The Age of Desire (30 page)

After the play, Edith and Morton, reveling in the dappled daylight on their faces, walk side by side through the Tuileries. They stroll past the carousel and the Grand Bassin
,
where children are crouching, pitting their wooden boats against one another and stop to admire Marqueste’s sensual statue of a centaur abducting a nymph.

“I am your nymph,” she tells him. Morton smiles but says nothing.

Finding a stone bench overlooking the river, she wishes she could take his hand but knows it would be foolhardy in the heart of Paris where friends might pass. At the moment, Edith wishes she weren’t so conventional.

“Will you miss me?” she asks, ashamed she needs to.

“Of course.”

“What will you do when I’m gone?”

“What I always do. Go to the bureau, write stories, eat at the restaurant, go home, sleep in my bed.”

“Will you remember Senlis? Will you think of Montmorency?”

He looks at her out of the corner of his eye.

“Do you really think I haven’t been touched by what we’ve shared?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I wish I knew.”

A breeze is rising from the Seine, scented with river water and warm mud. She puts her face into her hands. She doesn’t want to feel bereft. In just a few days, she will be gone. Why spoil the precious time they have together?

“Stop,” Morton says, “you musn’t,” and tugs on her arm, encouraging her to sit up. He takes out a cigarette and lights it, hands it to her, then lights one for himself. She sees her future, alone in the Tuileries, gazing at the suggestive Marqueste statue with longing, resting on this bench alone, reflecting, Once we were here together. She doesn’t want her memory of this moment to be sad. He blows a puff of smoke, his eyes directed at the river. She follows his gaze, to the flat-bottomed boats gliding toward distant locales. And the tourist barges, filled with festive sightseers. She remembers how Teddy wanted to take one of those boats with her. She shivers.

“A week from now, I’ll be halfway across the ocean,” she says.

“In a beautiful cabin with champagne and silk bedspreads. On your way to your perfect summer house where cool breezes blow. A week from now, not one thing will have changed for me. Paris will be steaming. Everyone will escape. I’ll still be here, soaked and sorry with all my worries.”

But Edith hardly hears him. All she can imagine is standing on the terrace at The Mount, looking across the gardens at the lake. All alone. And all that’s been awakened in her—the passion, the animal frankness she is just coming to know—will be forced back to sleep. She blinks back tears before they can fall. She doesn’t want him remembering her weak and miserable. She wants him to remember the cheerful, game woman she’s tried so hard to be. So she turns her face and smiles at him. He beams back, and she tries to note every detail of his face. Even the tiny mole on his cheek, the uneven edge of his eyetooth that must have been chipped in childhood. She tucks each detail into the hole in her heart.

When Edith arrives home, a letter is waiting on the front hall table. She lifts it. Seeing Anna’s familiar penmanship gives Edith’s heart a queer little jerk, and for a moment, she’s lost in a flood of affection.

Dearest Edith,
[How much it matters that Anna still cares to write “dearest”]

It has been a most beautiful, early spring here in New York. Flowers have appeared in all the parks and in front gardens all around town. I had forgotten that New York can be so beautiful. Like you, I had come to think of it as a trial more than a joy. But my walks have been sweet and satisfying, and it is very nice to renew acquaintances all up and down our block. Mrs. Van Peebles has given birth to a new baby, with a head of fine yellow hair like a fuzzy chick. And Lillah Bennet, the youngest daughter at 892, is engaged to be married to a very handsome young man. I have taken work tutoring the Lawndale children in 942 for a few weeks before school begins. They have read nothing of value, it seems. I do not know what is taught in school these days, but it is shockingly lean.

In the midst of all this, Gross and I escaped for a week to Virginia where we visited Mrs. Schultz, the mother of one of my old pupils. You met her once, and though she is very old, she is just as plucky and funny as she ever was. Gross fell in love with her and said we should adopt her like an old dog—which was a very unkind thing to say but struck a chord with me. She is indeed the sort of person so endearing and unique you wish you could pack her home with you.

I’ve missed you and thought of you often, and am saddened for how we parted. I do not know if you think of me, dear Edith. If I have not been supportive of your choices of late, I ache for it. I thought it would be good to let you know this before you return: that I wish to be a good friend to you in all ways, even if we are not of one mind.

I hear from White that Mr. Wharton is improving every day, and I am so relieved and grateful to you for finding an answer at last to his terrible misery. Some days I worried so about him, I imagined you sent him away because you did not wish to have him near. How could I have thought such a thing? You had his best interests at heart and the happy results speak for themselves. I know Mr. Wharton will be traveling from Hot Springs to Boston any day to see his sister and mother. I don’t know if he’ll stop in New York. I will feel so joyous to see him recovered if and when I do see him.

I’ve always wished to be of service to you, not a trial. I know I have been a trial of late and I ask forgiveness for your old friend and servant,

Anna

Edith tucks the letter into a drawer in her trunk, hopeful that, if nothing else, seeing Anna will ease her battered heart, not aggravate it. Dear Anna. Dear good Anna.

On the last day before Edith sails, she stands in the pink room, surrounded by flirtatious dresses, satin-lined cloaks, gauzy tea gowns, ready to be pinned into tissue and hung in the trunks. Each one enfolds a memory for Edith. From the black velvet gown with the delicately stitched bodice that she wore on their first outing together (Will he like me in it? she’d worried when she put it on, turning this way and that in the mirror), to the navy serge with the white modesty panel and pleated skirt she donned the day they found shelter and privacy beneath the lilac curtain under the ramparts of Senlis, their last moment of ecstasy together. The dresses are a compendium of her “coming out” year. She will never don one again without breathing in a sweet memory from the months that have changed her life. She steps to her desk and lifts the diary, where she has written about Morton, and holds it close to her. It documents every twist and turn of her heart.

I will give this to him tonight, she tells herself. He can hand it back to me tomorrow. She isn’t afraid. Maybe if he sees it from her point of view, if he knows that what she’s wanted from him is exactly what he’s given her—love without commitment or long-term expectations—his love for her will grow. He’ll admire all that she’s tried so hard to be: unselfish, grateful, open, giving.

They meet for one last dinner at Antoine’s, a restaurant just across the Seine from the Faubourg. He’s waiting for her when she arrives.

“You look peaceful,” he tells her.

“Maybe that’s what a man feels when he stands before a firing squad. There is nothing one can do to delay the inevitable, and so it’s best just to stand tall.”

Morton laughs. “You
are
a brave soldier,” he tells her.

“I want to give you something,” she says. “It’s a diary I’ve written for you.”

“Isn’t a diary meant for the writer’s eyes alone?”

“Yes. But this was written to you, from the moment you came to The Mount last summer.”

“Really,” he says, and looks intrigued. He holds out his hand and takes the leather-bound book, pages through it.

“I want you to read it, and give it back to me at the ship tomorrow. Can you? Will you? I must have it back.”

“If you like,” he says. “Will it make me blush?”

She laughs. “You don’t strike me as the sort to blush.”

“Will it describe in graphic detail everything I’ve done to you? . . .” He raises his eyebrows comically.

“Done
with
me,” she corrects him. “No,” she says, feeling heat rise to her ears. “It won’t do that.”

“A pity,” he says. “I’d like to see how the great Edith Wharton might describe
that. . . .
We could take a room tonight, you know,” he says. “At that little hotel I told you about. We could have one last time. Together. In each other’s arms. If you pay for it. I’m afraid I’m rather low on francs.”

She looks at him, so guileless, so greedy, like a little boy. She shakes her head. “I’d rather think back on Senlis. Or La Châtaigneraie. I don’t want to soil the memories with a mean little tryst. We’re more than that.”

He shrugs. How long will it be, she wonders, until he finds someone else? Until someone younger, more beautiful or more willing comes along, and he forgets how they once felt about each other? Surely, he will remember her through the summer? Maybe into the fall . . . and then? She picks up the menu and bites her lip, gathering all her stored strength just to say, “So, what shall we order for our last supper?”

At the train to Le Havre, Morton is dutifully waiting with her diary under his arm. She takes the leather book and tucks it into her hand luggage.

“Dearest,” she whispers, and longs desperately for just a moment alone, a whispered word, anything that speaks of all they’ve been to each other. She successfully begged Harry not to come and see her off, just so that she might have that moment with Morton, so that words might be spoken which she can enclose in her hand and clutch all the way to New York. But all around them, like a thrumming conspiracy, are people they know.

“My God, Pussy, what good luck to see you!” Her cousin Le Roy King steps between Morton and her, and throws his arms around her shoulders.

“Don’t you look splendid! Are you off today as well? Don’t tell me you’re on the
Provence
? This is just too lucky, I say! Let’s make certain we’re at the same table for dinner tonight. We’ll pop champagne and I’ll catch you up on Bunny and Abel and what’s been happening to the whole ugly brood. Where’s my good friend Teddy? At Hot Springs? Who’d choose Hot Springs over Paris? He’s a madman!”