“This is Mr. Keller, Carraway,” I said in my most charming voice. “May I please speak to Miss Vicky?”
PART TWO
ALICIA: 1949
Chapter One
I
“SAM’S MARRIED VICKY!” GASPED Cornelius. He could hardly speak. His breathing was erratic.
I allowed myself three seconds to register this monstrous news before I paid full attention to his condition. “I’ll get your medication,” I said, slipping out of bed. “Lie down.”
He was standing in the doorway that connected our bedrooms, but when I spoke, he obediently groped his way to my bed and subsided among the pillows. He was a bad color and in considerable discomfort.
In his bathroom I found the vial, removed two tablets, and filled a glass of water. I had lived with him too long to be frightened by his asthmatic seizures, but I was upset because I knew how much he hated me to see him in such a humiliating condition.
Half an hour passed with agonizing slowness. I wanted to send for the doctor, but the suggestion was rejected. Cornelius was an expert at diagnosing the severity of each attack, and just as I was on the point of overruling his decision, he became better. Even so, it was still another twenty minutes before he attempted to speak. His first words were: “This is the worst day of my entire life.”
“Now, calm down, Cornelius, or the asthma will come back.”
“Sam’s married Vicky!” he shouted at me.
“Yes, dear. I can’t imagine why you should be so upset. Wasn’t this exactly what you wanted?” I stooped to straighten the bedclothes.
Rolling over, Cornelius buried his face in the pillow with a groan. His bright hair curled on the white linen, and taking advantage of his averted face, I sank down on the bed and touched the nearest strand. Since hair has no sensory nerves, he felt nothing, but I still held my breath for fear he should be aware of me.
I had just withdrawn my hand reluctantly when he flung himself over onto his back again, and the abrupt movement pushed the bedclothes below his waist. His pajama jacket, which I had unbuttoned at the start of the attack, was open, and I saw he was still faintly sunburned from our Caribbean vacation in February. Below the crisp golden hairs which covered a neat oval in the middle of his chest, I could see the fine bones of his ribs and the hard smooth masculine texture of his skin.
“I heard the phone ring,” I said at last. “Where were they calling from?”
“Annapolis. They were married this afternoon in Elkton, Maryland, after fulfilling those token residence requirements. Apparently the story Vicky handed us about staying with an old school friend at Chevy Chase was a complete fiction, and Sam met her off the train as soon as she arrived in Washington from Velletria.”
“I don’t understand,” I said politely, watching the clumsy knot in the cord of his pajamas but averting my gaze before it could rest on the shadowy lines beneath the material. “Why did they feel they had to elope?”
“Sam knew I’d turned right against the idea of him marrying Vicky.”
“You had? Why didn’t you tell me? I never knew!”
“The whole subject had caused us such problems that I didn’t want to drag it up again.”
“But what made you change your mind?”
“I … got myself into a mess. Accidentally. And I didn’t trust Sam not to compound it.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“The operative words are: ‘I didn’t trust Sam.’ I only wanted Vicky to marry a man I trusted one hundred percent.”
“But—”
“Forget it. I don’t want to talk about it any more.”
Hearing the abrupt note in his voice, I tried to change the direction of the conversation before he could terminate it by returning to his room. “Well,” I said briskly, “what amazes me is not that they decided to get married. After all, Vicky’s very lovely, and Sam, though plain, is far from being an unattractive man. Of course I doubt if it would have occurred to him to marry her if you hadn’t put the idea in his head in the first place, but that’s neither here nor there. No, what amazes me is that Emily could have let this happen. Vicky’s been under her nose for two whole months—six weeks in Europe and now these last two weeks in Velletria. Surely she must have suspected something was going on! Sam must have been in touch with Vicky, there must have been letters and phone calls …”
“Not necessarily. He probably sewed the whole thing up when he made that surprise trip back to Europe at the end of April. I never really believed his story that one of our clients wanted to expand into the international market.”
“But he was only in Paris for a week!”
“Alicia, Sam could take a corporation, analyze it, dissect it, restructure it, merge it, parcel the shares out among the selling syndicate, and bank the profits all within the space of forty-eight hours. Don’t tell me he couldn’t sew up his own marriage in a week!”
There was a pause while he sipped some water. He was leaning on his right elbow with his back to me, and I was conscious of the gap between the pants of his pajamas and the jacket. Stretching out my hand, I let my fingers stop a millimeter from the skin.
“What are you going to do?” I said mechanically, withdrawing my hand as he set down the glass.
“What can I do? He’s got me by the balls.” This crude figure of speech, quite unlike the language he usually used in front of me, both revealed the degree of his distress and made him more aware of his surroundings. He buttoned his jacket, surreptitiously checked the fly of his pants to make sure it was closed, and thrust back the bedclothes. “Let’s both get some sleep,” he said, leaving the bed and moving to the communicating door between our rooms. “It’s after midnight.”
“But Cornelius …” I had been so hoping that he would spend the rest of the night in my room that I automatically tried to delay his departure.
“Perhaps it won’t be such a disaster after all,” I said quickly. “Sam’s fond of Vicky, and despite what you say, I’m sure you can trust him to do his best to be a good husband. Of course it’s a pity Vicky hasn’t married a man who truly loves her, but—”
“Oh, Christ, don’t start on your obsession with Sebastian again! It’s so downright unhealthy!”
“Not nearly so unhealthy as your fixation about your daughter!” I blazed, and then flinched as he slammed the door behind him without bothering to reply.
I sank down trembling on the edge of the bed. Time passed, but I did not move.
I had just resigned myself to my isolation when he slipped back into the room. He had reknotted the cord of his pajamas, but his pants still sagged at the waist because he was so slim. Sitting down on the bed beside me, he put his hand over mine.
I sat looking at his beautiful hands, which should have belonged to an artist, and for a moment pictured them drawing some exquisite picture or perhaps playing a Chopin nocturne. But Cornelius played no instrument and nowadays consigned nothing to paper except his signature. I had received only two letters from him in my life; he had written to me in the hospital after I had given birth to the second child of my first marriage. I had kept the letters, and now, eighteen years after Andrew’s birth, I occasionally reread them to remind myself of a time when communication, even by the written word, had been easy and direct.
After the silence between us had persisted for a full minute, I said levelly, “I’m sorry to detain you by making such a stupid remark. You really should lie down and relax now, or the asthma will get worse again.”
Without hesitation he climbed into my bed, and when I turned out the light and lay down beside him, his fingers at once intertwined with mine. We lay like that for some time, joined yet separate, he with his thoughts, I with mine, and just as I felt I could no longer endure the tension, his hand relaxed in mine as he slept.
I waited till I was sure he was sleeping deeply. Then I drew his hand against my body and pressed as close as I dared to him in the dark.
II
He awoke
at dawn. I felt his fingers curl involuntarily against my thigh, and in a flash I too was awake, panic-stricken for fear he would realize I had placed his hand where I most wanted him. Pretending I was still asleep, I moved fractionally so that his hand could slip free.
We were still. With relief I thought he had fallen asleep again, but then he said quietly, “Alicia,” and when I did not answer, he switched on the light.
The glare dazzled us both. When I could open my eyes, I saw he was still shading his face with his hand, and I had three seconds to watch the line of his arm and shoulder before he let his hand fall. I quickly looked away.
“Alicia …”
“No, don’t let’s talk, Cornelius. How are you going to get through a day at the office unless you have more sleep? This is the wrong moment for talking, and anyway, there’s nothing to talk about.”
“My God,” he said, “sometimes I really do think we’d be better off divorced.”
It was no longer possible to speak dispassionately in a cool voice while I pretended I was half-asleep. Sitting bolt upright, I shoved the hair blindly out of my eyes and shouted at him, “Don’t say that! How dare you say that! You must never, never say that again!”
“But I can’t bear to see you so unhappy.” He was in despair. His eyes were bright with pain. “I love you so much I can’t bear it. I thought that after last April we’d found some sort of solution, but …”
“Cornelius,” I said, somehow recapturing my crispest, most sensible voice, “I think it would be the greatest mistake to choose this moment, when we’re both so overwrought, to review the decision we reached last April, but just let me say this: our decision was the only possible one in the circumstances, and I’ve been most relieved to see that it seems to have been working out well. You now have a satisfactory mistress. I’m delighted. Nothing could please me more. I know for the moment I’ve chosen to remain alone, but that’s my own personal decision and there’s no need whatsoever for you to worry about me. Please rest assured that I’m perfectly happy, and although of course I regret that we’re no longer as close as we once were, you should know that I’ve completely accepted our new relationship and remain thoroughly contented with our marriage.”
He lay motionless in bed. He was watching some distant point above the picture on the far wall. “But if you’ve accepted it and I’ve accepted it,” he said slowly, “why aren’t we at peace?”
“These things take time. One can’t turn from a sexual to a platonic relationship as easily as flicking a light switch. Now, Cornelius, you must stop treating this situation as if it were in any way odd or unusual. Most couples don’t sleep together anyway after they’ve been married for eighteen years. It’s nothing out of the ordinary.”
“I wonder what would have happened if—”
“That’s the most dangerous phrase in the English language. Please don’t use it. I hate it. It’s always the prelude to some pointless reminiscence which is best forgotten.”
“But I don’t see why we should have to suffer like this!”
“There’s no suffering. We’re extremely fortunate and happy. We have money, we’ve kept our looks, and although your health isn’t always good, it hasn’t stopped you from having a successful, satisfying career. We have three wonderful children, and although I admit your daughter often drives me to distraction, I’m at heart as devoted to her as I know you are to my two boys. Of course it’s sad that we have no children of our own, but if I’ve accepted it totally—as I have—then I think you should too. There’s no need for you to feel guilty, Cornelius, I’ve been saying this to you now for so many years, but I’ll say it again if there’s any chance that this time you can finally bring yourself to believe me. What happened, happened. You didn’t choose to get sick back in 1931. It wasn’t your fault. It was like an act of God.”
“Acts of God come and go. They don’t go on and on and on.”
“This is sheer self-pity, Cornelius. I know it’s difficult for a man to come to terms with the fact that he can’t father children, but think how much more difficult life would be if you were not only sterile but permanently incapable of intercourse. In one of my soap operas the other day, the hero got polio and now he’s paralyzed from the waist down, with the result that his wife—”
He groaned. “Please! Isn’t it enough that we have to cope with real life? Do we really have to cope with imaginary people’s imaginary problems as well?”
I laughed, and when he saw I was amused, he was able to laugh too. The tears were burning behind my eyes. Turning my head sharply away from him, I saw our reflection in the mirror across the room, a happy handsome couple relaxing in an elegant sumptuous suite.
“I love you very much,” he said. “You’re the most wonderful woman in the world.”
“I love you too, darling.”
The mirror seemed to absorb our words and make them as unreal as our reflection. I thought of all the magazine stories I read about true love, marital bliss, and happy endings, and suddenly the reflection in the mirror was a mere blur, as if reality had triumphed at last over the dreaming images of the mind.
“Alicia …”
I should have stopped him, but I did not. I was weak as well as foolish, clinging to him as he started to kiss me, and so it was together that we wiped out all the painful progress we had made toward achieving a peaceful platonic relationship. We were back where we had started before the catastrophe of our quarrel the previous April, and nothing had changed, least of all the grief and the acute unendurable frustration.
When the failure could no longer be ignored, he said to me, “Let’s do what we did before we were married … when you were still pregnant … when we couldn’t … when I couldn’t …”
I had been weak and was now paying for the weakness by being forced to witness his immense humiliation and shame. For his own sake, even more than for mine, I was now determined to be strong.
“No,” I said.
“But I wouldn’t mind, I swear it—I’d do anything to make you happy!”
I knew very well he secretly hated any deviation from a sexual pattern which he considered to be normal. During the first year of our marriage, when our physical relationship had been perfect, I had marveled that such middle-class conservatism, heavily swathed in puritan beliefs, could prove so erotic, but when I was older I realized that Cornelius was erotic to me not in spite of his puritanism but because of it. I was reminded of stories of Victorian men who, accustomed to women encased from the neck to the feet in elaborate garments, would swoon at the glimpse of a feminine ankle. The sight of Cornelius discarding not only his shirt but his prim Midwestern upbringing was still sufficient even now after years of marriage to stimulate me to a fever of excitement.
The excitement hurt. Smothering it behind my most impassive expression, I said neutrally, “If you’d do anything to make me happy, Cornelius, then let’s please revert to the agreement we reached last April. I know that you love me better than anyone else, and the knowledge itself is enough for me. There’s no need for you to demonstrate that love physically, so you mustn’t feel under any obligation or compulsion to do so.”
He at once got out of bed and moved rapidly to the door.
“Cornelius …”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve been stupid. I’m sorry I bothered you. Good night.”
The door closed and I was alone again. Immediately I turned out the light so that I could not see the empty space where he had slept beside me, but beyond the window the dawn was breaking, and when I could no longer ignore the deserted bed, my courage failed me and I began to cry.
III
Sometimes I laugh at the soap operas when they present a grand passion as glamorous, creating an exciting but serene world filled with the music of soaring violins and the vistas of never-ending golden sunsets. Grand passions aren’t like that at all. They’re terrifying and destructive, razing homes, smashing lives, and ripping apart all semblance of civilized behavior, and be
neath the gleaming veneer of compulsive passion is the dark sordid stratum of other people’s suffering and loss.
I married my first husband, Ralph Foxworth, when I was seventeen in order to escape from an unhappy home. When I was twenty and five months pregnant with my second son, I met Cornelius. Three days later I went to live with him, and by the time Andrew entered the world I had already embarked on my new marriage.
I was still very young. I thought that if Cornelius and I loved each other enough the golden sunsets and soaring violins would still be waiting for us when we emerged from the shadow of my divorce. I thought I could bear losing both my sons to Ralph in the custody battle once I began having more children, and I thought that so long as I had Cornelius we would easily survive any misfortune which might overtake us in the future.
But there was no golden sunset. The violins played lusciously for a short time and then were still. I see life very differently now.
I am not a religious person, although of course I go to church at Easter and Christmas when the event is an Episcopalian social occasion, but I have come to believe that there are certain natural laws which operate in human affairs, just as there are natural laws which regulate the world around us. When I was small I learned that the sea is governed by tides; if the tide comes in, it must also go out. When I was older I learned that grand passions too operate under similar implacable laws; if you exchange your husband and children for paradise, you should not be altogether surprised if paradise turns out to be more—or in my case very much less—than you bargained for.
It took me some time to realize this, since the first two and a half years of our marriage were exquisitely happy, marred only by my private grief that I never saw my sons, but on September 7, 1933—the anniversary of that day never passes without me feeling ill with the weight of past unhappiness—Cornelius was informed that he had become sterile as the result of an attack of mumps suffered two years earlier. We were hardly surprised when this discovery affected our intimate life, and we accepted that we would need time to adjust to the situation, but it never occurred to us that our marriage was to be permanently crippled. We stumbled on awkwardly for a while. At last Cornelius overcame his difficulties, but before long, inexplicably, they recurred. He saw various doctors, all of whom told him that there was no physical reason why he should not have a normal sexual relationship with me, but this unanimous diagnosis failed to result in the disappearance of our troubles. Cornelius became increasingly awkward, I became increasingly nervous, and even on those rare occasions when we managed to consummate the marriage, the moment was always too brief and too burdened with anxiety to give us more than a tantalizing glimpse of the pleasures we had taken for granted in the past.
Sins of the Fathers Page 16