The Age of Desire

by Jennie Fields

  In the next room, Teddy finally comes to bed. She hears the familiar groan as he removes his slippers, the scuff of the sheets, the sigh as he settles onto his soft mattress. She soon detects that distinctive snore that rises only from a heavy blanket of brandy. She doesn’t know why tonight—a night so full of new people and ideas and pleasures—the widening distance between them should bathe her in such despair.

  Anna Bahlmann slowly climbs the stairs to her room at the top of the hôtel. It lies along a hallway she shares not just with Catherine Gross and Cook and Marthe, the Whartons’ servants, but with all the servants in the building. The narrow gaslit passage is made to feel wider with walls the color of clotted cream and pretty prints of odd-shaped houses from Japan. Her room is spacious for a servant’s room, and in the late mornings, when she comes back for a respite after typing up Edith’s pages, sunlight spills from an east-facing window and she likes to lie in its warm embrace. The bed is especially comfortable, with a cherry satin eiderdown and a fat bolster. More than at The Mount, and almost as much as in her beloved rooms at 882 Park Avenue in New York, Anna feels at home here. Now, at the end of her very long day, she finds comfort under the eaves.

  Once, many years ago, after years of boarding, she bravely took a flat of her own on the top floor of a house on Ninety-fifth Street. It was airy and clean, and she furnished it with family things her brother sent her from Missouri and a beautiful chest her cousin shipped her from Virginia. She adopted two kittens, and after a long day they would greet her with a symphony of demands. How rich she felt in that little flat! Free. But how lonely! After years graced with the music of other people brushing teeth in the hall bath, arguing, sneezing and singing to themselves, the long silences of her evenings were too accusatory, and ultimately painful, even with feline company.

  And then one day Edith came to her and said, “I know you love your little space uptown, Tonni, but won’t you come down and live in Number 882? You’ll have two rooms of your own, a sitting room and a bedroom. You can bring all your pretty things. The kitties can come, of course. It would be absolutely free, and Gross would love your company. Besides, I need you closer to me. The streetcar has disappointed us one too many times.” A month later the narrow house right next to Edith’s became her primary home.

  But the top floor of this building in Paris houses a special treat: the common room where an ever-changing cast of servants gathers in the evenings. Sometimes Anna sits by the fire with a book. But more often than not, after a page or two, she turns the book upside down in her lap and chats with the servants from other households. She is keen to know what other families are like, where and how they travel, and how they treat their staffs. Tonight she takes her darning egg and a pair of worn stockings and walks down the hall to see who is in the common room. Though it is very late, she finds Louise, one of the friendliest ladies’ maids, seated in the most comfortable chair by the fire. By her is one of the footmen, and across the room, a seamstress who has come for just a week to sew a new wardrobe for the very wealthy but very fat lady who lives one floor above the Whartons.

  Anna has never forgotten what Louise told her when she first arrived: “My mistress only wears her dresses once or twice and often gives them to me. She gives me her jewelry too. She gets tired of everything.”

  “But whenever do you wear such grand things?” Anna asked.

  “The best ones I have remade for me. The rest I just enjoy having. This was hers.” Anna recalls how Louise plucked a golden chain from her bodice. Dangling from it was a heavy gold seal. Edith has drawers of jewelry similar to this, but Anna can’t imagine Edith giving away a single piece. Could someone be so rich that things of such value hold no meaning? And at that moment, Anna thought of her own great prize, the secret locket she wears against her heart always. His locket. Nothing could make her part with it.

  “My mistress smokes opium,” Josette, a little French maid with a strawberry mark on her cheek, whispered last week. “Her skin is turning a terrible shade of yellow. Soon her husband will leave her. I see how he looks at her with disgust. I keep dreaming she’s died. I fear I’ll come to wake her one morning and she’ll be cold as ice.”

  Anna carries these stories with wonder and sadness, thinking about them for days afterward. If one were lucky enough to have such a life of privilege, how could it be tossed aside so casually? She considers telling Edith about the lady who smokes opium, but stops herself. The story was told in confidence. Doctors do not share information outside the sanctity of their offices. As a governess, as a secretary, Anna has spent a lifetime straddling a life of service and Edith’s world. And despite her middle-class roots, she is more comfortable as a servant after all these years. In the servants’ hall, she’s admired. Edith, lately, sees her faults and points them out too often. Sometimes, Anna feels like a mother whose child has grown beyond her, a child who no longer remembers the tenderness they once shared.

  Tonight, unsettled by Teddy Wharton’s growing melancholy, an issue Edith doesn’t seem to acknowledge, Anna chooses the settee near the footman where a glowing oil lamp brightens the corner enough that she can do her darning. She slides the china egg into the toe of one of the stockings and threads up the needle. She is surprised when the young footman launches into conversation.

  “I hear your employer is famous,” he says.

  She looks up, puzzled.

  “Mr. Wharton? He’s not famous.”

  “No. It’s the missus who’s famous. That’s what I hear. She’s a famous writer?”

  This amazes Anna—that even a footman would have heard of Edith. Is her fame now so widespread? True, Anna has helped Edith with nearly everything she has ever written from the time she was in braids. She answers her mail. Reads notes from the publisher out loud when Edith’s eyes are burning with allergy. She corrects her spelling. She picks up the pile of pages outside her bedroom door every morning to type and tells her when characters don’t seem believable or things don’t make sense to her. She offhandedly mentioned to Edith when she first read The House of Mirth that it struck her as ironic that Selden seemed to spend a great deal of his time with just the sort of people he disdained, and the next time Anna typed the pages, Lily Bart was telling Selden exactly that. But Edith famous?

  “I wish my mistress was famous,” Louise says. “Anyone can have money. Talent is something few have.”

  “That’s so,” the seamstress says.

  “You’re Mrs. Wharton’s secretary, are you not?” Louise says, sitting forward in her chair, her eyes suddenly bright.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you must read everything, then. You must know every word of her famous books, maybe even put a word or two of your own in there?”

  Anna nods.

  “Well, ma petite! I’d say that makes you famous too!”

  Anna feels herself blush. She’s never wanted the spotlight herself. Unlike Edith, who has always expected great things for herself, as though a fairy whispered in her ear at birth, “You are somebody.” Anna finds herself smiling as she darns, thinking about the stories she has typed from Edith’s scribbled and often indecipherable notes being read by kings and commoners everywhere. And those words that Anna suggested right there with Edith’s own. The scope of it, the impact of it makes her dizzy. I am nearly famous, she tells herself with a silvery dart of satisfaction.

  Anna is very pleased to be in Paris this year. The cobbled streets remind her of her childhood visits to her grandmother in Germany. Orphaned at the age of two, she was raised by her eldest brother, William, who was only fifteen, and by her Aunt Charlotte, who had a family of her own and little time for her. But with her grandmother, Anna experienced the warmth and sweetness of primary love. Now, in Paris, the smells of pastry, the blue-wet cold of European winter bring visions of those three important visits to Frankfurt. Oh, when her grandmother hugged her, how special she felt! How belo
ved. Her grandmother would braid her hair and tell her all about her mother’s childhood. She taught Anna German songs that they would sing together. On her last visit, it was as though Anna’s grandmother knew they’d never see each other again.

  “Memories will keep you warm, mein Hase,” she whispered in her ear. My little rabbit. She sent Anna back to America with a satchel stitched from her mother’s favorite childhood plaid blanket. Inside were photos of her mother as a little girl, the mother she never really knew, four pairs of hand-knit socks and, in a velvet case, a silver bracelet engraved with a tiny perfect rabbit. Her grandmother died the following year.

  Sometimes on the streets of Paris, when Anna hears tourists speaking German, she can’t help but feel a soaring in her chest. Perhaps she will turn and spot her cousins Liesel and Lotte, who used to come to dinner at her grandmother’s house every Sunday. But of course, the streets are merely filled with strangers. And though her French is almost fluent, she can’t yet express herself as well as she can in English or German.

  Many things weigh on her lately. Her bad knee protests when she climbs the three flights to her room; her heels are so tight in the morning, she can do no more than tiptoe. She must start taking walks when Edith is out to tea, to keep her legs strong. She will turn fifty-eight in a month, and the last thing she wants is to feel like an old, crumbling woman, growing more useless by the day. Edith needs her.

  And then there is Teddy Wharton. Edith, blooming in Paris like a struggling flower finally planted into richer soil, is willfully closing her eyes to how much Mr. Wharton has faded this winter. In some ways, Anna understands. Happiness can be a blinder. And this is the first time in years that Edith seems deeply happy. For so many years after her marriage, Edith was sickly. She told Anna from the start that things were not right in the marriage bed, and Anna advised her that she’d heard that marriage was often that way. The intrusive desires of a husband were something a woman simply had to tolerate. You did it so you could have children. How Anna wished that Edith might have had a child! She could have become a governess again. She would have loved that child, could have been the honey to Edith’s occasional vinegar.

  It’s hard for Anna to understand why Edith isn’t thrilled to have a husband like dear Mr. Wharton. Teddy Wharton clearly worships his wife. It’s as if every time Mr. Wharton lays eyes on her, he’s located his true north. Edith brings him certainty and calm. If merely once in her experience, Anna had a man look at her that way, she would feel as if her entire life had been justified.

  It can never happen now. She is too old for men’s eyes. When she was young, men didn’t regard her with love but there was at least approval. She recognized that gleam when their eyes met hers. Once on a streetcar in New York, a man commented that her deep golden hair, pinned to the top of her head in a braid, was the very color of late afternoon sunshine and made his heart stand still. Years ago, one of the footmen had knocked at the door of her room one night.

  “What’s wrong?” she’d asked, pulling her wrapper tighter. She imagined that Edith was ill, or had asked for her. The man smelled of bootblack. He must have just finished the polishing. And she could see black crescents beneath his nails.

  “Robert. What is it?” Without asking, he stepped into her room and she shrunk back, afraid.

  “Anna, beautiful Anna.” She felt heat flood her face. The room suddenly was too small. He was a coarse man, a big man. Not young. Not at all educated. Alfred White had told him it was better if he didn’t speak too much when guests came because he sounded like a longshoreman.

  “Will you take your hair down for me, Miss Anna?” he asked. “Please.”

  She stared at him. His big florid face. Not a handsome face, but manly, with a strong, masculine chin.

  “Please?” he asked. In his kind brown eyes, there was something she couldn’t deny: embarrassment, pain, longing? She felt her hair for pins, and began to remove them one by one as he watched—too hungrily. His breathing was odd and noisy. It scared her. But once she started, it was as if she couldn’t stop. She was mesmerized by his wheezing and the sound of the pins falling into the china dish. Her heart beat fast and light . . . like a small animal’s.

  “Shake it out,” he whispered hoarsely. He could hardly speak for his leaden breaths. She knew suddenly that taking her hair down in front of him was far more sinful than she’d imagined. She felt exposed, but also thrilled. The way his eyes glowed. The clarity of his desire lit a flame inside her. If he had put his hands out to grab her arms, she would have welcomed it. If he had kissed her, she would have let him.

  Instead, he made an odd, wounded-animal sound, squeezing his eyes shut and folding his large body suddenly forward. He shivered in a frightful way.

  “Thank you,” he gasped. “Thank you.” And then he ran from the room. She didn’t understand it. She couldn’t imagine what had happened. But that night, she wasn’t able to sleep. Her whole body felt on fire and she had no idea how to quench it.

  For two years—before Robert was asked to leave by Alfred White, the butler, because he had stepped on one too many guests’ toes, spilled too many things, dropped too many butter knives as he put away the silver—he’d knock on her door every Saturday night and she would open it for him. In time, he didn’t have to tell her to let her hair down. She came to look forward to it, though he never touched her, never choked out more than an “Anna” or “Thank you.” It always ended with that sound he made. Like pain. Like misery. And with him running from the room. This is all Anna Bahlmann knows of love.

  Catherine Gross, the housekeeper, once spoke to her about it.

  “I know he comes to your room,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Robert. I know he comes. I hear him. I know what you do.”

  “I don’t do anything.”

  “I wouldn’t tell the Whartons. You’re like a sister to me, Anna. But for pity’s sake, choose better than that oaf Robert.”

  “Nothing’s ever happened with him, Catherine. I swear it.”

  “Anna. I have ears. I know how a child is made. I know.”

  “You don’t know about this,” Anna said. She is grateful Catherine cares more for Anna’s welfare than for propriety. Still, when Robert was sent away, she felt a gasping emptiness she couldn’t share with anyone.

  In her lifetime, there has been just one other man that’s mattered. And one other memory that soothes her, that slakes her thirst on the loneliest of nights. Edith, who was very young at the time, had received urgent word that her mother was ill in Newport and had gone off to Rhode Island ahead of Mr. Wharton. It was June and Anna had stayed behind to close up the New York house for the season.

  Teddy Wharton rarely spent an evening at home when he was in Manhattan. He spent most afternoons and even whole nights at his club or would meet people for dinner or the theatre. Sometimes he brought his friends home and they would drink in his study. Anna would walk by the door and hear the clink of glasses, the laughter. She could always pick out Teddy’s voice, deeper and more velvety than the others’. He was a wonderful storyteller. But tonight he was alone. Anna knew he grew melancholy when Edith went off without him. She stood nervously by his study door for quite a while until she finally found the courage to knock.

  “Well, Miss Anna,” he said, smiling when he found her at the door. “She’s left us both alone, hasn’t she? Two orphaned children. Come in and sit down. Have a drink with me.”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Wharton. I couldn’t. I don’t drink. . . . I just came to see if there was anything I could do for you.”

  “Cagey girl! I’ve seen you drink wine at dinner. I’ve a nice cabernet here.” He got up from his chair and, before she could protest, drew a glass down from the shelf and poured it nearly full.

  “Sit. Right. Down. There.” His eyes were sparkling. She felt a little foolish, but she sat in the chair of
fered and took the too-full glass of black-red wine by its delicate, glistening stem.

  “Go on, then. Drink your medicine, young lady,” he said. She thought it amusing that he called her young lady since he was a few months younger than she. The first taste of the wine did remind her of the licorice-flavored tincture her aunt used to give her for constipation. The second swallow blossomed with ripe fruit.

  “Well, this is much better than being alone,” Teddy said. “Two lost children huddling together in the woods.” He smiled, his walrus mustache spreading like a golden fan. “And how is little Anna?” he asked. “Is the missus working you to the bone?”

  “Oh no. Mrs. Wharton is always very considerate of me.”

  “As she should be. You run this household. You do everything and ask for nothing.”

  “Catherine Gross runs the household,” Anna said soberly.

  “In theory. But if we asked Edith to choose just one of you to throw out on the street . . . I highly doubt you’d find yourself staring at pavement.”

  Anna felt herself blushing and could not meet his eyes. “That’s a terrible thing to say, Mr. Wharton. Mrs. Wharton would never throw either of us out on the street. Besides, not a thing would happen in this house without Catherine Gross.”

  He laughed. She watched him take a deep draught of his brandy. He held the glass up to the light as though trying to see through it. “Did you never want to marry?” he asked.

  “There was . . . no opportunity.”

  “But you’re a beautiful woman.”

  “Oh . . .” She bit her lip, shook her head vehemently. “I’m not.”

  “I’ve always thought so. I don’t understand why you hide your light.” She looked over at him. His blue eyes seemed a little queer. He’d been drinking too much. From where she sat she could smell the syrupy aroma of his brandy.