The Age of Desire (52 page)
Authors: Jennie Fields
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Historical
In the night, as Anna is sleeping, there is a timid knock on her door. At first she wonders if she’s dreamed it. She pulls on her wrapper and, moving close to the door, whispers, “Yes?”
“Miss Anna, let me in.” Anna shivers at the sound of Teddy Wharton’s voice.
“Are you all right, Mr. Wharton? Can’t we speak in the morning?” Most nights, there is a nurse watching over him. Or White. Or someone. He’s too unpredictable. Dangerous. Strange. And she has avoided him. He is no longer her charge. He is not the man she thought he was.
But tonight, his voice is sweet. A whisper.
“Dear Anna, please . . . I must speak to you.”
What would it hurt to speak to him? she thinks. She cracks the door just enough to see him standing in his nightshirt, barefoot. The moonlight from a window paints his shadow long, allowing it to fill the entire hallway. Why hadn’t he put on a robe, slippers? It’s not like him.
“Are you ill, Mr. Wharton?” she asks. “Shall I call the doctor?”
“Why can’t you forgive me?” he asks, his voice as innocent as a child’s. “Why?”
Anna can smell the liquor on his breath. The servants have been told not to bring him liquor, to lock the cabinet and hide the key beneath Edith’s blue hat in the front hall closet. The liquor only exacerbates his condition, roils the gout in his head, makes him impossible. But somehow, he has cadged a bottle. Brandy. She knows the scent.
“I think you’ve been drinking,” she says. “You really should go back to bed.”
But he doesn’t budge. He leans close to her door, his words low and intimate. “You loved me once, Anna. You have no idea what it meant to me. When Puss gave up on me, you still stood by.”
His voice is so inviting, it rocks her. She takes a deep breath, stalls. What can she say to him? Once she knew exactly how to soothe him, how to settle him. She wracks her mind for her next move. Yes, she did love him. But she doesn’t now. Can’t say it. Won’t say it.
“We all . . .” She tries to be brave, steps into the hall. Taking his elbow, she hopes to direct him back to his room, just next to hers. “We all . . . just want to see you get better. Come, let me walk you back to bed.”
“Will you lie with me there?” he asks. His voice is not sweet or childlike, but sly.
She looks at him sharply. “Certainly not.”
“But you want to, don’t you? You want to feel me against you
.
You’ve always wanted me.”
Keep breathing
,
she tells herself.
“You’re mistaken, Mr. Wharton.”
“A man knows these things. I’ve always known. . . .”
“Go to bed!” she says. She uses the voice she reserves for recalcitrant children, but he doesn’t seem to hear it.
“Say you love me.”
“No, Mr. Wharton. Go to bed.”
“Anna. Say it.”
“No. I won’t say it. And you need to go to bed!”
Suddenly, his voice is harsh, terrifying.
“Say you love me,” he barks.
“I . . . I . . . don’t love you. I care that you get well. . . . we all . . .”
But in the middle of her sentence, with no warning at all, he turns and grabs her wrists and pins her to the wall. She is so small. He is so much larger in every way. Pressing himself against her, she can feel his round belly, his massive chest.
“I want you,” he says.
“No. Please,” she begs. “You’re hurting me. Let me go.” She squirms. She kicks. Still, he holds her fast.
“Why should I? Isn’t this what you want?”
She has never known the animal in herself. But her animal instincts emerge now. She twists wildly until her hand is free, and, reaching out, she claws at his face in one awful murderous swipe. He jumps back, touching the wound in horror. She sees the gash of red she’s inflicted, and runs. Slipping into her room, she slams the door before he can stop her. Where is the key? Where is the key? She must lock it.
Where is her key???
But he isn’t trying to open her door. She hears him in the hall. Weeping.
“Y . . . You loved me once,” he is saying. “You bitch. You loved me once.”
She finds the key, but doesn’t sleep all night. In the morning, she feels a quaking in the pit of her stomach that doesn’t stop even after breakfast. When she hears from Catherine that Mr. Wharton got into a bottle of brandy last night and hurt himself—scratched his own face, imagine that!—she doesn’t refute the story. How could she tell anyone what he said? What he did . . .
For the next two days, Anna washes and washes her hand. Tries to obliterate the feeling of his flesh beneath her fingernails. But the misery won’t retreat.
Ever after, she won’t walk into a room if Teddy is there alone. She wedges her dressing chair beneath the doorknob at night. She believed in Teddy, but now she can’t help but see him as utterly and irreparably mad. And in her darkest moments, it is painful knowing that Edith, whom she loves more than herself, is the one that drove him there.
Weeks pass and still no answer from Morton. Edith is too numb to be hurt. Teddy is causing scenes almost every night. Morton is absent. Some mornings she can hardly bear to wake. At night, she falls into bed exhausted and hopeless.
Lately, she has taken to asking Anna to sit with Teddy and her in the parlor after dinner. At least they can speak to each other, for often Teddy is mute. Better he should be mute than raving!
One night, when Teddy finally goes off to bed, Edith looks up to see her old friend quietly, studiously knitting.
“At least there were no scenes tonight,” she says.
“Yes. It’s a relief.”
“Dine with us tomorrow, Tonni,” she begs. “Every night from now on, please. I swear I’ll go mad if I have to have another silent meal with
my husband.
” How sarcastically she says the words. Her husband. How is it that this man could be considered anything to her? This man who hates her. Who threatens her.
“You must send him away,” Anna says. Her voice is so small, Edith must lean forward. She’s stunned by what she hears.
“You’ve given up on him entirely?”
Anna nods.
Edith raises her eyebrows, looks into her face.
“But he’s not well, Tonni. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
“He knows. I knew he was ill. But now I think he’s evil. He threatens you. Me as well.”
Edith observes Anna, head down, her heart-shaped mouth set with bitterness, and sees something she does not expect: utter heartbreak.
“Has he threatened
you
?” Edith asks softly. “But you alone always believed in him.”
Anna’s lips quiver, though it is clear she is trying without success to look neutral. Her needles clack. Her eyes swim with unrestrained tears.
“Has he hurt you?” Edith asks, alarmed.
Anna doesn’t speak. But her silence says everything.
“If he is dangerous even to you,” Edith says, “my God, maybe there
is
no hope.” How is it that Anna hasn’t spoken a word of this? What has Teddy done to her? And yet, there she sits by Edith’s side. Stalwart. Loyal. How ironic that a friendship so unwavering is the one most easily taken for granted.
Edith leans over and grabs Anna’s tiny hand. “I’m so sorry,” she says.
Anna drops her knitting but can’t seem to meet Edith’s eyes. Outside or through the walls, one can hear someone playing Chopin études. Beautifully, without a mistake. The piano arpeggios swoop and swing, exuding joyous simplicity. “Tonni . . .” Edith notes that her own voice is trembling. “I want you to know . . . that I blame myself for what’s happened to Teddy. You think I’ve been blind, that I didn’t care . . . but . . . I know that my . . . my friendship with Morton . . .” She shakes her head, can’t go on.
Anna looks up, tears pouring now down her face. “I don’t suppose you felt you had a choice, Herz. Or you wouldn’t have done it.”
Edith nods. How bitter she feels. In fiction, consequences are the results of missteps. Shattering, wrong choices. What was it that Morton said so long ago about Lily Bart? About the seductive glow of wrong options.
But in real life, despite what she wrote to Morton, she cannot truly believe that loving him
was
the wrong option. If she had turned him away the first time he kissed her, the first time he touched her, she would have gone on living an airless, antiseptic life, knowing nothing of desire, nothing of love, nothing of pleasure. She would have died never having lived. Wouldn’t that too have been a tragedy? Perhaps there were no right options. Perhaps there never are.
For a long time the women are silent, both of them crying for something lost. With the étude complete, the clock ticks, the steam heat clanks, laughter rises from the Rue de Varenne.
“We’ll keep each other company, Tonni. What do you think? Two old ladies with handwork and poetry, watching out for one another?”
Anna looks up, her eyes both sad and grateful.
“Yes,” she says. “Just you and me. We’ll keep each other company.”
Epilogue
SUMMER 1916
E
dith leans to one side in her chair by the window, more weary than she knew possible. By leaning, she can just see the little back garden—once her favorite aspect from this apartment—now choked with weeds. Ever since the war, she has refocused her life. No time for gardens, nor servants available to keep hers in order. Healthy men are at the front. And everyone else is entangled in the war effort.
“Do you write as a woman, about women, for women?” Anna de Noailles once asked her. Back then she felt defensive. She did not see herself like other women. She did not see herself as a champion of women. But Edith’s greatest war effort has been for members of her own sex.
With saved money, Edith has founded workrooms so that French women whose husbands have left to fight, or died in battle, can sew and make an income for their hungry children. The goods are then sold to wealthy Americans shielded from the war, thereby raising more money to help more women.
She’s opened hostels where refugees, mostly women and children and the elderly, can seek out food and shelter, shoes for their bare feet and comfort from people who care. She has taken in orphans from the bloody fields of Flanders and the pale, exhausted nuns who walked them for days on their journey to safety. Edith’s money is being used for something irrefutably good. And it has mended her heart at last.
She rarely thinks of Morton these days, though when she does, she always feels a faint bruise on her soul. Still, she can’t regret it. Morton helped her taste the best of life, if only for a moment. She risked, and reaped the reward of that risk. In the process, she was scarred. But scars are beautiful, she believes. They are the marks of having lived. Teddy, sadly, is the one who wears the most gaping wounds.
Three years earlier, she finally divorced him after more threats, more madness. When the papers were signed, what she felt most of all was a sense of failure, hopelessness, exhaustion. Last she heard, he was making a spectacle of himself in Boston, holding up his stockings with gold garters, escorting a fancy woman on each arm. Someone said he threatened a prostitute with a knife. She knows she could easily fritter away more years regretting all the time she wasted with him. And rue her part in his demise. Instead, the war has given her focus. Together, she and Anna have done so much, making a difference for thousands of people in a terrible time.
And what it has meant to have Anna stand by her side! From the very beginning of the war, Anna was furious at the Germans. There was such loyalty in the way she raged against her own people, pledged her loyalty to France and to Edith’s causes. Knowing Anna, Edith would have expected no less.
Now she is gone. When Anna asked to travel to America, against all warnings, across a sea teeming with torpedoes, what could Edith say? She knew Anna’s cancer was advancing.
“I’ll give our speech in Kansas City,” Anna said hopefully. “We’ll get the good ladies of K.C. to reach into their pockets. Please let me go. The Captain and Aennchen want to see me one more time, and then I’ll come back.”
She packed her speech in her valise—the speech she gave again and again over the last year traveling from women’s club to women’s club throughout New England. Raising money for Edith’s charities, calling on a bestilled and safe country to help people whose lives had been torn apart by a war thousands of miles away. American soldiers are yet to fight. No one is certain if America will join the war. But Anna helped them to
see
it. To feel it.
Little Anna, tinier than nearly every woman she encountered, already in pain, her bones growing tumors all around them, but not saying a word about it, standing again and again before skeptical crowds, speaking out like an orator. Heartfelt. Proud. A tear escapes Edith’s eye, thinking of those meetings, the officious women presidents. The call to read the minutes of the last meeting. And then Anna stepping up to the podium, smiling her heart-shaped smile. Speaking up for women so far away. And she did it because Edith’s cause had become her own.
Walter says Anna was the engine behind Edith. Even when Tonni had gone nearly deaf, when her illness made her moody with pain. When her typing had grown slow and sloppy and Edith didn’t know what to do, Walter says the charity couldn’t have happened without Anna. Because somehow, her kindness made everything work. She soothed weeping workers whose husbands hadn’t written for weeks. She told orphans about her own childhood, and about her life, of which she was quite proud. There was much to look forward to.
In the end, Edith frequently grew cross with her. She got in the way too often. Anna wept because she felt herself useless.
“I’ve lived to be useful. And now this . . .” What could Edith say, because at the very end, it was true: she was no longer effective.
Walter, a glass of wine in his hand, his voice low so Anna couldn’t hear, said, “Let her go to her family, Edith. She wants to see them. You owe her that.” And Edith acquiesced. These last few years, Walter has been Edith’s strength. Through the divorce she never imagined would happen. Through years more difficult than she could have plotted in her books. Teddy so dangerous the doctor told her he was a danger not just to Edith but to society. Morton more unpredictable than ever. And the war tearing apart her beloved France. While she wrote
Ethan Frome
, back in the miserable summer of 1910, Walter read her pages every night. Nodded with approval. And Anna wept when she typed the ending. Together they held her up when Edith didn’t think she could stand.
And when HJ died just this February, Anna was there to remember the list Henry had made her jot down for his funeral when long ago he had a mere cold. Black horses. No cars. They laughed together. And wept together.
“You come back,” she whispered to Anna at the dock at Bordeaux.
“Of course,” Anna promised. Her face was as diminutive as a child’s. Had it grown smaller with pain and age? Edith settled her in her cabin, stayed at the dock and watched the SS
Espagna
sail out into treacherous seas.
Without Anna by her side, and her war charities straining forward, Edith has hired a new secretary, so much more efficient than a fading Anna. And she has found the perfect woman to help her run the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, a woman who has become her dear friend. Another to run the hostels. But no one can read her face and mood as fluently as the quiet bystander who watched her grow from child to woman. It could be a burden sometimes to be seen so clearly as Tonni saw her. Yet no one has ever made her feel more beloved.
Then, just a month ago, on a night as soft as a cashmere blanket, Edith received the cable that Anna had slipped into a coma and died. Walter held her all night long. And she told herself it was best that Anna hadn’t suffered. That she was with family. But what makes a true family? Wasn’t Anna’s true clan populated by Edith and Walter, Gross and Cook and White? She wrote to Anna’s niece:
Dear Mrs. Parker,
The cable announcing Anna’s death came last night, and you can imagine the shock it gave me. I was so reassured by your letter that I was looking forward to the possibility of seeing her here again as soon as it was safe for her to cross. I wrote her a long letter, telling her all my gratitude for the share I know she must have had in obtaining for the hostels a generous gift from the Kansas City Relief Fund.
You know, to some degree at least, what Anna has been to me for so many years, what a friend and helper and companion, and you will understand how it adds to my sorrow that she should not have been with me when the end came. Yet I am glad for her sake and for yours and your father’s that you were all together for the last months of her life, after so many years of separation; and her letters show me how happy she was in this reunion, and how much your affection and your devoted care were appreciated by her. I let her go reluctantly only because of her insistence, and because I thought she might be right in thinking that the Paris winter climate aggravated her illness, and I was much worried at the idea of her undertaking so long a journey. But alas, I think for a long time the end had been inevitable and I can only be thankful that it came suddenly since I knew she foresaw and dreaded much suffering.
I shall never have a friend like her, so devoted, so unselfish, so sensitive and fine in every thought and feeling. I send you all my deepest sympathy, dear Mrs. Parker.
Yours very sincerely,
Edith Wharton
Every day since, she has thought of Tonni too often, bitter that their last few months together were strained, that maybe Tonni escaped because she no longer felt valuable.
But how stunning that Anna, in her last and pain-filled days, had still managed to raise so much money in Kansas City! Such a genuine outpouring of interest and support—who could have imagined it in a small Missouri city! When the money arrived in an envelope, Edith thought: Her speech must have been extraordinary. The stack of money was wrapped in a glued paper band with Anna’s handwriting on it: “The Kansas City Relief Fund’s donations for our charities, Herz.”
Herz. Edith has always been Anna’s heart. How lucky she was to have Anna’s love all these years. When other loves failed her, Anna’s was unbending.
And now this letter from Mrs. Parker today telling her the true source of the money. It has shaken Edith beyond words. Almost too tired to get up, she does, walks wearily to her desk, pulls out her desk chair and picks up her pen. Her hand is shaking. But she must write it, while the news still rattles her heart.
Dear Mrs. Parker,
I am deeply touched by what you tell me as to the origin of the sum from the imaginary “Kansas City Committee.” I never dreamed that this was a gift from Anna, but I know nothing more characteristic than her sending me the money in this way.
Anna’s own money. All she had in the world! Sent to fund the one thing Edith cares about most. Anonymously.
She seems to have had a premonition that the talk she was to give for the benefit of my work would never take place, and to have wished that the refugees, in whom she took so much interest, should not be the losers. It was a beautiful thought, and just like her.
She did it for me.
The words echo in Edith’s brain.
She would have done anything for me.
Edith is too tired to finish, as though her heart is squeezed, unable to pump out enough blood to sustain her. She sets down the pen and blindly finds her way to her bed.
In the morning she will have to dictate the words anew to her secretary. The letter in her own handwriting is too pocked by her weeping, and the only person capable of reading the crabbed and tearstained loops is forever gone.
