The Age of Desire

by Jennie Fields

  Her mother rose sharply with a rustle of silken skirts. “Get up, Pussy. Young ladies do not sit on the floor.” Her voice was stony and threatening, but Edith didn’t want to leave her father.

  “Get up!” Lucretia bellowed. “With enough fortitude one can find reason to be happy even in the direst circumstances. And I do not want you to witness this ugly example of self-pity.” Her father raised his head, and Edith looked into his eyes. Even at the age of five she could identify hopelessness. Was her father at fault for not being able to mend his own broken heart?

  As it turned out, some relative eventually sent money before the family was evicted from the hotel, and the Joneses were able to stay in France for another year, until things began to “look up.”

  But Edith never forgot her mother’s disdain for her father’s tears. And her message: If one is unhappy, it’s one’s own fault. Edith therefore can’t help but define her own state this summer as an unprecedented bout of weakness.

  Summer in the Berkshires has always given Edith pleasure. But this July, she often stands on The Mount’s terrace awash in sadness. So much about the house of which she was once so giddily proud now seems a mere impersonation of the beauties that line George Vanderbilt’s apartment in the Rue de Varenne. The boiseries in The Mount’s library, the regimented allée of lime trees—the very backbone of The Mount’s garden—have been transformed by her newly Europeanized eyes into the faux and the failed.

  It is a perfect day, glorious without an ounce of disagreeable humidity. Her eyes take in the geometry of her once-beloved gardens; her ears are soothed by the music of the stone fountains. Laurel Lake dazzles like a diamond tiara. But none of the beauty reaches her soul. Her heart is blocked and she feels ashamed.

  She’s begun writing a new book about a headstrong, social-climbing, money-burning woman. She is taking a risk: this self-absorbed woman is her heroine.

  When she’s writing, she finds her only pleasure these days. She loses herself in the music of her words, her characters’ thoughts, their faces. She sees them all so clearly. Undine Spragg’s strong, almost manly hands, her petulant mouth. And dear, weak Ralph Marvell. She can hear his voice as if he is in the room, broken by his disappointment that Undine will never be the woman he wishes she were. Sometimes, when the writing truly flows, it’s as if Edith enters a place out of time. She has no sense that hours have passed. Bodiless, she floats above the world of her characters. This is the greatest ecstasy she knows, the reason she returns again and again to the page. But even these ecstatic journeys feel empty without Anna to comment on her writing at the end of the day.

  She recalls that when she was a child, she and Anna would be parted while the Joneses summered in Newport. They would reunite in the autumn, but oh, how she missed her Tonni on those long, hot summer days. She would compile notes to share about what books she was reading, the thoughts she had. She remembers writing, “We can read German together and collect autumn leaves and do a thousand things which are nothing to me now, but so much with you.”

  What a lonely little girl she was! And how utterly Tonni filled that loneliness with her patience and abiding interest. Edith would dream as a child that she could cast a spell on Tonni so she’d never want to leave Edith’s family. If she could speak that incantation now, she’d chant it until she could at last see Tonni alighting from the wagon, a soft and expectant smile on her face.

  Arriving in Kansas City dirty and exhausted from her train journey, Anna is greeted by her niece’s husband, Charles, whom she has only seen in photographs.

  “We’re so glad you’ve come,” he tells her on the ride home. “You see, William has simply stopped speaking. Anna Louise thinks you’re the one person who can make a difference.”

  Indeed, when Anna is face-to-face with her brother, the first thing she notes is the milkiness of misery in his eyes. Mourning his son, his wife, years past the fact. How grief can still the tongue, limit the soul!

  Anna presses herself to him and feels him relax into her arms. Her closest kin, crushed and brokenhearted.

  “Here I am, William,” she says. “I’m so looking forward to spending time together. It’s been too long.”

  He doesn’t say a word. But she feels his acceptance in her presence. She knows that somehow, in time, she will reach him.

  Later, in her room, unpacking her clothes into the oak armoire, she can hear, threaded through the Victrola’s wheezing Mozart, a countermelody of family conversation. Her niece, her great-nephews, her niece’s husband, chatting about ordinary things. A suffusion of hot pleasure runs from her throat to her belly, as though she has been drinking boiling tea. For the voices that sift up through the floorboards belong to her family! It makes no matter if raising her brother’s broken spirits seems herculean. Or that she has not seen any of them for years and years. They are her blood. What most people take for granted every day knocks the wind out of her. How ironic that the only person Anna wants to tell is Edith. “There I was,” she imagines confiding, “like a girl in love, because my family was just feet away. Edith, oh Edith! My heart rose like a hot-air balloon!”

  Just two weeks into the summer, Edith finds that she no longer just misses Anna but is irritated by her absence. When she writes now, she must work off her own handwritten pages instead of crisp typewritten copies. She wastes precious time copying pages when they get too garbled. And there is no one to question her, no one to say, “Surely you didn’t mean that, did you?” Or “I don’t understand why she would do such a thing. Perhaps a little explanation would help?”

  There is no one to keep her social calendar. No one to neatly copy letters. Alfred White brings her mail now, but he doesn’t want to disturb her until she’s dressed, so she receives no letters until nearly noon. When she’d told a weeping Anna that of course she could go to Missouri, Edith didn’t realize how much hardship she herself would incur. One night, she mentions her annoyance to Teddy.

  He takes a sip of brandy and laughs. “Imagine that! Our little Anna having the nerve to live a life of her own. Serves us all right for taking her for granted.”

  “Since when is she our little Anna?” Edith says with a huff. “She’s my little Anna and I want her back.”

  “Funny. I thought slavery was abolished.” Teddy must be on his fourth glass.

  Edith glares at him. “I have a book to write. You have no idea how hard it makes things for me.”

  Teddy’s voice deflates and Edith can barely make out his response. “No, dearest, only you know that. Is there no one you can hire from town? Surely there’s someone who can type.”

  Two days later, an officious little woman with a birdlike face and a smashed hat arrives at the door—the results of Albert White’s inquiries in town. Edith tries to explain to her what she must do.

  Pushing a pair of pince-nez onto her nose, she scans a sample page of Edith’s work. “If you presume I can read this handwriting, you’d be wrong,” the woman says. “Perhaps if you printed it out for me.”

  “But there are pages and pages. My scribble isn’t so terrible, is it?”

  The woman harrumphs and shakes her head. “You may be a famous writer, Mrs. Wharton, but you certainly could learn a little penmanship.”

  Edith gasps.

  “Never you mind, though. I’ll work through it. You may have to reread it to make sure I got the gist.”

  “I need more than the gist, Miss McCrae. I need every word as written.”

  Miss McCrae looks at her with an arched brow.

  “I can do only what I can do. Do you take me for a psychic? Please show me the typewriting machine.”

  By the end of the day, Miss McCrae’s pages are neatly typed without a smudge. But three or four times a page, there are words that have been misread, altered, transposed. There are no comments about the material. No suggestions. But only Anna could have softly, re
spectfully, provided that.

  Anna discovers that living with her brother is like living with a photographic negative, a shadowy ghost of the man she once knew. So she brings him books from the library. She sits for hours talking in a pure, happy voice—as one might converse with a small child who cannot yet speak—recalling his trips to Germany, the poems and philosophers they’ve always both loved. And she sees that she’s making progress. He begins to speak. Just an assent here or there. An occasional dark smile.

  And then one evening, a full sentence is born. “Dear Anna,” he says, interrupting her reading aloud. “You remind me . . . you remind me of our mother.”

  “Do I?” she says, smiling. “Can you tell me about her?”

  And with that one query, the dike is breached. A flood of memories pour out of William. How their mother had the tiniest teeth, like a child’s, and showed her pink gums when she laughed. How everyone remarked that her English was so perfect, so unaccented that she could easily have been born in America. She was proud of that. Their father spoke with an unmistakably German accent, as did all their friends.

  William’s face animates for the first time in months as he tells her stories of his childhood, of her brothers whom Anna barely knew, of the rainy night baby Anna was born, and how their mother wept, for at last she had given birth to a girl. Anna has never heard any of this before. She cannot even recall her own mother’s face. All her life, when people spoke of her mother’s death, they sighed. They said she died of rheumatism. But Anna knows it wasn’t so. Once, when she was fifteen, Aunt Charlotte told her that just months after Anna was born, when she was still being nursed, the flesh of one of her mother’s breasts developed a lump like the stone in a peach. By the time Anna was two years and two months old, her mother was gone. No one’s spoken the word. Cancer. Yet, what hurts her is that when they speak of Elise Rasche, it’s always about her untimely death, never about her life. No one seems to recall what she loved, how she laughed. Until now. “She read poems aloud to all of us. Even as a baby, you calmed down when she recited poetry.”

  “You do not know what you have done for me,” she tells him as they both climb the stairs to bed, hours later. “You’ve brought Mama to life.” William laughs aloud.

  “If only I could bring her back,” he says. “Mother and Lydia. And especially Lewis.” He closes his eyes when he says his son’s name. “If only I could bring them all back.”

  “Tonight, Mother was in the room with us. Tomorrow, we’ll speak of Lewis.”

  “I don’t know if I can bear to,” William says.

  “It will help. I know it will,” she tells him. “It’s swallowing down the memories that turns the world so black.”

  Before he heads for his room, he takes her hand. He looks as if he might speak. Instead, he squeezes her fingers and smiles faintly. It’s all she needs to know she’s made a difference.

  “Papa’s so much better when you’re around, Aunt Anna.” Anna Louise tells her before she goes up to bed that night.

  “Oh my dear Aennchen. Do not let your hopes rise too high. There’s a very long way to go yet.”

  “But at least you’ve begun the journey. You will stay, Aunt Anna, won’t you? You will!”

  The summer wears on for Edith as slowly as one of Henry James’s more recent tomes. So she’s overjoyed when Walter Berry arrives from Washington, D.C., for a visit.

  Though she’s had guests throughout the season, all this summer they’ve felt like an intrusion. But with Walter, she feels nothing but relief. When his long arms enfold her, she is at peace. When he wanders the gardens each morning at dawn in his snowy linen suit, Edith glances down from her bedroom window, wondering what her life would be like if she could make a clean swap and trade Walter for Teddy. How beautifully he stands out against the kelly green grass and brilliant flowers! How regal his gait! But because she has a far-too-developed rational side, she recognizes the negative aspect of this fantasy: unlike with Teddy, she never could have hidden a thing from Walter. Could she ever have felt free? Even now she feels him watching her with concern.

  “What is playing at you, Edith? Are you quite all right?” he asks one evening, wandering into the library after a dinner at which Edith wasn’t as talkative as usual. “Am I not the company you hoped for?” He pushes her feet aside and sits right down on the end of her chaise longue, where she has escaped to bury her agitation in a book. How well they know each other!

  “I’m fine. And you’re always the company I hope for, Walter. Always.” She looks at his long, sensitive face, his graying hair. She in fact wishes he could stay forever, take up residence in the guest room, filling it with his law books and ledger-shaped diaries.

  “I’m worried about you,” he says. “At first I thought I’d caused some offense. Or you weren’t glad to see me.”

  She shakes her head. “It’s not you.”

  He waits for her to continue, raises his eyebrows to coax her to go on.

  “I’m restless,” she says finally.

  He smiles. “Chérie, you’ve always been restless.” It’s true. Edith has always had a restless mind and body. She learned long ago that in order to listen well, she needs to distract part of her too-active brain. So she’s learned to knit or smoke or tat, just to focus. Her desire for travel is another sort of restlessness. Her interest in new books, new authors, new thoughts: all a manifestation of her restlessness. But restlessness without bravery means dissatisfaction. She wants something, but is she willing to take the risk to find it? All summer, longing has haunted her. She is surprised at its ferocity.

  “Cigarette?” She lifts the crystal and silver box from the table beside the chaise and offers it to him. Walter selects one, finds a match in his jacket pocket and lights her cigarette, then his own.

  “Would you mind, dear, if I turned off the electric light?” he asks. “It’s so harsh and my eyes are tired.”

  “Of course not.” She switches off the lamp for him. For a while they smoke in silence. How intimate it is to be so close to him in the dark. As her eyes adjust, she enjoys the platinum shadows lit only by the intake of their breaths reawakening the ash. She remembers how once Walter seemed so challenging, so intimidating. Now there is no one whose company soothes her more. He takes her free hand suddenly and enfolds it in his. How small her hand becomes in his large one. Through the open French doors the moon is huge, the color of a white-fleshed peach. A breeze blows the voile undercurtains, spilling ivory light onto the patterned rug.

  “Come,” he says and draws her to her feet.

  She has been sitting with outstretched legs too long, and her body aches as she rises, a reminder that she is no longer young. He leads her to the window, from where they can see over the terrace to the allée of lime trees, crisp and neat in the moonlight, and far away, the wispy glimmer of Laurel Lake.

  “It’s a perfect late-summer moon,” he says. “The moon is never so pristine in Washington. It always looks like it’s got a scratched lens over it. Here in the mountains, it’s clean as a dinner plate.”

  “You should stay longer.”

  “No. I’m needed in Washington. I shouldn’t have left at all, but I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

  She shakes her head at the word. “Needed. I think I don’t know what it’s like to be needed,” she says.

  “You? There are many people who find you indispensable, my love,” he says. “Henry James would fall into a heap if you should disappear. As would Teddy. And I most certainly would.”

  “Walter,” she begins. “Do you think there will be any more . . . surprises in my life?”

  “Surprises?”

  “I’ve come to believe I’ve used up my store of surprises.”

  “Ha.” He chuckles softly. “As though we’re all allotted a certain precious set. But, Edith, you hate surprises.”

  �
��I used to.”

  “Dearest,” he scolds, “you’re like your gardens.” He gestures out toward the perfectly trimmed moonlit hedges. “You like things just so. Surprise-free. It’s what drives us mad about you. And mad for you. It’s the Edith we love. And the devil incarnate.”

  “Maybe so. But now, I feel like I would like my life to grab hold of me and give me a good yank.” She thinks of the weeds in her garden. Is she like one of those weeds, in a place she doesn’t belong?

  Walter laughs. “Really? A good yank? If life did that to you, you’d spank its backside and send it home.”

  “No,” she says. Her fists rise to her waist, her feet planted wide. “You don’t understand. It’s insulting that you should laugh at me.” Her cheeks burn.

  He places his large hands on her shoulders, shaking his head with kind, narrowed eyes.

  “Dearest. I am not the enemy.”

  “I didn’t say . . . I didn’t think . . .”

  He leans forward and kisses her brow. His lips are cool and tender. She hears his breath catch. What is he feeling? How sweet his touch! Her heart pounds and she is ashamed to realize she desperately wishes he’d take her chin and kiss her lips too. She would part her lips. She would draw in the sweetness of his mouth. She would be unafraid. Instead, he steps away with a sigh, finds the ashtray on her desk and stubs out his cigarette.

  “Well,” he says, “it’s late, dear. And I have to travel in the morning.”

  “I wish you didn’t.” She tries to control the quaver in her voice.

  As he leaves the darkened library, desire for him cuts through to her marrow. Later, bound with craving, she finds herself wandering down the hall to his room. She is wearing only her nightgown, barefoot. Her hair is loosened. It is a warm night, and she can hear the crickets rasping outside. Urging her on. Perhaps it is better to risk and make a mistake than to do nothing. She has spent a lifetime doing nothing. Living in a ghostly marriage. Watching other women bloom amidst the spoils of a life she will never know. If she just knocks on his door. If she just whispers, “Before you leave in the morning, do let us be closer. . . .” What is the worst that can happen? She wants to be fearless like Anna de Noailles. At his door, she stands for a long while before she raps. Two knocks. The crickets scream. The clock downstairs chimes. She can taste his lips, feels his arms. . . . But there is no answer. She raps again. And nothing. Is he so soundly asleep already? Is he somehow not in his room? Or is he simply disinterested? She is middle aged, has never been beautiful like so many of the women Walter has escorted. Her heart sinks. How foolish she feels wandering back down the hall to her maiden bed to spend a forlorn night tangled in longing.