A Prologue To Love (20 page)

“Everybody hates my father!” Caroline continued ruthlessly. “Because he has force and intelligence and can command what he wants. And do you know what I want? I want to be just like him.”

Beth dropped her hand, and Caroline saw her eyes and for an instant she was a little girl again, wanting to burst into tears and run to Beth and hide her face in her lap.

“Yes,” said Beth. “I suppose you do.” She stood up tiredly.

Caroline’s voice stopped her. “And what’s wrong with that? What do you know about anything?” The stricken look was gone from her; her face appeared congested.

Beth paused in the doorway with her back to Caroline. “I suppose I should have expected it eventually,” she said. “There’s nothing else I can do for you, Carrie. Now I can go away. I can’t bear staying here and watching what is happening to you and knowing it will get worse.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Caroline roughly. “You — go away? You can’t! You have to take care of my father’s houses; you have to work for him.”

“No,” said Beth, shaking her head. “I don’t have to do anything, Carrie.” She looked over her shoulder at Caroline and shook her head again. “You think that you can buy people, don’t you, Carrie? Just as your father thinks. But there are some things you can’t buy, and I’m one of them. I have enough money. I have a pension of my own. And so I’m going away when you leave next Thursday with your father. There’s nothing for me here any longer.”

Caroline was angry and alarmed. “After all these years you’ve worked for my father, taking his money! You’d be that ungrateful?”

Now Beth turned fully around. “Are you out of your mind, Carrie? ‘Ungrateful’! You’re very ready to call others fools. You’re a young fool yourself. Your father has paid me less than a third of what I could have gotten many times over. Why did I stay? I could have married Mr. Bentley, the Boston shopkeeper where you buy your dress materials; he’s a rich man, rich enough for me, and I liked him, and he wanted me. That was four years ago. But I didn’t leave. Why? Just because of you, Carrie.” Her voice broke.

Caroline took a step toward her. “I don’t believe it,” she said flatly. “If you’re telling the truth — I don’t believe it! Nobody would be stupid enough to stay when she had a chance to better herself.”

“I would. I was stupid,” said Beth, spreading out her hands. “I agree with you, Carrie. Now it’s too late. Mr. Bentley married somebody else, and I didn’t care. I thought I’d stay here and protect you.”

“From what?” cried Caroline.

“From your father. From what he is; from what he’s already done to you. I wouldn’t be regretting it now, Carrie, if I’d only succeeded. But I failed. Didn’t I?”

Caroline was silent. She peered at Beth in confusion.

“Didn’t I?” repeated Beth.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“No. I don’t suppose you do, Carrie. I don’t suppose, now, you’ll ever understand. It’s too late.” Beth’s voice broke again. “Oh, Carrie. Is it too late?”

Caroline sat down heavily in a chair and put her hands to her cold cheeks.

“I’m tired. I’m hungry. I’m — ” Her muttering tone halted. There was such a wild and chaotic yearning in her, such loss, such anger, such bewilderment. She raised her voice. “Beth, you can’t leave my father. He needs you.”

Then she burst into agonized tears, and Beth ran to her and caught her head in her arms and held it to her warm breast. “Don’t leave me, Beth, don’t leave me!” the girl sobbed. “Oh, God, don’t leave me!”

“Hush, my love. Hush, my dear child. Hush, sweetheart. Of course I won’t leave you. How could I leave a poor child like you? Who would ever help you but me?”

Carrie clung to her, and said over and over in a dull and aching voice, “Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God.” It was too terrible for Beth to bear, and she pressed her cheek against the tormented young mouth and cried.

But Caroline would not see Tom again. Nor did he come to the shingle near the house. He wrote to Beth:

When Carrie wants me I’ll go to her, but not until then. I’ll wait for her, but she’ll have to call me first. Stay with her, Beth. You’re all she has.

“So this is your girl, eh, Johnny?” asked Mrs. Norman Benchley Broome in her hoarse and vulgar voice, as baritone in tone as a man’s. “Not a very pretty specimen, I’d say. You’ll have to buy her a husband.” Her laughter boomed out thunderously, and her raddled cheeks, painted and dry, swelled out. “A pretty price, too, or, damn me, I’ll be mistaken.”

Mrs. Norman Benchley Broome (she insisted upon the full name) had been a whore long ago in one of New York’s better bordellos, where her wit and rough glee and delight in her profession had made her extremely popular and had resulted in a high demand for her specialized services. She had captivated the delicate and attenuated Mr. Broome of one of New York’s oldest and most distinguished families. He had been an elderly widower, extremely wealthy, and a renowned auctioneer, and had recouped family fortunes long dissipated by his father and his uncles. He had no children; he had only numerous nieces and nephews who lusted for his money and whom he detested. So he had married Maggie Spitzler, partly because she amused him tremendously and he was fond of her, and partly to spite his hungry relatives.

New York had not turned its haughty back on Mr. Norman Benchley Broome. He was so rich, his fortune in the high multimillions, and he entertained lavishly and with taste and distinction, and his white-fronted Fifth Avenue house was famous for its parties and excellent company. But New York had approached his bride with scandalized tentativeness, for her past was no secret to the gentlemen, who had been titillated by her, and no secret to their ladies. It was not that Maggie ever pretended she had led a different life. It was even a matter of pride to her, and in drunken and taunting moments she would even embarrass the blushing but avid ladies with accounts of more florid episodes. Maggie, as she would say herself, didn’t give a damn for the proprieties. She gave a damn for nothing but herself, and she had such a love for living, such a dedication to life, and such a boisterous joy in it that eventually she drew all to her as a great fire draws the cold and thin-veined. She was cruel, rowdy, forthright, and blasphemous, and full of wit ‘and the very devil’, the gentlemen would say, thinking of their proper wives and dull daughters. On her husband’s death she had inherited every penny of his estate, his vast holdings, and the hatred of his relatives. She was now in her late sixties and as vital, avaricious, and conscienceless as she had been on the day she had run away from home at fourteen with a ‘drummer’.

John Ames was one of Maggie’s favorites for many reasons, though he was, she would say with hearty and unwinking blatancy, ‘a nobody’. So he had brought his daughter Caroline to visit his very old friend this hot July day when she was on the eve of leaving for Newport.

Caroline had not been impressed by the five-story white and marble-fronted house on Fifth Avenue, for nothing really impressed her except natural, wild, and savage beauty. The gilt and silver, the crystal and bronze, the thick oriental rugs, the statues and the mirrors, the damask and the carved wood, the great alabaster and marble fireplaces, the imported velvet and silk brocades oppressed her rather than inspired her respect or her wonder. They were only on a bigger scale than those in the houses she had infrequently visited in Boston. She thought it dull and dark, for the silk-shrouded windows kept out the blaze of fervent light that palpitated over New York. Her nostrils were offended by the mingled odors of incense and stuffy perfume in the great and crowded rooms. Mrs. Broome, to Caroline, was not only vulgar but disgusting. The girl gave her hostess several long if furtive glances and dismissed her as a detestable, nasty, and unclean old woman. Maggie, who had not reached her present eminence without astuteness and perception, felt Caroline’s cold hostility; however, so great was her vanity and her power that she ascribed it to the fact that Caroline was only a ‘bumpkin’, a raw and unattractive creature who was probably overawed or jealous or frightened.

Caroline sat stiffly on a carved chair with a red velvet seat. It was a throne-like chair; Caroline’s feet barely reached the floor; her dark hair did not touch the back of the chair. Her hands were folded tightly on her purse; her gray silk frock was most unbecoming. But a thin shaft of light creeping through the draperies lay across her eyes, so that Maggie, who could be very imaginative, thought they resembled the eyes of a young lion.

The old woman and the girl of eighteen sat opposite each other. John sat near his old friend, for whom he had an amused affection, much respect, and tolerance. They both drank whiskey, John with distaste but with an expression of appreciation, Maggie lustily. Caroline had refused even sherry, in a cold low voice. She had finally, at a reproving look from her father, accepted an ice, a lemonish drink which she did not like. It floated with bits of strawberries, and its foamy, creaming top nauseated her.

What an old, vicious harridan, Caroline thought, listening to the booms of ear-tearing laughter and the coarse, mannish voice. Mrs. Broome frequently slapped John Ames on one of his immaculate broadcloth thighs and then would let her enormous fingers remain on it a little overlong. She was unusually tall, as tall as John, and lathelike in figure, which a somewhat soiled bright pink brocaded dress with an exaggerated bustle threaded with gold did not soften. She wore slippers to match, and her big bony ankles swelled out over their fashionable narrowness. Once she had had a mass of naturally yellow hair; when it had begun to darken and to gray she promptly had had it dyed, though no other woman in New York would have been so daring. Now it was the color of a brass doorknob or knocker, but not as polished. She wore it piled in bunches of untidy curls and waves on the top of her cranelike head, with quantities of short ringlets, like dyed string, streaming down about a raddled neck. Though Maggie had never, since childhood, been exposed directly to the sun, it was odd that her skin should be so brownish, so coarsened, so resembling large-pored canvas, so grossly withered. Her profile, Caroline thought, resembled one of the less attractive buzzards, with the low slanted forehead, the huge predatory nose, the painted and crinkled large mouth surrounded by merciless clefts from nostrils to corners, the pointed but receding chin. But what really revolted Caroline were the very tiny and depraved black eyes between the bronzed lashes. They resembled varnished raisins and glittered restlessly and never softened, and never expressed anything but brutal amusement or rapacity.

Maggie loved jewelry and had enormous quantities of it. Today she wore her emerald necklace, gigantic stones, dirty and soiled, each surrounded by a halo of precious canary diamonds, and all hung on a jeweled gold chain. Matching bracelets marched up each strong but scrawny brownish arm, and her fingers glittered with rubies, diamonds, emeralds, and sapphires, and long earrings of the same pulled down her ear lobes. Her ears, Caroline noticed, stood out from her head, sinewy and unusually large.

Caroline could feel her power, but her young stubbornness, newly aroused, pushed resolutely against that power. Maggie had met aristocrats like Caroline in the past; she had always demolished them, because under the layers of breeding, courtesy, and good manners lay what Maggie called weakness. She wanted to demolish this girl also, a poor thing in her opinion, gawky, young, ignorant, and without any light or wit. It was unfortunate that she was dear John’s daughter, but one had to put people in their places immediately.

Maggie pondered. She was sixty-eight. John was much younger, but men had a way of dying, sometimes violently, and there was much in John’s past that could bring about violence. His heir would be this bumpkin in her frightful gray dress, ‘like a Quaker’s’, thought Maggie. The round white silk collar made the thick short neck even shorter. But she was John’s heir. The shrewd Maggie felt Caroline’s stolid strength. In the meantime, vexed and insulted by Caroline’s indifference and her hostility, Maggie used raillery delivered at the top of her voice.

“I don’t think I’ll have to buy Caroline a husband,” said John Ames, amused and not irritated by Caroline’s large and weighty silences. “She’ll be able to manage that herself. Don’t underestimate my girl.”

Maggie sniffed, produced a grayish and widely laced handkerchief from her sleeve, and blew her nose like a longshoreman. Dirty old hag, thought Caroline resentfully. Maggie looked at her and caught the expression in the girl’s eyes, the icy disdain, the cool withdrawal, the fastidious eyebrows. She grinned. The late afternoon sunshine took a reddish tinge. “I don’t underestimate anything belonging to you, Johnny boy,” said Maggie, having discerned that Caroline winced at this affectionate nickname. “Somebody like her daddy, eh? Do you remember, Johnny, my love — ?”

Caroline, in spite of her aversion, listened intently. Her father had told her little of his connection with the Broomes. Maggie enlarged on it with gusto, much thigh-slapping, many winks, nudges, and sly grins. The falling sun began to make a pattern on the crimson damask wall opposite; the fabric shone like rubies, and Caroline noticed it with the inner eye of the artist and thought how it might be reproduced in paints. But her attention was unwillingly grasped by the roaring and insistent voice of her hostess and its very vitality, and soon she heard and saw nothing else but this woman.

“Let me see, Johnny pet,” said Maggie, tapping a big and crooked finger against her lip. “I had been married to that Old Bastard five years; that made me thirty-five. You were about twenty-one, and more handsome than any of the vaudeville boys who used to slide in to see the cheaper girls at Madame de Plante’s. But in those days you didn’t have a flat dollar, did you?”

Caroline’s thick black brows drew together, puzzled. John looked at her out of the corner of his eye. Then he smiled at his old friend. “Not a dollar,” he agreed. “That is, none I could spare just then.”

“Ah, me, I got top price!” sighed the old beldame reminiscently. “And enjoyed it, too, and that’s more than the other trollops did. But never give anything for nothing; never found that bad advice at any time. Yes, you were about twenty-one and you’d been working for the Old Bastard for nearly a year, and he brought you here for dinner one night, and in you came in your secondhand, threadbare broadcloth coat — way out of style; they were wearing coats short that year, just about reaching their asses — and I thought, ‘What’s the old fool dragging in this time, something out of an alley cat’s litter?’ And there you were, looking like a million dollars. And I didn’t care if everything you had on didn’t cost two cents. You had me, Johnny, you had me.”

“Eight dollars,” said John Ames. Caroline was staring at Maggie, hardly understanding a word except that what she had heard was shameful. She could tell that from the sliding grins, the nudges, the chuckles of her hostess. What horrified Caroline was that her father was smiling, as if at a pleasant memory. “I bought it at Sam the Gentile’s in Chatham Square. And I still owed him four dollars for it when I came here, and he trusted me.”

“Hah!” exclaimed Maggie. “That showed a lack of sense on his part — Sam the Gentile! Did you pay him? Don’t tell me. I’d rather believe you didn’t. Where was I? Yes, Johnny, you had me two minutes after you walked in. The Old Bastard said: ‘Maggie, my dear, here is a young man who is going far, and he’s right under my wing’. I didn’t worry. Being under the Old Bastard’s wing didn’t mean he’d give you a cent you wouldn’t earn five times over. Johnny,” she said with a hideously languorous look and leaning toward him, “do you remember what I wore that night?”

“Certainly. A Worth gown of woven silver, and turquoises.”

She slapped his upper thigh resoundingly and beamed at him. “You never forget anything! You know, Johnny, I said to myself, ‘I’ll have that boy in bed with me as quick as a wink, as soon as I can get rid of the Old Bastard some evening’.”

Caroline turned a brilliant pink. John cleared his throat. “Now, Maggie. You never did, you know.”

“But I tried though, didn’t I?” She grinned at him archly. “But you were all loyalty to the poor old sod, and I never minded it a bit. I knew you’d be loyal that way to me, too, someday, after I’d put him down under the old six feet. I was a fine figure of a woman, wasn’t I, Johnny? The Old Bastard, heaven rest his thieving soul, got his excitements from watching me comb out my long yellow hair at night and brushing it over his big bloated belly; it was like a big toad.”

John cleared his throat again. He would have preferred that Maggie be more restrained; Caroline might have indigestion over this. If she were older, reflected John, I’d be afraid, with that color, that she was on the point of having a stroke. “Now, Maggie,” he said with a slightly quelling glance at his dear old friend.

She tossed her head. “Oh, I forgot Miss Stockington, in person, was here.” She chuckled. “But, what the hell, Johnny! She’s got to learn someday, if only secondhand like your old suit. Doubt she’ll ever learn any other way. Truly, Johnny, the girl doesn’t resemble you at all, though I must admit that’s a fine pair of eyes there. Does she ever smile or laugh?”

“Not often,” said John. “Young people are always very serious, you know.”

“Never anything to be serious about in this world, except money.” Maggie was enjoying herself. She continued with her reminiscences.