“Okay.” Charlene trudged behind her. “I’m sorry you cut your finger. I hope you see Kurt again.”
* * *
She saw him several times during the next nine months, having him when and where she could arrange it, as they had agreed. Of course, she acquiesced to her mother’s terms for visitations to Vermont—but broke the rules repeatedly. Kurt appeared to play along with her desires at first but became increasingly irritated and disinterested in their “sport,” as he termed it, because it drew him away from his own life.
“There can be nothing between us,” he said after making love one late summer day when they had ridden into the hills to be alone. His words were meant to cut and sting. Had Emma not been jaded by their lovemaking they would have struck with more force. The thought of revenge flitted through her mind, but she blotted it out, knowing that the consequences to her would be just as devastating as to Kurt.
Shortly after that meeting in Vermont, she wrote that her mother would be away for several days at the Wharton household in early September and that he must come to the farm to keep her company. She also had important news affecting him.
On the day of his arrival, she drove the carriage to Pittsfield, hoping that she wouldn’t be seen by anyone she knew. He departed the train looking somewhat tired, probably from having risen early, to arrive in western Massachusetts at a reasonable hour. They said little on the trip back to the house, Kurt being more interested in the eventual delivery of her father’s Model T than in Emma’s well-being.
“I’d love to take it for a spin,” he said.
“Absolutely not.”
“Why?”
“What if there was a crash? What would we do then?”
“Pretend it didn’t happen?”
Emma sighed.
After lunch, they sat in the living room, where she told Kurt her news.
“No,” he said, after she was done. “This is an absurd joke. Don’t torture me like this.”
“It’s true,” she replied, her strength hampered by her own guilt. “I’ve been sick from the changes in my body—ill in the morning, along with unfamiliar occurrences of a personal nature.” She stared at him. “I’m going to have a baby—your baby.”
“That’s impossible.” He sat on the sofa and, for a time, buried his face in his palms. When he finally lowered his hands, his eyes were stricken with panic, not tears of joy. “How could this happen? We took precautions.”
“Don’t ask me,” Emma said, her voice coated with irritation. “A condom isn’t foolproof.” She looked down on the silvery scar on her left index finger—a constant reminder of their first sexual union. “This whole affair has been a mistake. I should have turned you away when you came to the door in Vermont as my ‘surprise.’”
Charis sauntered into the room, his snakelike tail swishing behind him. He swiped at the curtain as it curled in the warm September breeze. Emma walked to the window and looked out at the verdant lawn scattered with maple and spruce trees, past the meadow, to the hazy line of blue peaks on the horizon.
Kurt came up behind her and she felt his presence.
He placed his hands on her shoulders. “Are you sure the baby’s mine?”
Emma wheeled and slapped him hard.
He reeled backward, stung by the pain.
“How dare you! There’s never been another. . . .”
He rubbed the red welts on his cheek left by her fingers. “You’re a child. You can’t have this baby.”
“I’m eighteen, two years younger than you. You can’t tell me what to do.”
“For God’s sake, Emma, what do you want?”
She balled her fists, stopping short of brandishing them at him. “To have our baby.”
He shook his head violently. “No. This child will ruin both of us—can’t you see that? Do you want to be saddled with it before you’ve even had a chance to begin your studies?” He stepped toward her, his eyes burning like fire. “What about your art? You want to be a sculptress, don’t you? How can you fulfill your dreams while changing diapers and raising a child? I have two more years of studies left and then law school. It’ll be another four years before I can even earn apprentice wages. I can’t afford to have this child . . . or a marriage. It will break both of us.”
He sat on the sofa, his arms stiff at his side. “What about your mother? She’ll throw you out of the house. What will you live on—certainly not the little money I make? She’ll send you somewhere to have the baby and then put it up for adoption. I’ll be a pariah. We’ll live our lives in utter disgrace.”
She watched a patch of yellow sun drift across the meadow, all the while considering how easily she had lost control of her life. Rooms full of emptiness opened before her: she alone in a dreary Boston apartment; alone in childbirth, the baby yanked away by a scowling nun; she and the child in a bare room, with no heat and little light, wondering where their next meal would come from. She shivered despite the warm day. “I suppose we should have thought of that.”
“You should have thought of that,” he replied. “You were the one who wanted me at your pleasure. You demanded that I have sex with you.”
The truth of his words pierced her. She ached with hurt, but wanted him out of the house, out of her life forever; however, she realized that Kurt controlled her life now. Although she carried the child, his decision was the one she must abide by for she had no other choice.
“I should slap you again,” she said, her voice icy, “but I won’t.” She walked to the front door and opened it. “You’re lucky my father is dead—if he were here, I’d have him thrash you. Get out!”
He walked past her, onto the wide porch filled with white wicker furniture, and down the steps before looking back. “I know you too well, Emma. You’d never have your father thrash me—you’re stronger than that.” He put on his cap to ward off the sun. “I’ll walk to the Lee train station. The exercise will do me good.” He shouted from the lane, “If you need money, let me know. Think of your reputation.” He strode away and soon disappeared, his body concealed by a wooded bend.
Charis meowed and rubbed against her legs.
She collapsed on the sofa, reluctantly picked up the cat, and stroked him until he decided it was time to jump down from her lap. The curtains swirled in the breeze; moving in and out from the window as if they were breathing.
A half hour later, the sky darkened under the threat of an afternoon storm. The clouds obscured the sun on the meadow and the breeze suddenly stilled. Past the neighboring farms, behind the distant mountains of blue, lightning speared the ground and thunder cracked in echoes across the valley. Emma bowed her head, uncertain whether to cry or pray. What she thought of as love, so certain, so assured, had crumbled around her.
* * *
The end came with tomb-like finality. Alone. Complete and utter desertion. Bitterness and hatred accompanied her dissolution, Emma blaming herself and then Kurt, and, ultimately, deciding both were at fault. Her mother was ignorant, never knowing her daughter had conceived a child outside of marriage. Emma hid her pregnancy and physical ailments well with clothing and medicinal stomach powders, and found the deception easier because of her mother’s cold lack of interest in her life.
Still, the feverish hours alone in the house stung her. She wondered what Kurt might be doing in Swampscott, or at school in Boston, while she languished in the Berkshires with a child growing inside her. Why couldn’t he be more considerate? Why had she pushed him away when he was all she had? These and a hundred other questions plagued her as September drew to a close. She was able to send one letter to Kurt, asking to meet on a specified date.
Emma convinced her mother that she must travel to Lowell Normal School, a teachers’ school for women, on the pretext that she might start a new course of study—a respected one that would allow her to earn an independent living. Her mother showed more interest in her than she had in months, apparently thrilled that her daughter would be abandoning the less honorable w
orld of art.
She spent a day on the train traveling to Lowell, not knowing whether Kurt would be at the station. If not, she had decided to make the trip to Swampscott to find him.
He was there, sitting on a bench, looking grim and dissatisfied, as if she had torn him from an early bed after a late night. They left the station and walked near the steep banks of the Merrimack, past the river’s watery boulders and adjacent red-brick textile factories that puffed smoke into the air.
“I want no more to do with you,” he said when no one was near, his face turning crimson.
Emma flinched, hearing the dreaded words. “So, there’s nothing more to discuss? I came because I thought you might change your mind, but I see you haven’t.” She struggled to speak over the river, its white foam splashing over the embedded rocks. “I can’t believe you would desert us. Leave me and the baby to fend for ourselves.”
“You have your mother and the funds your father left the family,” he said. “I have nothing but my name and the promise of a career. If I fail my studies and can’t enter law school, I fail at life. I won’t risk my future because of a child and family commitments. I have no money, only my brain and nothing more.”
“Certainly you have no heart—only for yourself,” she said.
His tone softened. “Face facts. What can I offer you?” He stopped, snapped off a maple leaf from a tree in the first blush of crimson and crushed it like paper in his hand.
The chill of fall, not fully arrived, hovered in the air and almost overpowered Emma with its prescient smell of death. “For months we’ve kept up this façade,” she said. “I went to bed with you in Vermont because I love you, not because I want to control you. I was so afraid of losing you—that’s why I cut myself. It was a stupid, girlish, thing to do. Can’t you understand? I loved you, needed you. . . .” Emma looked at the swirling brown water, frothy after a recent spate of rain, and thought how easy it would be to sink into its murky depths. One slip on a mossy rock and the nightmare of the pregnancy would be over. There would be no confrontation with her mother, nor a child to rear in a lonely home. How quickly the horror would end. She turned toward the river and tears filled her eyes.
He withdrew behind her, like a skulking animal.
“This is useless. You haven’t answered my question. What can I possibly give you?”
“Nothing. If not love, nothing.” She laughed, turned to face him, and looked into his eyes, their color transformed to a hard, icy blue—a shade so frigid it froze her to the spot.
“First tears, now laughter,” he said and reached for her.
She slapped his hands away. “I’m laughing at the absurdity of the situation. For a moment, I actually considered throwing myself into the river—maybe not here in front of you—I suppose any body of water would do. If there’s no love between us, there’s nothing. ‘Think of your reputation,’ you said the last time I saw you. You should have thought of the consequences to your reputation as well; after all, your life would be ruined by a child you couldn’t possibly love.”
“Emma, stop. Don’t be cruel.”
“Cruel? I’m only thinking of what’s best for both of us. Why bring a child into the world if it would negate the opportunity to further my career and my art? Why bring an unloved baby into the world if it would destroy his father’s chance at law school? Yes, we’re better off without such a hindrance to our reputations.”
He stared at her.
“I can see behind your cruel eyes,” she said. “If the eyes are the window of the soul, I’ve looked into hell.”
He glared at her and then reached into his pocket. “Here’s fifty dollars. It’s all I have to give you—more than I should—but I knew it would come to this. Use it as you see fit, but never call upon me again. Perhaps, someday you’ll understand the trouble you’ve caused.”
He turned and walked away, leaving Emma shivering by the river.
“I will see you again,” she yelled after him, “and it will be on my terms.”
He looked back, scowled, and then continued up the sloping bank to the street. At the top he shouted, “How you get home is your affair.”
Emma collapsed on the bank, lifted a rock, and smashed it against the earth. Mud splattered her hands and arms and she wiped away the dirt, a finger grazing the silvery scar left by the scissors in Vermont.
She found her way back to the station and, catching the last train west, found a vacant berth near the back of the car. She cried quietly, and cursed the man whom she thought she had loved, knowing that she would never see him again.
* * *
Her father’s automobile arrived in early October and she now had a driver’s license despite her mother’s objections to the vehicle. As she had surmised, her mother hated it and would have sold it immediately if not for Emma’s assertion that she would now be able to drive her about the countryside in one of the few, if not the only, Model Ts in the county. Helen quickly adopted it as a symbol of their wealth, despite their diminishing funds. The car was stylish in its way, a deep forest green with a black convertible top and spoke wheels. Everything about it conveyed the modern, as if the excitement of a new age and century had borne fruit, but there was more to the automobile than style.
Secretly, Emma had visited Dr. Henry Morton in Pittsfield before the car was delivered.
Now, her mother’s trip to Boston, and the new vehicle, made a return trip to the bustling town easier. The day had arrived when Kurt’s money would be put to use. She cranked the car. It sputtered before the engine kicked in with force, dust rising from the rumble.
She arrived after a short trip and parked a safe distance from the doctor’s office. She stretched, stifling a yawn that verged upon a shiver. How often her mind had brought her to this point, picturing an outcome she neither wanted nor desired.
Now that she was here, she hoped only to sit in the sun and daydream rather than leave her father’s new automobile and enter the office of Dr. Morton, a purveyor of services to women. She had heard about the infamous physician through whisperings at school. He was rumored to be a man with a reputation—a secret practice obscured by an otherwise legitimate office and sterling credentials: a degree from Columbia College in New York City, medical studies completed at Harvard. She wondered why such an esteemed doctor had taken up practice in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on the far western fringe of the Commonwealth between the Berkshires and the Taconics.
Had he done something wrong to impede his career or, perhaps, been ostracized from New York or Boston, seeking refuge in a town of thirty thousand people? Was he paying off those who might have him arrested for violating the law of “procuring a miscarriage”? Whatever his background, he was the doctor Emma sought, after making a prior appointment and examination at her own risk. The earlier trip to Pittsfield to arrange the procedure had filled her with terror, but her options were few—either have the baby and, most assuredly, be tossed out penniless from her home, or end the life that grew inside her. Both choices filled her with despair.
She looked at the brick buildings with similar façades lining the street, but each one so different inside, filled with the trappings of an energetic community: an apothecary with glass vials of colored water shimmering in the window, a millinery shop sporting hats adorned with egret and pheasant feathers, a dressmaker displaying gowns of silk and other comely fabrics, a bakery exuding delicious, warm-baked smells through its door.
The midmorning crowds sauntered down the brick sidewalk as the sun, cascading its warmth over her, poured onto the automobile seat. The gentle rise of Mt. Greylock, emblazoned with scarlet maples and green patches of pines, presided over the northern horizon.
She took a deep breath and forced herself to leave the car’s comfort, assuming her place among the pedestrians, knowing full well Dr. Morton’s address, but wrapping her dark hair in a scarf and lowering her head as people passed, to avoid being recognized so close to home.
The brass plaque, glinting in the sun,
was the only indicator of the office, which occupied the first floor of a corner building. Her hand hesitated at the door, but she screwed up her courage, thinking she was already damned so why not go through with it. Her mother had told her many times that women who had sex before marriage were shameful harlots who would never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
As she entered the quiet office, she took a last look down the street. A white church steeple punctured the cobalt sky, a stark vision that stung her eyes.
A nurse, attired in a uniform the color of the steeple, sat behind a desk. “Good to see you again, Emma,” she said, looking up from the papers in front of her. The woman forced a smile—an attempt to put her at ease, a technique used with more success by the down-home ministrations of the older, gentleman doctor who visited the family farm when needed.
Emma nodded and the nurse invited her to sit.
“Did anyone come with you?” the woman asked.
She gazed at the framed diplomas on the walls before answering. “No, my mother took the train into Boston for several days and left me with the automobile—that’s why I wanted this appointment time. I told her I was staying with a friend in Vermont.”
The woman studied her like a curious cat. “Then you’ve made your preparations and you’re committed to the procedure? We are, of course, prepared for you. You should be fine by tomorrow—unless there are complications.” She awaited Emma’s response.
Emma stared at the woman, unnerved by the word “complications.”
“Fill out these forms,” the nurse continued, handing the papers and a pen across her desk. “After that we can begin. Oh, and please . . . use your real name and birthday. You are certifying that you are over eighteen years of age. You’ve done everything he asked? No meals since last night?”
She nodded and signed the documents, paying little attention to what they read, having never considered falsifying her name and age. The pen felt thick and leaden in her hand.
The Sculptress Page 5