Coming of Age

by Deborah Beatriz Blum

  Margaret waited.

  “An able cricketer, too,” said Reo. “Opening batsman for the Star Club’s Pearce Cup–winning team.”

  He turned and faced her. “I’d go there in the evenings. Sit at their kitchen table. Robert, her brother, played the fiddle, so did her sister Flora. But Eileen was the gifted one. And she could sing, too. It was a regular ceilidh.”

  “Ceilidh?” Margaret asked, not really caring what it was, but trying to cover her discomfort.

  “Kitchen party,” said Reo, looking out, over the sea. “I sent her my poems. She was encouraging. I asked her to marry me. She said no.”

  This Eileen must have had lots of other suitors, thought Margaret.

  “You’re a married woman,” he said, reaching out and touching her arm. “But you don’t talk about your husband. He’s never in any of your dreams. Instead it’s this Edward fellow who’s always there.”

  “Luther’s my best friend,” she said. “Sometimes one tends to take one’s best friend for granted.”

  26

  THE ARENA HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT BLOOD

  I’ll not leave you unless I find someone I love more.

  —MARGARET MEAD

  June 1926

  The Chitral was due to dock in less than two hours, reuniting Luther with the wife he’d not seen in ten months. Since they’d said their good-byes at the Baltimore & Ohio railway station in Philadelphia, she’d kept in touch mainly through the group bulletins, offering him few clues to her state of mind and leaving him with a sense of vague misgiving.

  That morning he’d explored the waterfront of Marseilles, making his way down narrow streets lined with terra-cotta buildings, their windows closed behind faded blue wooden shutters. His mission had been to secure the “nicest rooms in Marseilles” for Margaret. Somewhere along the way he passed a boutique de modiste and went in to buy a hat. Standing in front of the mirror, he tried on several berets until he found one he liked.

  Two hours later he was at the pier looking up at the massive steel-sided Chitral. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his trousers, jingling a set of room keys.

  At last the Chitral’s crew lowered the gangplank. As the passengers started to disembark, he ran halfway up the gangplank to intercept Margaret. Pushing his way through the crowd that was advancing toward him, searching the faces, he was surprised not to find her.

  Returning to the foot of the gangplank, Luther waited, watching as the other passengers greeted their families and loved ones. Then, high above him, he saw a young woman in silhouette leaning on the ship’s rail. He squinted up into the sunlight. She was too far away to recognize.

  He waved and the figure waved back. Curiously, she did not move from her spot. He waved again and again she responded. After two or three more exchanges she walked away from her post.

  Obviously it wasn’t Margaret. He felt almost ill with disappointment.

  Where was she? Why wasn’t she there? The fear that something terrible had happened suddenly seemed possible.

  Just then Margaret appeared at the head of the gangplank, along with a tall young man who stood at her side. Even at this distance Luther could see the man was good-looking. As soon as Luther spotted him, the man stepped out of sight.

  Luther hurried up the gangplank. Margaret met him halfway.

  “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “I didn’t realize the ship had stopped.”

  “Just so you’re all right,” said Luther. “I was beginning to worry.”

  “We need to get my luggage,” she said, thrusting a baggage check into his hand.

  Luther took the slip and went to retrieve her trunks. After she had cleared customs Luther hailed a taxi and gave the driver the address of their hotel.

  Inside the cab Luther said, “I’ve found us a nice room.”

  He reached over to squeeze her hand. That’s when he noticed that Margaret’s fingers were closed tightly over the clasp of her handbag.

  Their room in the hotel was on the third floor.

  When Luther opened the door it was dark inside. Turning, he saw that Margaret had walked to the bed. He went to her and took her in his arms. Her shoulders were stiff, unyielding.

  Afterward, after Luther finished dressing, he sat on the bed, watching Margaret as she fastened her skirt. Sensing her discomfort, he walked to her and pulled her back down on his lap.

  Margaret started to cry, burying her face in his neck.

  “There, there,” said Luther, stroking her hair. “We have all the time in the world.”

  This seemed to make her cry, even harder.

  “Mar,” he said, continuing to smooth out her hair, “what is it?”

  “Luther,” she began, “do you remember how you said before our marriage that if…?”

  He waited for a moment, then said, “Yes, of course. Go on.”

  Margaret stood up, straightened out her skirt again, and began to pace the room. “Well, I met someone onboard ship I love that way, and I want to be with him.”

  Taking this in, Luther went quiet. Then, in as neutral a tone as he could muster, “Tell me, Margaret, what’s he like?”

  She avoided meeting his gaze as she told him about the “brilliant young New Zealand student, on his way to Cambridge University on a two-year fellowship that had been awarded for his work on dreams.”

  “We talked and talked and talked,” said Margaret. “For six weeks.”

  Luther said nothing.

  “We were walking around the deck, talking, when the ship docked. Suddenly I sensed that the ship wasn’t moving. That’s when I saw you.”

  Luther stood and walked to the shuttered doors, stepped outside onto the balcony.

  Standing at the iron railing he had a full view of the harbor. Moored sailboats bobbed on the water, their masts sticking up in the air like a thicket of nettles. He could hear the faint din of the fishmongers hawking their wares in the marketplace. He caught the slightly unpleasant odor of fish. Sunlight reflected off the surface of the water.

  Thinking over the situation, allowing himself to calm down, he decided that it was not unreasonable that Margaret should have developed feelings for the young man she’d met on the ship. It was quite remarkable they had so much in common. And, after all, he himself had met an attractive British girl named Dorothy Loch. They’d become close friends. It might have turned into more had it not been for his commitment to his marriage. He resolved that he was not going to let this shipboard infatuation of hers ruin their time together. He’d come prepared with a list of interesting places, historic sites he really wanted to see. He was going to show her a marvelous time in France.

  Walking back into the darkness of the room, Luther looked at Margaret. She was standing at the dresser, brushing her hair. Her back was to him.

  He said, “I haven’t changed my mind.”

  Margaret turned to him.

  “I love you, and my love wants only your greatest happiness,” said Luther.

  Tears welled again in Margaret’s eyes. “I know that.”

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s go to lunch. I think we both need it and will feel much better then.”

  * * *

  Margaret spent her first days with Luther on the coast. The gentle breezes of the Mediterranean should have been a tonic to her troubled mind, but they were not. The effort to make sense of her conflicting relationships drained her of energy.

  So she turned to dream analysis. For Margaret believed, as did many of her closest friends, that dreams were a window into the unconscious mind. Dreams—and what they told her—might provide a path through this difficult terrain.

  Each morning, as soon as she opened her eyes, she jotted down the images from the night before. She had learned that if she didn’t record them immediately, they’d vanish along with the morning dew. Some dreams she scribbled on scraps of paper, so illegible she could barely make out what she’d written. She labeled each dream with the date and time that it occurred, then placed it into the folder s
he was compiling for Reo.

  Many of the dreams in this collection, not surprisingly, centered on how she might feel when she saw Ruth:

  We are at a railway station waiting for Ruth. I don’t know when she will arrive. Finally I see a large placard that reads “Mrs. R. Benedict.” I see her approaching very eagerly. I am awkward in getting to her—have to go around several tables before I finally reach her and kiss her.…

  On June 28, before she and Luther left Marseilles, she sent Ruth a note saying, “I didn’t write on the boat. There got to be so much to tell.” Five days later she sent another rushed apology: “You won’t know what all this is about. It’s rotten of me to write this way—and yet there’s too much to go into. I’ve the worst gnawing sense of failure.” Finally, in a third letter, she had no choice but to give Ruth an explanation for her emotional distance:

  Are you prepared to play nurse to a cranky invalid? I’m all of that. My sinuses are ghastly. I’m so tired I can’t stay up for more than two or three hours at a stretch and just at present I’m cutting a wisdom tooth in a very wholesale fashion. It makes me sick. I did so want to enjoy Europe. I might just as well be in Kansas City. I’ve almost given up and gone home but I couldn’t rest with my family and it’s cheaper to live here. I haven’t much money either. Only I’m not willing to spoil your summer with all my aches and pains and miseries.… I meant to bring you something better back.

  * * *

  Margaret and Luther traveled by train to Provence, where they joined their friend Louise Rosenblatt, who had spent the last year studying at a university in Grenoble. The three planned to tour the south of France and the Loire Valley together.

  For Louise’s sake, the unhappy couple pretended that things were fine between them but invariably conversations were strained and small disagreements erupted over sightseeing plans. As the three made their way through stunningly beautiful countryside, they seemed to be stuck under a smothering cloud of dejection.

  On July 2, after they’d checked in at a pension outside the city of Nîmes, they reconvened for some tea on the balcony. Before them were the rolling hills and valleys that had, centuries before, been occupied by Caesar’s army. The trees that covered the hills were chalky green, like desert plants, the land itself a pale and sandy limestone. From where she sat, Margaret could make out in the distance a long symmetrical shape. She reached for Luther’s binoculars. A row of nine arches came into focus. It was the Pont du Gard, the ancient Roman aqueduct that crossed the Gardon River.

  She glanced at Luther, seated across the table from her. A book about the Roman occupation of Gaul sitting open in front of him. She knew that few things excited him more than the achievements of the ancient engineers.

  Sunset was a long time in coming. The sun remained suspended in the sky, showing a deep orange and scarlet between the dark branches of trees. The setting was a perfect foil for these newly reunited companions, all three trying to read one another’s thoughts again and find some common ground. After what seemed to Margaret like an interminable interval, Louise rose from her chair and said, “I’m turning in.”

  Always the gentleman, Luther stood to kiss her on the cheek.

  When he sat down, Margaret said, “I drove her off.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Luther.

  All of a sudden a bat flitted across the darkening sky, reeling into the unknown, a reminder of life’s ominous and unexpected turns.

  Luther leaned back in his chair. “Have I told you how I’ve always wanted to visit Nîmes? The arena, the gladiators?”

  “Well, no gladiators anymore, I should hope,” said Margaret.

  After dinner they walked into the velvety blackness of the night. Following a sandy path that wound around the perimeter of a hill town, they reached an impasse, a wall that had been constructed out of limestone blocks, stacked one on top of the other, to form a haphazard fortress.

  Suddenly Margaret felt that she could stand it no longer. She must bring him up. She said, “Reo must be in London by now.”

  “Oh?” said Luther.

  “I have no plans to see him again,” she said. “At least not for now.”

  Inside her head, feelings beat like the wings of that excited bat, a fluttering indecision that was nearly unbearable. At one moment she wanted to fly to Reo, the next to remain with Luther.

  Since their initial lovemaking in Marseilles, which had been so desultory, Margaret and Luther had shared their bed as if they were brother and sister. Margaret was grateful that he put no pressure on her, but knowing him as she did, she was sure he was disappointed.

  Then, of course, there was Ruth. The thought of Ruth, waiting and soon within close proximity, no doubt wondering why Margaret’s letters were suddenly devoid of affection, was almost too much to bear.

  Still the pull of desire for Reo, a man who had not yet committed to her, who had not taken any steps to consummate their affair, was irresistible.

  Physically, he was holding her at arm’s length.

  Was it an aversion to something about her? Could his disinterest in sleeping with her be the result of what one friend called the “castrating effect” she seemed to have on men?

  Or was it because he was still in love with Eileen Pope, the girl who had inspired so many poems?

  Either way, Margaret was determined to overcome his reluctance.

  More than anything she wanted Reo to make love to her.

  * * *

  The next day the three friends walked through Nîmes, stopping at the American Express office to collect their mail. Margaret found four letters from Ruth. She opened the one that had been postmarked the earliest, on June 26. Ruth had written it while still onboard ship:

  I go up and stretch myself in my deck chair and close my eyes and warm my body and my soul at the thought of coming to you. It’s always a delicious comfort just under my latest word, my latest movement. And I’m thinking of you these days landing in Marseilles. You will be with Luther and that will be home.

  She’d ended her letter with, “Oh sweetness, I want you now.”

  Margaret stuffed the letter back in its envelope.

  They wandered through Nîmes, stopping on a bridge that overlooked a pond of dark brackish water. Black swans floated across its surface and palm trees lined its edge. Luther pointed out the symbol of the crocodile that seemed to be embedded everywhere. He told them what he’d learned—that Nîmes was first cultivated by veterans of Caesar’s Nile campaign who’d brought their beloved crocodiles with them when they came.

  Barely able to contain his enthusiasm, Luther led them through the narrow city streets into the arena. His voice ringing out off the heavy stone walls he said, “The arena has always been about blood.”

  With notebook in hand, he pointed and gesticulated, trying to “recreate the sight of a festive afternoon when that huge arena was filled with fervent, yelling men and women, probably both the drunk and the sober, cheering as hungry lions were turned loose on a huddled band of Christian men and women.” He went on to explain how the Roman engineers had designed a stadium that could hold 24,000 spectators and afford each one of them an unobstructed view of the blood sport.

  Margaret looked for some shade, exhausted from the effort of sightseeing under the noonday sun.

  Later that night she found the courage to write again to Ruth:

  Oh if only you were somewhere nearby. I can’t tell you things in letters. There’s too much now. I’d have to write for a week. And my arms are playing a whole orchestra.… I am so tired I fall asleep on my feet. This restless touring of one night stands is maddening. We go and look at things which mean less than nothing to me. I’ve bitten my lips until I can’t eat or sleep.

  Feeling as she did, Margaret told herself, she must put an end to this indecision and do it soon.

  * * *

  The lobby of London’s Russell Hotel was an ornate palace of gloom. Rose-colored marble panels lined the walls and a giant curved banister of matching marble ra
n up a wide staircase to a dark mezzanine. Ruth had chosen this establishment for its proximity to the British Museum and now she regretted it.

  That morning she’d killed a few hours walking the halls of the museum, looking at the Greek statues and the powerful Assyrian bas-reliefs that those British lords of the universe had plundered for their own pleasure.

  At a nearby tearoom Ruth sat before a pot of tea and a plate of seed cakes and scones. Margaret’s letters had left her apprehensive. She knew Margaret so well. She was no doubt overextending herself, trying to please both Luther and Louise by giving them what she thought they wanted. Ruth wrote:

  Dear one … All I can write is that I love you. As for the rest I’m bound to talk beside the point. All I know is that you are miserable—that is all I’m conscious of. I know I can’t touch the misery; all I can do is to hope that you’ll come upon the technique of misery, which is mostly indifference, not to spend too much mental energy or the hours. And whatever weather and the charm of beautiful places can do, I wish them all to you.

  Still, as much as Ruth tried to rationalize that Margaret was fatigued, even ill, there was an undercurrent in her letters that simply didn’t “smell right.”

  * * *

  In bed in their hotel room in Carcassonne, Margaret was turned on her side. On the white stucco wall, next to her, was a scorpion, its nose pointed downward. Its trunk was at least an inch long and slightly bloated, its tail curved with a spike on the end. Its pincerlike claws seemed to be grasping for something. Margaret felt if she were to make a sudden movement it would surely jump toward the sheets and onto her.

  Luther was coming with a glass.

  On silent bare feet he stepped close, clamping the glass against the wall, capturing the scorpion in the middle. Then he took a postcard and slid it along the wall, sealing off the opening of the glass. Now he had the scorpion trapped and could move it.

  She watched him carry it outside.

  Once again he had made things safe for her.

  That night she chose Luther over Reo.

  The next day she wrote the following to Ruth:

  Letters from your sailing and landings came today. The war is temporarily over and I’m filled with a great repentance for all this meaningless hysteria I’ve been giving you. Just at the moment I’m calm and sane enough to confine myself to raging at these intervening weeks before we can be together.… And I love you so.…