Captains and The Kings (54 page)

Bernadette never learned that a restrained voice meant dignity and control of strong feeling or good manners, especially in women. She thought such a voice was servile, fit only for servants, and that the possessor was timid, humble, inferior, and worthy only of abuse and peremptory correction. Or worse still, afraid of her. In all these years with Elizabeth in her house she had not learned to the contrary. "Oh, you wanted them for that sickly, miserable son of yours, did you?" Bernadette shouted with coarse derision. Now Joseph could see her, in her scarlet velvet dress which was too small for her slightly obese figure, her curled head bobbing with hateful emphasis, her plump flat face distorted with contempt and ridicule. "He's always abed like a consumptive girl in a decline! Now, let me tell you something, Elizabeth Hennessey! This is my house, and I am mistress here, and you and your son are here only by my sufferance and good nature and regard for my father, and from this time hence you are to ask me for any favor, for any flowers, for any decisions, and not have the impertinence to do what you will without regard for my station!" She snorted. "And yours. If you have any, which you do not." She had never spoken so to Elizabeth like this before, and before this her voice had always been, if not polite or considerate, or least a little courteous though forced. Her spiteful remarks about Courtney and Elizabeth had never been in their presence, but only to Joseph and her friends. Elizabeth stood there in silence before this virago whose dislike and hatred and resentment had suddenly broken forth from any controls she had heretofore kept over them for the sake of vague decency in the presence of others. "I want to tell you something else too, my woman!" Bernadette continued to shout. "I've wanted to tell you this for a long time and only refrained out of respect for my father. He never could endure you." Her face was gloating with elation and joy that she could finally vent her stifled loathing on Elizabeth. It actually shone in the gaslight. Her mouth spread in a grin of delight and her eyes glittered with glee at the thought that she was wounding and injuring Elizabeth. "He was forced to marry you and adopt your brat, because your father had more political power than he did! But I want you to know that no one really believed you were the widow of a war hero, and that Courtney is his son, miss! You were probably a wanton woman and don't even know the paternity of your son. You, with your namby-pamby ways and graces and pretensions of being a lady-you who cohabited with a man to whom you were not married and God knows how many other men! Don't you know you are the laughingstock of half a dozen cities, not to mention Green Hills? You are absolutely shameless. You go among respectable people of propriety and reputation as if you deserved to be in their company, and not on the streets where you really belong, and only the fact that you are my father's widow prevents my friends from drawing aside their skirts when you appear. You are hardly more than a strumpet, and everybody knows it!" Elizabeth's face had changed. It had become rigid and immobile. She said, in her chilly voice, "You have forgotten. Your father left me his share in this house, and your mother left you her share. I pay my portion here, and my son's expenses." She fixed the panting Bernadette with her great green eyes. "I will not reply to your filthy insinuations, which are worthy of you, Bernadette, for you are a vulgar and cruel woman. You are without sensibilities or ordinary decency, and if you are avoided by your family it is your own fault." "What!" screamed Bernadette, advancing a few more paces towards Elizabeth. "Don't come any nearer me," said Elizabeth, and now her face and voice were charged with passion. "I warn you. Don't come nearer." Joseph, to his amused amazement, saw the desire to kill on Elizabeth's face, and with it her desperate fight for control over her unbelievable rage. "I want you out of this house, my house, tomorrow!" shrieked Bernadette. "Bag and baggage, out of my house!" "This is my house, too, and I will leave it when I desire, and not before." Elizabeth's voice was louder but still under control. She held the roses tightly. "These, too, are my flowers, as well as yours, and I will cut them when I will, and not defer to you at any time, from this day forward." Bernadette raised her arm, her fist clenched, and she advanced directly in front of Elizabeth, and her face was evil with rage. But Elizabeth caught that arm in mid-air, as the fist was descending on her, and with a gesture of full loathing and disgust she flung Bernadette from her with such strength that Bernadette staggered, tried to get her balance, fell against the plants near her, then fell heavily to the floor. Instantly she yelled like a banshee, and she uttered imprecations that Joseph had not believed she knew. They were full of foul words and gaspings. Elizabeth looked down at her, then turned with dignity and scorn and moved up the aisles towards Joseph. She saw him for the first time, and stopped abruptly, and scarlet waves ran over her white face. Her green eyes were blazing with an ardor and anger he never guessed she was capable of, and her mouth was parted. Bernadette was still howling threats on the floor, and struggling to rise. Joseph smiled at Elizabeth. "I am glad you said that, and did that," he said. "I've been wanting to do the same for a long time. But after all, I am a man, and that would be improper, wouldn't it?" She stared at him. Bernadette was on her feet now, and she too stared down the aisle at her husband, her mouth slavering, tears on her cheeks.
But she had stopped her shrieks. There was something here that terrified her, though she had not heard Joseph's remark which had been almost inaudible except to Elizabeth. Joseph stood aside for Elizabeth to pass. She still held her roses. She began to move past him, then, without volition halted when they were only inches apart. She looked up into his ascetic face, and at a mirth in his small eyes she had never seen before. The pale gray silk over her high and beautiful breast trembled. Her eyes did not drop or falter, but now there was a film of tears over their greenness, which Joseph saw now was not a deep emerald green but a pale green like brook water which reflects grass. For the first time, looking down at her, she became a desirable woman to him, and not only a desirable woman but a woman of mind and high pride and spirit and self-respect--a truly womanly woman, such as his mother had been, and his sister, and Sister Elizabeth. "Don't leave," said Joseph to her. She gave him the very shadow of a smile. "I don't intend to," she replied, and he laughed a little and bowed to her as she went on her way. ]oseph watched her go. The gray silk dress fitted her slender figure as smoothly as a skin to where it broke, over her hips, into drapes and folds that fell classically to her feet. At the doorway she paused and glanced over her shoulder at Joseph and he could not understand her expression. He did not know until much later that she had loved him for several years. Now Bernadette was at his side, clutching him, weeping, crying out her fury at Elizabeth. He pushed her away, and she stood and looked at him with fear and suffering. "You spoke and acted like a slut, with no self-discipline at all, and no shame," he said, and his voice was harsh and brutal. "I heard it all, so don't lie as usual. Until you mend your manners, and treat Elizabeth with consideration you must not speak to me. I don't like fishwives." He added, "You owe Elizabeth an apology. I suppose it is useless to ask you for that, but you can show it in some fashion if that is possible for you." He left her then as if she had been an abominably bumptious servant, and Bernadette was left alone to cry in a lonely desolation that had nothing to do with Elizabeth. From that night on she held her tongue in the presence of the other woman, never again spoke to her directly but only obliquely, and was expansively polite to her when Joseph was in Green Hills. Six months later Elizabeth bought Joseph's first house from him and left the Hennessey mansion with her son. A month after that they became lovers. It had happened without premeditation, and without Joseph being conscious that he loved Elizabeth Hennessey.
He had almost forgotten that night in the conservatory, except that his aversion for Bernadette had increased. As he handled Elizabeth's extensive affairs in his offices in Philadelphia himself, for it was a private matter, he was approached one day with a fine offer for some property she owned in the city. He decided he would consult with her rather than conclude it himself, as usual, for it involved a respectable sum. He left for Green Hills the next evening, and Elizabeth met him at the door of her house herself, and not a servant. She looked at him mutely, and then her smooth cheeks flushed and she stood aside and let him into the hall. Then she said, "Would you like a glass of wine, Joseph? Have you dined?" It was late, and the servants were abed on the fourth floor, and the summer twilight still lingered in the west in a lake of pure serene jade. "To tell you the truth, Elizabeth," he said, with honest surprise, "I don't know if I have 'dined' or not. I didn't come in my own coach, but on a regular train, for my coach is being repaired. I am staying only overnight. I have business to conduct with you." She knew at once that he had not gone as yet to the Hennessey house, and she felt a curious and breathless excitement, an excitement she had forgotten had ever existed for her. She said, "Let us go into the morning room and I will see what there is in the pantry, for I dislike disturbing servants who have worked hard all the day." This consideration for servants or others was unique to Joseph. He followed her into the morning room which he had remembered had been furnished in Bernadette's flamboyant taste, all carved and gilt furniture and heavy silken draperies. Now it seemed larger for the scale of furniture was smaller and it was simple but gleaming, dove gray and blue with a touch of pink, and the French windows were open to the rose-filled gardens. There was a scent here not only of the roses but of lilies and fresh grass and wind and air. (Bernadette believed that the "night air" was dangerous and so very little entered the Hennessey mansion even during the summer, Elizabeth painted in water colors, and the gray silk walls bloomed with bright tints of wild flowers and ferns and water in narrow wood frames, something again unique to Joseph who was accustomed to enormous gilded frames for pictures. He studied them while he waited for his hostess, and he was impressed by her austere taste which was so like his own. He felt the usual tightness in his neck and shoulders loosening, and the compression in his chest easing. The house was silent, yet filled with breezes and he could hear the fluttering of new leaves on the trees. Elizabeth returned with a large silver platter on which there was a cold bird, wine, a salad, brown bread and butter, and a glass of yellow custard. She set out the small oval table with white linen and bright silver. She did not speak. This, in itself, was refreshing to Joseph who heard nothing but voices all day long, everywhere. He studied Elizabeth, in her white frock sprinkled with small violets and green leaves, her pale blond hair glimmering in the candlelight, her face composed as always, and as delicately reserved. Her waist, he noticed, was very slender, her breast daintily swelling, her hands capable and swift and very graceful. She had a profile which seemed to have been carved by a marble knife. He had not known hunger for a long time. Nor had his relish for food increased. Yet, all at once, he felt hungry, and he sat down at the table and Elizabeth sat near him, her hands in her lap, watching him. He did not know of the passion in her eyes, and that the supposedly resting hands were tightly held together. When he did glance up at her she gave him her cool smile and still said nothing. The house was full of the soft sighing of the wind and the scent of the gardens and the whisper of trees. There was nothing else. She poured two glasses of wine, one for herself and one for Joseph. He had never liked wine. He suddenly found this wine delicious, and as suddenly intoxicating. He leaned back in his chair and for the first time looked fully into Elizabeth's face. He started to speak, and then all at once he felt a desire for Elizabeth he had never felt for any other woman, a desire so hot and so intense and so tender that he did not recognize it for what it was. He could only think how womanly she was, how intelligent her face, how exquisite her white throat, how fine her chin and her nose, and how clearly green her eyes. It seemed incredible to him that such a woman, so patrician, could have loved the gross Tom Hennessey. As Elizabeth gazed at him calmly she knew, surely and completely, that he loved her if he did not know it yet himself, and that it was possible he had loved her for a considerable time. She knew all about Joseph. Tom Hennessey had told her, with ridicule and envy, and she had learned much since she had gone to live in the Hennessey house. Now she said to herself, But what I felt for Tom is nothing compared with what I feel for this man, and have felt for a long time. That was only girlish infatuation. This is love, the love of a mature woman for a man. This is the man I have always wanted. She looked at his hands, his face, his eyes, his graying russet hair, the spare strength of his body, and she felt the power in him, a different kind of power than that which Tom had possessed. It was a fine-honed power, and invulnerable. She remembered what Tom had said of him and something turned away in her, as at a spoken lewdness. Tom, like his daughter, had been a liar. She felt no betrayal of Bernadette, no shrinking, no considerations for any propriety or custom or social stringencies. Bernadette did not exist for her. They sipped wine together in the deep and eloquent silence, and listened to the night sounds outside, and the sudden hoot of an owl and the sleepy cry of a bird. The tension in the room increased, became sweetly unbearable, and all things in the room had an enormous imminence as flough they possessed a life of their own. The candlelight had a consciousness, and its golden shadows were alive. Then Elizabeth very simply stood up, and Joseph slowly rose also. Elizabeth gave him her hand, like a child. She blew out the candles, and a soft darkness filled the room. Hand in hand, like young lovers, they went up to her bedroom together. When Joseph awakened in the morning, just as the blue-gray dawn stood at the windows, and he saw Elizabeth beside him in her white bed, his first sensation was of a peace he had never known before, a fulfillment, an astonished contentment. He saw her pale hair on the pillows, her mysterious sleeping face, the girlish mounds of her breasts. He had never done this with any other woman before, but he gently took a long strand of her hair and kissed it. It was warm and fragrant against his mouth. He kissed her shoulder. She moved and went into his arms and she said, "I love you." But he could not answer that in turn because he had never told a woman he loved her. It was three months before he could say it without feeling absurd and without embarrassment, and then he knew it was true. For the first time in his life he knew joy without fear, joy to the uttermost, joy without skepticism or wariness or doubt. He knew what it was to love a woman, not only with sexual ecstasy but with his mind and his whole self. He had never believed it was possible. Three months later he said to her in the small but expensive hotel where they often met in New York, "I will divorce Bernadette, and we will be married." Elizabeth said, "You ha,/e three children, one only a toddler, and we are Catholics, and I have a son also, and we have duties." For the first time Joseph was angry with her. He said roughly, "You don't mind committing adultery with me, and I believe that is against the Church, too." Elizabeth looked at him seriously and said, "In some way, I don't think either of us is committing adultery. Our marriages were adulterous, and that is the worst kind." He said, still roughly, "What about Tom Hennessey? You wanted him, didn't you?" She smiled a smile he had never seen before, full of mischief and light. "I was young, and he seduced me. But I seduced you. In some fashion that is quite different!" "That may be logical," said Joseph, "but it is hardly theological." The months and the years that followed seemed to him incredible in their wonder and strange ease and lightness. He had always felt old, cramped, constricted, and now he knew what it was to feel young, released and almost free. It was an ambiguous feeling, touched with vulnerability and even with a little fear at times, as if he were no longer his own man, his own fortress, his own invincibility, sufficient unto himself. He had never known what it was to trust fully in all his life, but he trustcd Elizabeth and this often disturbed him. After all, she was a woman, he would think for the first years; she was another human being and mankind was capricious, changeable, inclined to treachery. Then as time passed he felt less apprehensive in trusting Elizabeth, and came to trust her fully and without any reserve at all. She was that paradox to him: An intelligent woman. He found himself not only talking humorously to her and even with a little heavy banter--which surprised him as a new language--but confiding some of the aspects of his enterprises with her, though hardly all. He was also surprised by her subtlety, by her quickness of perception, her common sense, her sudden insights, her shrewd grasp of intricate matters, and her comments. She never pretended to be revolted by some of the things he told her, nor did she appear to believe that she should be revolted. She would listen with gravity, and if she had reservations she would voice them, and, to his delight, he sometimes found them practical. Once he said to her, "There are times when I can hardly believe you are a woman!" To which Elizabeth would reply wryly, "I never believed that intelligence was a matter of sex, though that is the delusion of many." On one occasion he said to her, "Elizabeth, you are a great gentleman," and she smiled. She thought to herself, My darling, you are the man I have been waiting for all my life. How fortunate it is that we both knew at last. Elizabeth was an endless and fascinating discovery to Joseph. She had, he would tell her, a thousand faces. She was a thousand different women. She shared his love for music. Her own knowledge of the art was necessarily more formal, for she had been taught at her schools, but she too discovered different men in Joseph. His perception, his engrossment with it when she accompanied him to the Academy of Music in New York, touched her almost to tears, and she marveled. His library, filled with the books he was constantly buying, and reading, commanded her respect and admiration. He had had little formal education, as he had often told her, but he was in all ways an extremely educated man and not the "money-grubbing brute" her father had called him. He had, she discovered, a sensitivity that he carefully kept within the core of him, as though it were a shameful secret and an entry for enemies. Bernadette had once jeeringly told her of Sean and Regina, and Elizabeth guessed that Joseph would never forgive nor forget nor recover from his sorrow. She gave him, once more, a motivation for living. He found himself enjoying life, reluctantly, and finding pleasure where he had never known it lived. His entry into her world of the mind and the spirit was cautious, half-retreating, dubious, sometimes sardonic, but he entered just the same and found it absorbing. Finally his impulses to suicide became fewer and fewer, and at last he felt the urge but once or twice a year, when he was away from Elizabeth for longer than he desired. He was still gloomy and distant with others, still suspicious and contemptuous and reserved, but he was less apt to be so as the years passed, and his first impression of strangers was less automatically condemning. It was probably Elizabeth--unknown to both of them--who had made him see his children for the first time, or rather her influence over him. She had often told him of her affection for them, particularly Ann Marie who was very like her, but he had dismissed this as womanish sentimentality. However unconscious it was, however, Elizabeth had succeeded in gentling him to some extent. He only knew that he loved her and that without her life would blacken for him again. Bernadette, who had long suspected her husband of infidelities--she had received many arch hints from her friends in Philadelphia and New York--did not discover Joseph's liaison with Elizabeth until five years after it began. She often went to New York with a woman friend or two to shop, and they remained overnight in the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where Joseph maintained a large suite. She loved the uproar of the city, and the stench and smoke from soft-coal fires and industry did not disturb her, and she had favorite shops and jewelers which she visited. She usually went to New York when Joseph was absent from Green Hills, for when he was "at home" she could not bear to be away. She was strolling happily with a friend, and gossiping, when they arrived at an intersection roaring and shrilling with traffic. They waited for a break in the crowds and wagons and carriages, and as they did so Bernadette desultorily glanced to her right and saw a closed carriage almost within touching distance of her gloved hand. Then she stood, stiff and motionless, staring, disbelieving, feeling a jolt in her breast like a deadly blow. There sat in the carriage, waiting, Joseph and Elizabeth. They were laughing, and, Bernadette thought dimly, I have never seen him laugh like that. Elizabeth's usually composed face was incandescent with laughter below the violet silk of her bonnet, and she looked impossibly beautiful and vivacious, her cheeks pink, her green eyes scintillating. Joseph was holding her hand and apparently teasing her. Suddenly he lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it, and she pretended to be shocked, and laughed again. Her face was the face of a woman rapturously in love, and Joseph's face, for all its sternness and lines, was the face of a lover. It was a face totally unfamiliar to Bernadette in its absorption. Never had he seemed so almost gay and insouciant. "Do let us move on," said Bernadette's friend beside her. "I declare, you seem rooted to the walk, dear." Numbly, moving as uncertainly as an old woman, and stumbling under her brown merino skirt, Bernadette obeyed. She felt feeble, drained as if bleeding to death, dazed, broken. Her vital parts seemed to be disintegrating, dropping away from her, and a sickness and anguish she had never known before lumbered in her breast. Her friend mercifully was chattering on, and Bernadette, her eyes swimming in a mist of agony, looked back