A Prologue To Love (89 page)

“I remember so many things about you, unfortunately, that it sometimes depresses me. But I am learning to control even that.” Amy stood up and smiled down at him. “I must leave you now. So good-by. You need not, you know, even appear in court.”

Ames looked up at her. How pretty she was, really beautiful. He had never noticed before the loveliness of her serene eyes, the firm curve of her pink lips. She had spirit and grace. She was a woman, too, and she was tender and not maudlin. She had the power of self-assurance and self-control and kindly warmth.

Ames said suddenly, “Oh, I’ll be in court, all right! To contest the divorce.”

Amy stood very still. Then she said quietly, “But why? You never really wanted me, Ames.”

“I do now.” He darted out his hand and took one of hers.

“My dear,” she said, watching him and holding back her tears, “you’ll never see one cent of my money. Not one cent.”

“I don’t want it,” said Ames.

“Good heavens. What’s come over you?”

“You,” said Ames.

Amy let him hold her hand. “I must think about all this. I’m not sure I care a thing about you. The girl who loved you has gone. I am a different person entirely, a stranger.”

“Let’s get acquainted, then,” said Ames gravely. “Permit me, madam, to introduce myself. Your husband. May I have the next dance?”

“You may, sir,” said Amy. “But only that one dance. My program is all filled up.”

“I’ll manage that,” said Ames.

They looked at each other, then they began to laugh together, and Amy bent down and gave him a chaste kiss. But his arm went about her neck and he kissed her thoroughly, until her hat fell from her head.

“You’re not the only one who’s been a damned fool,” said Ames. “But as former damned fools, and therefore dangerous, let’s take each other out of circulation. Who else could stand us?”

When Amy, adjusting her hat, came into the living room, Caroline was waiting for her in cold and somber silence. Amy sat down near her, and then Caroline said, “When I took you home you told me that you could not love my son, for you had become entirely different.”

“Yes,” said Amy. “I did. I am. But I think, too, that Ames has become a little different too. We’ll see.”

“I don’t believe in happy endings,” said Caroline.

Amy shook her head. “I don’t either, Cousin Caroline. I don’t believe in endings at all.”

Caroline studied her, then her hard expression softened. “I never saw it before, but you resemble your mother more than a little. What do you mean by not believing in endings?”

“Every day is different, and in some way we change with every day,” said Amy. “I must think about all this.”

Caroline walked into her son’s room. His bandaged head was turned to Amy’s yellow roses. Caroline said at once, “I hope you fully understand what you and Amy are doing.”

He half turned his head and slanted his eyes at her. “Does anyone?” he replied. “Did you always know?”

Caroline considered this. Then she said, “I don’t think, really, that I ever knew.”

He looked at the ceiling. “It’s very funny,” said Ames, “but I felt I was sliding down a long black slope and couldn’t stop. Then I heard you call me, and I began to be rushed back. When I woke up, you were here.”

“Did you want to come back, Ames?”

He thought about it. “Frankly, I don’t know. I never had that lust for life that I hear about. That teeming exuberance for living, like John’s. I wasn’t afraid of dying; I was only afraid of going blind, before the operation. But when I heard you calling me, I came back, and I can’t tell you if it was willingly or not.”

“Did life always seem immaterial to you, Ames?”

He thought to himself: What a strange conversation to be having with the poor old girl! He said, “I think so. I can’t ever remember being all worked up about living, now even when I was a kid. I can stand it fairly well if things don’t become too involved and emotional, for life’s just not worth all that trouble. That was a great part of the difficulty between Amy and me. But now I think she’ll never be that way again.” And he smiled.

“And you?”

“I? Well, dear Mama, for the first time in my life I think there may be something to this life-loving hullabaloo. I’ll explore the matter. Gingerly.”

Caroline said as she turned to leave, “I told you before that I love you, Ames. I love John also. It doesn’t matter in the least whether you care about that or not.”

No, thought Caroline, there are no happy endings for anyone in the world. But when we repent and try to make amends, there is hope, not for a happy ending, but for peace. And some small understanding.

The gray wind and the gray sea shouted at Caroline’s back on this cold, early November day as she climbed up the steep and forgotten road to the cemetery. Her head, in its knit cap, lifted to the top of the slope where the ancient and abandoned gravestones stood at desolate angles or had fallen on their faces, names obliterated, memory vanished, love forsaken. The black spire of the empty church raised its point against the bitter and turbulent sky. It was almost dusk; it was hard to see the slipping earth and knotted roots that covered the path. Tall and empty trees lined the forgotten road, but here and there some small maple or elm had clutched at its handful of red or yellow leaves tenaciously, as if to deny the coming darkness and the coming death of winter. But the wind tore them away, and the leaves rattled and scurried along the path, alive in their deadness, their dry voices scrabbling. An owl cried. The air was filled with the threat of sleet, and a low and melancholy thunder invaded it as the sea raised its voice.

Though the graveyard was forgotten, even by all those in the village below, there was an area, wide and groomed, surrounded by a low iron fence. In the center of it stood a great tall shaft, white and glimmering in the dull light of the day’s ending. Here lay Tom’s father and his mother, and Tom and Elizabeth and Beth, under the large lettering: ‘Sheldon’. Even Beth, who had never had that name. There was much space for more graves, and here, thought Caroline, I’ll lie, myself, and perhaps it won’t be too long to wait. There were urns here, filled with ivy, and cypresses, and flower beds, blasted now. In the summer it was beautiful and had become somewhat of a local spectacle. Caroline opened the low gate, which was surrounded by all those many forgotten headstones, and stepped inside the private area she had bought.

Something, or someone, moved suddenly in the dull light, and Caroline found herself confronted by a stranger in the black garments of a priest. He was not very tall, but he was plump and had a very peaceful and serious face, and his bared head was somewhat bald, with fine flying hair sparsely fluttering over the empty places. He smiled at Caroline’s sudden halt and look of alarm, and when he smiled his face was instantly charming and radiant. Caroline stared at him with shock, remembering. She put her hand, gloved in rough wool, to the breast of her old brown coat.

“You are Caroline Sheldon, aren’t you?” he asked, and his voice was strong yet gentle. “And I — ”

“I know,” said Caroline. “You look like your father. I called him the Weasel.”

“So I understand.” He was kindly amused. “I’m also Melinda’s brother.”

He could see Caroline’s gray and sorrowful face and the fear-filled gleam of her eyes. “I came to see my sister,” he said. “She is very ill, I am afraid.”

“I know,” said Caroline, breathing with loud difficulty against the wind. “I call her house every day. I promised Mary.”

“She would like you to come sometime,” he said. “It’s very lonely for her, with Nathaniel at Plattsburg — that is the name of the place? — and Mimi in New York.”

“How could she be lonely?” said Caroline. She stumbled as she went to a stone bench and sat down. “She had everyone to love her all her life. And Amanda and her children visit her often, and all her many friends in Boston. Melinda and I — what can we speak about together? Nothing.”

She panted on the bench, and William came to her and sat down beside her.

“But what are you doing here?” she demanded shortly.

“I came to see Melinda. And to say good-by,” He paused. “My wife died a year ago. I suppose you didn’t know.”

“Yes. My son John told me.” The dusk had taken on a peculiar steely transparency, and Caroline looked at the face so close to hers, the face Elizabeth had loved, and had died in the loving. Her whole body felt encased in pain.

“But I’m not going back to England,” said William. He pointed to his garments. “I’m a simple parish priest now, as you can see.”

“Your father is probably turning in his grave,” said Caroline sourly, trying to breathe against her torment.

He laughed a little. “Probably.” He was silent for a few moments, then said, “I am going to the battlefields in France. My children are provided for and surrounded by all Rose’s large family, and so I can go, as I now am, with no regrets or worries.”

Caroline’s eyes slowly roved over her private graveyard. “Why are you here?” she asked.

“To see Elizabeth’s grave. To think of her and pray for her soul.”

Caroline bent her cheek on her folded hand. “I had nothing to give her and no way to help her, and so she is lying here now, and she’d be only twenty-six if she had lived. That is too young to be dead.”

“There are younger, every day, dying,” said William. “Is life so glorious that we should regret to leave it?”

He got to his feet and went to Elizabeth’s grave and looked at the white shaft that towered over it and then at the small flat white stone with her name upon it.

He said from his little distance, “It is the living for whom we should feel pity. And the unborn, who shall be born, to face the world they must face. Elizabeth is safe.” His plain features expressed his pain and sadness. He came back to the bench.

“I want you to know,” he said, “that I loved Elizabeth more than anyone else, more than my parents and my sister, and far more than my poor young wife, who would not even be Elizabeth’s age if she had lived. I never forgot Elizabeth. And it wasn’t until only recently that I stopped hating the man who was responsible for so much of my misery and hers.” He hesitated. “Perhaps sometime I can even pray for his soul.”

“No,” said Caroline. “Never for Timothy. It was not only Elizabeth; it was something else, besides. It was what he was.”

“I know what he was,” said William soberly. “A thoroughly evil man, a dangerous man. You look surprised, Mrs. Sheldon. Don’t be. I knew, as you probably knew. But I pray sometimes that perhaps there was something else, too, which will serve as his first step to heaven.”

“There never was,” said Caroline in a loud and breaking voice. “The world is full of such men now. No one knows or can guess how many. They will destroy all of us if they can, and it’s very likely that they can and will.”

“Nothing can happen that God will not permit to happen,” said William, and he put his hand on her arm. “If these men do get their power it will be because of the sins of the rest of us, our apathy, our own faithlessness, our own greed and stupidity.” He folded his hands on his knee and looked at Elizabeth’s grave and then over all the graveyard. “Our own lack of manliness and resolution. Our godlessness. Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon — they were all the scourges of God, the whips of God, punishing mankind for its sloth and its forgetfulness and complacency and sin. Its pride and selfishness. Its boasts and its own ugly lusts. Who knows what face the next scourge will wear, and what his name is, and where he lives at this very moment? We can only know that he does live and is watching and waiting.”

The first drops of sleet stung their faces. William rose and offered his arm to Caroline, and they went together to Elizabeth’s grave. William blessed himself and murmured his prayers, and Caroline looked at the stone mutely. When they turned away she said, “I came today. I don’t know why today. It’s ridiculous, but it was as if I knew I’d never come again. Except for the last time.”

She leaned on William’s arm as they crept down the forsaken path, and there were tears on her cheeks. William’s arm was like the arm of a son, and she turned her fingers and clung to the cloth that covered it.

And again, thought Caroline, as she sat before her sparse fire and looked at the small red coals, I am waiting. Our life is nothing but a waiting, and I’m not sure, even now, that there is anything to wait for, except for a little quiet and a little peace.

There was such silence about her now, as if she had been totally forgotten. But I’ve never been remembered, she said to herself. She thought of Amy and Ames, together again, and of the pleasant bulletins she received from Griffith at least once a week. “The young mistress,” he stated, “is managing very well, indeed. Sometimes the master is even subdued. Young Mrs. Sheldon is very determined, and I think, in a way, that he likes the new regime. There is no weeping, but only occasional sharp words, and the mistress’s are always the sharpest,” he reported happily. “Quite often the master will come into the kitchen for a drink with me and a few pungent remarks about women. All is well.”

All was ‘well’ with John and Mimi too. John, wrote Mimi, was helping her to prepare for her show in early December, which would be about two weeks before her child was to be born. He had disliked some of the frames; he had ordered others, and Mimi laughingly confessed that John had been right. He talked of the coming baby with enthusiasm, she wrote. There was such a change in dear John. He no longer called her several times a day to be reassured that she was thinking of him. He knew, said Mimi.

I have undone a little, thought Caroline. At the very last moment, I have undone a little. The rest lies with my sons and their wives. It isn’t much, but it is something, some recompense. My sons will never love me; that would be impossible. But in some way I have learned to love them, and that is more than enough. It is only this waiting, this endless waiting.

She went up to her gallery and looked at the paintings of her grandfather. She saw more in them these days than ever before. Often she forgot to be in her study at the usual hours. She had a tremendous fortune to manage, which would belong to her grandchildren, and in another way it had become a trust again. But what would they do with it, these unborn? Would they be frightened, or would they love? Would they hoard, or would they live? She tried to imagine their faces, but they eluded her except for Christina’s; she saw their forms and their movements, but not their faces and their eyes. Sometimes she would pray awkwardly for these children. What would their world be like, this frightfully turbulent world on the eve of much more turbulence and terror? Would their world die, and them with it?

“It is in the hands of God,” William had said to her when they had parted.

But who knew what fearful designs were in the heart of God? He was a God of Justice and wrath, as well as tenderness and mercy. He did not consult men; He warned them, if they would listen, in their hearts. But who listened to Him? Occasionally astronomers saw a nova, ‘a new bright star’, which disappeared shortly afterward, in days or weeks. Were they worlds which had brought God’s anger on them, and so their own destruction? The endless whirling nebulas were the hot vortexes, too, of new creation. But why, when it was all such a great weariness and an endless repetition? Or was God waiting for something too?

Ames and Amy would come about twice a month to see her, and now John and Mimi came to see Melinda and always spent a few hours with Caroline. She would look at them with secret tenderness, but she would also feel an enormous fatigue, so that when the door closed upon them she would climb upstairs to her bed and be forced to lie down. It was as if she had mysteriously moved far from them and they were no longer even a small part of her life, and it exhausted her to shout over the tremendous distance to them. Their very voices, young and vibrant, took strength from her. They belonged to a world she had already left. But in leaving, she still had nowhere to go. She could only wait, her face turned to darkness. Did something move in that darkness? Was something developing there? She did not know. Day by day another tendril of her life attaching her to the world raveled and broke, another distant door closed.

This is what it means to grow old, she thought. But her Aunt Cynthia, had lived to a much older age and had enjoyed every moment of it, and no doubt had regretted to leave. There were old, old dowagers in Boston, immediate and always aware, and engaged in life, and dominating it. Some were in their eighties and even their nineties. Their zest had not diminished. They would consider Caroline Ames young, compared with themselves. But I am old, thought Caroline. I was never young. Except for just a little while with Tom, who, at the end, had not wanted me and had wished to leave me forever.

Sometimes she would lie down in Elizabeth’s room, but now Elizabeth’s face did not come to her, not even as a shadow. Elizabeth had not lived here; why should she return even for one instant? Sometimes Caroline would lie down in Tom’s room and sleep, but she never dreamed of him. She never felt his presence.

It is this which is the worst, she would say to herself, the knowing that even the dead have left you, finally and for all time.

She went to New York and remade her will. Higsby’s organization would not fail for lack of money, but only from lack of resolution. There was a larger perpetual fund for Sisters of Charity Hospital. There was a large sum for Griffith and Father Bellamy. There were trusts for medical research on cancer and heart disease. There was a fund for the everlasting care of the Sheldon graves. Then there were the new trusts for her sons and for her grandchildren whom she would never see.

“Certainly you’ll see them, dear Caroline,” said another Mr. Tandy in a courageous voice. “Why, you are in the prime of life.”

“Nonsense,” said Caroline. “I never was.”

He looked at her dying face and agreed silently. Her body, always so stocky and wide, was dwindling rapidly; her face was old and sunken. Only her eyes, as if new life had been born in them, were young and clear.

She shook hands with Mr. Tandy on leaving. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever see you again,” she said. All that money, he thought with more than a stab of envy. All that miraculous money! Yet she had disposed of it indifferently, as if it no longer belonged to her, as if it meant nothing to her at all. One could only think of that money in connection with joy and luxury and comfort and security and power, but it was evident that Caroline did not think so.

She said at the door, “I suppose you think I am quite mad.” Then she smiled, and he was astonished at the sudden shining of her eyes. “But I’m not, really. You remember the phrase: ‘In sound mind and in sound body’. You put it there yourself.”

He thought about Caroline for a long time after she had gone. She had given all her life for her money; she had tripled the fortune her father had left her. She had devoted herself to it, as everyone knew. It had been her life. Now it was nothing to her. “Incredible, incredible,” said Mr. Tandy to himself.

Then during one week in early December, Caroline stopped reading her business and financial magazines and journals. They gathered in her study, still in their wrappers. When her Boston office called, or her New York bank, she did not answer. She walked in the first early snows of December, along the black and shining shingle, looking at the gray and splashing ocean and at the gray and uneasy sky. She was taking stock of her life, for all at once that seemed to be the most important thing in the world. But when she attempted to sort it out so that it presented an orderly pattern or had some significance that she could discern she could see only confusion and lack of significance, and pain and misery. It was as if all her existence were a mass of many-colored ropes, slippery and twisting, tangled together, in which she was bound and beyond escape. Yet, escape she must, if she was to live, or even die in a measure of peace. As she struggled for order in her mind she was repeatedly overcome by an awful spiritual weariness, a repugnance, that was really despair. The soul’s night of darkness was on her.

She had sent Maizie to the village for a Bible, though up in the attic, somewhere, forgotten by her, was Beth’s Bible, rotting away. “Yes,” said Maizie in the general store, “the old lady wants a Bible! Gettin’ scared in her old age.” The people in the store laughed heartily and with viciousness. Only thing in the world the old lady ever cared about was that cemetery plot up on the hill and her money. Never gave a cent to anybody; that was her. Now the growing village needed another school; kids were getting born much more than they used to. And the ‘new’ church needed lots of work, and there was old folks needin’ help, and their sons and daughters got too much to do with their own kids to care about the old folks any longer. If the old lady down there behind her walls wanted to do something with her money — and why shouldn’t she? — there was lots to do in the village and roundabout. People were smartenin’ up these days; they knew they had a right to be helped by folks who had the money, though they hadn’t earned it theirselves. Come to think of it, everybody in the world had a right to everything everybody else had, hadn’t they? They was born, weren’t they?