The Last Summer of the World

by Emily Mitchell

  “Is your mother frequently unwell?”

  “She has been feeling poorly for these past few months. When we first arrived, she never was. But now she goes to bed often when it is still light out.”

  “I am sorry to hear it. Has she seen a doctor about it?”

  “She has not. It is not easy to see a doctor. Most of them have gone away to the war.”

  “And what about you, Kate? Are you in good health?”

  “Yes. Mama says I am too sad all the time, but it is hard to be merry here. I miss Mary and … I miss Mary very much. I write to her two times a week and she writes to me almost as much.”

  “And what about your papa? Do you write to him?”

  “Oh, no. I do not want to write to him. I do not like him anymore.”

  “But do you get letters from him?”

  “No. Well …”

  “Catkin, it is all right. You can tell me.”

  “Well, I do, but Mama doesn’t like it when I read them. So I throw them away instead.”

  “Kate, I know your papa loves you very much. I know he misses you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “Have you seen Papa and Mary? How are they?”

  “No, I have not seen them. But I am told by friends that they are well.”

  “That’s good. I’m glad about that.”

  Clara thinks she feels her chest cracking in two, a fissure opening behind her sternum and racing through her body until she’s sure it will fall to pieces right there on the stairs. There is so much light in the voice, so much hope. Kate wants her father and her sister; she wants her family to be as it was before. And how can she explain so her daughter will understand that she could not stay with him a day longer, that she had to leave? For when they arrived safe in New York, and the immediate demands of escape were gone, she discovered that underneath her enforced calm something in her had turned over. She saw him begin to adjust to life in the city; she saw him in the company of friends; she saw him reunited with his mother and sister, witnessed their joy and relief at finding him well. It surprised her that he could walk around, talk, smile, concentrate on work just as though he had done nothing wrong. She would watch him, amazed at his resilience, his imperviousness, and she hated him for it. She realized that she no longer wanted him to be happy. Instead, she wanted him to suffer as she had; she wanted him to lose the things that mattered to him.

  So she left. She had taken her daughter with her, and come here, to this place, where she did not have to see him anymore. And the act was part revenge and part salvation because she knew if she stayed in that apartment with him she would go mad. To keep any part of herself in tact, she had to leave. This house was the only place she knew to go.

  And who is this woman to come here and raise her child’s hopes, confusing her with false reassurances? Who is she to come and praise him and talk about how he loves his daughter? He had not loved her enough to be faithful; he had not cared about her enough for that.

  With her heart racing, she gets to her feet and goes downstairs, into the salon. Kate is sitting on the rug by the fireplace, and Marion is perched on the front of the big overstuffed armchair. She looks ill at ease, and when she sees Clara, she rises as if she is being drawn up to standing by a string. Her face dances with nervous energy, something close to fear. She opens her mouth, about to speak, but before she has a chance to start, Clara cuts her off.

  “I think,” she says, “you had better leave this house now.”

  LATER, SHE HEARS a soft knock on her bedroom door.

  “It’s me, Mama,” Kate says from outside.

  “Come in, sweetheart.” Kate sits on the end of the bed, cross-legged. “I am sorry that you had to see her. If only I hadn’t had this dreadful headache …”

  “It’s all right, Mama. She was kind.”

  “Sometimes the people who seem the most kind can be the most wicked. Did you get some supper?” Kate nods. “Well, kiss me good night then and go off to bed.”

  Kate leans over and kisses her, then gets up to leave. In the doorway, she pauses and says, “When the war is over, will we see Papa and Mary?”

  “Katie, don’t ask me that. You know I cannot tell you. “

  “I am sorry, Mama. Good night.”

  But though she feels enervated from the day’s events, she cannot sleep. For hours, she turns in her bed, rest just out of reach. Each time she feels herself slipping toward it, something calls her back into the waking world, a noise in the house, or out among the trees. The dull rumble from the guns of the front. At last she opens her eyes and climbs out of bed. She goes across the landing to his study and lets herself in.

  When she can’t sleep, she comes here, raises the sash and sits on the sill looking out. Tonight the fields are silver. The moon is risen and almost full, and there is the river in the distance, and stars in the lower regions of the sky. She can watch as the light changes and brings back another day, gray and ragged, there to be endured. Her mind will be threadbare from lack of sleep; great dark circles have appeared under her eyes making her even uglier, she thinks, than she was before. When day comes, she will send her daughter off to school, and then she will settle into her chores, the running of the household, which, when they first arrived, made her feel solid and whole. She had her own clear, hard edges; her days were dictated by necessity: she must do certain things or her daughter would go hungry, they would be cold, there would be no light. At first she had loved this urgency, this simplification of life, and she had felt it as a kind of independence. In the spring, she’d had a photographer come from town to take their picture: she and Kate, sitting in the garden she had tidied and planted, to show she did not need him even for that. She had made copies of the picture and sent them to friends and relatives. We are getting along really quite well here, she had written. We are doing fine.

  But this isn’t the case anymore. She is tired of living in this house with the past all around her, the good memories in their way more terrible than the bad ones. It was never independence; it was only distance; she still waits each month for him to send her money, so the food she buys, the coal that they keep warm with: it is still his. The house is his. So is the furniture inside it.

  And then, too, some nights she will come in here and unlock the closet where all of his photographs are stored. She will light a lamp and lift down one of the boxes from the shelves and open it. Inside, there are the scenes of their life together, the landscapes they had traveled through, their children as they grew from babies. The emotion she has when she does this is a combination of longing and disgust. Here is his vision, elaborated in hundreds of discrete moments, plucked from time and fixed on paper; here are the things that he chooses to tell the world about itself. It is a beautiful vision, one in which nothing is ugly and broken, nothing dull and repetitive; the pictures he makes are of a world that can be understood and can be loved therefore without reservation.

  But she knows that there is another version; that there are things his vision omits to show. The real world is far messier and more confusing than these photographs betray. As many dreams are denied as fulfilled; as many loves fail as endure. Wars begin for foolish, petty reasons, and continue inexplicably for years. Husbands leave their wives in spirit and in fact; women who tell of such betrayals are dismissed or disbelieved. She understands that she did not come here to leave him; quite the opposite. It was by coming here that she could try to hold on to him, to both of them, as she used to believe they were.

  But now, perhaps, she can let go of the old story. When she told Marion to leave that afternoon, she felt something in her revive. Some willfulness, some ownership of the present and the future. From her sister’s letters, she knows that, at home in the States, the Liberty Loan campaign is hiring staff, and that they will consider applications from women. Perhaps she should take her child and go back to America, where she can work, where her independence can become real. If only she could walk into a
new life without the weight of the past, clean.

  What she longs for, more even than she longs to have her family back whole, or for her husband to have been the man she hoped he’d be, is to be understood. To be believed. It is a terrible thing that he had been unfaithful, but it was far worse that the world accepted it as at most a minor foible of his character; or even as his natural right as a man. As though her feelings were evidently of less import than his; if she was hurt, well, she was wrong to be so sensitive. She was being dramatic. She was making a fuss. You married him, knowing his faults, Stieglitz had said, as though this fact absolved Edward from responsibility for his actions.

  She is not certain yet how she will do it, but she knows that she will have no peace until she can show the world that she knows its secret mechanisms. That she is onto its schemes. She wants her vision of things to be expressed, accepted. In a different life, it might have been expressed through music, but in this one she must find another means to tell about what she sees. And she knows that to do this she must first relinquish his way of seeing. She must rid herself of his perspective. She is trapped under water, tangled in the weeds at the bottom of a lake, and above her she can see the light of the surface but she can’t quite swim up to it yet, she is still caught and held down. But she is ready, now, to try. She will find out what it takes for her to be free.

  She will not have to do much to begin it. The records that we keep of the past are delicate things, in fact, susceptible to sun and to damp. All she must do is leave this window up, just as it is right now and leave the closet door ajar. The weather will do the rest. It will be an act of neglect, and this feels right to her, the appropriate reaction to all the things that she has lost because they were not important enough to save: her music, her husband and her dearest friend. Such a small thing, to leave a window open like this in a room on the second floor. No more than a minor oversight.

  She takes the key from where it is kept in the top drawer of the desk and unlocks the closet so the door swings open …

  THIRTEEN

  February 1919

  EDWARD SAILED FOR America a few days after he saw Mildred. After a week at sea, he watched the Manhattan skyline rise out of the harbor, the city still daunting in its grandeur, oblivious to his small struggles. Mary met him at the quay. She waved to him as the boat docked, standing with Lee and Lizzie Stieglitz, his old friends and Alfred’s brother and sister-in-law, on the end of the pier. Her dark hair tangled in the wind off the water.

  He ran down the gangway to embrace her.

  “How beautiful you look! So grown-up …”

  “Papa, it’s only been a year. I haven’t changed that much.”

  “A year is much too long.” Lee Stieglitz took one of his bags and they caught a cab across town to their house in the East 40s. They spent the evening talking. Mary was doing well at school, especially in science; Lee, who was a doctor, helped her with her work. That was why she had done so well, she said. Lee waved her away: Not at all. She showed a natural affinity for biology and chemistry. She was top of her class in those subjects. Mary shrugged shyly. It isn’t that I don’t like painting and drawing, too, she said, and Edward realized she was worried he would be disappointed that she didn’t want to pursue art.

  “Well,” he said, “I couldn’t be more delighted. You have found something you love to do, so you must follow your inclination. My daughter, the scientist. How marvelous.” Mary smiled and began to talk enthusiastically about her classes, her teachers, her plans. The Brearley School had been closed because of the influenza, but if it opened again in time for her to finish her classes, she would begin a course in medicine at Vassar in the fall, a year before her Brearley classmates would be eligible to enter college.

  Edward thought how remarkable she was; with all that had happened to her family, she was not crushed by it. He wanted to tell her he was sorry; that he would have given anything to prevent this. Before she went up to bed that night, he said, “I wish I were here for some other reason …”

  “Hush, Papa. It is not your fault. There was nothing you could have done.” She said it with such confidence that for a moment he almost believed it was that simple.

  The next day he went to meet with his lawyer.

  “Miss Beckett’s attorney has asked you to give testimony on the final day of the trial. You will be questioned by him and by Mrs. Steichen’s attorney. During the interim you should make no attempt to contact either Mrs. Steichen or Miss Beckett.”

  “What will happen,” Edward asked, “if the verdict goes for Mrs. Steichen?”

  “I assume,” the lawyer said, “that you will subsequently be seeking a divorce from Mrs. Steichen. You can do so on grounds of abandonment.”

  Edward realized he had not clearly formed this determination; there had been so much else to think about. He had grown accustomed to living without Clara, to being alone. Then there had been the moment in Voulangis when, confronted by the destruction of his photographs, the dwindling hope that his family might be reunited had flickered and gone out. Now he was presented with the end of his marriage as an all-but-accomplished fact. It seemed both chilling and inevitable.

  “Yes,” he said. “I don’t see any reasonable alternative. After this we could never live together again.”

  “So then you will be settling the question of whether you or Mrs. Steichen will have custody of your two daughters.”

  “Yes, I guess we will.”

  “Well, if the jury finds for Mrs. Steichen in this suit, it could go hard for you in the divorce proceedings. The courts do not tend to look favorably on fathers who philander, or rather, fathers who philander and don’t hide it well enough. If you would like to have access to your children in the future, you must hope that the verdict goes against your wife.”

  “I see.”

  “Your interests are best served if Miss Beckett is found to have a reputation beyond reproach. Miss Beckett has informed us of the possibility of damaging testimony from a Miss Mildred Aldrich. Is that correct?”

  Edward nodded.

  “Our strategy will be to discredit her. Any meetings between yourself and Miss Beckett that occurred in France were purely accidental and the result of your mutual service in our valiant Expeditionary Force. Miss Aldrich is an elderly woman, and we will attempt to convince the jury that she is confused about what she saw, just as Mrs. Steichen was. Beyond that, much will depend on you and Miss Beckett appearing to be honorable people wrongly accused. Your war record will help.” He drew out a cigarette from a gold case on the desk. He lit it and inhaled meditatively.

  “I would say,” he continued, “that our chances of prevailing are really quite fair. Yes, indeed. You have cause for much optimism.”

  THE PRESS WAS there; not in large numbers but in sufficient force to ensure everyone’s discomfort. On his way into the courtroom, Edward was waylaid by a man from the New York Post.

  “Does your wife’s suit have any merit?” the man asked, his pen quivering over his notebook.

  “No, of course it does not,” Edward’s lawyer cut in. “Mrs. Steichen’s accusations are unfounded and we will prove this. They are a slander on the name of a hero of the Great War.” He took Edward by the elbow and walked him toward the courtroom. The man came after them, still talking.

  “Major Steichen. Is it true that Miss Beckett posed nude for you in your studio as your wife alleges?”

  Edward rounded on the man, his outrage boiling up. In his ear his lawyer hissed, “Don’t rise to it, damn it.”

  They entered the courtroom.

  THE PROCEEDINGS WERE as unbearable as he’d imagined they’d be. Clara gave testimony and then Marion. He watched as old friends were called to the stand to vouch for his character, or his wife’s. Was Mrs. Steichen jealous of her husband? Marion’s lawyer asked. Was she prone to outbursts of anger?

  Was Mr. Steichen often away from his wife for long periods of time? The sort of spans that would have afforded opportunity to meet a
paramour? Clara’s lawyer asked. He saw their lives being sifted and put on display. It was excruciating.

  Marion did not look at him during her testimony. She spoke with her head down, her face flushed with embarrassment throughout. No, she said, she had not done any of the things that Clara’s suit accused her of; she had been properly attired on the sole occasion she posed for Major Steichen, which was a photograph taken out of doors; she had never encouraged any romantic advances from him; she had encountered him by chance during her time in France, when they were both serving in the American war effort, she as a nurse.

  Edward was struck by the fact that everything she said was true. Of course, there was a huge sin of omission. But Clara’s lawyer had not asked them about the summer of 1918, only about the one four years before it. He watched Marion up on the stand, bright red with shame and almost in tears, and he thought, I’m the only person who knows why she is so upset. She is doing something she knows is wrong. But there isn’t any right thing to do, under these circumstances, only bad and worse. He had to look away then, for fear that he would start to cry himself.

  He was called to testify toward the end of the third day. As he was being sworn in, he looked out across the sea of faces in the courtroom. Among them were friends and strangers, some reporters. People were wearing the white masks over their nose and mouths that were supposed to ensure against the influenza that had come from Europe with the returning troops. To one side Clara sat with her lawyers; Marion with hers to the other. He saw Alfred seated near the back. When he looked, however, he could not see Mildred anywhere.

  The whole proceedings struck him as so absurd that for a moment he actually felt like laughing. What a colossal waste of time this is, he thought. It is obscene for us to spend a single day on it. Here we are, alive, possessed of that extraordinary gift of remaining still alive. So many people, he thought, are no longer in that fortunate position, Lutz and Knightly, Gilles Marchand. Rodin. And yet we who are so lucky are exerting our energy making each other suffer. What an insult this is to the dead in all their millions.