“Hello, Bruce!” said Paul. “Not celebrating your last night as a bachelor?”
“I escaped all that half an hour ago, thank God. I can imagine nothing more barbaric than being hung over at one’s own wedding.”
“Well,” I said tactfully, “if you’ll excuse me …”
I left them alone, but later after I had dismissed my maid I did not go to bed but sat brushing my hair absent-mindedly. I was trying to decide which specialist I should consult next, but when I realized I was thinking far too much about the unbearable burden of my childlessness I tried to turn my thoughts elsewhere. Would I ever have the nerve to get my hair bobbed? I tried to imagine myself with a modern style, but I knew Paul would be sure to hate it He liked a woman to have long hair.
I wondered if Dinah Slade’s hair was long, but judging from the hat she had worn in the newspaper photograph I guessed this was unlikely. Of course, when one was very young one could look attractive in even the most outlandish modern fashions …
Must stop thinking about Dinah Slade. I tried to imagine what Bruce was discussing with Paul. It was odd how hard it was for me to believe they were unrelated, but that was probably because if I had been Elizabeth I would somehow have contrived to have Paul’s child. But had Elizabeth ever loved Paul as I loved him? Surely she was much too dignified to succumb to the headiest of passions, but perhaps that was why Paul had always felt so safe with her and why their friendship still survived even though they were no longer lovers. I tried to imagine Elizabeth in bed but could not. Surely she would think the entire act was nothing but an inexcusable breach of good taste …
Must stop thinking of Paul in bed with other women. He had been surrounded with women when I had first seen him. How long ago that seemed, almost as long ago as the days of my first marriage! I had been married for only two years before Frederick died of typhoid during a diplomatic mission to Mexico, and in retrospect it seemed we had hardly known each other at all. I had been given a sheltered upbringing by my grandmother in Philadelphia after my parents had died in a railroad accident, and Frederick had received an equally sheltered upbringing in the care of his elderly uncle, a Hudson Valley recluse. We had loved each other in a pleasantly romantic way, but “the darker side of marriage,” as my mother’s married sister was pleased to describe it to me on the night before my wedding, had remained not dark but certainly obscure. I had been glad to give myself to Frederick, glad to make him happy and glad when each mysteriously pointless episode came to a rapid conclusion, so when Frederick died I did not pine for lost pleasures as other women might have done, but slipped uncomplainingly into the quiet life deemed suitable for a young widow in those far-off days before the War.
Then one day, three years after Frederick’s death, some friends I was visiting on Long Island gave a garden party and I met Paul Van Zale.
I knew his reputation. Anyone who was anyone on the Eastern Seaboard had heard of Paul Van Zale, his meteoric rise to riches, his spectacular divorce and his unending stream of women. When I first saw him he was talking to two of the famous beauties of the day, while a third was offering him a glass of champagne. He stretched out his hand to accept it, glanced carelessly past his companions and saw me. One look at those dark eyes was enough to remind me instantly of “the darker side of marriage,” and blushing in dismay at my uncontrollable imagination, I turned tail and fled. I was much too unsophisticated to know that this immediately made me irresistible to him, and I was much too ignorant of his circumstances to know he was tired of his bachelor life and wished to remarry. He knew exactly the kind of wife he wanted—he even had the most important attributes numbered and could tick them off on his fingers—and although I did not know whether I could satisfy his requirements I soon knew I would rather die trying than live, the rest of my life without him. I admit I was clay in Paul’s hands, but I might not have been if he had treated me with a style which matched his reputation. However, nobody could have been more of a gentleman than Paul was when he first began to call on me, and no young woman could have dreamed of a more romantic and chivalrous suitor. Even later when he described his concept of marriage to me in such painfully unconventional detail I could not quite believe he would be unfaithful to me after we were married—or even during those winter months of our courtship.
We became engaged in April 1912 and agreed to marry in June. I was afraid society would think we were being hasty, but my secret dread was that Paul would change his mind if we waited too long, so I did not argue about the wedding date. Besides, by that time I could hardly wait to be his wife, and Paul, as I soon discovered, was not prepared to wait at all.
“My yacht’s in the water now,” he said in May, “and the weather’s nice. Let’s go away for the weekend.”
I told him I would prefer to wait until we were married. “After this weekend I won’t ask you again until our wedding night.”
“But—”
“Supposing you hate going to bed with me.”
“I can’t imagine—”
“I’m forty-two years old, I’ll probably live at least another twenty years and naturally I’ll want to make love to you as often as possible. Three hundred and sixty-five days times twenty is seven thousand three hundred—and that’s not even counting leap years! I agree we should deduct six months for total physical exhaustion, but even so do you really want to commit yourself to going to bed with a man over seven thousand times without knowing exactly what you’re committing yourself to?”
We laughed. I tried to be worldly and sophisticated instead of old-fashioned and straitlaced, and to be honest I did not have to try very hard. I was too much in love with him, and in my own mind I had already committed myself to him for the rest of my life.
I went away on the yacht for the weekend.
It was a revelation to me. I had never thought I would ever stoop to a love affair, even with a man who had promised to marry me, and having stooped I was quite prepared to be crushed by guilt, but the guilt never came.
“I know I should be feeling wicked and immoral,” I said to Paul as we leaned on the deck rail and watched the sunset, “but I only feel happier than I’ve ever felt in my life. What sort of a creature does that make me?”
“Human,” said Paul, and immediately suggested we continue our affair when we left the yacht.
“Oh, but supposing I start a baby! That awful word ‘premature’ in the birth announcement and everyone counting up how many months we’d been married …”
“Good God,” said Paul, “don’t you really trust me to look after you properly?”
So ignorant was I about birth control that I had not realized how much care he had already been taking on board the yacht. “And besides,” said Paul, taking the opportunity to remind us both of a truth I preferred not to think about, “since your doctor has given you certain advice about the dangers of further miscarriages I’d be criminally negligent if I made love to you with no thought of the consequences.”
When I returned from my honeymoon I found another doctor and persuaded Paul to let me undertake the task of avoiding conception. I managed to convince us both that my subsequent pregnancy was accidental, but the second time he was openly skeptical, and after that he took control of the situation for some years. It was not until 1921 that I won permission from him to use a new device which was supposed to be the last word in reliability for women who wished to avoid having children, but inevitably in 1922 I found I had once more managed to conceive.
After our reconciliation later that year we had been obliged to discuss the problem again. It was very difficult for both of us even to mention the subject, let alone discuss it unemotionally, so it was hardly surprising that in his anxiety not to hurt me and in my anxiety not to anger him, we achieved only the most facile communication.
“Perhaps I should take care of matters again,” he had said awkwardly.
“But that’s so tedious for you.”
“You mustn’t think that.”
“But I understand the doctors device better now.”
“But that’s tedious for you.”
“No.”
“Well, if you think you can manage—”
“Yes.”
“—without accidents—”
“Yes,” I said, but I knew that the only reason why I wanted to persist with the responsibility was because I could not bear to think I would never again have a chance of becoming pregnant.
Paul never had accidents.
“It was an accident, a terrible accident. …”
I thought of that clear pragmatic mind, so uncluttered by passion that it was capable of analyzing every detail of a romantic relationship and taking the necessary efficient decisions to guard against trouble. If Dinah Slade’s pregnancy was indeed an accident, something had gone very wrong not only with Paul’s obsession for self-protection but with that cool uncluttered analytical mind.
“I don’t believe in romantic love,” he had said to me long ago. “It’s really just another form of mental derangement, destroying logic and leading to irrational behavior.”
After talks with Elizabeth I realized that his experiences with his first wife were responsible for this attitude, and since there was no altering the past I resolved to live with it as best I could. There was no point in getting upset because Paul felt himself unable to say the magic words “I love you.” I knew that in his own way he loved me very much, and that had to be sufficient. Besides, as I left my twenties behind and became more experienced in the ways of the world it occurred to me that the husbands who chanted the ritual “I love you” to their wives every day of their married lives were all too often the ones who ran off with other women. Better silence than insincerity, I told myself, and I fell back with relief on the old cliché “Actions speak louder than words.”
Actions. “One silver christening mug …”
Must stop thinking about that, must, must, must. …
I was still staring at my reflection in the mirror with troubled eyes when a sound next door made me jump. Paul had slammed the door of his dressing room and was dismissing his valet. The next moment the communicating door was flung open with a bang and I rose automatically to my feet, the hairbrush still in my hand.
Despite the violence of his entry he looked more exhausted than angry, and I saw at once that he was deeply upset.
“Paul, whatever’s happened? Did you—”
“Yes, I had the most godawful row with Bruce.” He shed his jacket, kicked off his shoes and slumped onto the bed. “Sylvia, you know how fond I am of that boy. It’s true we’ve seen little of each other in recent years, but I didn’t realize until tonight that he’s never got over that time when … Well, there was a scene years ago. I’ve never talked to you about it because I wanted to believe the whole matter was closed. It was only when he told me tonight that he didn’t want me to be at his wedding tomorrow that I saw the issue was very much alive.”
“But why on earth shouldn’t he want you at his wedding?” I exclaimed astonished.
“He said he had had enough of New York society thinking I was his father and that he was determined to demonstrate the truth once and for all by excluding me from an important family occasion.”
“But surely wouldn’t that create even more gossip? Oh Paul, he must have had too much to drink!”
“No, he was reasonably sober. He didn’t call me a selfish capitalist son of a bitch until I told him it was nonsense to say I’d ruined his mother’s life.”
“Paul! I just can’t believe Bruce would—”
“I regret to say I was then fool enough to embark on an anti-Marxist polemic, and we had one of those ridiculous quarrels over politics which ended when he lost his temper and tried to hit me. Fortunately my reflexes are good and he missed, but when I saw he obviously wanted to try again I went to the door and shouted for Peterson. You can imagine how I felt having to call my bodyguard to protect me from a man who for the first seventeen years of his life always treated me with as much affection and respect as a boy would treat his father.”
He got up from the bed, reached inside his discarded jacket and pulled out his gold pillbox. Watching him I said slowly, “What happened when Bruce was seventeen?”
“This scene I mentioned earlier. To cut a long and very painful story short, he came down to the office to discuss a certain matter with me and during the course of the discussion he revealed he believed himself to be my son. Naturally I was appalled. I couldn’t believe that Elizabeth—Elizabeth, of all people!—had been less than honest with him about such a fundamental fact of his life. I myself had always been honest with him, and when he became old enough to ask questions about my relationship with his mother I was glad he was able to come to me without embarrassment. Certainly I made every effort to repay his confidence by trying to explain the situation as adequately as one can ever explain such things to an adolescent boy who knows nothing of life, but since he never asked me outright if I was his father, I never came right out and said, ‘You’re not my son.’ I simply assumed he had his facts straight, and it wasn’t until he said to me that day at the office, ‘You’re my father and therefore you should do this, that and the other,’ that it occurred to me that Elizabeth could have misled him.”
“Paul, are you absolutely one hundred percent sure …?”
“My dear, he was conceived while Elizabeth and her first husband were spending a summer in Europe. I was three thousand miles away, and unless Elizabeth underwent a twelve-month pregnancy there’s no possibility whatsoever that I’m Bruce’s father.”
There was a pause. He moved toward the communicating door but then changed his mind and slumped down once more on the bed. “I told Bruce that,” he said. “I felt it was essential that he should know the truth, but Elizabeth was furious with me and that led to another row. She said that although she had never directly lied to Bruce she had made no effort to disillusion him, because she thought it was best for him to believe I was his father.”
“I expect she liked pretending to herself that he was.”
“But my God, how could she do such a thing to that boy? When I think of all the times she and I used to agree on the intellectual necessity of truth and honesty!”
“One can’t always live life intellectually, Paul.”
“But Elizabeth and I did! Over the years we evolved this mutually satisfactory relationship which incorporated all the principles which we held to be intellectually valid. I’m afraid you just don’t understand.”
“I understand that Elizabeth wanted her son to be your son. I understand that she must have loved you, otherwise she wouldn’t have cared about that. I understand that if you love someone you want to be with them, and that it’s easier to be with them in marriage than in an adulterous liaison.”
“You’re seeing everything from the typical woman’s point of view. Elizabeth wasn’t a typical woman. If you could stop looking at the situation so romantically—”
“Romantically! Paul, I’m talking realistically! I’m talking about the way things really are, not the way they are in some intellectual theory which has no relation to reality whatsoever!”
“I was always realistic!” cried Paul, suddenly becoming more overwrought than I had seen him since Jay’s death. “It was Elizabeth who lost touch with reality, lying to Bruce like that! She blamed me for the way Bruce and I became estranged, but it wasn’t my fault, it was hers! If she hadn’t lied, I wouldn’t have had to tell him the truth, and I hated having to tell him, hated having to hurt him, hated the whole damned interview—”
“Oh, darling, don’t upset yourself so!”
“—but I had to tell him, didn’t I? What choice did I have? How could I have let him go on believing a lie like that? I had to tell him!”
“Yes,” I said, “you did. It was just sad such a confrontation had to happen, that’s all. Isn’t it a terrible irony that in any—” I fumbled for the tactful word—“unusual relationship it’s always the children
who seem to suffer most?”
“I wouldn’t have hurt Bruce for the world.” He dragged himself to his feet. “God, I’m tired! I’d better go to bed.”
“Stay here with me.”
“No, I must be alone, I feel so disturbed. I mean,” he added clumsily, as if the effort of arranging words in a sentence was too much for him, “I don’t want to disturb you and I’m sure that no matter how tired I am I shall find it impossible to sleep.”
I did not press my request since it was obvious he wanted solitude, but when he had gone I lay awake for a long time while I wondered if I could somehow assume the role of peacemaker. Obviously there could be no quick reconciliation between Bruce and Paul, but perhaps later I could attempt to pour oil on the troubled waters. It would be a challenge for my diplomatic talents, it would make Paul deeply grateful to me, and it would certainly take my mind off all thought of Dinah Slade.
II
It was October when I spoke to Bruce. He and Grace had spent the summer months in Europe before returning to New York for the start of the academic year, and Paul and I had gone up to Bar Harbor as usual after the Fourth of July. I had paid secret visits to four more doctors who specialized in female medical problems, but although they had all been discouraging I had heard there was a doctor on the West Coast who had success in helping women through difficult pregnancies, and I thought that when I was next visiting some cousins in San Francisco I would make an appointment to see him.
Meanwhile there was no opportunity to visit the West Coast. When I returned from Bar Harbor it was late September, my New York social calendar was already full and it was hard enough finding a free afternoon when I could see Bruce.
The Rich Are Different Page 23
