A Prologue To Love (44 page)

“Caroline’s eccentric, yes,” said Mr. Tandy. “Let me be candid, dear boy. Caroline led a very secluded life while a child. Then she traveled with her father. She met many famous people internationally. Her father entertained them, and they entertained him and Caroline. Had she been — ah — capable of forming friendships in those young years she would have done so. But she did not. There are some people who are constitutionally incapable of making friends. They are recluses by nature. Caroline is simply wise enough to know her incapacity.”

Mr. Tandy felt he was being mendacious, but he wanted to comfort Tom. Besides, John Ames had been dead a long time, and it was bad taste to arouse the dead, to confront them with accusations, to denounce and judge them.

Now Tom was coloring again, and he smoked and looked at the window, where the November light was ashen and dull. “I don’t know how to say this, sir, but I must. I’ve been reading some books about a doctor in Vienna, a Dr. Sigmund Freud. I don’t understand his theories, but then I’m not an educated man. But from what I have read, he has cured people like Caroline through some sort of hocus-pocus. And I understand that there are some of his pupils in New York now. I have the address of one or two of them, which I got from the newspapers.

“I thought,” said Tom, “that you might talk to Carrie and persuade her to see one of them. He might cure her of her terrible fears and her obsession for me and make her more normal and pull her out of herself. Something must be done quick for Carrie.”

“My dear young man!” exclaimed Mr. Tandy. “Are you speaking of alienists? They are for mad people. Good gracious! Caroline’s not mad. Did you actually think that an alienist, by some sort of hocus-pocus, as you call it, could help Caroline? I’ve read about their theories, too, quite extensively. They are of the opinion that every quirk of human nature is in some way connected with — ah — with intimate relationships. Can you conceive of Caroline talking artlessly and confidentially to such a man, when she won’t even talk to you, whom she loves? The idea is ludicrous! Caroline!”

Tom was silent. Mr. Tandy became agitated and shook his head. “There’s nothing wrong with Caroline; she’s mentally and physically far superior to most members of her sex. Her mind is absolutely clear and sharp, like a man’s. And I’m certain she had no — ah — twisted thoughts about her father, as those men would imply. Certainly John Ames had a powerful influence over her, but not that! How could you think that of her? Good gracious!”

“I didn’t!” shouted Tom, ashamed and red-faced. “Good God! Don’t you understand? I thought one of those alienists could help her, that’s all.”

“Well, then,” said Mr. Tandy, “Tom, let me tell you this: Caroline is a strong individualist. She is not like other women. She is herself, and as a human being and herself she deserves her dignity, which these men would violate, even if you could get her to go to one. She would have every right to be insulted at the mere suggestion. Why, I’ll wager she has twice the intelligence of that Freud himself! And a great deal more character and self-discipline. If she is peculiar about money and has fears about it, that isn’t unusual. We call it the fetishism of money. It doesn’t represent to Caroline what it represents to others, and she isn’t the only human being with that peculiarity. It represents, I think, security to her, and the slightest loss of it makes her frantic, for her security is threatened. Why she has this fear, I don’t know, but again it is not unusual. I know half a dozen people in Boston alone who are that way. We call them ‘eccentrics’.”

He added with more gentleness, “Don’t be alarmed. God can help her. But only God. I am an old man, and I never gave much thought to God in my youth, but I do now. If we all prayed more and tormented ourselves less, this would be a happier world. A more peaceful one. If you can, at any time, turn Caroline’s slightest thought to God, you will help her to her own individual salvation, for men aren’t saved by themselves but only by the power, the merits, and the grace of God. Caroline is in His hands.”

It was bitterly sleeting when Tom arrived home the next morning. After he dismissed the station hack he walked around the side of his great house and looked at the sea walk leading to the shingle. More huge boulders had been washed up upon it. He shook his head. The ocean roared and hissed in the storm and was hidden behind the steely curtain of the sleet. Caroline would not let him, despite his strength, move the boulders himself, and she was always promising to get ‘the man’ to move them. “You have to watch your heart at your age, Tom,” she said. ‘The man’ rarely appeared. Caroline called him shiftless and spoke of the hard-working servants in her aunt’s former home in Boston. Tom suspected, quite rightly, that Caroline would not pay him enough.

Tom listened to the howling and screaming of sleet and water and watched the faint dull light that hardly lifted the desolation. A strong odor of salt mingled with the furious wind. Tom said aloud, “Somehow, this makes me think of my own life.” He pulled his coat up around his ears and went into the house. He encountered Gladys in the dark hall, and as she helped him remove his wet coat she sniffed and gasped audibly. With his usual kindness he asked what troubled her.

“Oh, sir!” she sobbed. “It’s awful! Poor Beth died late last night! All alone, too.”

“Oh, my God,” said Tom, feeling heavy and old and full of grief. “Well, she wasn’t young, Gladys, so don’t cry like that.” He paused. “What time did the doctor come, Gladys, and what did he say?”

Gladys paused portentously, Tom’s coat dangling in her arms. “After she was dead, sir. Oh, ain’t it awful? Poor Beth!”

Tom stood still. “Why wasn’t he sent for before she died?”

Gladys hung up the coat in the hall closet before she answered. And then she said in a muffled voice, “The mistress didn’t send for him, sir, until I came down after looking in on Beth at ten o’clock, just before I was going to bed, and there she was, dead. I’d seen her last at six when I took up her supper, and she was very sick, sir, indeed she was!”

“Did you tell Mrs. Sheldon that?” asked Tom.

“Yes, sir! And she said that Beth would be all right, and if she wasn’t the doctor could come today.”

“And — no one — was with her when she died?”

“No, sir. Nobody. I wanted to look in on her a couple of times, but I was busy with Miss Elizabeth and Master Ames. They do get out of hand, and old Mr. Burton can’t handle them alone.”

“Mrs. Sheldon didn’t go up at any time?”

“Not that I know of, sir. She was busy, like always, in her study.”

“Yes,” said Tom. “Like always.”

Gladys had drawn the shades in Beth’s room, but Tom opened them. He was conscious of the profound silence of death in the little chamber and the sound of wind and sleet battering against the small windowpane. Beth lay in her bed, which had been neatly remade, and she appeared asleep, her sparse white hair around her withered face. Tom stood beside the bed and looked down at the dead woman, and even in his inner rage and grief he was aware of the sadness and loneliness of her expression, the abandonment of the folded hands on her sunken breast.

He looked at the forlorn old woman for a long time. Then he said aloud, “Good-by, Beth. I loved you very much. God be with you.” Then he went downstairs. The silence of death appeared here also; the children’s voices could not be heard. To Tom, this was stealthy and guilty and sly. He went to Caroline’s study and flung open the door with a bang. The room had been lit against the darkness of the day, and Caroline was at her desk, frowning, her new spectacles on her nose, her pen in her hand, and heaps of neat papers before her, and ledgers. She was not yet dressed; she wore one of the flannel nightgowns Beth had made for her and her ancient brown dressing gown, and her feet were in slippers. She started at the noise of Tom’s entrance, looked up, removed the glasses, and gave him a sober smile, waiting for his usual kiss. But he stood in the doorway and looked at her, and all at once she was aware of his anger.

“Tom,” she said. Then, “I’m so sorry about Beth.”

“That’s a lie,” he said. “A filthy, conscienceless lie. A contemptible lie. You aren’t sorry at all. You let her die alone. You didn’t even send for the doctor until she was dead, though you gave me your promise. She served you all your life, loving and caring for you when no one else cared for you or loved you, and she wouldn’t leave you. She was better than most mothers to you. But you couldn’t spare five minutes to see her yesterday, to speak to her kindly, to show her any concern, to let her know that you loved her, But you never loved anybody, did you, Carrie?”

She jumped to her feet. Terror filled her eyes, and even now Tom could wonder confusedly at it.

“Tom! Beth was old and sick. Very old, very sick. She’d been this way for over two years. She had every comfort! Gladys waited on her hand and foot. And Beth knew how busy I am; she understood.”

“Did she? Does anyone understand when they’re dying and no one comes or cares? Will you understand, Carrie, when that time comes for you?”

(The terror became a stark brightness on Caroline’s face, and she was a girl again, listening to paternal reproaches she did not comprehend but which threatened her.) “Tom!” she cried again. “I’m going to have Beth buried tomorrow near your parents. I’ll put up a big stone for her. I’ve ordered the nicest coffin from Boston — it cost three hundred dollars. And a lot of flowers from Brewster; they’ll be here tonight. Tom!”

“A coffin and a stone and flowers for an old dead woman who had just wanted to know that you hadn’t forgotten her,” said Tom. “Just think how much that’s going to cost you, Carrie. A few dividends for November from New York Central Railroad! How can you bear it?”

She held out her hands to him, and her face was blank. She had the bewildered attitude of one who is blind and waits for attack.

“I’ll never forgive you for this, Carrie,” said Tom, and stepped back over the threshold and shut the door behind him.

He could not stand the house yet, the silent, guilty house. The dead old woman on the top floor seemed to dominate it, to fill it with her forlorn and seeking presence. He put on his coat and went outside into the wind and dimness and salt sleet and walked down the sea lane to the shingle, which was wet and black. The wind tore at him; the sleet stung his face; the scream of the ocean deafened him. But he stood and did not care or even know. He was one wound of sorrow.

Then he felt a hand on his shoulder and heard someone panting beside him. He looked and saw Caroline. She had flung one of his old coats over her dressing gown. Her ankles were bare, and her loosened hair whipped about her face. “Oh, Tom,” she cried. “Come in! You’ll catch lung fever out here. Please come back, Tom.”

“I’ll never come back,” he said.

“Listen!” cried Caroline in despair. (She was fifteen years old again, and she had not heard from her father for several months and she was afraid he was ill or dead in some foreign city, and she was lost.)

“I can’t listen, Carrie, because you can’t say anything that would mean something to me. You’ve ruined your own life. You’re ruining the children’s lives. I can’t help you. I’ve tried, all these years. You’re beyond help. But I can help the children because they’re still young. They never had a father like yours, God damn him!”

(The young Caroline had no words. She was heartbroken; no one cared for her; there was no one in the house but Beth, who could not comprehend her few incoherent words and cries.) “Listen!” she pleaded. “Please listen.” The loneliness, the forsakenness, was a thick aching in her heart, and the inability to communicate was a stone in her throat.

“To what? What can you say, Carrie? I can only tell you that I’ve loved you so much that I’ve become less of a man because of it and let you have your own way all the time so you wouldn’t be hurt. But I’m going to take a hand in things now, myself, about the children.”

(She was now the Caroline who had heard her father cry out, not for her, but for his other daughter. She was the forgotten daughter, and only the other was remembered.)

“Oh, God, listen,” she groaned. “I’m here. Don’t you hear me? Please listen. Don’t you hear me?”

“I hear you, Carrie,” said Tom, unrelenting. He pushed his hands into his pockets and turned his face from her, and it was the turning away of her father’s face. She grasped his arm with both hands and clung despairingly to him. Her wet loose hair blew about her like a long dark banner.

“I’m trying to tell you about Beth. It isn’t the way you think. I’m not that bad. Beth — ”

“I don’t care what you think, Carrie. But I am thinking of Beth and all that Beth means. And I’m thinking of the way you won’t have anything to do with your family, and especially with Alfred Bothwell’s wife, Melinda, who never hurt you.”

(The storm howled about them and shook them, but Caroline was the girl who had first seen her aunt in her father’s arms, in warm lamplight, and she was hearing Cynthia’s soft, seductive voice. And she herself was betrayed.)

“Listen,” she whimpered. “Please listen.”

“What you have, Carrie, in money means nothing to me. It never did. What is money? You gave your life to it, just as your father did. You’re nearly forty, and you worship money and put all your humanity in it, as if it meant anything at all.”

(She was the young Caroline crouching on the dirty floor of Fern and Son, robbed, beaten, dragged, thrown down.)

“Listen,” she sobbed, and shrank back from him. “You don’t know what money means to me, Tom.”

“Yes, I do,” he said in a hard voice above the storm. “It means your life, doesn’t it?”

“Yes. Yes. But not the way you think. Please listen.”

One of her hands clutched him again, and he pushed it off, not feeling its icy wetness. “I’m going in,” he said. “And you’d better too. Doctors cost money, you know.” He paused. “You’ve even made our house ugly and dirty because it costs money to keep a house clean. You’ve bought all those expensive pictures, but you keep them locked away and hide the key. Why, Carrie, why?”

(She was the young girl who had sat in the woods near the old house in Lyndon in the autumn, with the trees fiery about her and the sky brilliant through and above them, and there was a scarlet ribbon in her hand.) “They’re mine,” she said, her voice rough and hoarse. (They were hers, secret and loved, and they loved her in return, and she was not alone but was communicating in fullness with beauty and tenderness.)

“Yes, everything’s yours, Carrie. Everything. But not everything now. You can have your money. That’s where your treasure is, as the Bible says.”

(But her treasure was in love, and there was no love and no security now.) “Why don’t you listen?” she said. “Let’s go in and I’ll try to tell you.” Her voice died away futilely.

“You don’t have anything to tell me any longer, Carrie.”

He stood apart from her, and there was no love, no concern, no softening on his face. Her thin slippers had sunk into the wet sand; a wavelet of the incoming tide dashed over her ankles. He said, “You hate people. You always did. I don’t know why. Maybe you think that friendship will cost you a little cash. You never give anything to charity. You care for no one but yourself. And your money.”

(She was beating again on the doctor’s door, and then the doctor was there and she was pulling at his sleeve and he was resisting her and regarding her with scorn and detestation because he thought she had no money to pay for help for her dying father. She heard the last echoes of the clanging of his doorbell.)