The Age of Desire (49 page)

Edith smiles sadly, looks off into a distance that Anna can’t fathom.

“Generous, yes. But I suppose you know better than I that I haven’t been loving to him for years. I’ve been like my mother was to my father. Disdainful. But unlike my mother, and no one can say otherwise . . . unlike my mother, I’ve been patient with Teddy.”

“Will you divorce him?” Anna asks very softly.

Edith turns and looks at Anna, aghast.

“Divorce him?”

“Some women would.”

“Yes, but to hear that from
you
, of all people. It’s not how I’ve ever seen myself. Divorced Woman. It’s such a shoddy title.”

“I’m not saying you should. I would never say you should. . . .”

“I’m sending him back to Boston. He’s inherited money from his mother. If he can work it out with his lawyers, he’ll pay me back. I made him promise he’ll stay with Nannie and nowhere else. They deserve each other, those two. . . . And as for Maisie . . . did you know she bills herself as Maisie Courvoisier.
Courvoisier!
It’s so laughable. Teddy’s brother has been to see her, and is working to ‘comfortably settle her elsewhere.’”

The two women look at each other with dark amusement. And then Edith steps toward Anna. She takes her elbows into her hands.

“You’re probably thinking I’m no different than Teddy. That my feelings for Morton are hardly better than his for Maisie. . . .”

“I’ve never thought that,” Anna says.

“You see, that’s the sad part, Tonni. I
have
.”

Oh, the weariness that descends on Edith! There were to have been rooms of new furniture for 53, rue de Varenne. Fresh and French and perfect for a new life. Knowing that Teddy has compromised the trust, there is nothing to do but cancel the orders. Only the orders for new beds, the curtains that are nearly finished and a dining table remain. All the days Edith and Anna spent visiting showrooms, workshops, choosing the most audacious little bergère, the silkiest rug—for naught. Who knows when more money will be coming in? There is The Mount to care for, the new leasehold in Paris, servants for both places. Edith can’t shake away the memory of her father’s misery at discovering his money gone. The financial burden these days seems to sit squarely on Edith’s pen.

So, feeling hard-nosed and sensible, she opts to sell 882 and 884 Park Avenue, and to bring the New York furniture and rugs to Paris. Her life in New York is over, and with it both a nostalgia tinged with bitterness, and relief. Just the thought of a trip to New York to manage the closing of the houses, the transfer of furniture, is anathema to Edith. She asks Anna to go in her stead. Upon hearing the news, Anna nods almost imperceptibly, her lips straight and pale.

“Of course,” she says. Edith can see that she’s shaken.

“What is it?” she asks

“I’m sad to say good-bye to New York,” Anna says, and leaves the room hurriedly. Edith wonders if she has left to cry.

The new year is coming. Edith feels
old
for the first time in her life. She wonders what to look forward to. Morton is mostly absent these days. Once, meeting her for an hour’s tea break at a little café, he tells her, “I expect you will see less of me now.”

“Less than I’m already seeing you? That would mean not seeing you at all.”

“My job consumes me more and more.”

“I know it’s partially because I don’t want to go off to just any hotel with you,” she says.

He glances up at her, removes the cigarette from his mouth. “I’ve never met anyone else like you,
chère
. But you want what I can’t offer.”

She grabs her cup of tea. “What is it you think I want? I’ve never made a claim on you.” The tea is too hot, scalds her tongue.

“You want true love,” he says with far too much amusement in his voice.

“Don’t be absurd. I am too old to believe in fairy tales.” There is, unhappily, very little that’s true about his love, she reflects.

“You deserve better,” he says. “You make me wish I could transform overnight into a solid sort of fellow.”

She shakes her head. “I love you for who you are, Morton. I married a solid sort of fellow—well, he was once—and you know how that turned out.”

He kisses her when they part. A sad kiss. She wonders when she’ll see him next. She doesn’t want to be like his landlady. Hanging out by his door, waiting for him to return. She has too much pride. But, despite all the misery he’s put her through, oh, how he still moves her!

It is painful for Anna to unlock the door to 882 Park for her last visit. This house is the closest she has ever had to a real home of her own, filled with things she is happy to see again: the Virginia chest of drawers, her books, her postcards, Aunt Charlotte’s sofa, all of which she plans to ship to Paris. But this house contains far more than gathered furniture. For her, it is spilling with memories of more peaceful times.

She lights the drawing room fire, reflecting back on all the evenings she sat and read by its reliable heat, knowing that Edith and Teddy were next door, Gross in the kitchen fixing a pot of tea, whatever maids were in service, rinsing their stockings and hanging them in the bathroom at the top of the house. How kind of Edith to give the staff a space of their own. To give
Anna
a space of her own; all these years, she has felt the house was truly hers.

She stoops to gather the pile of letters on the floor by the front door, which she stepped over when she entered, and begins to sort through them. There is a thin blue envelope with M
ISS
A
NNA
B
AHLMANN, 882
P
ARK
written on it in a familiar childish scrawl. She notes the Boston postmark.

Dear Miss Anna,
[All these years and Teddy calls her this still—like one of her students]

Can you find it in your heart to forgive me? I know Puss has by now told you everything and that my actions have lowered your opinon of me. I can’t blame you one single iota.

Once we were the best of friends. Do you think you can see your way to ever being my friend again? If not, I’ll understand.

Edward R. Wharton

At first, Anna wants to press the letter to her breast. To smell it. To cherish it. To answer it! All these years she has stood by him. Believed in him long after Edith gave up. She was certain that he was the kindest man she knew. Perhaps he was not an intellectual. But the way he cleaved to animals and nature touched her indescribably. She believed he had an inherent purity about him. Purity! How could she have been so wrong? Flaunting a showgirl on his arm! Stealing money from Edith! But worse, and there’s no use denying it, what hurts Anna the most is that he turned his back on what was for her the happiest times of her life, those few special summer weeks when every night he shared the drawing room with her so contentedly, breathing in the mint of mountain air, aligned, allied. The thought of it now breaks her heart.

She walks to the fireplace and stands with her hand outstretched, the letter held out but not quite touching the fire she’s just set. The breeze from the blaze makes the notepaper shudder, turns her fingers pink with heat. How easy it would be to lay his letter atop the crackling logs, to watch it singe and curl into ash and nothingness. But with a gasp, she pulls it back, and in the end, slides it into the lining of her smallest suitcase, where, she thinks, perhaps, it will remain forever.

TWENTY

JANUARY 1910

A
ll the month of January, Paris rains and rains. Edith can’t walk anywhere without a sodden umbrella thrust over her head. The streets are conduits for jets of water. Motorcars throw disastrous wakes at anyone in their paths. At night the windows shudder and drip. Edith even dreams of rain.

Still waiting for Anna to arrive with the furniture, she pays her bill at the Crillon and moves the household into 53, rue de Varenne. She has a new bed, as do Gross and Elsie, the most recent
bonne
. There are a few chairs she’s bought in antique shops. And a fruitwood table as worn and smooth along its edges as a piece of driftwood. In a way, the austerity of her circumstance suits her solemn mood. It’s better to be in her own apartment than at the Crillion. But even the tight modern windows and steam heat can’t keep the damp out. It seeps into her bones. Gross says she’s never ached more in her life.

As warned, Morton rarely answers her notes. I mustn’t expect anything from him, she tells herself. Edith tries to work on short stories each morning, but the words tumble together and her thoughts feel as sodden as the streets. Teddy’s brother writes that Teddy’s claims of filling a house with showgirls were mere delusion. Except for the apartment where he did indeed keep his mistress, the rest of the house was empty. The mistress has been paid off somehow. (Why else would she want to be with Teddy other than money?) The apartment house is on the market. The proceeds will go back into Edith’s trust fund. And whatever else Teddy owes will come from his inheritance.

But the money was never the issue. The thought of spending the rest of her life with a delusional, miserable, child-man that she no longer loves, that she can’t ever
remember
loving, twists Edith’s heart. And Morton is withdrawing. The hopelessness of her life feels like it’s rising around her.

And then, three days before her forty-eighth birthday, the waters of the Seine begin to rise as well. Winter floods are not so rare in Paris. But there’s never been one like this. The Seine roils and roars and rises right up to the tops of the bridges. Water rushes through the streets. The public clocks all freeze at once. At 10:50
A.M
., the power station that controls the clocks with compressed air is swamped with river water. The motionless clock hands all over the city remind everyone the exact moment for days and days. Electricity snuffs out from street to street with a sizzle and a pop. The telephone lines fail. The night feels claustrophobic. Nothing glows. Nothing twinkles. The City of Light huddles in darkness. And Edith discovers she hasn’t a single lantern in the house. Gross scares up some candles from a box she’s just unpacking. Fat, white kitchen candles. She fixes them inside drinking glasses with dabs of wax and they walk with them from room to room. At least the steam heat is working!

Edith peers out the front windows and down onto the Rue de Varenne. It is difficult to make out anything: a cloudy night with no streetlights. What is that moving? A single rowboat floating toward the Rue de Bac! Who would keep a rowboat in the city of Paris?

“Do we have enough food to last?” Edith asks Gross. There’s just Gross and Elsie and herself to worry about. The new hired cook hadn’t yet arrived when it began to flood. Who will feed them?

Gross comes to the rescue. She boils noodles and makes some kind of gravy to flavor them. She steams cabbage and carrots with vinegar and sugar, just as her mother did in Alsace. For dessert, they eat green apples. Sated, sitting in silence all together at the one table in the apartment, Edith can hear the street sloshing below. They might as well be in Venice.

And so it is for days. The Seine rises to record heights. Walkways are built over the larger streets. Edith hears the echo of hammering but can’t tell from which direction the sound originates: it bounces off the buildings. The water doesn’t go down. Cook arrives one afternoon, having used ramp after ramp to reach them, but he was forced to walk with water up to his thighs down the Rue de Varenne. In his knapsack, he carries fat chunks of cheese, a tin of crackers, jam, chocolates. And wine. Three bottles.

“I worried you had no food at all,” he says. “And you mustn’t drink the tap water until you boil it, you know. It could kill you, they say.” He tells them that the flooding outside the Gare St. Lazare is almost up to the awnings. The tracks appear to be under six feet of water, but who could know? One would have to swim to find out! Edith wants to cable Anna to wait until the flood has gone down before she sails. No trains can arrive from Le Havre. But of course, the telegraph lines are inoperative as well. On Edith’s birthday, an intrepid, gawky boy, a cap pulled down over his broken-nosed face, arrives soaked to his chest, thrusting forward what appears to be a cone of newspaper.

“Madame Wharton?” he asks.

“Oui. C’est moi.”

Edith reaches for the little bundle and sees that it is a bunch of wilting, though still fragrant violets. She pulls off the damp note attached to them:

Dearest,

These old violets were minding their business on the table at my favorite not-yet-flooded café. I surreptitiously wrapped them in the newspaper I was reading and by now the café owner has missed them and is no doubt cursing me, because there are surely no more to be had in all of Paris. Under the circumstances, it is the best I can do to wish you a Bonne Anniversaire. I hope you are surviving La Grande Inondation and staying très très seche.

Yours, Morton.

No present could have pleased Edith more.

It is almost a month before Anna can bring the furniture to Paris. She nervously pores over the
New York Times
each morning, hunting for the latest news of the floods. She is fairly certain that the letters she sends to Edith will never reach her and hopes she’s not worried about the furniture’s whereabouts. But surely Edith has more pressing things on her mind. Procuring food. Keeping dry. Keeping warm.

Anna wrangles permission from the new owners of 882 and 884 to stay longer than planned since neither the furniture nor Anna have anywhere to go. It is sad and unpleasant living among boxes and crates in what was once her home and now seems more like the baggage room of Grand Central.

While waiting, she thinks of Thomas. His silence all these months niggles at her. She had not thought him the sort of man who doesn’t answer. He is a man who declares himself one way or the other. An organized man. These are things she admired about him. If he has found a better candidate to be his partner, surely he would write and tell her, wouldn’t he? Unless she has simply thrown too many obstacles in his path. Unless he thinks she no longer cares. Either way, she needs to know.

So she unpacks the box that contains her old stationery, and, drawing a piece of blue paper from a box with 882 Park written up top, she writes a short note telling him that she will soon be back in Paris and would be happy to see him, if he could find the time to visit France. She tells him that there has been much turmoil and illness in the lives of her employers, which deeply saddens her. She writes about the Paris floods and her concern for Edith. And she ends up by recalling how pleased she was to see him in the lobby of her hotel in Venice. “Like a Venetian mirage, there you were, standing by the desk. I had to rub my eyes to believe it was you. It would be splendid to have that moment repeated, in Paris. I hope you will find the time.” The last thing she does is include the Rue de Varenne address.

She seals the letter and presses it to her heart for a moment. What will he think when he receives it? Will a new wife turn it over in her hand, wondering who sent it? She presses a stamp on its corner and sends it off with the postman, trying to feel nothing, certainly not expectation—for Anna firmly believes it is better to expect nothing than to be disappointed.

At last, the
New York Times
reports that the Parisian flood waters are receding, and that Paris is coming back to life. It isn’t until Anna assures herself that the trains from Le Havre are once again running that she books passage, uncertain of the world she will find when she arrives and deeply saddened to be leaving the city of her birth, perhaps never to live on American soil again.

It is a beautiful almost-spring day when Anna boards the train from Le Havre to the Gare St. Lazare, and all along the route she views muddy devastation. Fields sit in foamy cocoa puddles. Houses are painted halfway up to their roofs with brown scum. And Paris is a slippery, miserable mess, just shaking the mud off the cobbles, coming back to life. Like a general, she waited in Le Havre to direct the crates of furniture to be packed into a cargo train before she boarded her own train. She is exhausted now, bone weary, and painfully aware that she is not a young woman anymore.

The apartment house at 53, rue de Varenne looks more beautiful to her than she could have imagined. Climbing out of the motorcar into the courtyard, she breathes a sigh of relief. Cook helps her with her bags. All the way from the station, he’d caught her up about the flood. About how he brought the household food and how Gross cooked until the new cook was able to come. How the rowboats floated down the streets.

“Mrs. Wharton will be so happy to have the furniture at last,” he says. “She said just yesterday that living in those empty rooms with the polished floors was like living in a ballet studio!”

“Did she think I’d absconded with it?”

“She said, ‘Anna is doing the sensible thing and waiting. I’m sure of it.’”

Anna smiles to herself, pleased to be assured of Edith’s trust.

At the door to the new apartment, she breathes a sigh of joy and relief. And when Edith hears the door open, Anna can hear her fly through the apartment to greet her.

“You are here!” she says. “At last, a normal life can begin again.”

Anna can’t fool herself into thinking that Edith is speaking just of her absence, and yet she knows there is a kernel of truth in that too. Edith embraces her like a soldier separated from a fellow combatant during battle.

“Our new life,” she says. “Welcome to our new life!”