A Prologue To Love (84 page)

They went downstairs together. The maid had opened a few windows, and the ragged draperies were blowing in a fresh wind. Everything outside dripped and sparkled, even the lost garden. The sea spoke in its great voice. Ames listened. “It is the only thing I miss,” he said. “The sound of the sea.”

But nothing else, thought his mother. There was nothing else for you to remember, my son.

She watched him run lightly down the broken path to the cab he had brought. He did not look back. There was nothing to draw his eye to his mother in a last kindness, in a farewell. He had forgotten her. As I forgot him, always, when he was a child, she said to herself, desolated.

Higsby Chalmers was extremely shocked at Caroline’s appearance. She appeared to him to be dying steadily with her house, to be pacing with it in its decline into wreckage. He murmured, “My dear Caroline,” when he took her hand, and could helplessly say no more for a while. When Caroline offered him tea he accepted, though he wished to decline. He had need to recover from his human consternation and his pity. Then he became aware that there was some subtle change in her, for she was looking at him not with her old expression of withdrawal and indifference but intensely, as if weighing and considering.

The teacups were sticky, the tea itself foul, the little cakes uneatable. But Higsby, usually fussy about such matters, was not aware of them now. He was conscious only of Caroline. There was a change in her; it was as if she had come up a cobwebbed companionway from the dark bowels of some ruin of a ship, and her eyes were looking, for the first time, on the running sea and comprehending its existence.

Caroline always came to the point, unlike other people, and Higsby was not surprised when she said, “I read your letter fully and then put it aside. It did not concern me. But lately it has. Why isn’t of importance. Tell me more.”

Higsby put down his teacup, leaned forward toward her, clasping his plump hands between his knees. “As I’ve written you, Caroline, the thing that is in the world now, the war, is the opening of the grand design against mankind. You told me last year that you had known of it since you were less than twenty-four. President Wilson is dimly coming to understand too; you will remember that only lately he warned America again never to permit a strong centralized government in Washington.”

Mr. Chalmers stood up and walked slowly and distressfully up and down the gritty floor. He stopped and stared through a smudged window at the wild garden, and he thought: That is the way it will all be soon unless we can stop it.

“Can we stop it?” asked Caroline in her low, rough voice. “I don’t think so, Higsby. We have too many idealists and simple men like Mr. Roosevelt in Washington. I’ve known all you’ve been telling me since I was a young girl. We can’t stop it, Higsby.”

“Perhaps not,” said Higsby with sadness. “We have the enemy here, too, in full force. Eugene Debs, who was indicted for conspiracy to kill. The Socialist movement. Now new, in America, as it is not new in Europe. Like you, Caroline, I feel that these creatures will force us into a war with Germany to prevent a quick, negotiated peace between Germany and England. And to give impetus to revolution, beginning in Russia.”

“I know, I know,” said Caroline. “I’ve known, perhaps, for much longer than you have, Higsby. But you must have some plan or you’d not be here.”

He sat down and wiped his cherubic face. “I have. Education of the people. A foundation, such as the Carnegie Foundation which established free libraries. I even have a name for it,” and he smiled sadly. “The American Foundation for Constitutional Freedom. The Constitution stands in the way of the tyrants. It will be destroyed unless we begin to enlighten the people. I have the idea of a large, permanent building somewhere, perhaps in New England. We will staff it with informed intellectuals, experts on the Constitution, teachers, professors, historians, people aware of what is truly happening in the world. They will write pamphlets, sheets, bulletins, perhaps a newspaper. All this will be disseminated profusely over every section of the country. Free. To schools, to clubs, to organizations, to newspapers, to universities and colleges, to the professional and business people. Without charge. We must alert writers and newspapermen, everyone who has access to the public means of communication.”

Caroline shook her head. “You won’t win, Higsby. It’s impossible. The American people will be offered everything in exchange for their liberty. You must remember ancient Rome. A country never greedily took the path to tyranny, in all the world’s history, and turned back. Not once, anywhere.”

Higsby said stoutly, “There was never a Constitution like ours, Caroline, in the history of the world. You see, miracles do happen. Perhaps America will turn back one day. Who knows? But shall we let her go without one protest, by default? Shall we hopelessly, by our silence, accede to her destruction? For our souls’ sake, we cannot!”

“How much?” said Caroline. Higsby sat down and talked quietly and steadily. Then Caroline, when he had finished, went to her study and wrote out a check. She brought it downstairs again and gave it to Higsby, He caught his breath.

“That is only the beginning,” said Caroline. “There will be more. And I will establish a trust for your hopeless, your surely hopeless, foundation.” She smiled grimly. “But we’ll have tried, won’t we?”

She folded her hands together and looked beyond him. “I’ve never taken any interest in my country until now. I never took any interest in anything until now. When it is too late, perhaps.”

Before calling on his mother, John Sheldon first went to see his mother-in-law, Melinda Bothwell, who had a great affection for him. He did not deliberately take advantage of that affection, but he reached for it greedily. He everlastingly wanted to be liked, to be regarded fondly. It was like a protection which he urgently needed. Melinda always spoke to him kindly and tenderly, knowing his desperate need, and he basked in whatever she said and in her accepting presence. She knew how weak he was now; she only prayed that that weakness would not injure her daughter.

He laughed when she told him that her son Nathaniel had enlisted for an officers’ training school. “He was always quixotic, wasn’t he, Mother Bothwell?” said John. He resented Nathaniel’s existence; he would inherit half of the Bothwell fortune, and Nathaniel did not particularly care about his brother-in-law.

Melinda looked at John gravely, her beautiful calm face showing no annoyance. “Quixotic? Perhaps. Both my children always had passions of devotion to something or other. It is their nature. Nathaniel is sure we’ll be in this war; he wants to do his duty, he says. It is not that he’s convinced this is a just war, but he wants to help his country if she needs him.”

John shrugged and laughed again. For one instant he hoped that, in the event of a war, Nathaniel would be — He hurried away from the thought in his mind. Mimi would be brokenhearted. Then, as always, he was jealous. Mimi should have no other loves but himself.

“How is Mimi?” Melinda asked, understanding everything, and full of pity. John was so vital, so full of physical strength, so ruddy and imposing, and in many ways so intelligent. He did not have the intellect of his brother Ames, nor his appreciation for beauty. There was much of his mother in him.

“Splendid, splendid,” said John. And then his hazel eyes hardened. “She is almost six months expecting, Mother Bothwell. Yet she is working all day and part of the night in preparation for her one-woman show in New York — just about the time the baby is due! I wish you’d speak to her; write to her.”

“Why?” asked Melinda mildly. “That is a great part of her life, John. She is an authentic genius, though you don’t seem to know it. Those two gold medals she’s already received weren’t given her because she is a Bothwell or because she is pretty!”

John covered his anger with an engaging, coaxing smile. “Oh, I know that. I’m not entirely a fool.” But he thought: Mother Bothwell is an idiot, and though she is a very feminine woman she doesn’t seem to understand that a woman should devote all her life to her husband and have nothing else in all the world but him. Even her children should be nothing in comparison. There were moments when he tightly resented, even disliked, his coming child. He only endured the thought of it, sure that his mother, in spite of everything, would make the child her heir.

“Her work is noted for its marvelous color, in particular,” said Melinda. “You know what they say: power, depth, fervor, as well as drawing. No other living artist, some critics say, is able to get so intense a red, so living and so vital a yellow, so furious a blue.”

“Well,” said John. He sat with Melinda in the beautiful room overlooking the sea. It was particularly brilliant today, a passionate aquamarine. He had long known his defect and had hidden it, he thought, from everyone. It was only that damned Ames who knew. Like all those who had secret defects, he had made it wholly his own and had even come to regard it as valuable, or at least distinctive.

“Don’t you think so?” Melinda said.

“I’m no art critic,” said John with a beguiling expression and a carefully cultivated gesture of self-deprecation which always disarmed a potential critic or enemy.

“Of course not,” said Melinda, whom he had, as usual, disarmed. “Do have some more tea, John.”

He wanted a good sound whiskey before he saw his mother, but he never offended, even slightly, if he could help it. He accepted more tea, which he loathed, and with an air of gratitude that she could be so kind, “You know that Amy has left Ames?” he said.

“Yes.”

John laughed. He knew Melinda’s fondness for Amy and Amy’s brothers and Amanda. “She should never have married him,” he said. “That nice little girl.” He did not think Amy ‘nice’ at all. He thought her a stupid, vacuous little fool whose only virtue was her father’s money.

“I agree that the marriage shouldn’t have taken place,” said Melinda. “It was disastrous for both of them. Ames is entirely too intellectual and too-finished — for Amy.”

John was not sure that he liked this statement. He thought his brother a poseur, with all those ‘treasures’ of his and his malicious insistence that John observe the delicate colorings of enamels or porcelain when he knew all the time —

Melinda looked at the watch on her breast. “Dear me, it’s almost time for you to go to see your mother,” she said. “Don’t call for a cab. My own car is here, and Gregory will drive you to your mother’s and then to the station.”

“I don’t know why she wants to see me,” said John. “We haven’t seen each other since Mimi and I were married. And she tried to prevent the marriage, at that.”

“Perhaps she wants to talk about Mimi’s show,” said Melinda.

“I hardly think so,” said John. “They haven’t seen each other for ages.”

Melinda smiled. When the car came for John she gave the young man her hand affectionately, but her large gray eyes were full of concern. She did not know why she said out of impulse, “Be kind to my child, John. She is a dedicated artist; she had no choice in the matter. Do try to understand a little, won’t you?”

John patted her hand. He always knew what to say, and now he said generously, looking into Melinda’s eyes, “I try. I don’t always succeed. I hope it’s enough.”

John had been greatly disturbed over the separation of Ames and Amy. His brother had blandly told him, smiling that subtle smile of his, “Now I’ll soon be free to marry a healthy woman who’ll give me children. Not that I like the little swine, but there is all Mama’s money, you know.”

Ames had seemed very complacent, like a white and slender cat of aristocratic breeding. He had looked at his brother with one of those infernal mysterious expressions of his.

“I thought the old lady had bribed you to marry Amy. I heard some rumors.”

“You must never,” said Ames, “credit rumors.”

“But you seemed very damned prosperous after the marriage! In fact, the old lady as much as admitted to me that she bribed yon to marry Amy. Everybody knew.”

“I am not one to make public announcements,” said Ames. He said with a glint in his cold slate-gray eyes, “I hope when I marry that I have a dozen children. I intend to marry a good breeder. With the exception of Mama, the family doesn’t run to breeding. Even she had only three of us.”

So Ames would soon be free again to marry — and have children who would inherit the great Ames fortune — Ames, whom John had thought would be eliminated.

As John was driven to his mother’s house he began to have some sanguine thoughts, as he was a naturally optimistic young man. Had the old white hag repented? Was she going to announce a softening of her decision? What else could be the reason? She had done her worst to John. Anything else she could do would be for the better. He remembered her voice on the telephone, strange, faint, hesitating, almost questioning. His always buoyant spirits rose higher as he rang the bell at his mother’s gates. When he saw her approach down the broken path, he noticed how old she had become, how slow and ponderous in movement, how laboring. Her head was bent. He had never seen it bent that way before, as if she were mortally tired. He wished she would look up to see his broad white smile. She did. He smiled wider, took off his hat, made his brightly colored face affectionate. “Mother!” he called to her.

Caroline paused on the path. She saw John through the gates, confident, smiling, appearing to be delighted to see her. It isn’t the money, she thought; please God, it isn’t the money. She knew the thought was foolish. When had it ever not been the money? But a starving man, seizing food given to him by an enemy for the enemy’s own evil reasons, does not question. Let it be that I can reach him, she prayed.

Her lips moved. Was she actually smiling? thought John in astonishment. His thoughts ran quickly, plotting, arranging themselves, conjecturing.

Something was ‘up’. He became a little confused, and he sweated under the August sun and was excited. He told himself to be careful, to watch her before speaking, to turn every word over before it was uttered. He remembered that his mother was no fool; it was almost impossible to deceive her. She couldn’t have added so enormously to her father’s fortune if she had been a fool. Yet, he thought, even people like his mother became senile, soft, open to cajolery, to false affirmations of concern. Look at old Brundage, a hard-fisted old Wall Streeter at eighty, hating his children, hating his wife, hating everyone. But one of his daughters, who had made a bad marriage, had, within a month of his death, so diddled him, so lavished hypocritical affection on him, so hovered about him, that he had made her his major heir. He had refused to see her for fifteen long years before that.

John thought: Maybe Mama wasn’t as complacent about Amy’s desertion of Ames as he had pretended. It’s possible that she’s up in the air and he was lying to me.

“I’m awfully glad to see you, Mother,” he said with just the right amount of awkward sincerity in his voice as she unlocked the gates. He put on an embarrassed expression and looked aside. His mother’s hand paused on the key. He knew that she was examining him, listening. Waiting. So that’s it, he thought exultantly. But what ‘it’ was, he did not quite know.

“Why are you glad to see me?” asked Caroline abruptly.

Under the same circumstances Ames would have said, “You sent for me, didn’t you? You must have had a reason. It may even be a good reason!’’

Caroline would have understood that sourly. But John said with an impulsive flow of words, “After all, you’re my mother, aren’t you? I’ve missed you.” Caroline knew it was a lie. Slowly she turned the key and in silence admitted her son.

He followed her up the path to the house, and he maintained a jocular and boyish air. He said to his mother’s back, “A man likes to think he has some family. I wondered when you’d ask me to come.”

“Did you?” said Caroline without turning.

He sat opposite his mother in the deathly living room. He had not been here for many months. It’s like an abandoned cemetery, he thought. He remembered it as it had once been, full of firelight and lamplight and sun. For almost the first time since Tom’s death he thought of his father. Poor devil. Poor ignorant devil.

“Mimi sends you her love, Mother,” he said.

Caroline felt the hidden miniature which Mimi had given her warm against her heart, for now she wore it inside her clothing. “I suppose so,” she murmured. Then she could not help herself: “Is she happy?” Caroline’s voice rose. “You are not making her miserable?”

John looked at his mother and frowned. “Certainly she’s happy, Mother. I wish you’d see her or let her come here to see you.”

Caroline said, “She came here. Just recently. Didn’t she tell you?”

“No.” John smiled over his anger. So Mimi wasn’t as open as he thought. Why hadn’t she told him? “She likes her little secrets, like all women.”

“And,” said Caroline reluctantly, for she had not intended to ask this at all, “the baby. It will be born in December?”

“Yes.” John brightened. “If it’s a girl, would you like her named after you?”

“No,” said Caroline.

John’s brightness dimmed. His mother’s tone had been harsh and firm. He could not know that the very thought of a child being named after her frightened her with something that was very like superstition. John said, “Mimi wants to call her Christina.”

“Christina,” said Caroline. The syllables seemed to cling to her heart as a child’s fingers cling to one’s hand. She smiled faintly. “A very nice name. And if it’s a boy?”

“Thomas,” said John promptly, thinking of that only at that very moment.

Caroline was silent. John was sure that he knew the way now; it was through Mimi. He was no longer angry with his wife. Why, the little devil was smart and cunning! She, too, had a nose for money.

“Her painting?” said Caroline.

John considered his mother. He shrugged and said lightly, “She still plays around with her paints. Even now. She wants to have a show just before the baby is born. It’s true that I don’t know very much about art” — and he watched his mother warily — “but it’s also true that Mimi isn’t a real artist — that is, of any importance — though she’s received some recognition and even some money. If she were an important artist she’d be wallowing in gold bills.”

Caroline’s broad face was closed. She thought of her grandfather, David Ames. And then she studied her son sharply. Did he value everything only in terms of money? But, she said to herself, I have always been that way, always, except for my grandfather’s paintings. Why should I expect something different from my sons? Her eyes left John and stared desolately at a distant window.

How can I reach him, she asked herself, if there is anything there to reach? What words can I say to him to ask his forgiveness, to beg for some affection, to explain that all my life was a victimization and I crave his pity for what I am and for what I did to my children? How does one say this to one’s children in one’s old age, especially if one never knew how to use words?

“I think,” said Caroline, “that Mary is a true artist and that someday she’ll be famous.”

John sat up, smiling brilliantly. “If you say so, then it must be so, Mother.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked with disconcerting sharpness.

“Well. You have your gallery; you’ve had it for years.”

Caroline paused. She tested him. “Would you like to see it?”

She hoped that he would say, “If you want to show it to me, but I know nothing about it. You see, I can’t distinguish color at all; I’m color-blind.”

If he had that honesty, some of her anguish would leave; she would then have a way to reach him.

But John shone like the sun. “I’d love it! I’ve always wanted to see it! Ames told me of the — the color, the vitality, the meaning.”

It’s no use, thought Caroline. What a fool I am.

Desolation, like death, filled every portion of her sick body. In other years she would have said to John, “You are lying. You could not see the colors in those paintings.” But now she was full of compassion. She said almost gently, “I’m sorry. But I’m afraid I’m too tired today to climb the stairs. By the way, did Ames tell you that my paintings were done by David Ames, who was your great-grandfather?”