The Age of Desire

by Jennie Fields

  “I saw you last night,” she tells him. “Out on the terrace. Are you all right?”

  “I’m going back today,” he says very quietly.

  “Are you? I understood you were staying through the weekend.” He catches her eyes and stares at her, smiling weakly.

  “Do you want me to stay?” he asks, his voice rising with hope.

  She hesitates too long. This is how Morton must feel, she thinks. Trapped into a lie to ease my pain.

  “I’m going,” he says. “You want me to go. I’ve been here too long.”

  “I think you should go if you’re ready to go,” she tells him.

  He nods and closes his eyes.

  “If someone could take me to the train.”

  “Of course.”

  She sees the sorrow, the defeat in his eyes. He is as angry at himself as he is at her. For loving someone so unavailable to him. She understands that also . . . far more than he knows.

  That afternoon after Carl has gone, a letter is delivered telling her that Walter will arrive at The Mount the following Friday on his way up to see his ailing mother before he leaves for Cairo, where he has been appointed a judge at the International Tribunal. Edith feels a sense of relief that could only be compared to letting out a breath after holding it until one’s lungs burn. The thought of laying her sadness in his large hands eases her immeasurably.

  On the morning of Walter’s scheduled arrival, Teddy is preparing to go fishing for a week with a Peter Van Gelder, a New York friend who drives up in his own motorcar. It’s starting to rain, and, already in a nervous buzz, Teddy insists on packing too many accessories and jackets and three pairs of waders because he can’t decide which he likes best. When Teddy goes back into the house for more, Peter leans toward Edith.

  “Edith, do tell me. Is he quite all right? He seems a bit wild.”

  Edith steels herself. If Teddy doesn’t leave the house, she thinks she might go mad. She’s been looking forward to Teddy’s leaving almost as much as she’s been counting the days until Walter’s arrival.

  “Nothing to worry about. He’s a bit overexcited lately. But not sad like he was in Paris.” She can see in Peter’s eyes that he’s weighing whether he should take Ted on the trip at all.

  “You’ll have a wonderful time,” she reassures him. “You know how much Teddy loves nature! You’re doing the kindest thing by taking him.”

  Teddy arrives back just in time to keep Peter from speculating further.

  When they drive off, Edith stands in the rain waving gaily and feels alive for the first time in days. By afternoon the sun is not just out, but glistening, as Walter arrives in the wagon. His lanky body, which always strikes Edith as taller than she remembered, and his energetic certainty fill The Mount with a fresh sense of hope.

  “My darling!” he declares, doffing his straw boater and enfolding her in his arms. “When I am with you, I feel at home.”

  She loves his dry, exotic scent, no doubt bought years ago in Paris, his elegant clothes always so rich—today a beautiful white linen summer suit, velvety at the edge from too much washing. She wishes he would hold her in his arms for an hour. No one makes her feel more at peace than Walter!

  In Hamburg, Thomas Schultze insists on staying for a few days to show Anna around, and he begs her to change her itinerary to accompany him to Essen to see his factories. But even after hours of walking together through the streets and over the canals of Hamburg, enjoying the musical theatre and dining in the cafés, she cannot imagine their shipboard friendship going further than it’s gone. She has never seen this turn in her life as an option and it confuses her. Why should Thomas, wealthy and smart, choose Anna of all women? Why should any man choose her? At her age. Her hair more white than golden . . . and still a maiden.

  After a vibrant staging of Die Brautwerbung, they stop for a glass of wine in a small restaurant near her hotel. The room is dark and a sole violinist bows sad melodies that twist and lose themselves in the walls of dark velvet curtains.

  “So will you come to Essen with me tomorrow?” he asks, leaning forward. “We could stay a month in Hamburg, there is so much to do! But I have so hoped you’ll let me show you Essen.”

  His eyes are shimmering. He has a young spirit, she thinks. And he is good company. Not too domineering or opinionated, but with firm, clear views of the world. And a desire to know more about everything.

  “I’m tempted, Mr. Schultze. But my cousins are waiting. And my time abroad is limited. I must go on with my trip.”

  “You haven’t enjoyed Hamburg?”

  “I have. Immensely.”

  “And my company?”

  “Even more.” She looks down at her hands.

  “And you won’t, then, come on to Essen for a few days?”

  “I . . .”

  “Look at me, Anna.” He has never called her by her first name before. His deep, thoughtful voice reaches her very depths.

  She looks up to see his face in the candlelight.

  “Why won’t you change your plans?” he asks. “I was hoping you could meet my daughters, get a taste of my life . . . see my factories.”

  “My cousins are waiting for me to arrive. . . . I’ve looked forward to my trip for so long, you see, and I have so little time to take in what I’ve planned.”

  Disappointment crumples Thomas’s mouth. But he nods.

  “Are you sure?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  There is a long moment of silence. Anna sips her wine, feeling a tumultuousness inside that the wine can’t settle. She is afraid he will argue. And she will say yes just to please him. She doesn’t want it to come to that.

  But Thomas is not the sort of man to argue or cajole.

  “Do you think you might send me postcards of your journey?” he asks at last. “It will give me something to look forward to. And I can imagine my dear Miss Bahlmann in beautiful places doing wonderful things.”

  She smiles at him, thinking him a very special man.

  They walk back to her lodgings together and the silence is companiable, though sad. When they reach the doorway of the hotel, she holds out her hand in farewell. Instead, he steps forward to take her face in his hands. He gazes at her for a long while, as though he is a camera imprinting her image. And then he kisses her lips. Just a moth’s wing of a kiss. Later, as she travels through Weimar and Frankfurt, Baden and Rothenberg, she will often fall asleep thinking of that modest kiss—the haunting brush of a man’s lips against hers—the first she has ever known.

  FIFTEEN

  EARLY AUTUMN 1908

  Sleep will not come to Edith—no matter how she tries to change her habits, her thoughts or even her level of anger at her impossible situation with Fullerton. (Not a letter. Not a card. For weeks and weeks again!) She begins to fear her own bed. Because she knows in it she will wrestle with sleep and lose. When morning seeps through the curtains, it always finds her emotionally spent. She writes, but how difficult it is to remember where she left her characters, what they are thinking or how different they are from one another! Guests come and go, filling her guest rooms and parlor. She laughs with them. Eats with them. But feels nothing. The walking dead. She has heard these words before, but now she knows precisely what they mean.

  She hears that Dr. Kinnicut, the doctor she trusts most for both Teddy and herself, has come to Lenox for the month of September. He writes that he’s all too happy to see her at his rented house, a stately white colonial right in town. He views Edith over his reading glasses as she tells him about the torment of her sleeplessness. He nods, the only doctor she’s ever known with such sympathetic eyes.

  “I’m sorry you’re suffering so,” he says.

  He takes a deep breath and pens a prescription for a sleeping powder.

  “Just a few
grains before bed and you’ll be fast asleep,” he says. He smiles, this cheerful reliable man with a bald pate as pink as a rose. “Works every time,” he says. Well, why not believe him? If Dr. Kinnicut thinks it will work, it surely will, she tells herself. By the time she is back at The Mount with the packet from the pharmacy, she is immersed in a glow of expectation she hasn’t felt in weeks. At this point, sleep seems almost as desirable as a night with Fullerton. After dinner, she excuses herself from her guests and follows Dr. Kinnicut’s instruction, stirring the powder into her evening cocoa. Even the few grains infuse the cocoa with a poisonous tinge, but she drinks it down, determined.

  She settles into her bedroom armchair to read Jenseits von Gut und Böse while waiting for the drug to take effect. How she’s enjoyed Nietzsche lately, even in her wounded state! But suddenly, she might as well be sitting on a high, bright cliff, for her bed appears far away, her dresser, the mirror on her dressing table flickering, dancing, shimmering in lamplight. A wave of nausea overtakes her, but she can’t quite understand what she’s feeling. She stumbles to the bed, which she thankfully had turned down earlier, but even before she turns off her light, the drug sends her plummeting toward a dreamless ocean. Oh! The feeling of falling is so real. So dangerous. Falling. Asleep. As she says the words aloud, they take on new meaning.

  She wakes in the morning and is certain the cliff of her last waking thought has collapsed on top of her. The heaviness of her limbs, her brain, startles her. The morning light feels evil, pressing through the window, reaching out to pry apart her sticky eyes. Her head could not be more swollen and useless if she had drunk an entire bottle of brandy by herself. The light by her bedside is still burning. She never turned it off!

  Most mornings, she wakes and grabs a handful of paper from the nightstand, dips her ink in the well she keeps there and begins to write immediately—before her trip to the bathroom. Morning is her best time. The time of her greatest clarity. Even after a sleepless night. But today, she can barely lift her head. And her thinking has been reduced to primal thoughts. Sip of water. Bathroom. Sick. Must be sick.

  She wakes again and it is late. The sun has flooded the room. Her head is not as groggy as it was. Someone is at the door. Teddy.

  “Do you plan to sleep all day?” he asks. His voice hurts her ears. “Are you unwell?”

  “What time is it?” she asks.

  He pulls his watch from his pocket.

  “Seven minutes after eleven.”

  She sits up, startled, miserable.

  “This won’t do,” she says aloud.

  “I’ll say it won’t,” Teddy agrees. He closes the door and if it is not with a definite slam, it certainly sounds like one to her bruised brain.

  The fun Anna has with her cousins Liesel and Lotte! Lounging in a green-hued café in Gottingen, sharing feathery potato dumplings, Westphalia ham, and beer—such beer! They chuckle over a mention in Anna’s guidebook of Otto-the-One-Eyed’s reign over Gottingen—“Imagine. A Cyclops ruled Gottingen,” Lotte declares. Anyone watching them could see they have the same happy, drifting laugh, the same soft gray eyes. They could be sisters. Three round-faced, older, single women. In their company, it is easy to put aside thoughts of Thomas. To block thoughts of Edith, except, of course, remembering to send each of them postcards. How Anna labors over the condensed little messages she pens on the back, making sure they are charming and informative. But at night in her room at the Friedrichsbad Spa, she aches, without knowing why.

  After two and a half weeks of laughter and getting to know one another far better than they ever have, Liesel and Lotte return to Frankfurt and Anna travels on to Verona and Venice alone. Unafraid. The silence soothes her. The sights are beautiful with or without a companion. “I am a lone animal,” she thinks proudly.

  Yet sitting in her sparkling room overlooking the Grand Canal, she has a weak moment. How much more fulfilling it would be to share this scene with someone about whom she cares. She pens a real letter to Thomas, describing the sound of the water, the singing, the light off the canal washing her ceiling and glass chandelier in watery ripples. And she says he would enjoy it all. She wishes he were there. Later in the week, as her elevator cage settles in the lobby, Anna, a pink mohair stole wrapped about her arms, ready to make her way to a café for dinner, spots Thomas through the gilded bars. He is leaning on the hotel’s front desk, speaking her name.

  “Thomas?”

  He raises his face, beams at the sight of her.

  “My dear,” he says. “Don’t you look well!”

  She feels her heart thudding. He is not a handsome man. His features are weathered, and maybe he was never beautiful. But his eyes are remarkably gentle, and so happy to see her.

  “I didn’t expect. Why are you . . . ?”

  Through the hotel’s arched windows, the early evening light on the canal is buttery and glowing, as it was when she wrote him the note.

  “Perhaps you will join me for supper,” he asks, extending his arm.

  “Of course,” she says. “I’d be delighted.” Isn’t it best to let gravity take her than to flail, than to struggle? She tucks her fingers into the crook of his arm and they saunter down the dock to a waiting gondola.

  “This is my gondolier, Giuseppe.” The man nods at Anna and helps her into the craft.

  As the vessel swings its way into the heart of the Grand Canal, Anna hears Thomas sigh with pleasure.

  “I am a fortunate man,” he declares.

  Edith receives a postcard from Anna hand-painted in the most glorious shades of sea and sky.

  I had a sudden opportunity to run off to Greece and enjoy a friend’s hired yacht, and after all you told me about this exquisite country, I didn’t see my way to turning down such a generous offer. Athens was marvelous but sweltering, and after visiting the Parthenon—which simply snatched the breath from my lungs—we have driven to Cape Sounion by motorcar. The breezes here are delightful, the pines are as green as parrot feathers and the air is perfumed with “rigani”—Greek oregano. Do you remember the scent? It makes me weak in the knees. Have you ever tasted retsina, the pine-resin wine? It’s awful and yet curiously makes me want to drink more! I do so wish you were here to enjoy this. I know it would raise your spirits, dear.

  Anna in Greece? Joyous! Having made a friend who can hire a yacht? “We have driven down.” Who are we? A party of people? Another maiden friend? And she knows that Edith’s spirits need raising. The woman is clairvoyant! Edith, indeed, feels like she’s sinking daily. It’s been weeks since she felt like herself. Her head hurts. Her heart aches. But Anna has never sounded better! Edith is relieved to find the card lifts her own heart, that she doesn’t begrudge dear Anna her glistening fragment of happiness, though her own happiness is so miserably fleeting.

  “The woman who loves a fool, is a fool,” she tells herself sternly.

  I will forget him, Edith vows. I will reclaim myself. After weeks of intense writing despite her exhaustion, she slips the first six chapters of The Custom of the Country into an envelope and hands it to Miss Thayer to ship out to Scribner’s Magazine. And thus unburdened, she begins by spending hours in her garden weeding—something she almost always expects the gardeners to do. She had forgotten how much pleasure there is in yanking up weeds, rendering a bed pristine again. At night she focuses on her guests—this weekend an opera singer, a French poet. She reads Nietzsche. In the mornings, she writes a new short story about a woman who misreads a man’s intentions. She thinks she is winning the battle.

  And then, a few nights later, suddenly heart-thuddingly awake, she finds herself so bloated with anger at Fullerton she paces the room rather than struggle for sleep on her bed of nails. And eventually she descends to the library, seats herself at her desk and picks up her pen.

  Dearest HJ,

  I beg of you. I urge you to help me. I don’t
know what’s happened to Morton. He’s broken my heart with his inability, or perhaps I should say “refusal,” to answer any of my posts. What could be hampering him? Do you know if he is ill? Or has he found someone else to love? Has he written to you this summer? Would he tell you if it were so? I am at wit’s end. I am desolée. I thought we meant something to each other. I thought he felt for me all that I felt for him. You saw us. Did you see deep true affection or did I only imagine it? I feel sometimes as though I am going mad. I don’t know where to turn. And so, of course, mon cher maître, I turn to you. Burn this immediately!

  Edith was born to be a lady. And a lady never pursues, never complains, never makes a scene and certainly never makes a fool of herself. So if Fullerton isn’t going to be available to her in any way—and surely only a cad could be so callous as to drag her heart through this ditch of incomprehension—then she will have to run the other way. Walter writes from Massachusetts, where he is visiting his mother:

  I know you’ve told Teddy you wouldn’t leave for Europe until after Christmas this year. But in his present state, nothing seems to faze him anyway. Do you think you might get away? You know I must be in Egypt, and the Provence is the last ship I can sail.

  It’s true, Edith reflects. Teddy, these days, with his pig house and chicken palace, is happy all the time like a five-year-old. And since his fishing trip, he is giddier than ever. The mysteries of his brain are increasingly hard to fathom.

  And you, dearest one, are not sleeping. You’re quite miserable—though you won’t tell me what’s troubling you. Didn’t the doctor suggest you go somewhere, anywhere else? So break with this scene and join me. You’re always happier in Paris. Or perhaps you can cross the Sleeve and visit Henry at Lamb House. He’s begged me to convince you to come. It will be much better for you to have a travel companion in the state you’re in—why, you’d forget your passport, your pearls and heaven knows what else—and there’s no one’s company I’d prefer to yours. Do say yes before the ship is sold out and they make you sleep in the hold.