“Sometimes you are an awful lot of effort.”
“I’m sorry.” She closes her eyes, remorseful. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Did I hurt you?”
He glares at her, not answering. “HJ is coming soon. You understand?” he says.
Her lips quiver.
“Then we’ll have no time alone together . . . even if he does approve of our enchevêtrement romantique.”
“Just not here. Not here at Harry’s.”
“And then you sail. ‘Not here.’ It’s an excuse, you know. It’s an excuse because you have no heart.”
“I do have a heart. . . .” In fact, she feels it sinking, clanking away from her like a rock down a well. She must know him better, feel closer to him before she can feel close in that other way. “What sorts of concerns have you had?” she asks.
“What?”
“You said you’ve had other concerns which kept you from me. What sorts of concerns?”
“I told you it has nothing to do with you. Why would it help to share my worries?”
“It might make me feel nearer to you. . . .”
“Women always think it’s a good idea to know more about a man. But what they discover rarely does anything but upset them.”
Edith opens the door and heads for the parlor. All her remorse, all her longing freezes in her veins. He wants her to give up everything, and intends to give nothing in return. He follows her down the hall straight to the front door. The scent of his lavender cologne precedes him.
“Thank you for visiting,” she says, opening it.
“Listen to the ice in Madame’s voice. You push me away, and don’t even offer me tea to ask for forgiveness?”
“There’s a tea shop just at the corner.”
“I have a mind to start shouting until all the servants come running.” And then his voice rises to an ear-shattering volume. “Mrs. Wharton’s breaking my heart!”
“Hush,” she says, exasperated. “All the servants here speak English.” The bonne is already running into the room with a concerned look on her face.
“Is everything all right, Madam?”
“We’re fine, Celeste. Mr. Fullerton is just leaving.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
When the bonne’s footsteps retreat, Edith turns to him. “If you want tea with me, or anything, things will have to change. I can’t keep up with you. One minute you have no time for me. The next you’re on my doorstep.”
“Ah, we’ll have tea soon and far more,” Morton says, snatching his hat from the stand in the hall and flashing a broad, assured smile. “Because fortunately, dear, you love me.”
Henry and Edith have a plan. Instead of his coming directly to Paris as usual, he’ll sail to Le Havre and take the train to Amiens, where they can enjoy the cathedral together. He writes her:
To see the cathedral in the late afternoon will be of the last refinement. And it will be adorable to have WMF—kindly tell him, with my love, how immensely I feel this.
Knowing that Henry is far too fastidious to ever act on his adulation for Morton, could never have been the older man with whom Morton dallied, Edith sees that she has been appointed his surrogate. She smiles at his note. He wants Edith and Morton to be together.
When she tells Morton about it on the telephone—all the rage she felt the last time she saw him had astonishingly melted away—he agrees to join her in picking up Henry at the train station in Amiens. “After Henry goes to bed, the rest of the night will be ours,” he says. “If you promise not to hurt me in the process.”
The morning of Henry’s arrival, however, Edith wakes, her heart pounding to the sound of a terrible deluge. Thunder. Rain rushing down the streets in torrents. Wind rattling windows. No day for a motor-flight of any kind. She immediately wires Henry to come straight to Paris instead of Amiens, and dashes off a note to Morton as well. As she sips her morning tea, she is astonished at how relieved she feels.
Arriving in Paris larger, more winded and red-faced than ever, Henry is happy to be welcomed into Harry’s dry and fussy little house.
“In retrospect, I see that a side trip to Amiens might have killed me. I must be grateful to the gods for concocting this wretched rain.”
He is pleased that Harry has agreed to let him have the yellow bedroom overlooking the just-budding rose garden. Before he takes a nap to fortify himself for the rest of the day, he hugs Edith warmly.
“You are so exceedingly important to me, dearest Edith,” he says with stentorian grandeur, as the servants mill about with fresh towels and fire stoking. “Or I should never have dragged my weighty, miserable soul across the channel. I want you to drink in my stay, because I may never come again.” Edith begins to close the door when she hears Henry calling through it.
“When I wake, will I get a glimpse of Miss Bahlmann?”
“No, I’m sorry. She’s gone back to the States.”
“Why on earth would she desert you? That doesn’t sound like her.”
Edith bites her lip and demurs. “I sent her back.”
Henry frowns. “What did she do to deserve that?”
“She disapproves of Morton,” Edith says.
“Ahhh. Well, in the future, you can always send her to me. I know she doesn’t disapprove of me. And I find her very useful.”
Park Avenue could not look more foreign to Anna if it were Tverskaya Street in Moscow. After such a long season in Paris, the houses (especially 882 and poor 884 with no window boxes and tired curtains) look small and plain and rather oddly unpeopled. Though Anna has always appreciated New York more than Edith, perhaps she has finally caught Edith’s Americaphobia as one might catch a cold. Everything looks smaller, more provincial and more foreboding than it has ever seemed to her before.
It takes a good two weeks of unpacking her trunks and reacquainting herself with her treasured things: her books, her favorite mulberry-colored teapot, her Aunt Charlotte’s mohair armchair, to feel comfortable once more. But she has to admit, she is remarkably happy to be away from Edith. How painful it was to have to hear from Cook two, three times a week about her lunches with Morton Fullerton. And Anna wouldn’t have even minded that so much if Edith hadn’t appeared so unconcerned about Teddy, so defiant of all the things she’s been taught, of the vows she once took so solemnly. In some odd, angry way, Anna wishes she would never have to lay eyes on Edith again.
After some days, Anna is surprised to find herself revitalized by familiar smells and sounds of New York. Even the steam train rattling through the open tunnels on Park Avenue warms her heart. Everyone is talking about how, come June, the law is forcing the railroads to switch to electric trains only. It feels like an era passing. New York is growing up. And she has missed so much of it. If she stays with Edith, she will miss more.
One day, Anna walks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and wanders among her favorite Greek and Roman galleries, and then spends time among the American paintings, something she has hardly ever done. She stops at a George Inness painting titled Autumn Oaks, with its light just breaking through the clouds and spilling onto the golden-green grass. There is a sort of innocent optimism about American paintings that feels spirited and true.
And then, as Anna stands there, tears well up in her eyes. A rush of them. She fumbles in her handbag for a handkerchief, sits on a bench near Autumn Oaks and tries to hide her face from others in the room. What’s come over her? She feels suddenly, excruciatingly brokenhearted.
How happy Edith is with Morton and Henry, gathered at luncheon in the courtyard of the Hôtel d’Angleterre, the three of them relaxing under a mauve umbrella, sipping cold white Bordeaux. The breeze in Beauvais is as sweet and warm as July. Two little girls sit cross-legged on the stone pavement under a fringe of fragrant wisteria, playing clapping games in high, cheerful French. The waiter is whistling
. Sweet-faced pensées bloom around a stone fountain plashing with water. Canaries sing in unison in a fat silvered cage by the restaurant door. Was there ever so sweet a symphony?
“Oh happy day,” Henry declares, clasping each of their hands. “We are together at last! And in such a lovely place!”
Edith smiles at him, and then at Morton, who initially didn’t want to come to Beauvais at all but now looks as happy as she’s seen him in a while. How startlingly handsome he is when relaxed. She watches Henry gaze over at him fondly. He, too, revels in Morton’s beauty.
“It will be uncomfortable with the three of us,” Morton had fretted when she invited him. “I’ll want your attention. He’ll want mine.”
“Please come. The thought of you not being there makes me sad. You must come.”
Having them both here now, how could she feel more magnificent? Free and happy to be out of Paris and Harry’s house of servants and strictures. Today in the sunshine and country air, she feels ten years younger.
“If only one could put a day into a potion and drink it whenever one likes,” Henry says. “I would choose today and Beauvais.”
“I would choose today,” Edith agrees.
“I would choose the day I graduated from Harvard,” Morton says.
Henry shakes his head and laughs. “You’re a scamp, dear man.”
Morton looks up through his lashes at Edith. “It was wonderful being young,” he says sheepishly. “But this is lovely too.”
After the lunch is cleared, they linger over coffee and cigarettes.
“My two dearest friends are friends!” Henry declares. “This is a gift of the most generous sort. In my experience, one’s friends never like one another.” He sighs with contentment, and Edith feels awash in Henry’s benevolent approval and distracted by the sweet pressure of Morton’s leg against hers.
She realizes that with Henry along she is more talkative than when she’s alone with Morton. Henry’s open attachment to her makes her more self-assured, more amusing. She’s always so worried when she’s alone with Morton that she won’t please him. That he’ll judge her wanting.
Now after luncheon, strolling the streets of the village, pausing briefly at the twelfth-century church of St.-Etienne to admire the stained glass, and then walking on through the marketplace in the square, she feels carefree. Stopping at a booth selling thickly embroidered gypsy scarves, she wraps one around her hair and poses for them. Together they insist on buying it for her. “The real Edith,” they declare. “A mad gypsy at heart.”
“We should buy you these too,” Morton says, lifting some painted gourds from the table and shaking them at her. “No? Too much. Ah then, Gypsy. We’ll leave you as you are.” All around the square, fruit trees are in bloom, snowflakes of cherry and apple blossoms swirl on the breeze. Edith feels perfectly giddy.
Together, with Edith in the middle, they climb arm in arm in arm up the narrow lane toward the cathedral. And then suddenly, there it is: the choir of the great church, a dizzying circle of ivory vaults rising like a dream against the azure sky.
“One can almost see it turn,” Morton says. “Wheeling cosmically through space.”
“Its own planet,” Edith says, breathlessly.
He takes her arm and presses it to him, enfolds her hand in his warm one. If her life could end this moment, she’d be happy. She reaches out her free hand and takes Henry’s plump one.
“I’ll never forget this day,” she says. “Never.”
Later, while Henry makes a tour of the ambulatory, Edith and Morton wait for him, basking in the sun—as in Montfort on the warmed stone steps—leaning against one another. She has never felt closer to him, even in that old ruin. For here she feels their hearts entwined in view of the whole world.
“Dear, are you happy?” he asks her, just as he had at Montfort.
“I don’t think,” she tells him, “I ever imagined being so happy.”
I must pack this day away in a great flurry of excelsior and cotton, she thinks. Soon, it will be just a memory.
ELEVEN
Only after such days, the blankness, the intolerableness of the morrow—the day when one does not see you! What a pity that one cannot live longer in the memory of such hours—that the eager heart must always reach out for more and more! I used to think: “If I could be happy for a week—an hour!” And now I am asking to be happy all the rest of my life. . . .
Poor hearts, in this shifting stream of life, so hungry for permanence and security! As I wrote these lines, I suddenly said to myself, “I will go with him once before we separate.”
It would hurt no one—it would give me my first, last draught of life . . . why not? I have always laughed at the “mala prohibita”—“bugbears to frighten children.” The antisocial is the only one that is harmful “per se.” And, as you told me the other day—and I need no telling!—what I have given already is far, far more. . . .
After they have put Henry on the train at the Gare du Nord, with kisses and a basket of food, trying not to notice the tears shimmering in his pale eyes, they wave the train down the track and are alone at last together. Their bodies cleave toward one another, their hearts racing.
“Shall we?” Morton says in a voice so rich and secretive, Edith can feel the vibration of it in her own throat.
The train to Montmorency is on Track 5 and they hurry, not touching but leaning toward one another. Leaning and longing. She can feel his presence to her marrow. The train glistens in the shafts of white light from above as though lit by angels. Others are sliding open the doors and entering. They walk far down the platform to find an empty car. Alone in the sunny maple compartment, their hands reach out beneath Edith’s spread skirts and grab onto each other. When the train jerks forward, Edith knows she has not felt more thrilled, expectant and fearful since that day at the Frascati Gardens preparing for her one and only ride on the Chemin de Centrifuge.
Soon the countryside rolls out beside them. The sweetest green of the new leaves. The blossoms of every kind of fruit tree. The just-born beds of lettuces and beans. And the châtaigniers, the chestnut trees, lacy margins between the fields, their white-blossomed cones thrusting toward the sky. Not a word passes between them. Sometimes, on other journeys, Morton has grown quiet, lost in thought, far from her. But this silence is shared, carried between them like a child, one hand in each of her parents’ hands, being swung joyously over a curb.
During Henry’s visit, they were able to steal just moments of time alone. An occasional dinner when Henry was off honoring other invitations. A walk now and then in the Luxembourg Gardens squeezed from the lackluster substance of their busy days. But sometimes there was a sparkling, thrilling kiss in the shadows. A dangerous press of bodies in a doorway. Too many days their plans fell through, though. Morton was too busy. At the last minute, plans were canceled. Never before has Edith suffered such swings from euphoria to despair. The thrill of hearing Morton call her “mon amour.” The desolation when no note arrives. These swerves of spirit are new and frightening. Elation collapses like a soufflé snatched clumsily from an oven. And then her heart soars again when her breakfast tray provides a note saying Morton could hardly work all day for thinking of her.
But now, at last, there is nothing standing between Edith and Morton. And as the train chugs toward Montmorency, she wishes to leave all her sadness behind, to be open to this man in a way she has never allowed herself to be—with anyone. All her life she has been “good.” But how has it served her to be true to a man who has never given her pleasure? To do what is expected of her, but do nothing to increase her own joy?
Morton, she suspects, has never been good or cared for the appellation. What did Anna de Noailles say about him? That he had a reputation. Why were men allowed to pursue their desires while the world turned a blind eye . . . but women became “fallen women,”
“ruined souls” if they did the very same? The dishonesty of it, the unfairness of it swells her with determination.
The day is hot, and the train grows warmer as it flies beneath the sunshine. Morton leans over and slides open a window. The breeze wafts in and Edith unbuttons the top button of her dress to catch it. Morton smiles at her when she does and she beams back.
The train leaves them off at a shady station, Morton helping her down, his hands about her waist. A walk through the streets of Montmorency shows them pretty vanilla-colored houses and flowers everywhere.
“So this is where Rousseau walked and had deep thoughts. Shall we go up to the church first?” Morton asks.
“To pray for our souls?” Edith teases.
“Yes. Seems only right,” he says. “Then we’ll see Rousseau’s house.”
Edith has read only a bit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writing. But she knows he focused on how children are born “natural” and how society ruins us, perverts us, sends us away from all that matters. For the first time in her life, she is delving deep for what is in her soul—the childlike soul that all these years has been strangled by strictures. Morton takes her hand. Ah, the joy of being so open, so free.
They walk quietly through the St. Martin and she takes in the stained glass windows, the smell of long-ago smoke, the cool damp that seems a relief on such a hot day. And then they walk just a few streets away to the white house with the many-paned windows where Rousseau lived. Just before they enter, in the front garden of the house, amidst the blossoms and the flutter of new leaves, he kisses her.
“Dearest,” he whispers.
She feels as though happiness might immolate her. But she enters the house, feigning deep interest, inspecting the rooms where Rousseau wrote, dreamed, thought new thoughts that stirred a nation. The tiny desk where he penned The Social Contract strikes Edith as humble. She is grateful that Morton is thoughtful enough to let them be tourists for a while. Maybe he is only feigning interest too. He never lets go of her hand. Oh! She is smitten. Lost. She did not know that her ability to love could be so expansive, so generous. He could break her heart and she would not stop loving him. There is almost no disappointment he could conjure that would break the spell of her love for him. This alone seems a gift.
The Age of Desire Page 21