungers, its overwhelming sympathies. And if she must confess it at this late hour of her life, with all the central founts of love—sexual passion and maternity—so disastrously cut off, had not this deep, this steadfast friendship for Mary been the one human relationship where love had never failed to nourish and replenish her?

  The spree on which they went consisted in going to the slums. “We’re taking you into the ghetto,” Mary explained. Ah, that was a night she had not so much as mentioned in her novel. How could she have done so? Too swift, too fluid in the memory the scenes and the emotions—that sense she’d had walking between her friends, arm linked in arm, that there were being opened up for exploration large and hitherto unimagined areas of life. Grand Street, Division Street, Delancey. A cold night with occasional flurries of snow and the blue flames from the small acetylene lamps that dimly and intermittently lighted the pushcarts and the faces of the crowds blown off into the wind like birds, like flowers. Such crowds, such an assemblage of strange peoples teeming, pullulating, boiling over, the pushcarts drawn up in a double line on either side of the curb, the dark mass of the tenements looming up to right and left—that feeling she had had of being closed in by tenements stretching off in solid blocks to north and south and east and west—multitudes out that winter night haggling, bargaining, pushing—the laden carts displaying every variety of merchandise—hairpins, shoestrings, pickles, aprons, dresses, bars of nougat, kitchen utensils, mounds of nuts, rugs, linoleum, fruits; Mary explaining, “It’s the bazaar, the ghetto.” The bazaar it was, the ghetto, but something else that teased the mind, ancient, Biblical—those faces, the pushcart vendors with their eyes rapt back on some fixed point of meditation and their beards blown in the wind—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Abraham; fish for sale, ribbons, vegetables, children’s apparel—the vigor of those women, their grasp and strife and surge, the large deep-breasted mothers of the race sorting, bargaining, picking over the merchandise, jostling you off the sidewalks, milling round with their indomitable vigor; Mary beside her, “No room for all these people, look at the tenements, see the homes we give our immigrants—in they come, thousands by the month”; Morty waving a vague hand in the direction of the harbor, “That’s our industrial civilization for you.” Mary, who had told her in a whispered conversation on the streetcar that she and Morty were going to have a child, warm, well clad against her arm, “You should see these streets in daylight. You should go inside some of these tenements. You wait, I’ll take you with me, I’ll show you children. What our industrial civilization does to children. I’ll show you mothers. You wait, I’ll take you with me,” showing life to her, trying to sell sympathy to her, to sell love to her, to give her you might say the whole wide world to take into her arms, the wind blowing and the snow increasing and the blue flames caught in the wind like birds, like flowers, and memory bringing to her mind remembrance of that early dawn in the big room overlooking Florence, that sense she’d had of distributing herself among the vineyards and the orchards. Had Mary maybe got some inkling of the nature of her grief? Between them there had been something, a sympathy as though with her quick intuitions she had guessed or very nearly guessed her secret.

  That then had been the real beginning of her long and remarkable friendship, her association with Mary in her work and interests. The shifting of allegiances, abandoning Eva and Locatelli for the great business of trying to reform the world, had of course been gradual, but Mary and Morton had seemed bent on introducing her to the sufferings of the poor. They wished to have her see it at firsthand, to actually get it as they used to say “circulating in the mind, in the
imagination, a part of the heart’s blood,” and it was in connection with that branch of her own work dearest to her heart, the attempt then being made to do away with industrial processes carried on in the tenements, that Mary got her first to visiting the homes where children, little boys and girls scarcely more than babies, were kept all day long at unimaginable tasks.

  Loading dice, finishing coats and pants, making willow plumes, artificial flowers. Ah, she could see those children now, clad in scanty clothing, eyes dulled with mortal weariness, little hands and minds conditioned to the various coordinations. There in those bare kitchens she used to find them, their eyes mirroring only what they saw reflected in the eyes of the driven, the exploiting parent—fear, urgency, hunger, terrified by the intrusion, looking up like frightened beasts. Afraid of what—of penalization, punishment? In all those eyes, the mother eyes, the dull eyes of the children, the same expression, as of souls already killed, creatures already thrown upon the waste heap, finished, exploited to the very last shred of human endurance.

  And so, one thing leading to another, she had finally become a part of that great movement, the stirring in the hearts of men and women, at the turn of the century, of indignation at the evils of society, that hope in human nature, the belief that it was capable of improvement, the desire to right the wrongs, to make the world as Mary used to say with head thrown back and sudden fire in her eyes a better place in which to live. She had found the right, the perfect occupation, and presently she’d had a stroke of luck, she’d become the beneficiary of a will. Let no one ever tell her that money contributed but little to the enjoyment of life. Why, when she’d found herself with money of her own, dependent on nobody, capable of making her own choices, doing what she wished with what she had, it had made all the difference in the world. All so unexpected too, her grandfather dying suddenly and his fortune entailed to be divided, left in equal parts to his children and their issue, and as both aunts were childless there she was at twenty-eight with a decent little fortune of her own, the income to be hers till she was thirty and after that the entire principal hers to squander as she pleased. Good luck it was indeed, let no one say it wasn’t. No time at all before she’d bade goodbye to Cousin Leonie’s—egged on by Mary (“What, wait and let your grandmother dictate to you what your life is going to be—with all that money yours. I never heard of such a thing”), she’d made her declaration of independence; she’d taken an apartment not far from Mary and Morton. She’d walked breast to breast with them in all their plans and leagues and projects.

  And so on that fine afternoon in May 1915 life had seemed to her a pretty glorious affair. It had been good to her, it had given her Mary and all these Italian working girls marching along with her, keeping step, keeping step. Today I turn my back upon the sorrows I have known. I shall forget my past.

  THREE

  Well, it had been only a few days after that parade that the past had come barging up at her in the most extraordinary manner. The curious thing about it had been that she’d recognized the fact the moment she’d held that blue heavily-scented envelope in her hand. Eleanor, she’d thought, looking at the Boston postmark, recognizing the handwriting. Opening it, seeing the gold monogram with the crest above it, enveloped by the still familiar scent—heavens, her aunt might have been in the room with her—she’d read the little missive, large letters scrawled across the page with a great many words heavily underlined. “My darling little niece, it’s so many years since you and Lucien and I have seen each other. We shall be in New York Saturday next staying at the Plaza—and will you come at four-thirty to have a cup of tea with us? We must hear all about you. We suppose that you are quite a songstress now.”

  How upset she’d been, put out of her stride all day. Why revive those memories, she’d asked herself, and during that interminable committee meeting and amid the endless discussion she’d resolved many times that she would not go; she’d changed her mind as frequently—since the request had come from Eleanor why and for what reason could she possibly say no? Tortured by indecision she had not answered till the following day when she’d written the briefest possible reply—yes, she’d be there. It would be nice to see them again. In the interval she’d wondered why in heaven’s name she had not turned her back on the proposal (the old unanswered questions had pursued her. How much had Eleanor known? How much had been kept from her? Did Lucien know about the child?), and when she’d come to dress for the appointment how undecided she had been about her costume. Should she look her dowdiest and simply rub it in that she had turned her back upon the world of foolishness and fashion or would she wear her new spring clothes? She was forty-nine. That was, if anyone asked her opinion, the moment when a woman was at her very prime. She’d scrutinized her face with care. She was not by any means a beauty like Aunt Eleanor but still she had her points. She’d made up her mind that she would look her best.

  She’d been early for the appointment and had gone into the park and sat down on one of the green benches close to the entrance, pretty appalled at being there at all and rather inclined to get up and go directly home. The day was perfectly lovely and she remembers how she had looked with the tenderest affection at the flowers of the maple trees, yellow and red, crushed on the pavement by the feet of the passersby, and then up through the boughs above her head, deep, deep into the blue sky between the leaves thinking how perfectly exquisite they were—the leaves and buds and blossoms spread out like flowers in water on the air.

  She was pervaded by the spring, that sense of being still endowed with youth—the same old heart in ferment. And suddenly dropping her eyes she’d seen emerging from the mists and all the lacy greenery and in the procession of the other vehicles about to leave the park (it could not be, she thought, yes, it certainly was) Aunt Eleanor and Lucien Grey. There they sat behind the chauffeur in that high landau with the top thrown back, Eleanor grown a great deal stouter, dressed with extreme elegance, and Lucien still slender, wearing a Homburg hat in the jauntiest possible manner, about them both something unmistakably European as though an afternoon drive and in exactly those lazy, lolling attitudes had become the habitual order of their days.

  No, she thought, I can’t go on with it; why should I? But even while she said it getting up. How weak she’d felt, her knees shaking under her. Trying to keep her eyes on them, she crossed the street, saw the car swing round the Plaza and stop in front of the hotel. There seemed to be some delay about their getting out and she’d had ample time to watch Eleanor while Lucien assisted her to get out of the car. How stout she’d grown, florid, and her hair, no question about it, dyed that startling copper-gold. And Lucien, dear me, dear me, it was all in the way he moved, the way he helped, handled her, you might say, as though assisting her in and out of cars and carriages, trailing behind her into dining rooms, picking up her handkerchiefs had become (where had they been? What had they done with themselves all these years?) the chief business of his life. They gave their orders to the chauffeur, dismissed him, and stood an instant on the sidewalk looking vaguely out across the Plaza. Then just as they were about to turn and go into the hotel Eleanor caught sight of her and coming forward with her arms outstretched, “My darling little niece,” she drew it out affectionately. Pressed against that ample bosom, positively drenched in the somehow familiar odor of her perfumes, she felt herself kissed first on one cheek and then on the other, conscious all the time that Lucien was standing there beside her. Eleanor let her go and turned to him. “Why, Lucien,” she drawled, “she hasn’t changed a bit.”

  Lucien came forward. Would he kiss her or would he not? Good God, he extended his hand, he took one of her hands, lifted it to his mouth, kissed the back of her white glove. “Margaret,” he said, and she might have been wrong but it seemed to her his voice was shaking, “Margaret, let me look at you.”

  All three started up the steps, went on into the hotel, Lucien regaining his savoir faire (if indeed he’d lost it), tripping round her with considerable agility i
n his endeavor to assist Eleanor who was a bit unsteady on her feet. Thus the three of them walked through the spacious airy hall (she could never go into the Plaza through that particular door without reenacting the entire scene), she and Lucien in the wake of the large, beautiful, perfectly possessed woman drawling out her little questions and comments as though they’d been the only people in the place. Would they like to have tea in the little or the big dining room? What an extraordinary hotel, so large and American. “Look, Lucien, at those absurd jardinieres.”

  Miraculous at moments are the powers of insight, the ability to put this suddenly with that. Certain it is that in those four or five minutes, trailing along behind Eleanor and with the oddest feeling that the spring, the green trees outside, all that movement of boughs and the passing of vehicles was somehow still a part of the poignant experience, seating herself (they finally decided to have tea in the little dining room) at a small, prettily-appointed table and a great to-do about who should order tea and who should take chocolate in process, she appeared to have found an answer to many of the questions that had so tortured and bewildered her throughout the years.

  Lucien had, there was no doubt of it in her mind, even while enjoying with her their delightful secret interchange, even while bored to death by all the banality and repetition of the family scenes, belonged to that world of Chamberlains and Fosters—he had been tied and bound to it hand and foot. She had watched him push back Eleanor’s chair, rearrange her scarf, had noticed she remembers that he carried in his pocket a small French novel and even while she was attempting to make out the title on the cover she’d got it all in an astounding flash, her mind traveling back with the most extraordinary conviction to the moment that held for her the clue to her bewilderment—that morning at the breakfast table when Lucien had announced so suddenly that he and Eleanor were leaving for the mountains. For what she’d seen again was Eleanor, that look she’d worn upon her face—sensual, possessive, triumphant. It was Eleanor who’d forced the issue. Ah, she had known, this dull, this repetitious woman, what was hers to give and to retract. She had taken her shrewd and well-calculated risk there as they’d lain beside each other in the summer night, for about that seldom if ever mentioned word, which more than likely had at that time never so much as passed her lips, Eleanor had known all there was to know. He should choose between the two of them. That’s exactly what she’d told him, not with anger but with all the persuasiveness of her beauty, her passion, and her desire; he could go on with it if he wished to, but he must face the music out alone.