Our glances met at last, and suddenly I saw beyond his exuberance to his concern and anxiety. The English Paul with his crushing indifference had vanished and I was once more in the presence of the American Paul who was so proud of his marriage and who so intensely wanted all to be well between us.
“Paul …” Tears sprang to my eyes.
“Ah Sylvia, don’t be sad!” he exclaimed impulsively, and when he tilted my face to his I was a slave to his quicksilver moods again, overpowered by his vitality and his charm. “If you knew how glad I am that I decided to come home …”
He never finished his sentence and I never gave him the chance to do so. He drew me to him, I slipped my arms around his neck, and as he began to shower me with kisses the tears streamed down my face to wash away the last traces of my pride.
II
We lived in a fifty-room house which faced the park on Fifth Avenue. It was built in the classical style, with pillars, porticos and long symmetrical windows, and certainly looked stylish although, as my housekeeper was always telling me, it was not an easy house to run. Paul had had it built after we were married, and when I remarked vaguely that it was a pity townhouse gardens always had to be so small, he bought the house next door, demolished it and had the grounds suitably landscaped for me. He even had a tennis court made, as well as an indoor swimming pool. I did enjoy the garden, but when we first moved into the house I was more absorbed in choosing which rooms would be set aside for the nursery.
Those days seemed long ago now.
My responsibility as Paul’s wife was to supervise his domestic affairs, organize his social calendar, represent him on various charitable committees, and see that he was never troubled by details which would unnecessarily consume his time. It was a demanding position but I enjoyed it, and if I had merely been Paul’s employee I could have handled my duties tranquilly. The trouble was that being Paul’s wife was far more difficult than being Paul’s employee.
Paul’s shining virtue was his honesty. He did not live as other people lived and his standards were hardly those of the conventional world, but he had his own code of honor and he stuck to it through thick and thin. Before he embarked on either marriage or an affair he always told the woman exactly what he expected of her and what she could expect of him, and if he ever made a promise to her he kept it. He never promised anyone fidelity, a calm life or peace of mind, and yet in his own way he could be both loyal and trustworthy. I knew that so long as I did my job well he would never discard me to run off with someone else; I knew he was genuinely proud of me and always praised me to his friends; and I knew I occupied a special place in his life. Knowing these things did not make my difficulties disappear, but it did make them easier to endure. I accepted the fact that his work came first and that the bank consumed enormous amounts of his time. I accepted the fact that for a man who barely drank or smoked women were an inevitable vice, and I accepted too that for Paul a casual liaison was of no more importance than a hard set of tennis or a fast swim in the pool. He lived with tremendous pressures, and it was vital that he could relax whenever he wanted in whatever way he pleased. Yet acceptance was hard. There were so many evenings I spent alone, but I loved Paul and I knew it was futile to try to change him. I had to accept him as he was.
Once long ago when we were first married I had thought I could change him. I was only twenty-five then, and although I had been married before I was still naïve. I had thought that if I loved him enough he would never look at anyone else, and even later when I was disillusioned I still thought I could put matters right in the simplest of ways.
I can still remember the appalled expression in his eyes when I had told him I was pregnant.
“But you told me you couldn’t carry a child!” he said accusingly as if I had been guilty of some gross deception, and when one look at my expression told him how insensitive his response had been, he began to talk rapidly about his horror of childbirth. His first wife had died from some postpartum complication and he had blamed himself terribly; for months after her death he had been plagued with guilt and when he eventually recovered from the tragedy he had decided he wanted no part in any future pregnancy.
It was not until I miscarried again that he tried to tell me he did not like children. It was quite impossible to believe him. He idolized his daughter Vicky, and it took no modern psychiatrist to interpret the role Paul’s ambitious young protégés played in his life. However, I did believe that for some reason he was afraid of fathering another child, and I became determined to find out what that reason was.
Summoning all my courage, I called on my mother-in-law, an aristocratic, erudite and forceful old lady who by some miracle had always approved of me, and asked her outright if she knew of a reason for Paul’s fear.
“I can tell you nothing,” she said, neither hostile nor sympathetic but merely neutral. “You must ask Paul.”
Paul’s sister Charlotte was dead by then, but the next time I saw her daughter Mildred I made further inquiries.
“My dear, I’m just Paul’s niece!” said Mildred. “What would I know about anything like that?”
I had an absurd impulse to discuss the problem with Elizabeth Clayton, the woman who had been Paul’s mistress on and off for more than twenty years, but of course that was impossible. It was not until Paul’s daughter Vicky died that Elizabeth and I became close friends.
I was very fond of Vicky. She did not resemble Paul in looks, but whenever I was with her I was reminded of him constantly. She had that same zest, that same quick mind, that same source of ready humor, but where Paul was hard she was sensitive, generous and sweet-natured; she had all Paul’s warmth without the layer of steel underneath. Paul spoiled her abominably, but somehow it never mattered. She had the humor to see the absurdity of the pedestal on which he wanted to place her, and the innate good sense not to think of herself as a fairy-tale princess who could have everything she wished. Paul’s mother had brought her up, and this stroke of fortune undoubtedly saved her from becoming unbearable. Old Mrs. Van Zale was the sort of woman who stood no nonsense from anyone, and Vicky was a glowing example of a sensible, balanced upbringing.
I can vividly recall the panic which swept over me when I realized someone would have to break the news of her death to Paul.
It was not Vicky’s husband who telephoned me with the news but Stewart, Jay’s elder son by his first marriage, and as soon as the call had finished I rushed to Paul’s mother. But shock and grief made her cold. When I cried in despair that I did not know how to tell Paul she merely said, “It’s your duty,” and after that there was nothing I could do but leave her to grieve alone. I was crying when I left her house. The tragedy of Vicky’s death seemed far more than I could cope with, and finally I became so desperate that I turned to the only other person in New York who could help me, Elizabeth Clayton at her house on Gramercy Park.
“I know it’s shameful, Elizabeth, I know I’m being weak, but …”
“I’ll tell him,” said Elizabeth.
I never found out what happened between them because neither of them ever spoke of the meeting, but I always remembered how Elizabeth had come to my rescue and Elizabeth always remembered how I had paid her the ultimate compliment of asking her to take my place at Paul’s side. The incident created a strange bond between us, and not long afterward when Paul himself promised me that the affair was finished my natural awkwardness with Elizabeth dissolved and we began to meet occasionally for lunch. I was worried about Paul’s health at the time, and it was a relief to have someone to confide in.
“He has this awful fear of fainting,” I said. “I think it must be some legacy from his childhood asthma, although I don’t like to ask him about it.”
“No, never discuss his delicate childhood with him, Sylvia. He hates to be reminded of it. As for his present health, I shouldn’t worry too much about it—he’ll recover soon enough once he gets to Europe.”
How right she was! But then Elizabeth always
did seem to understand Paul much better than I did, and I could not help but think it strange that he had never married her. She was only a year younger than he was, and very grand in a quiet dignified intellectual way which had deeply intimidated me when we had first met. I was not her social inferior, for both my parents had come from families well known along the Eastern Seaboard and our wealth had sprung from land, not from a vulgar enterprise such as mining or railroad expansion, yet Elizabeth always made me feel as gauche as a girl whose father had made a fortune out of hatpins. Nor was I uninterested in culture. I had always enjoyed my novels and my evenings at the theater, but whenever Paul and Elizabeth drifted into a discussion of some fine point in French literature I would feel as idiotic as any retarded servant girl fresh from some charitable institution.
This was my fault, not Elizabeth’s. I was being too sensitive, for like Paul’s mother Elizabeth had always approved of me, and even in the awkward early days of our acquaintance she had made it clear that she wished me well.
When Paul’s health deteriorated again after Jay Da Costa’s suicide it seemed only natural that I should once more turn to Elizabeth for advice.
“I know it’s right that he should make another visit to Europe,” I said, “but should I go with him or not? You know how I feel about Europe, Elizabeth! Of course I want to be with Paul, but maybe I should try not to be so selfish and let him go alone. I don’t want to spoil his trip, and maybe if I went along he wouldn’t be able to relax because he’d be afraid I wasn’t enjoying myself. What do you think?”
“Let him go by himself,” said Elizabeth. “I think he needs to be alone to sort himself out. The Salzedo affair coupled with Jay’s suicide has been a severe drain on him.”
I accepted the advice of the oracle thankfully and for at least three months congratulated myself that I had made the right decision. Paul became involved with European politics at the Genoa Conference, he reorganized the office of Da Costa, Van Zale in London and he wrote spirited happy letters home to say how much he was enjoying himself. He even had this new mistress, a young English girl called Dinah Slade. Later I saw a photograph of her in the rotogravure section of the Sunday Times. I was surprised she was so plain, but when I heard she owned some ancient manor house in Norfolk I immediately understood Paul’s interest in her. Paul had a weakness for ancient manor houses. I could imagine him poking around Mallingham Hall with great enjoyment, and of course the fact that the lady of the manor was hospitable would have been an additional attraction to him.
When the affair showed no signs of wilting I did begin to wonder if I had been right in taking Elizabeth’s advice, but by then there was nothing I could do but wait for the inevitable end. I was certainly surprised he stayed so long with Miss Slade, but I knew Paul too well to be seriously alarmed. I wondered whether she thought—as I had thought before her—that she could change him, and if I had not long since trained myself to feel no emotion on the subject of Paul’s women I might even have pitied her when in November he left her so abruptly to come home.
But I did not pity her. I was too busy being grateful that Paul always kept his word to a woman, no matter how brutal that word might be. I knew he would have said to Dinah Slade, “I can never marry you,” just as he had written to me in July, “I give you my word that I shall return,” and now I saw that his honesty was unchanged. I had trusted him to keep his word; he had not failed me, and now all that mattered was that we were together again to resume the partnership which meant more to me than all the conventional marriages in the world.
III
We had no time alone together at first. Steve Sullivan arrived at the house soon after we had stepped into the hall, and Paul immediately took him to the library. It was futile for me to speculate on the nature of the crisis which absorbed them. Paul never discussed his work with me and I had long since realized that the world of his bank at Number One Willow Street was a world I could neither enter nor share with him.
Later they left the house for a partners’ meeting downtown, and Paul said he did not know what time he would be back. “Don’t delay dinner for me.”
“As you wish. Don’t work too hard, darling.”
At least, I thought as I watched him go, he looked fit enough to cope with his work. I remembered how haggard he had been after Jay’s death, and shuddered. That had been a terrible time for Paul. Jay had somehow managed to involve the firm in a major scandal. I never fully understood the details of the Salzedo affair, but a regular loan had been used to finance a South American revolution, with the result that everyone, from the White House to the poorest American investor, had called for an explanation. I did not believe Jay had deliberately aligned himself with revolutionaries, but it was obvious he had been negligent and would have to resign. The fact that he had preferred suicide to resignation was the first hint I had that the balance of his mind had been disturbed by the disaster, and when I heard he had accused Paul of engineering the whole episode to disgrace him I knew he had taken leave of his senses. Paul never demeaned himself by repeating this accusation, but Jay’s sons had behaved outrageously at the funeral and had bandied the slander around as if it were gospel truth. Stewart and Greg Da Costa had always been wild. Jay had been too busy to spend as much time with them as a father should, and a succession of stepmothers, all barely older than they were, had hardly helped the situation.
If Dinah Slade had helped Paul forget Jay’s suicide I was going to be the last person to deplore her lengthy presence in his life. Finishing my dinner, I glanced at my watch and wondered when he would be coming home from Willow Street.
It was eleven o’clock when I heard the automobile draw into the courtyard, and pulling aside the drapes of my boudoir, I looked down as the Rolls-Royce halted by the steps. Paul sprang out with alacrity even before Wilson could open the door for him, but Peterson was slower and O’Reilly lagged behind in obvious weariness. When Paul was fit he exhausted all the people who worked for him.
Leaving the window I put my book aside, turned out the boudoir lights and retreated to the bedroom to brush my hair. I was still toying with the brush five minutes later when I heard Paul enter his room next door and start talking to his valet. I listened, my fingers curled tightly around the brush’s handle. Wardrobe doors opened and closed. Finally the valet left. There was a silence.
Remembering that I had barely begun to give my hair its traditional hundred strokes, I brushed so furiously that the hair crackled, but before I could count to ten Paul had opened the communicating door and was strolling across the threshold. He was wearing his favorite bathrobe—his “dressing gown,” as he sometimes called it in the English fashion—and reeked of such casual elegance that I felt both too formal in my Parisian peignoir and too disheveled with my hair still flying from the brush. I suddenly realized I was immensely nervous, and desire, resentment, anger and love were all twisted together in my mind in a heavy emotional knot.
“I thought you’d gone off to Europe again,” I said lightly, patting and smoothing my hair into place.
“I’ve no doubt you did. It’s been a hard day.”
For me as well as for you, I thought, but managed not to say the words aloud. “I do understand,” I said instead to my hairbrush, “that there must have been so much to catch up with at the office.”
He sighed. He was lounging gracefully against the mantel of the fireplace, and as I glanced at him in the mirror I saw him straighten the Dresden ornaments. “Do you think I wouldn’t rather have spent the time with you? However,”—his glance met mine in the mirror and he gave me his brilliant smile—”tomorrow I shall make amends. Can you meet me for lunch? I’ll book our favorite table at the Ritz-Carlton in belated celebration of our anniversary and afterward we’ll go to Tiffany’s to choose our presents.”
“That would be nice,” I said levelly. It was an event I had dreamed of during the months of our separation and I could not understand why I now felt so angry. I felt I was being unreasonable, and I w
as just willing myself to smile at him as he deserved when he abandoned the fireplace to move closer to me.
“Sylvia …” He took a strand of my hair, and as he curled it around his finger I felt that the gesture was symbolic of our relationship. My body became rigid with tension. “Do you want to be alone?” he said at last. Oh, how I wanted him! As I shook my head violently I tried without success to sort out my confused feelings, but fortunately he understood me better than I understood myself. As my eyes filled with tears he drew a chair close to the vanity stool where I was sitting and prepared to take infinite trouble to set matters right.
Ironically this small evidence that he cared was enough to make me feel better, and even before he began to speak I had conquered the desire to cry.
“My dearest, I hope I’m not so insensitive as to suppose I can come home five months late after you’ve been obliged to tolerate God knows what kind of gossip and expect you to fall willingly into bed with me with no questions asked, no reproaches given and no explanations either sought or received. …”
He was giving me back a little dignity, allowing me to recover my self-respect. I fought against feeling grateful to him and lost. He was saying what I wanted to hear, and he was saying it with the charm which had overpowered braver, stronger, angrier women than I. I allowed myself one last resentful thought: How clever he is! And then my resentment became admiration and my anger mellowed into amusement at his ingenuity. I felt quite recovered now, strong enough to grasp the dignity he was offering me and scoop up my self-respect. As I turned clear-eyed to face him he said with all the honesty I loved, “Ask what you want—say whatever you like. After all these months you should at least be entitled to freedom of speech.”
The Rich Are Different Page 17