It was only when he said in a low voice, “I’d rather you didn’t ask me again,” that I knew the entire episode had been a failure.
Paul never guessed. “Bruce said he’d come downtown and have lunch with me!” he exclaimed pleased, and seemed to have no doubt that Bruce would keep his promise. It was not until we were in Florida two months later that I said to him casually, “Did you ever have that lunch with Bruce?” And he answered without looking at me, “Not yet.”
After that we did not speak of Bruce for some time.
It was the spring of 1925. Paul was enviously watching Dillon, Read, another front-rank Yankee house, pull off a dazzling banking triumph. After purchasing the Dodge Brothers Automobile Company for one hundred and forty-six million dollars, they formed a banking syndicate—which Van Zale’s rushed to join—to pass out to the public the securities of the new Dodge Company. The two issues of bonds, preferred and common stock, were all oversubscribed, and the profits of the banking syndicate soared into the millions.
“It’s nice the stock market is so popular now,” I said to Paul, privately glad that this Dodge coup had taken his mind off some adverse publicity he had suffered the previous year. The Internal Revenue Service had made its records public for the first time and revealed that he had legitimately paid only fifty thousand dollars in income tax, a disproportionately small portion of his earnings. However, I thought this disclosure proved Paul did not have the influence over the I.R.S. that Bruce had attributed to him, and the more I thought about it the more convinced I became that Bruce had exaggerated Paul’s power.
Our social life was as busy as ever, and although I was always meaning to catch up with the latest Galsworthy novel I never seemed to have the time to open a book. We saw a dreadful play by Eugene O’Neill (I did try to keep up with Paul’s intellectual tastes, but sometimes it really was impossible), attended a disappointing production of Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra and endured an interminable evening of Siegfried at the Met. We were also at Carnegie Hall when Igor Stravinsky made his American debut, but afterward to my relief Paul declared he had no patience with modern music. I often wished we could go to a motion-picture theater, for some of the modern films were supposed to be so enjoyable, but Paul thought motion pictures were a debased art form and would have nothing to do with them. I always felt so left out when my friends would sigh over Rudolph Valentino or revile Pola Negri in East of Suez.
There were the usual weddings and christenings, with each glimpse of little bridesmaids or infants in long robes reminding me of the baby I wanted so much to have, but I had calmed down considerably since the episode of the Tiffany bill and knew it would be a mistake to rush into another pregnancy without sufficient forethought. When someone told me that the illustrious West Coast doctor had proved to be a quack I had despaired of finding a doctor who would promise me a nine-month pregnancy, but then it occurred to me that since only a dishonest doctor would guarantee to perform miracles, I would be wiser to remain in the care of my doctor, who knew my medical history so well. The real problem, I now saw, was not finding a doctor but coping with Paul’s morbid fear of childbirth, a legacy bequeathed to him by his first wife and reinforced by Vicky’s tragic death.
Carefully I worked out a plan of action. It would be best for me to conceive in the very happiest circumstances so that the event would mean something special to him. Our summer vacation at Bar Harbor sprang at once to mind; the unpretentious surroundings of the cottage always drew us closer together, and directly after our vacation that year I knew he was planning a business trip to Chicago and the West. That meant that if I became pregnant and miscarried he would never know about it. I would have to disclose a visit to the hospital, but I could always say I had had to attend to some minor feminine complaint
And if I kept the baby … I hardly dared consider such a miracle, but I was sure that once all danger to my health was past Paul could not help but be pleased with the news.
Meanwhile I had my charity work to fill the void that the empty nursery created in my life, and in May, a year after Bruce’s wedding, I was just returning from a committee meeting to raise funds for the Orphan Asylum Society when O’Reilly cornered me in the hall.
“Is my husband here as well?” I said surprised, for it was still early in the afternoon.
“No, I just came uptown to retrieve some papers. Mrs. Van Zale, before I go back to Willow Street could I have a word with you for a moment, please?”
I thought he wanted to discuss a domestic matter. The recent supply of gin had been most unsatisfactory and Paul always liked to have the best liquor to offer his guests.
“Is it about the bootlegger?” I asked, still thinking of the children in their orphanage at Hastings-on-Hudson as I followed him into the library. “Did you find a new one?”
“Not yet,” said O’Reilly closing the door purposefully behind me. “I’m still looking. Are you still interested in Dinah Slade?”
Six
I
TO HEAR THE NAME Dinah Slade was unpleasant enough. To hear the name spoken by O’Reilly in an atmosphere chilling in its familiarity was a nightmare. But there was no escape. He was blocking the door.
“He’s writing to her,” he said. “Personal letters, not just letters about her business, and she writes back. The way they’re going he’ll send for her before long, and then once she’s in New York—”
“Mr. O’Reilly,” I said in my calmest, firmest voice, “the subject of Miss Slade is not one I care to discuss with you either now or at any other time.” I felt sick. My heart was thumping painfully and the strength seemed to be vanishing from my legs. Moving closer to the door—and to O’Reilly—I said levelly, “Excuse me, please. I wish to leave.”
“Don’t you want to see the letters?” he said, not moving an inch. “I could arrange—”
My self-control deserted me. In fury I lashed out at him, but he caught my wrist before the blow reached his face and gave my arm such a tug that I tumbled against him. In shock I tried to speak, but he forestalled me. His arms tightened around my waist, my breasts were pushed hard against him, and his hot dry tense mouth closed on mine.
I jerked back my head to escape, but his tongue was already sliding past my lips. I went limp. It was not just because it was useless to fight anyone so intent on having what he wanted. It was because it was my only way of disassociating myself from such violence. I felt unspeakably humiliated, and in a second tears were scorching my cheeks. At once his kisses stopped, but he did not release me and when I could see through my tears to his hard set face I saw it naked for the first time, not closed to all emotion but wide open and passionately alive.
“I love you,” he said.
“Oh, I …” But speech was quite beyond me. I still made no attempt to struggle, but for different reasons.
He started to kiss away my tears.
“I’ve loved you for a long time … always, really … but I knew I’d have to wait until you became disillusioned with him, and he was so clever, never putting a foot wrong, but oh God, it’s been hard to endure, knowing how he treated you, seeing him with all the other women, I—” He stopped as if it was too painful for him to say more. His fingers pushed themselves into my hair in hard quick distracted movements. At last he said, “I couldn’t give you a life in a Fifth Avenue mansion, but I have a lot of money saved and we certainly wouldn’t starve. And I could give you everything he could never give you—I’d never look at another woman, never.”
He started kissing me again. Hardly knowing what I was doing, I touched his dark hair. My fingers were shaking. I closed my eyes as if to blot out the sight of a world turned upside down, but all I heard was him begging me in his tense urgent voice, “Let her have him. They’re two of a kind, and someday he’s going to leave you flat to go off with her for good. But you don’t have to wait for that to happen, Sylvia. Let me take you away from here as soon as possible and you’ll never regret it, I swear it.”
“I�
��”
“Shhh.” He was caressing my hair again, and the thick uncoiling strands were sliding through his fingers. I was immensely aware of his physical excitement and immensely shocked to find that it was contagious.
I groped to reassemble the fragments of my defenses. “Paul would never leave me. He’s always promised—”
“There’s no promise he wouldn’t break if it suits him.”
I thought of Alan Slade.
“He’d never bring her here—with the child—”
“There’s nothing he wouldn’t do.”
I thought of him brutally disillusioning Bruce.
“You don’t know Paul as I do.”
“And you don’t know him as I do,” he said. “Which of us knows him best?”
“If you hate him so much, how can you bear to—”
“Remain in his service? Because there’s a lot of money in it for me and I wanted to save up enough to afford to take you away.”
I immediately thought of blackmail. Appalling thoughts about the Salzedo affair flashed into my mind, but I could not face them. My courage failed me. I could not cope. “But to work with him every day,” I stammered, “to live beneath his roof—”
“Your roof. That’s all I cared about.”
“How could Paul never have guessed?” There was something sinister about the fact that Paul, who was so astute, had been deceived for so long.
“He thinks I’m only interested in celibacy.”
“But if he should find out …”
He laughed unexpectedly, and this eased the tension between us. He had been holding me tightly but now he released me, stepped back a pace and fumbled for a cigarette. “If he finds out,” he said amused, “he’d have a fit. Literally, maybe.” He paused, the cigarette case still unopened in his hands. Then he added softly, “He’s an epileptic, isn’t he?”
“What! An epileptic?” The suggestion was so ridiculous that even I finally had to laugh. “Of course he’s not! Whoever told you that?”
“The Da Costa brothers.”
“Oh, my God, is there nothing they won’t say about Paul? How despicable they are!” I cried, and the next moment all my emotions of the past five minutes clashed together.
I burst into tears.
Abandoning his cigarette case, he at once took me in his arms again and began to stroke my hair. When he had finished apologizing he said curiously, “You know nothing about it?”
“I know it’s not true!” I dashed away my tears. “Lately I’ve been wondering about the Da Costa brothers’ slanders, but that statement at least is an outright lie! Why, you must know that perfectly well yourself—you see almost more of Paul than I do! Have you ever known him to have an epileptic ‘ seizure?”
“No, I never have.”
I felt quite illogically relieved. “Well, then—”
“He behaves pretty oddly sometimes, doesn’t he? Those times when he won’t go out. … That drug phenobarbital.”
“That’s all a legacy from his childhood asthma. It runs in the family—why, Cornelius suffers from it! Do the Da Costa brothers say Cornelius is an epileptic too?” I broke away from him, too angry to be still any longer, and the abrupt movement loosened my hair completely so that it cascaded down my back. Raising my hands, I groped helplessly for the pins.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, following me to the mirror where I was attempting to recoil my hair. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I’ve always known that where your husband’s concerned I must concentrate on hard facts if I’m ever to get anywhere with you, so it was stupid of me to raise the issue of his health. Let me stick to his correspondence with Dinah Slade. The letters show beyond any doubt that—”
“I don’t want to see them. I’ve always accepted his infidelities, and because I’ve accepted them they can never humiliate me. But if I now start behaving like the traditional jealous wife I’m quite sure I shall be traditionally humiliated, and that’s why I absolutely refuse to read or discuss his correspondence with another woman.”
He was silent. I saw his eyes watching me in the mirror, and my hair felt so heavy that I could no longer hold it up. As it slipped through my hands he bent his head to kiss me on the neck.
“You have the most beautiful hair I’ve ever seen.”
I tried to push him away but he only drew me closer to him. Again I was fearfully aware of the disastrous physical excitement generated by his fanaticism.
“Be with me now. Please.”
“No, I—”
“We could go to my room.”
“Absolutely impossible!”
“All I’m trying to prove is that I won’t disappoint you.”
That was just it. I was terrified of giving in to him. It had never even occurred to me before that any man but Paul could arouse such a response in me.
“I have to think,” I said unsteadily. “I must have time. Please, Terence. Let me go now.”
“You can’t go like this,” he said, kissing my loose hair, but he stepped back and made no further effort to touch me while I put my hair up. When I had finished he said, “I shall be out of town with him on business next week until the end of the month. Perhaps in June we can discuss all this again.”
“July,” I said, “Bar Harbor.” I would be safe in Maine because Paul and I were so close there.
“That doesn’t offer me much opportunity,” he said, guessing my thoughts.
“I’m sure you’ll make the best of what opportunity you can find.”
“Sylvia—”
“I can’t talk any more, Terence, I just can’t,” I blurted out, my tongue tripping awkwardly over the simple words, and before he could destroy my remaining defenses I rushed upstairs to my room.
II
My mind was in such turmoil that it was at least an hour before I grasped the fact that I was on the brink of an infatuation which threatened to distort, perhaps destroy my grip on reality. I did not love Terence. That was impossible, since I still knew next to nothing about him, and to tell myself that I could easily fall in love with him when I knew him better was to traffic in dangerous illusions. The truth was that Terence was no different from all the other men who had in the past tried to persuade me that infidelity could be amusing. The only reason why I had become so confused was that I happened by chance to find him physically attractive. In my labors to recapture my sanity I paused to marvel that I should now find Terence O’Reilly attractive. Then remembering that fanaticism I shivered, though whether because I thought such single-mindedness sinister or erotic I hardly knew.
I struggled on. Naturally there was no question of my giving in to him. I did have sympathy for wives who unsatisfied by their husbands sought passion elsewhere, but I could hardly put myself in that category. Paul satisfied me. I loved him. We had, as he himself had said not so long ago, a successful marriage, and if I were to risk ruining it by a pointless lapse with another man I could rightly tell myself I was insane.
All the same … just what was Paul doing with Dinah Slade?
My calm rational common sense lurched and broke down. I thought of loving someone who never looked at other women, someone who could say “I love you” without difficulty, someone who was strong and sympathetic without being remote and detached.
Eventually, noticing the time, I changed for dinner, and by taking that trivial action I was able to regain my grasp on reality and think practically again. It was no good moaning about Paul’s infidelity. I had made up my mind long ago to accept him as he was, and although the Dinah Slade affair was thoroughly distasteful to me it would be stupid to lose my nerve over it and go to pieces. Obviously I had to find out what was going on, and since it was in Terence’s best interests to lie it would be a mistake to accept his information about the Dinah Slade correspondence as gospel truth. In fact the more I thought about it the more unlikely it seemed that Paul would break yet another important promise by reviving if only by letter his moribund affair with Miss Slade.
“You look tired,” said Paul when he came home that evening. “Is something wrong?”
“Oh, Paul!” As soon as I saw him Terence became insignificant and I could dismiss all thought of Dinah Slade. He kissed me, held me close and sat down with me on the couch as Mason brought in our drinks. “It’s nothing,” I said. “I’ve just felt blue all day. I don’t know why.”
“Well, there must be some reason!”
“Perhaps it was because I saw Caroline Sullivan today at one of my committee meetings and she showed me some new photographs of Tony—he’s such a cute little boy now, and suddenly I remembered that he’d been born just before Dinah Slade’s child …” I saw him look away and knew he was angry, for this was a subject we had both studiously avoided since the incident of the Tiffany bill. I had to summon all my courage to go on. “… and I wondered if you ever heard from Miss Slade nowadays. Doesn’t she ever send you any photographs of her little boy? I would if I were her.”
“You’re not her.” He drank half his tomato juice and picked up a magazine which lay on the table.
“You mean she never writes?”
He tossed aside the magazine, yawned and fidgeted impatiently with his glass. “We exchange classical quizzes occasionally. It’s an amusing pastime, quite harmless. She started it by sending some photographs with no covering letter, just a few lines of Latin, Catullus’ description of a baby—quite clever. I capped the quote and sent her another one to identify, and soon the game developed into a regular quiz. As a matter of fact I received a letter today which I want to show to Elizabeth—there’s a question I can’t answer, and I think Elizabeth might have some ideas. You can read the letter if you like,” he added as if the conversation were of no importance to him, and pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket.
The Rich Are Different Page 25
