Angry Wife
Page 24
In his own rooms he dismissed Joe and stood looking out of the long windows that faced the avenue of oaks winding to the gates. What a strange chance it had been that into Malvern had come the two women, gentle and beautiful, to serve and yet never to be servants! If Bettina and Georgia had not been here, if there had only been Jake and Joe and old Annie and Phelan, and all the crew of ignorant black folk, he and Tom would have been different men. Those black folk belonged to the past, but Georgia and Bettina did not.
He sat down and put his head in his hands and closed his eyes. He saw Georgia again as she had looked beside him on the hill, the sun on her faultless skin. Her eyes, so exquisitely shaped and colored, were lit with pure intelligence. That was her fascination for him, that within her golden beauty and clear simplicity there should dwell high intelligence and sensitive feeling.
Lucinda opened the door and saw him thus and cried out, “Pierce, are you ill?”
He let his hands fall and tried to smile. “No—only tired, my dear.”
“Something is wrong!”
“Nothing except large vague general things,” he replied.
“I insist that you tell me,” she demanded.
“I’m troubled for the future, my dear—”
“You mean the railroad?”
“The railroad is only part of it—perhaps our whole nation is only part of it—” he said slowly.
She lost interest. “Oh, that—Pierce, really, we haven’t time for such things.” She came in and sat down. “I want to take the girls to New York. It’s the only possible way to get our gowns in time. I have decided on a pale hyacinth blue for myself, with silver lace—very narrow. Sally and Lucie are bridesmaids and they will wear daffodil yellow—I want to show the Wyeths that we are quite as good as they—although Malvern is in West Virginia, it is only just over the border. If it hadn’t been for the war—”
“Do as you like,” he said absently.
She was suddenly angry. “Pierce, I don’t believe you care at all that Martin is going to be married—our eldest son!”
He roused himself at this. “I do care, Luce. Maybe that’s why I feel so troubled. I don’t believe the world is going to get easier for the children. I don’t know what’s ahead—”
“Really, Pierce!” Lucinda cried. “Of all times to talk so! Why, you said yourself only a few days ago that things were better—the strikes put down, and the depression over—” Her prettiness suddenly disappeared in a sharp look. “You’ve been to visit Tom again,” she said.
Her shrewdness confounded him. Then he recovered. “Yes, I have been to see Tom,” he said.
She flushed swiftly from neck to hair, a deep and furious pink. “I suppose Georgia is there,” she said.
He looked at her, not knowing how to answer her. She would never understand, however he tried to tell her, that she was not threatened by Georgia. He could never make her understand how he felt about Georgia, that it was not love—not love of a woman. He could never make her comprehend that Georgia was a revelation to him of a truth which he did not yet fully comprehend in himself. In his hesitation he was speechless. She stared at him, he saw the flush drain from her face until it was dead white and her eyes were the color of frost.
“Luce!” he cried in alarm.
But she did not answer. She went away and closed the door behind her.
He leaped to his feet to stride after her, to seize and compel her to listen to him. But what would he say? He did not know. He sat down again and so sat for a while, the house very silent about him. Would she tell Martin—whatever it was she feared? He pressed his lips together firmly, got up, washed, and changed his clothes. When he went downstairs he looked at himself—he made sure of himself before his mirror. At the bottom of the stairs he went into the dining room. A tray was on the table. Lucinda was there and with her Martin. He knew the moment he met his son’s eyes that she had said nothing. He glanced at her but she looked away from him and took her seat at the table and poured his coffee.
“Well, Martin,” he said gently. There was something tender and touching in the young man’s joy. Nothing must spoil it.
“Father—” Martin began. “I reckon I’m too excited to talk,” he said. He broke off, and their eyes met.
Pierce smiled. “I know, my son.”
So had he felt on the day when Lucinda had set the day for their marriage. He remembered her loveliness, slender and delicate. He turned to her. “We remember, don’t we?” he murmured.
She looked back at him with eyes so cold and hard that he all but gasped. Did she hate him? But for what? He hastened to hide himself and her from their son.
He lifted his wine glass. “I hope you’ll be happy, my son,” he said.
But he was increasingly disturbed as the days drew nearer to Martin’s wedding day. Lucinda did not forgive him, and yet there was nothing to forgive. He knew it and could not explain to her the state of his own feelings and the confusions and fears that filled his mind. A healthy rage might have cured them, a vast upheaval of open anger, a quarrel that would have cleansed them both of their secret thoughts. But she gave him no chance for such healing. She was constantly busy about the wedding, and she made her absorption into an icy covering for herself. Her voice was clear, her eyes calm, her whole bearing as composed as usual. But when he leaned to kiss her cheek it was cold beneath his lips. Twice he seized her in his arms and bent her like a reed to his body, and each time passion died out of him. Her whole body was cold, slim and smooth and unyielding. She knew it and she looked at him with malice that terrified him.
“Don’t look at me like that, Luce!” he implored her.
She turned her eyes away, lashes falling, and did not answer him. He could not reach her, and at last he tried to ignore her. Sometime, as soon as possible, he would have it out with her. But nothing now must spoil Martin’s wedding.
He was especially tender to his eldest son in all these days. He wanted Martin to have the life he had dreamed of when he came back from the war, which outwardly he had lived and yet had not realized within himself. Whether it was his fault or Lucinda’s he did not know. But he knew that somehow between them, while Malvern had been perfected in beauty, they who were its heart and its soul had not grown together into fulfillment, and by that much Malvern was empty within.
Nevertheless he went to his son’s wedding in state in his private car, and reproached himself for discontent. No man could have asked for a handsomer family than his. He saw them as his possession when one by one they stepped upon the platform at Wyeth. Lucinda was crisply composed; the mother of fine children. She looked as slender and almost as youthful as her daughters, her silver grey costume and her air of worldly wisdom were the chief signs of her being older than they. Sally was his darling, warm-skinned, bright-haired, taller and a littler plumper than her mother. She wore a soft blue frock and coat and a wide blue hat with a rosy lining. Lucie was a thin shoot of girl, pretty and cool in a cream-colored frock and a straw hat, and Carey and John were dressed alike in dark blue suits. Pierce took proud stock of their health and good color, of the soft smooth complexions of his daughters and of his sons’ height. He had no ugly duckling.
The love he felt for them overflowed and he pressed Lucinda’s hand inside his arm. “Thanks for handsome children, my dear,” he murmured, smiling down at her.
She flashed an upward look at him from under the tilted grey hat brim. “They are handsome,” she agreed, and softened toward him for the first time in all these days. “They have a handsome father,” she said. He was absurdly grateful and his spirits rose. Perhaps he and Lucinda could renew themselves in this young marriage.
Martin had come the day before. Mrs. Wyeth had invited them to stay the week, but Lucinda had refused. It would be more dignified, she announced, if they came in their own private railroad car and only spent the day before the wedding with the Wyeth family. She did not want to stay on after the wedding was over. “There is nothing so melancholy as a house a
fter a wedding,” she declared.
Thus they proceeded in the middle of the bright summer afternoon to the long rambling white-painted house that stood conspicuously on a hill above the little town.
Two carriages had met them, driven by black coachmen in smart new uniforms. Mary Lou was the eldest daughter and the first child to be married and everything was at its best. Pierce felt himself being carried back into the old world in which he had grown up, far from the seething possibilities of the future. Wyeth village had not changed at all. He had used to drive through its single street when he went to see Lucinda in the days when he was courting her. Together they had gone sometimes to a Christmas ball at the Wyeth mansion or to a garden party on its lawns, the lawns which old Mr. Wyeth had struggled so valiantly to make into smooth green slopes. But the red Virginia soil refused to nourish grass seed from England, and the native crab grass had kept its voracious hold. Virginia could produce her own fabulous beauty of redbud and dogwood and apple-bloom, and Scotch heather flourished like a weed. But English lawns she would not grow.
The carriages rolled up the long avenue of beeches and approached the house he remembered. Nothing had changed but he had a strange sense of the passing years. He turned to Sally at his side.
“Sally, child, can you imagine your pa in a long-tailed blue coat, dancing with the prettiest girl in the world on that very porch?” He reached for Sally’s little hand. She still wore his sapphire ring upon her third finger but any day now he must expect to see it supplanted by another. She looked up at him with her warm violet eyes.
“I know who was the handsomest man,” she murmured. “I wish I could have seen my pa.”
The warmth which he missed in Lucinda he found in Sally, he told himself, and why should he complain? But some day soon the warmth would be for another man and then he would feel very lonely indeed. He sighed and looked ahead. He and Lucinda must come together closely and more close as time went on. Old age was over the horizon and they must go through it knit together. He must find a way to win her trust.
Then there was no more time for thinking. Colonel Wyeth had flung open the door and stood, a tall dramatic figure, with welcoming arms. They got out of the carriages and black men sprang to fetch their bags and black women in spotless white aprons appeared with smiles and murmurs of pleasure to take them to hospitable rooms. The wide hall, the breezeway, open from front to back of the house, was fragrant with lilies. Colonel Wyeth clapped Pierce on the shoulder.
“Come and quench your thirst,” he shouted. “We’re one family now, Pierce. God what a handsome son you’re givin’ me and Ma’y Lou—well, I say in all modesty that she is his match—pretty, though, the way a woman should be. But that’s her mother. Man, I don’t mind tellin’ you now but I had a time makin’ up my mind between my Dolly and your Lucinda in the old days—I don’t know that I ever chose—I saw your eyes stealin’ around to Lucinda and so I said, ‘Dolly’s my girl—’”
It was the old, comfortable, cheerful, ignorant, happy world. He felt it close about him. Gleaming polished silver, paneled walls, old portraits, velvet curtains and flowered carpets, good food, wonderful thirst-satisfying, thirst-stimulating drink, and everywhere obsequious smiling dark faces. He sank back into his childhood. Here it lived on unchanged. Had he said to Charles Wyeth that anything was changed or could be changed, the tall lean silvery haired Virginian would have laughed. Nobody could change Virginia, he would have declared.
He sat drinking a softly sharp, frosted, fragrant julep, in a great room whose windows were open upon a curving river, to which a meadow sloped. Wyeth was talking incessantly—
“It gives a man queer mixed feelin’s, Pierce. A little gyurl, the little thing that’s been runnin’ round the house a few years, the joy of the home, and now I’m givin’ my little joy away! Oh, don’t misunderstand me—Martin’s a credit to you—a sound young man without any of these hyeah radical notions that are comin’ in from the no’th. I feel puffectly safe about my little Ma’y Lou. All the same—” He shook his head.
Pierce smiled. “I know—I was thinking the very same thing about my Sally. It won’t be long—”
“Has she got herself a beau?”
“Six or eight or so,” Pierce said, “but I notice she’s beginning to concentrate.”
“A mighty pretty gyurl,” Wyeth said mournfully, and continuing in the same mournful tone. “How’s cattle over your way? I hyeah you’ve come to be a mighty cattle man.”
“I’m a fool,” Pierce said ruefully. “I reckon I’m trying to buy all the cattle in the States.”
“It’s all right if the market holds,” Wyeth said judicially. He spoke with authority on all subjects. “Though it’s a mighty gamble, if you’ve got nothin but cattle. But you were smart to go on for railroads, too. Thataway a man has two strings to his bow.”
“If both strings don’t break the same year,” Pierce agreed.
“Well, I reckon they got the communists or socialists or whatever they are scotched for good,” Wyeth said gaily. “We can’t allow that sort of internationalism to get in here from foreign countries.”
“No,” Pierce agreed. He wondered what Wyeth would say if he knew about Tom. But nobody knew. It was as if Tom were dead and had been dead for years.
“Not that it ever could happen here,” Wyeth went on heartily. His ruddy cheeks, his long moustache, his fine white hands holding the tall frosty glass were absurdly like the portrait of his own father hanging on the paneled wall behind him. “I’d rather see my daughter dead then married to one of those radicals who believe that black is as good as white.” He held his glass to be refilled. “I like niggahs, don’t I, Henry?” The elderly man servant standing at his side smiled faintly as he bent with the tray. “But I like ’em where they belong—and where they’re happiest.”
“Martin is no radical—so far as I know,” Pierce said mildly.
He wondered if it were weakness that kept him from telling the truth as he saw it to this comfortable man, the truth about Tom, about the strikes, about his own vague fears. Wyeth was perhaps stupid. No, he was not stupid, he was surrounded and isolated by comfort. He had inherited wealth and home and friends as he had inherited his family and its blood. He could be destroyed but not changed.
Pierce allowed a waiting servant to replace his glass while he took in the meaning of these words. The quick and the dead—the wise old phrase came into his mind. The dead were those who would not comprehend and share in change. He thought of Lucinda with a strange foreboding. And she, his wife!
He drank long and deep of the smooth liquid in the silvery cold glass in his hand and quelled the monstrous fears in his mind.
The day passed in a dream of pleasure. The great and ancient house lent itself to the young marriage. Guests came and settled into its shelter, gentle handsome old people, young and beautiful men and women, children excited and gay. Friends whom he had forgotten and relatives he scarcely remembered. A web of kinship seemed to bind them together. Wyeths were related to Carters who were seventh cousins to Delaneys and Pages and Randolphs, and Lees were knit into the blood streams of all. The world grew secure and steady in kinship and common ancestry. In the evening he went with his sons to the stag dinner for Martin, and he sat in silent admiration of the young groom and in pride that the life from his own loins had borne this fruit that would bear again. He was fulfilled before other men. He had everything that a man could want. Had he not?
When at the end of the dinner they rose, glasses in hand to toast his son, he lifted his own glass high and his eyes met Martin’s. The image of his son was dimmed in sudden smarting tears. More than he wanted happiness for himself he wanted Martin to be happy. He wanted Malvern to be the home of the next generation in peace and security. He must devote himself for the rest of his years to building that security.
He was very tender to Lucinda that night and he humbled himself before her.
“This day takes me back, my darling,” he said.
“Your lovely hair,” he said. “I remember the first time I saw it down, like that. You kept brushing it—”
She smiled, not looking at him, and put the brush down. Then she turned down the lamp and stepped up and into the bed beside him. The moonlight from the open doors lay across the floor like a bright carpet.
“I hope Mary Lou will be as beautiful as you are, after their son is grown and ready to be married,” he murmured. He saw the endless vista of the generations ahead and he drew her into his arms. “We’ve made a great family, you and I,” he said.
Still she was silent. He wondered for a moment if she could continue in anger. But her slender body was pliant in his arms. He stifled the impulse to cry out, “Forgive me,” for he had done nothing to forgive. She had been very angry, but for no cause of his. In her own self there was something—what, he could not know, that kept her angry with him for what he was, a man and her husband. He sighed and loosened his arms. She lay for a moment as if surprised, and then of her own accord, firmly she put his hands upon her breasts.
Standing beside Lucinda next day in the little Episcopalian church which had been built by a Wyeth two hundred years before, Pierce listened to Martin declare his vows to the little lace-veiled figure at his side. He was beset by doubts. Why had he not taken more pains to discover what sort of a woman Mary Lou was? Why had he merely accepted her as another pretty girl, sweet-tempered, yielding, feminine, charming—when actually she had the power to make his son happy or wretched?