by John Jakes
He had been at her a lot on that subject recently. Verbally and otherwise. She’d already miscarried once, in her third month. After she awoke from the opiate the doctor had administered, the darkness in her mind lasted for weeks. Crying spells, visions of Paul, hours in bed in the daytime with all the drapes drawn. She grieved for the poor nameless babe she’d lost, yet a certain part of her thanked God the child would never have to know a father like Bill.
Without taking his eye from his New York Times, Elstree rattled his gold-rimmed coffee cup on the gold-rimmed saucer. A serving girl with a silver pot jumped forward from her station at the nearest French door.
When the girl retreated, he said, “My dear, is there any news? I calculate it’s about time for—”
“No,” she broke in. “Again this month, no change.”
And God forbid that there should be, with this new thing hanging over us.
“You know how eager I am for a son. Ideally, more than one. Isn’t it true that problems such as we’re experiencing generally arise with the wife?”
“I’m not a medical expert, Bill.” And you’re a man, flawless, therefore ready to blame every deficiency on the woman. Just like all your fine male friends.
“Well, I really wish you’d consult a specialist. I’m sure there are excellent ones in the city. Shall I look into it?”
“No, I will.” I’d sooner be dragged over red-hot rocks than give you a child. I won’t be your brood mare.
Since the nightmare experience in the private railroad car last fall, she had at least been spared further brutality. Without actually apologizing, Bill said his behavior that night was due to the tensions of the wedding, and an excess of champagne, which always induced a bad reaction. A month later he told her he would be more comfortable in a separate bedroom, and he assumed she would be also. When he had needs, or was impatient for her to conceive, he visited her for an hour. He hadn’t hurt her even slightly since that first night. Yet he still could intimidate her with his eyes, because she knew the furies that could rise behind his composed, rather ordinary face.
Her hand moved back and forth, stroking Rudy. The oval-cut diamond of her engagement ring glittered. How do I approach him about the new problem? How do I even begin?
For an hour before breakfast she’d worked to stiffen her nerve, telling herself the matter was too important to ignore. Then the tug of depression would undermine that conviction: The depression was powerful and sly. She personified it as a predatory animal crouching in a corner of her soul, waiting to attack when she was weakest.
She slipped her hand in the pocket of her robe. Touched the notepaper. She took strength from it. She mustn’t let the matter pass.
“Listen to this damned nonsense,” Elstree said. He shook the paper to show his displeasure. Below the massive marble rail of the terrace, the pruning shears of Henry Prince clicked away. Henry Prince was a Shinnecock Indian; a short, stout man with black curly hair and a nose and mouth suggesting a Negro ancestor or two. He had been born Prince Henry, a tribal name, but had decided long ago that reversing the names would make him more acceptable to wealthy employers. Henry lived out by the Shinnecock Reservation with his wife and two boys. Unlike most of the other Indian cabins scattered in the pine flats, Henry’s property was free of weeds and broken windowpanes.
Elstree read aloud. “ ‘The reign of the Nero of the nineteenth century, King Weyler the First, must be ended at all hazards.’ Isn’t that a lot of damned rot?” He threw the paper on the green wicker table. Henry’s broad brown face appeared between the marble balusters, on a level with Julie’s slippers decorated with silver thread. Henry gave her a wink and a smile. Among a staff of twenty-two, he was her only friend. She sometimes went by herself, in a buggy, to take a hamper of food to his family. She went when Bill was at one of his clubs or staying in town. She knew he wouldn’t approve.
Elstree reached for his cup, expecting it to be full; it was. She said, “Who were you quoting, Bill?”
“Joe Wheeler, the Reb cavalry general. He was one of the last to give up after Appomattox. He’s been in Congress for years. Represents some district of wool hats and rednecks down in Alabama. I’ve always thought him one of the more sensible politicians from that part of the world. Until this.”
“Weyler is the governor of Cuba?”
“Yes. I’m a Republican but by God I don’t support intervention in Cuba. Let Weyler hang all the revolutionaries and peasants down there, who cares? If we listen to Wheeler and the other jingoes—if we interfere—we’ll be in a damn war that would be catastrophic for business. Drown us in blood. Blood happens to be the same color as red ink.”
Julie was sadly amused by his ferocity. William Vann Elstree III took no active role in management of the family stores, merely spent the enormous income generated by them. Yet he liked to pose as the field general who designed the chain’s grand strategy. On their wedding night he’d called her a fraud. He was no less of one.
Julie’s hand crept to her pocket again. Her mouth was dry. The strong coffee set her stomach churning. Henry Prince’s shears clicked on as he worked his way toward the end of the terrace. Two other men were thatching the green lawn with rakes.
Elstree looked closely at his wife. “You didn’t hear half of what I said about Joe Wheeler. What’s wrong, pray?”
The folded notepaper in her pocket burned hotter than her fear. She glanced behind her. The serving girl had gone inside.
“Bill, who is the person who uses the letter R as a signature?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you—”
She took out the paper and held it up. The abrupt movement sent Rudy bounding off her lap. “I found this note signed R. The handwriting is a woman’s. The note confirms a time for supper at Rector’s in town.” Elstree stared. Her courage, not great to begin with, rapidly shrank. “I presume the note’s yours. The servants can’t afford Rector’s.”
“Where did you find that?”
“On the floor beside the liquor stand in the library. Dropped accidentally, I imagine.”
“Please give it to me.” He held out his hand and snapped his fingers. “Please.”
“Am I not entitled to an explanation?”
“No. Give it to me, Juliette. Now.”
The best she could do to show her anger was to drop the note on the table between them. Elstree’s chair creaked as he snatched the note and stood up.
“Bill, are you seeing someone In New York?”
“You have no right to ask me a question like that.”
“I think I have every right. I’m your wife.”
He walked around the table and put his soft, manicured hand on her shoulder, gently. It terrified her.
“My dear, understand this. Men are men, with well-defined rights and privileges. Wives are expected to make allowances.”
“I see. Is this what they’re calling a double standard, Bill?”
“I don’t know what they’re calling it, sweet. I know it’s the way I live, and I don’t propose to change.”
“Well, you’d better, Bill, or I—”
Elstree’s smile chilled her to silence. He closed his hand on her left wrist firmly enough to hurt. He bent to her left ear as if to kiss it. “Don’t threaten me. Don’t you ever threaten me. I live my life as I please. You’re my wife, you’ll inherit my money, what else do you want?”
Then he kissed her on the cheek. “After bridge I’ll be taking a train into town. If you need me tonight, it’s the Princeton Club, as usual.”
“Will they take a message while you’re at Rector’s?”
He dropped his pale hands to his sides. With a terrifying stare but perfect politeness, he said, “Goodbye, dear.” And stalked off without a backward look.
Julie went up to her room, locked the door, turned off the two electric lamps with fringed and pleated shades, closed the drapes, and lay in bed past noon.
Belle Mer was a forty-room house, copied by its architect from a F
rench country palace. Julie and her husband had been in residence since early June. After their honeymoon on the estate last fall, they’d wintered in Elstree’s townhouse in Chicago. In January and February they were in Palm Beach. In June Elstree’s private railroad car brought them from Chicago to Long Island.
Of all the places, Julie preferred Long Island. She loved the rough moorlands running east to Montauk. The wind-twisted trees, the ponds, the grazing sheep and cattle, the tar-paper huts of the fishermen, the small unpainted clap-board houses of the potato farmers. The farther you traveled in the direction of land’s end, the more lonely and barren the prospect became. The wind and sky, the bluffs and beaches so empty and primitive, mirrored her loneliness. A dilapidated windmill stood at Montauk, its vanes slowly turning in the sea wind. You might have thought yourself in the Old World, where trolls hid in deep woods and princesses died of unrequited love …
Southampton Village, the center of Southampton Township, was altogether different. It was social and snobbish. The first of the moneyed elite had moved there around 1875. Members of that founding group who were still alive considered themselves quite special. Mrs. Goodhue Livingston of Old Trees, for example. She had a small coterie of female friends of similar status and longevity in the community. People called them the Dreadnaughts, and it was apt. Like gray battleships, they ruled the social seas and patrolled for interlopers. On the one occasion Julie had been invited to tea by Mrs. Livingston, the old lady said to her, “If you can get past the foul-smelling duck farms at Riverhead and Quogue, and the equally noxious Tammany Democrats who’ve built at Hampton Bays, this is really quite a little paradise we have here. We intend to keep it that way, for ourselves.”
Julie quickly understood that she didn’t belong to the charmed circle, and might never. She was the daughter of a man named Pork, whose Connecticut origins had been forgotten and whose credentials were not yet recognized in the East. For Bill it was different. He mingled easily and was accepted by other clubmen and their wives, some of whom had roots in Chicago. Julie supposed her rejection was in part caused by her age, or perhaps by the air of sadness she feared she projected without wanting to. As she sank deeper inside herself, it really didn’t seem to matter.
When the Elstrees had returned from Palm Beach in March, Nell had called on her daughter at least twice a week. She gushed over the splendor of the Elstree townhouse. She praised Julie’s decision to marry such a fine man. Nell’s step was energetic during these visits, her eyes bright as a bird’s at a feeder overflowing with seed. Julie had made her extremely happy. Julie had restored her health. And Julie’s unbound hair—oh, how glorious that was! Nell took it as a symbol of her daughter’s newfound appreciation of all her mother had done for her. Willful children did come to their senses, didn’t they?
Nell’s happy state was briefly disturbed when Pork had his accident in late March. At the packing plant, he took a tumble on a floor slippery with blood and broke his ankle. Forced to lie at home for two weeks, he conducted business from his bed and complained endlessly. He returned to work sooner than Dr. Woodrow wished, and the ankle failed to heal properly. He resorted to a crutch and installed an inclined stair elevator at the mansion on Prairie Avenue; seated on it, he could ride up and down the great central staircase in relative comfort. He continued to complain.
Pork was slow to heal; still hobbling when the Elstree servants packed forty-six crates, cartons, valises, and hat-boxes for the couple’s summer sojourn at Belle Mer. Nell wept when Julie said goodbye. “Caring for your father is such a burden. As if I don’t have enough of them already.”
Still, she didn’t forget her daughter. Hardly a week passed without some expensive little gift arriving on Long Island by express. A stuffed bird; a brooch; a gold box for pins. Tokens of a mother’s regard for a child who had finally seen the beacon light of duty.
Julie followed a screening hedge of bayberry near the inland edge of the property. It was early afternoon. During the time she lay in her dark bedroom, the sun had broken through, although it had a peculiar yellow cast, more like autumn than summer. The first mosquitoes were out, clouding around her neck and face.
On the other side of the hedge she heard a small motor running. She passed through a break in the bayberry, knocked and stepped inside the shed building. It smelled of soil and mold and the menhaden fertilizer sold in coarse bags by the factory across the Island. Henry Prince looked up from the wheel on which he was sharpening his shears.
“Henry, will you drive me to Montauk? I’d be grateful for the company.”
“Ready in five minutes, Mrs. Elstree.”
Though Henry always maintained proper decorum with his employer’s wife, he and Julie were close, for reasons neither had ever expressed. Indeed, Julie couldn’t fully explain it to herself. She just found Henry’s broad face and flat nose and dark brown eyes likable, and the man himself trustworthy.
Henry drove the little buggy east along dirt roads that became more narrow and rutted every mile. They plunged into Hither Woods, a woods so deep and overgrown, she half expected to see the trolls she’d imagined.
But the destination, Montauk Point, was worth the struggle. Henry tied the buggy at the foot of the slope crowned by the hundred-foot-high lighthouse. As he packed his corncob pipe he said, “I’ll wait here if you want to roam awhile.”
“Yes, I do.” Julie clambered down. The sea roared loudly. Her long hair tossed and snapped around her shoulders. A northeast wind had come up, pushing black cloud banks ahead of it. Westward, the sun was all but hidden in summer haze. The kerosene-oil light in the lighthouse was flashing.
“Might be a nasty storm there,” Henry said with a nod seaward. “The roads will be mire if it rains.”
“I’ll only walk a little while,” Julie promised, and ran up the hill. The wind off the Atlantic almost tore her shawl from her shoulders.
Circling the lighthouse, she saw the keeper high above. He waved to her; she waved back, She leaned against the eastern side of the lighthouse, gazing at the wild waves foaming and crashing.
Julie knew she wasn’t one of the so-called new women who defiantly proclaimed one standard, and only one, for both sexes. She was married. Not happily, but she’d spoken the vows. Still, she could come here, to the lonely light where the wind moaned and the waves burst into huge white fans of spray, and she could speak the truth in her heart.
Paul, I love you. I’ll never love anyone else, no matter whose name I bear. God as my witness, I’ll escape from this maze I walked into because of my own cowardice. It may take months, or years, but escape I will.
And then I’ll find you.
About once a month Julie visited her uncle in the city. I.W. Vanderhoff lived in baronial splendor in a four-story townhouse on upper Fifth Avenue, where telephone and telegraph lines spiderwebbed the sky above the street and farmers drove herds of pigs to market amid the hack and carriage traffic.
Uncle Ike was a scarecrow, an old tosspot and womanizer, but Julie warmed to his very lack of respectability. “I wouldn’t fit in with that snotty crowd,” he said in reference to Southampton. “Two glasses of bubbly and I’d pinch some old dowager’s bottom.”
Julie played rummy with Uncle Ike. His card sense nearly always defeated her. So the game proceeded somewhat by rote, simultaneously with conversation. During a game in late July, Uncle Ike scratched his beetlike nose and said, “Juliette, how’s this fellow of yours? Does he make you happy?”
“Uncle Ike, will you discard?”
“I gather that means he don’t.” Uncle Ike had never quite forgotten his country origin. He was so magnificently rich, he could flaunt it. He liked that.
“Bill Elstree’s quite the clubman,” he went on. “Bit of a rake in days gone by.”
“Play,” Julie said.
Uncle Ike cocked his head, taken aback. “My, this ain’t the Juliette I used to know. You sound hard, child.”
“Things change, Uncle Ike. People change. That’s a
ll I care to say. Will you please play?”
That was one of the rare days. A day when she felt secure and confident; possessed of a measure of that courage Paul always said she had within herself, if only she’d reach down and find it.
But then there were the other days. The days of female complaint, when savage pains drove her to bed. The days when she thought fearfully of Bill and the violence latent within him. Days when the bestial darkness crouched in its corner, waiting to leap and devour whatever scrap of contentment she’d found …
Amid a run of the dark days, she saw Aunt Willis again.
It was early August. Elstree had left for the race meeting at Saratoga. “Telegraph me at the Grand Union Hotel in case of emergency. I’ll be away two, perhaps three weeks.”
Julie wondered whether R might also be registered at the Grand Union. She’d considered hiring a detective to follow Bill, in hopes of discovering R’s identity. Then she decided that she really didn’t want to know.
Elstree’s trip to the Monte Carlo of America turned out to be well timed. It allowed Julie to see Aunt Willis in New York without risking a confrontation between her aunt and Bill. They met in Willis’s suite at the Waldorf and rode in a hansom to Delmonico’s for luncheon.
Willis was bone-thin and grayer, but otherwise unchanged. She was full of enthusiasm for her new passion, collecting art. “I’ve chanced on a wonderful painter named Claude. Claude calls himself an impressionist. It’s a curious term, but it defines his work exactly. Some of my tasteless friends say Claude paints with dribbles and dabbles and dots. What of it? The work’s beautiful, very evocative. I’ve bought three paintings and I’m negotiating on a fourth. They’ll never be worth anything, but I don’t care.”