The Age of Desire

by Jennie Fields

  “It’s no joke.”

  “I don’t understand. You travel in first class. I have seen you come out of your stateroom. It’s just down from mine.”

  “You have?”

  “But now you say you are a secretary. How could a secretary—any secretary—afford a stateroom on the Amerika?” Anna is surprised at his question. An American gentleman would never ask a question so baldly referring to one’s finances.

  Still, she smiles and tells him honestly, “It was a gift from my employer.”

  Anna expects now that Thomas Schultze will tip his hat and move on. Surely knowing that she is no better than a stowaway in his upper-class world, the king of nickel steel won’t want to be seen with her.

  Instead, he offers her his arm. “You must be very good at what you do,” he says, “to receive such a reward. I admire people who do their job well. I admire unerschütterlich people.”

  “You don’t object to women working?” she asks, tucking her hand into the crook of his elbow.

  He shakes his head. “My wife didn’t work,” he says. “Once the children were gone, she wasn’t happy with her life. She simply had nothing to do. Sometimes, I think it’s what killed her. She was not unerschütterlich in any way.” Unerschütterlich, meaning stalwart, unshakable. It is a German word one rarely hears, and yet he’s used it three times.

  “I’m sorry,” Anna says.

  “No. She’s been gone a long time. We married very young and hardly knew each other. You’re not married?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  “No.”

  “But why not?” he asks.

  “That is an embarrassing question to ask a woman,” she says, again noting that no American gentleman, or Frenchman, for that matter, would have put the question to her.

  “It’s a respectful question. A bright woman like yourself. And pretty too. Why on earth would you not be married?”

  “I’m not pretty.” Anna thinks of her eyes, which her cousins used to say were so light colored, they made her look invisible. Who could love a woman with invisible eyes?

  “You are modest. Another admirable virtue.”

  “You are most kind.”

  “Will you dine with me tomorrow night? The people at whose table they’ve placed me talk and talk and I . . .” he moves his face close to Anna’s and his bushy gray eyebrows rise with amusement, “I don’t understand half their English. But I’m too proud to let them know. I took the Hamburg/Amerika line thinking I would have the pleasure of German companionship, but you are the first person I’ve had the chance to speak to in German. Even half the crew doesn’t speak German. So, will you join me, Miss Bahlmann?”

  “I’d be honored,” Anna says.

  “No,” Mr. Schultze says, tipping his hat, “I’d be honored. Eight P.M.? Table for two?”

  Anna smiles and nods. Imagine what people will think when she shares a table for two with Mr. Schultze. She can hardly envision the stir!

  And so for the rest of the journey, she dines with Mr. Schultze. She walks with Mr. Schultze. She sits on the deck and reads side by side with Mr. Schultze. Every night before she goes to her cabin, he kisses her hand with the graciousness of a bygone courtier.

  “How nice that you have made friends with that older gentleman!” one of the ladies who had shared a table with her says when she passes her in the grand salon one morning.

  “Yes, he’s very kind.”

  “I do believe I see a blooming romance. Perhaps he will ask you to marry him.” The woman, who must be about forty, is the sort of long-nosed, gossipy soul that will pass on all she is told to the rest of the table, to the ladies with whom she plays whist, to the cabin maid and anyone else who is foolish enough to listen.

  Anna laughs. “It’s nice of you to be interested in me. But it is a friendship, nothing more.”

  “Well, we’re all cheering for you, Miss Bahlmann. He looks like quite a catch, although since no one can understand him, no one is certain who he is.”

  “He manufactures steel,” Anna says. She is happy to pass this on to whomever Mrs. Brewer will grace with the tale.

  “Indeed!”

  “He owns four factories in Germany.”

  “Well, that does make him sound quite prosperous. And aren’t you lucky that you speak German and can converse with him. It appears your journey abroad will not be for naught.”

  Anna winces.

  “My journey abroad will not be for naught, no matter whom I meet. I did not come to meet a man.”

  “Come, Miss Bahlmann. Every single woman wants to meet a man. It’s what we women are made for, no?”

  “I am made to aid in the writing of novels, Mrs. Brewer. To make my employer’s life simpler. And to teach. That’s what I was made for.”

  Mrs. Brewer purses her lips. She gazes at Anna.

  “And do you wish to tell me that even if you had the opportunity to marry a steel magnate, you’d turn it down to be a typewriter for some lady novelist?”

  “Yes,” Anna says. “That’s precisely what I wish to tell you,” she says and then rushes away. “I have to meet my friend the steel magnate in the Palm Court.” She wonders how long it will be until her conversation is on the lips of everyone on the Amerika.

  One night as Anna and Mr. Schultze stroll along the deck under a shimmering moon, he asks her, “Do you think while you are in Germany, you might come and visit one of my factories?”

  “Do you really want me to?” she asks.

  “Well, I don’t know whether you’ll be in Essen or Stuttgart. But if you are, I’d be so pleased to show you. My factories are dreadfully noisy, and I’m afraid that the smell of steelmaking isn’t very pleasant. But the energy there, the very brawniness, will excite you. I guarantee it.”

  “Then I’d be very pleased to come if I’m nearby. I would like to experience the world that excites you so much.”

  He reaches out and takes her hand in his, swings it subtly as they walk, and glances at her, smiling like a shy young beau. She notes the surprising softness of his skin, the sweetness of his touch. She thinks if she had met him thirty years ago, she might actually have fallen in love with him. She can imagine herself moving to Germany as a young bride, making a home for Mr. Schultze, setting his table with silver and laying out his clothes each day. She can imagine watching as he grew wealthy and important. But now, the thought of romance is a puzzle piece that no longer fits. She wishes to gaze on the house where Goethe was born in Frankfurt am Main and the house where he died in Weimar. To drink Italian wine overlooking a field of sunflowers. She wishes to meet many people from many lands and speak to them in all the languages that she knows. And then, she wishes most of all to return to Edith and Teddy, to Gross and White and Cook. To 882 and her books. To the life that has been kindly allotted her, that she does not wish to trade in, as flawed as it may suddenly be.

  After Sally and Eliot have each been delivered to their trains to resume their own lives, Carl Snyder lingers in Edith’s. He spends afternoons perusing books that Edith has recommended, sitting cross-legged on a bench in the cutting garden. At night, after Teddy has gone to bed, he perches close to his hostess, telling her the books she’s given him are the education he never got, having been so caught up in science classes as a young man. He watches Edith with that sad, longing look he never loses. He’s taken to touching her hand often, kissing her good night. Once he embraces her before bed, and she feels his heart beating wildly against her chest. While Carl’s infatuation warms and amuses her, her misery over Morton’s inexplicable silence squeezes her every breath. She dreams about him. Nightmares every time. He is laughing at her. He is telling her he never loved her. He is dancing with Katherine.

  On the thirty-first, a stack of correspondence arrives in the afternoon post. A postcard
from Anna from the Amerika. How joyous she sounds! She says she has made a wonderful friend on board, and is grateful for the beautiful stateroom that Edith has given her. She describes the women in their jewels and the color of the sky at sea. Edith misses her. She cringes at having sent her away to protect her from her own bad temper.

  And then Edith lifts an envelope of heavy woven paper. Even before she sees the handwriting she knows who’s sent it. She feels surprisingly angry and thrilled in equal measure. If Morton only knew how much he’s made her suffer. For a moment, she is afraid to slice it open.

  It’s better to know, she finally tells herself, remembering with an ache the elation she used to feel slipping her knife into his petits bleus each morning. How connected she felt to him back then, as though a glistening strand of spider silk always shivered between them, stretching when they were apart, turning when they turned. Now there is far more than Carl’s vast ocean parting Morton’s heart from hers.

  My dear,

  I have just received your cable. I am sorry to have worried you. Simply put, I thought it best, seeing as you were suffering from the distance between us, not to write. You did, after all, tell me not to write, and I took you at your word. I felt it better for your new novel if you had no thought of me. And after all the good true moments we’ve shared, I want you to be as joyous as you were beneath our curtain of lilacs. (Every second of that hour for me was but the promise of dearer moments to come.) I did not want to think of you miserable and pining for someone far away who could give you no peace.

  You see, there have been worries with me I can’t share with you at present. I count on being able to tell you by autumn that these dreadful problems have sorted themselves, and that I am no longer worried. And then I will be kinder to my dearest friends. It is difficult to be generous when one is under a cloud of anxiety, n’est ce pas? But after your year of concern over Teddy, you know whereof I speak, chère.

  Last night I saw La Princesse de Clèves at the Theatre des Artes and thought of you and how you would have enjoyed it. It is too hot here, and the theatre was steaming. Two women fainted. It hasn’t rained in three weeks and with this heat, the Seine has never been lower. I fear for the fully filled tourist boats. I imagine they will scrape the bottom and stick there like ugly wads of American chewing gum stick to streets where tourists have dropped them.

  You said you couldn’t bear the dwindling and the fading of our feelings for one another, and though my feelings have not faded, I thought I was doing your bidding. But if it was only a moment of misery that made you write it, then I am yours,

  Morton

  He is mine, she thinks, and smiles at the thought, touches the very words. I am yours. All this time he says he didn’t write her because he thought it best, and yet . . . is he being honest? How can she be sure from thousands of miles away?

  Teddy comes trudging into the library in his socks, perspiring, panting.

  “No shoes?” she asks.

  “I was mucking out the pigpens. My shoes were covered in mud. I left them downstairs for Laurette to clean. Dear little Lawton always looks sad when I leave. Won’t you come down and see him? Carl has. He says he’s the finest pig he’d ever seen. I do believe I love Lawton as much as our little babies.” He lifts Nicette from the floor and cuddles her against his sweat-soaked shirt. “You have competition, Lady Nicette.”

  “You should take a bath,” Edith says. “You smell of the pigpen.”

  “Nicette likes it. Don’t you, girl? You like it that I stink!”

  “Put her down and take a bath,” Edith says, quietly attempting to push Morton’s letter beneath the newspaper that came with the afternoon post.

  “What are you up to?” Teddy asks, looking over at her desk. Up to? Does he suspect? Or is it just an innocent question? These days, she hardly knows how to read him.

  “Just reading through my mail. Go wash yourself. You make the whole room reek.” She envisions his belly, which, with all his drinking, has recently become ridiculously globular, poking out of the bathwater.

  “What is that? A postcard from Anna?” he says, grabbing Anna’s card with his free hand, turning it over, reading it. Edith pushes Morton’s letter even farther beneath the newspaper.

  “She’s having herself a fine time already. Happy to see it. Dear woman. Do you want to read it, Nicette? It’s from Miss Anna! No. You just want to eat it. That would be rude. What? Don’t look hurt. It just doesn’t belong to you. It was addressed to your Mama. Nicette, Nicette, Nicette, I do love you!” He buries his damp face into her fur-muff back.

  And then he sets her down and heads for the door.

  “All right then, au revoir, Pussycat!”

  Edith shivers at how wrongly he pronounces the French. “Oh Rev-oy-er.” She hears him pad down the hall. Good God, the man leaves a trail of stench behind him. Edith closes her eyes, wishing she never had to open them to Teddy Wharton again.

  That night, she writes back to Morton. At first his letter felt like a great relief. Especially his hopeful mention of the lilac bower. But then the poisonous anxiety of so many days of silence boils up while she sits at dinner with Carl and Teddy chatting about cattle, and she feels more indignant than relieved. Joyous? He wishes her to be joyous? The absurdity of it makes her want to bang her head against the wall.

  Having shed Carl’s clinging presence by telling Teddy that the two of them should take a walk along the ridge to see the best view of the sunset, she settles at her desk and begins:

  At last, my dearest, your letter of the 21st . . . Que voulez vous que je vous dise? [Already she is angry in French. Will she make it through this letter without screaming at him for his cruelty?] Your silence of nineteen days seems to me a very conclusive, anticipated answer to my miserable cry! You didn’t wait to be asked what was “best”!

  But don’t read a hint of reproach in this. I have spent three weeks of horrible sadness, because I feared from your silence that within ten days of our good-bye the very meaning of me had become a weariness. And I suffered—no matter how much—but I said to myself: “I chose the risk, I accept the consequences.” And that is what I shall always say. [She must make him see he hasn’t fully destroyed her—although so many days he did, he has. . . . ]

  Only, cher, one must be a little blind—or else a little relieved at the “reasonableness” of my attitude—to read in my note of the 11th anything but an appeal for frankness—a desperate desire to know, at once, and have the thing over. [Could he have truly believed she meant “Don’t write”? Was he so insensitive to have believed her? Even poor oblivious Carl Snyder would have known better!] Don’t be afraid! I can only reiterate it. Anything on earth would be better (I’ve learned that in these last three weeks) than to sit here and wonder: What was I to him, then? I assure you I’ve practiced my “Non dolet!”

  She scolds him for wanting her to be joyous. She excoriates him for suggesting that not hearing from him or thinking about him would be better for her novel. If he were any other man, she would have dismissed him as a complete fool, a manipulator, a cad. But these words were from Morton. Her beloved.

  It would be a great joy if you could send me a line once a week—only never, never under compulsion!—And, when your plans are settled—about coming to America,—if you were to tell me it would be kind. Even if you’re not coming, I should be rid of the ache of wondering. . . .

  Dearest, I love you so deeply that you owe me just one thing—the truth. Never be afraid to say: “Ma pauvre amie, c’est fini.” That is what I meant when I said I couldn’t bear to watch the dwindling and fading. When the time comes, just put my notes and letters in a bundle and send them back, and I shall understand. I am like one who went out seeking for friendship, and found a kingdom. Don’t you suppose I know that the blessedness is all on my side?

  That night, she expects to sleep well, but she’s mi
serable in her lonely bed, her pillow a mountain range, her sheets on fire. And then with no sheets, she shivers. With no pillow, her neck twitches and burns. But her physical wretchedness is the least of it. She struggles helplessly between sadness and fury. Feelings she has tamped down for weeks and weeks, now released like Pandora’s terrors, flying around her room, biting at her heart. Sighing and flailing, she finally gets up and sharply parts the drapes to look out over the valley. Clouds circle the moon, ever moving, crossing the nearly full orb, weakening its mighty beam. Down below, bathed in milky light, she sees Carl pacing the terrace in his robe. He must have awakened too. Or never slept. Does he suffer from longing as she does? For her. For her! She can hardly believe it. She wishes she could ease him, even imagines going down in her robe to talk to him. To hold him. To kiss him. But she doesn’t. Her heart is tied up like a hog headed for market. If only she could send Morton Fullerton to market instead! All summer she has hated her own husband, imagined him dead, for he stood between her and the one soul she’s loved more than any other. Now her anger is beaming across the Atlantic to that very soul, to the café where he sits at night with his books, his thick coffee. No, it’s already morning in Paris. He is walking to his office, his ebony mustache catching the sunlight, his eyes as blue as the cornflowers on china. His crisp, perfect clothes. His polished shoes. She wants to slap him. She wants to hold him. She wants to be near him. She wants to open her clothes again just once for him. Just once! She wants everything she can’t have. The pain is excruciating. Cracked ribs, torn muscles couldn’t hurt more. She once heard of a man in so much pain he scratched his very eyes out. She would. She could! Instead she cries, lets out a sound like a banshee into the silence. Teddy is drunk, won’t hear a thing. Carl is far downstairs. She cries and cries. Until, damp and weak, she tumbles at last into a dead sleep.

  In the morning, she drags herself to breakfast. Carl is there, wan and quiet.