The girl before whom Elliot had most often bowed that afternoon had been Elaine Lovell. She was very blond and pretty and that day was dressed all in white. It had flashed over Charlotte that Tennyson had described her perfectly—Elaine the fair, the lovable, the lily maid of Astolat. Ten years later, Elliot Livingston married Elaine Lovell.
THEY WERE STILL DISCUSSING her last remark about Boston when Charlotte drained her cocktail glass, dragged her attention way from the past, and listened.
June had the floor at the moment. “In this burg,” she was saying, “who your pals are depends on when you were born, quite as much as where and of whom. Two or three years’ difference in age and two people may never meet, even though their mothers and fathers do go to the same dinner parties. A girl’s partners at dancing-school when she’s a mere infant will be her partners at her coming-out dance and usually her ushers at her wedding, too. Darn stupid, I call it.”
“That explains it, I guess,” laughed Elliot Livingston. “I’m too old ever to have crossed your path, Miss Vale. The difference between a Harvard sophomore and a Harvard senior is at least ten years. When I was a sophomore going to débutante parties, you were still going to sub-deb dances—or more likely, in the nursery sound asleep.”
“Scarcely!” Charlotte laughed back. “But thank you, just the same.”
Charlotte had now learned that it was more gracious to accept with thanks a well-intended compliment, however obviously it stretched the truth, than to scoff at it. In this case the fact was that Elliot Livingston had been invited to usher at her coming-out dance but he hadn’t even come.
Elliot Livingston had been selective. He had attended only the parties for girls whom he knew well, and whom he well knew were attractive, and consented to assist only at parties of relatives, or of sisters of intimate club mates. By the end of his junior year he unusually refused even those.
June’s escort for the evening appeared at this juncture. There was another round of cocktails. Charlotte allowed her thoughts to drift back to the past again.
The second time she had met Elliot Livingston had been when he stood in his wedding line and gave her hand a brief shake, unaware of her identity. Later, hidden in a corner, eating melted café parfait, she had watched him pick up Elaine’s long trailing wedding veil, throw it over his arm, and follow her upstairs. And she had thought, He’ll really kiss her, now, in some dark corner up there.
The marriage had proved to be one of those perfect ones, “made in heaven.” But as if nature begrudged such perfection on earth, it had intervened. Elliot Livingston had been a widower for four years now.
20
A QUESTION OF TABOOS
After dinner, when about to sit down at the card table, Barry casually suggested that Lisa and he “take on” Charlotte and Elliot. And thus began a prolonged tournament between the two couples, which lasted until after midnight and was resumed a week later. And again two weeks later. And so on throughout the fall and winter. Each contest was preceded by dinner, Charlotte not returning to town until the next morning. It soon became the custom for Elliot to stop at the Marlborough Street house in the late afternoon, take her out in his car, and in the morning to drop her at her door on his way in to his office.
In the morning Charlotte usually strolled through the gap in the low stone wall dividing the two estates, and when Elliot came out he would find Charlotte already seated in her place beside him on the front seat. Once he was delayed, and asked her to come in and join him with a second cup of coffee. At the next meeting of the bridge tournament, Elliot was the host.
It was the first time since Elaine had died that he had given a party of any sort in the house which he and Elaine had planned, built, and vitalized together. It was cause for much excitement and rejoicing among the servants. They deplored their young master’s prolonged mourning, the empty rooms, the empty flower vases, the unused china, glass, and linen. Their mistress gave beautiful parties. Every detail, from the combination of the hors d’oeuvres with the cocktails to the species of floating flower or sweet-smelling sprig in the finger bowls, she decided. Elliot had kept all expression of her art concealed since her death—almost as if one should seal up inside the tomb of a dead painter all his pictures. He would have abandoned the house altogether, he once told Lisa, if it had not been his two boys—ten and twelve when their mother died. Both the boys were at Groton now.
One afternoon in February, when Elliot was driving Charlotte out to spend the night with Lisa, he asked her to marry him. He hadn’t planned to do so on that particular afternoon. The weather was responsible. For many weeks Boston had been encrusted in black ice and covered with splotches resembling mold, when one of its typical midwinter thaws arrived.
The days had begun to grow longer. When Charlotte took her place in the car beside Elliot at five o’clock, the dove-gray sky over Marlborough Street was tinged pink. They drove straight into a glowing red sunset as they left the city behind. On either side of the road there were jagged walls of grimy snow piled high by the plows which kept the surface of the main highways scraped smooth. Except for the sunset there was no more color in the landscape than in a pencil sketch. Yet spring was undeniably in the air. The warm breeze that blew through the open car window seemed to smell of running sap, swelling buds, and growing roots.
“Spring will soon be here,” said Elliot, while stopping at a red traffic light. The tone was charged with joy.
“Yes,” Charlotte agreed, “just smell it!”
“Are you going anywhere this spring?”
“No. Are you?”
“I suppose not. I’ve been looking up California and Honolulu—but it’s not much fun traveling alone. It would be different if—well, if you happened to be along.” Charlotte glanced at him. His eyes were fastened on the back of the next car ahead. “These early false alarms of spring always make me restless.”
“I know. Same here.”
They rode in silence till the next red light. “If we did happen to be on the same trip together,” he went on, “do you think it would be successful?” And before she could answer, “This isn’t a sudden idea of mine,” he said. “I’ve thought a good deal about it. I mean about you and me.” The light flashed green. He slipped in the clutch, shifted the gears, they sped smoothly along. “How do you feel about us? People are beginning to ask questions, you know, and wonder.”
“Are they? In this city people ask questions and wonder if you as much as have lunch at the Ritz with a man, I’m told,” laughed Charlotte.
Elliot ignored the laugh. “My mother thinks you’ve saved me from becoming a confirmed recluse,” he said gravely. “I must say you’ve made me very happy this fall and winter.”
“Have I? Really?”
“The question is have I made you happy?”
“Yes, you have. I might easily become a confirmed recluse myself.”
“Do you think I could go on making you happy?”
“What is it you’re trying to say?” she laughed gently.
“Something I’m making an awful mess of! It’s supposed to be a proposal of marriage.”
“I thought so, but I wanted to be sure.”
“I’ve probably been in too much of a hurry, rushed it, failed to prepare you. If I’ve made a mistake, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. You haven’t made a mistake.”
“Then you think you can be happy with me!”
“It wouldn’t be your fault, Elliot, if I couldn’t.”
“Is that a way of saying you can’t?”
“No! I didn’t mean that! I’d just like to think about it a little while. It’s my very first proposal of marriage, you see.” By this time she had told him about their early meetings at dancing-school, but little else about herself. “Though I was engaged once, many years ago, for about five days. At least I considered myself engaged.” She spoke in that self-belittling way she had which he found so baffling in a woman with her background and brains. “But there was
no proposal.” She gave a short flouting laugh. “It was one of those violent affairs with no preliminaries at all.”
“There shall be all the preliminaries you want this time, Charlotte. Nothing will be hurried. Nothing. I shall be very careful of you.”
“I know you will! I’ve always thought of you as a sort of Sir Galahad.” She paused. “It isn’t always easy to make a Sir Galahad happy. They have such high ideals about women. Of course, if a woman is an Elaine—”
“I want to speak of Elaine. I understand how you may feel. I plan to put all Elaine’s things in storage for the boys, and to do the house all over as you’d like it. I want it to be your home.”
“That’s lovely of you, but Elaine was always so kind to me I don’t think I’d resent her things. Once when we were both at one of those sub-deb dances she saw I had no supper partner. She shared her partner—Johnny Wilder—you remember him. She made him sit between us and get ice cream for us both. Elaine was actually as good and kind as people said she was.”
“That’s true. I’m glad you knew her.”
“She must have whispered in Johnny’s ear and told him to ask me to dance when she left, for when the music started and several boys dashed up to ask Elaine, Johnny got up and asked me. Do you ever have patterns like that repeat themselves in your life, Elliot?”
“I don’t think I know what you mean. I’m not awfully quick at getting your hidden meanings sometimes, Charlotte.”
“Well, don’t you see, it is a little as if Elaine had whispered in your ear?”
“No, no, she hasn’t,” he assured her earnestly. “I don’t believe in any of those communication ideas. You need never be afraid Elaine will ever come back in any way. It doesn’t hurt me any more to think of Elaine, or to speak of her. She’s just a beautiful memory now, like—like—”
“Like a beautiful idyl,” she finished for him. “Like footprints in the snow.” She stopped abruptly. “No, not in the snow,” she corrected, “but in the sand that’s hardened and holds the impression, for you have her two sons, Elliot!” She paused. “And, oh, so much else besides. Countless objects that she’s touched and are a part of her.” Her tone was wistful, so too her expression, as she thought of her meager store—dried petals, a coil of wire, an empty perfumery bottle, a few words on paper. And she couldn’t even speak his name!
Elliot misinterpreted the cause of the wistfulness. “Don’t let anything that is finished disturb you, Charlotte. I’m not good at expressing myself. All I want to impress on you is, my life with Elaine is over, ended. I shall begin a new life with you, and for you.”
“You couldn’t say it any better, Elliot, and I think you’re a perfectly lovely person!”
“I don’t deserve any credit. It was my mother and sisters who told me how hard it would be for you, or for any woman to live in Elaine’s house with Elaine’s things.”
“Have you discussed me with your mother and sisters?” They, like Elaine, also deserved their pedestals. That explained his chivalry.
“Yes, I have discussed you with them. And with my sons, too. Do you mind?”
“No, no! I’m honored. I’m pleased—terribly pleased.”
“Everything has been done, except speaking to you.”
And except making love to me, it flashed over Charlotte. He had never kissed her. According to Elliot’s standards the honorable and honoring approach to marriage was to wait until after one’s intentions were declared before indulging in kissing or love-making.
When he dropped Charlotte at Lisa’s house, the stars were out, the doorway was shrouded in black shadows. But Charlotte had not committed herself, and Elliot’s last gesture was simply a longer pressure of her hand as he bade her goodnight.
There was to be no game of bridge on this occasion. Nor was she to return to town with Elliot in the morning. She was remaining until after lunch. She was spending the night with Lisa, on Barry’s request. He had to be in New York. Lisa would be alone except for the servants. There was no cause for anxiety, Barry said, but he’d feel better if Charlotte would come out.
Ever since Lisa had told Barry that her daydream was no longer a mere castle-in-the-air, he treated her like a piece of blown glass as fragile as a soap bubble. The fact that she had had five children without any complications had little effect on him. His attitude toward the approaching event was a painful combination of alternating periods of bright hope and black fear, while Lisa sailed the familiar course serenely.
Charlotte found Lisa on a couch in her upstairs sitting room, prosaically paying bills. She joined her with her crocheting—a blue-and-white afghan, which she was making for the “belated kiddie,” as Lisa called the awaited child, after Hunt’s picture entitled “The Belated Kid.” One day Barry had brought her a postcard print of the painting. It showed a shepherdess returning from the field with a limp baby lamb in her arms. The tired mother followed close beside the shepherdess, head uplifted toward a small dangling paw, eyes filled with anxiety.
Although Lisa showed no “holy attitude,” she announced that Barry’s child was to bear all the marks, stamps, tags and badges of his English-born father that she could “pin on him.” His name was to be Christopher, after Barry’s father and older brother, recently deceased. Barry now was the eldest son, and Barry’s son, if any, would some day inherit the fifteenth-century manor house in southern England, and whatever else was left of the depleted Firth possessions. Yesterday a package had arrived from England, from Barry’s aged father, containing a pair of silver porringers bearing the Firth crest, hall-marked 1670. There they were, on the mantel.
It wasn’t until after Charlotte had properly admired the porringers, that she was allowed to return to her crocheting.
Lisa pushed the bills aside and reached for a ball of pink wool with two knitting needles stuck through it. “Did Elliot bring you out as usual?” she inquired, drawing out the needles.
“Yes.” Then, after a pause, she said quietly, “Lisa, Elliot has asked me to marry him.”
“I’m not in the least surprised, and I’m awfully glad! You’ll be my next-door neighbor! What fun we’ll have—we four! And what a feather in the family’s cap a Livingston will be! I can say that to you, Charlotte, for you’re able to get outside your family and smile at it. You certainly deserve this!”
“But I haven’t said I’d marry him yet.”
“What are you waiting for? Just to worry him a little? Don’t keep it up too long. He’s such a dear.”
“Yes—but isn’t he a little—well, a little like Elaine? He’s so fine, I mean so sort of pure. Even his mind and imagination seem pure, and I’m wondering—”
“I know what you mean. He is sort of a puritan, I admit. But he’s so decent. He’s like lots of people in this city—awfully kind down underneath the inherent taboos of their background.”
“Inherent taboos,” Charlotte repeated reflectively. “That explains it, I guess. Last week at the bridge club when we were discussing Steinbeck at lunch, I wondered what was the matter with me not to be shocked in the least by certain details Steinbeck describes, which are absolutely repulsive to most of them there. I don’t like being too different. I wonder why it is I lack the inherent taboos of my background.”
“Because your background wasn’t very kind to you, and you revolted against it. You’re the straightest thinker and freest spirit in the Vale family. Even when you were so dominated by Mother Vale you imagined what you pleased, and read what you pleased. By the way, do you realize that we haven’t yet mentioned how your mother will feel about Elliot? It’s simply amazing to me, Charlotte, how completely emancipated you are.”
“Yes, but it may cost me a pretty penny,” laughed Charlotte wryly. “Mother keeps right on threatening me about her will. The labor of her song now is that no doubt Dan Regan could make good use of what property she doesn’t leave Dora. She insists that Dan come and see her twice a day now.” (The ankle had not progressed as it should. There had been more X-ray pictures
in the fall, with Dan Regan lifting the little old lady in and out of her wheelchair, and holding her hand throughout the process.) “Dora says Mother has a crush on Dan. It certainly would be funny if Mother should leave Dan Regan her money after fighting against him tooth and nail when he wanted to marry Fabia.”
“Not so very funny for you, I should think,” said Lisa.
“I’d better tell Elliot he may have asked a pauper to marry him.”
“That won’t make any difference to Elliot. He’s already told me how he feels about you. The man is in love with you, Charlotte!”
“And you don’t think anything I could tell him about myself or my past would make any difference to his—being in love?”
“I’ve been wondering a little, lately,” she began, “about your past, as you call it. You don’t need to tell me, Charlotte, but I’ve been wondering if there wasn’t somebody on the cruise, whom you haven’t mentioned, who has made you so much nicer to men. I don’t think it could be Ham Hunneker.”
“No, it isn’t Ham.”
“Well, it’s your own affair. Probably I’d mention it to Elliot if I were you, but in no such way as to let it loom up and spoil things; that is, if it’s finished and over with.”
“It is.”
“Well, then, don’t be in doubt about Elliot. He has all the requisites to make you happy.”
“Even if I don’t love him?”
“Certainly. Loving a man is only one of the reasons a woman marries for. Anyway, a woman of our age.”
“What are the other reasons?”
“For a home of her own, a child of her own, and a man of her own.”
“Do you think I really might have a child?” Charlotte asked.
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