The Age of Desire

by Jennie Fields

  Edith’s letters to Morton are too long, too frequent. But, as she composes them, she can see Morton in a chair just on the other side of the room, listening, his head cocked just so, a cigarette teetering between his lips, his eyes squinted to avoid the smoke, his legs outstretched. Listening is one of his greatest skills. And thinking about him, feeling him there, as she writes, her letters begin as one long howl of pain, because, of course, he isn’t in the chair. He will never sit in that chair! Then somehow, she gathers herself, regains her poise, and goes on to report her days, her small bits of news, her hopes, her memories, just to undercut the obvious grief written all over the first page.

  This grief affects her fiction too, though she’s back to writing as soon as she wakes. Like a trained dog, she tells herself. But there is a new darkness stealing over the novel. A sense that nothing good will ever come to pass in her fictional world either. It’s easier to write letters, even if she is unsure how Morton will take their frequency.

  “I am ashamed to write so often, because with this life I lead here, there’s absolutely nothing to tell,” she writes. But she fills the pages, one after the other. Anything to make the “conversation” last longer. Sometimes she tries to be magnanimous, to balance the foolish prattle.

  “Write. Don’t write,” she tells him. “Which means always when you want to, and never—not once!—when you are busy, or in the least feel it as a thing-to-be-done. I don’t want to put any more of those into your life.”

  Then one morning a letter arrives announcing that it’s possible that Morton will not make it to the States at all this summer—in fact, come winter, he doesn’t even know where he’ll end up. Things are not good at the Times. He’s sure Edith will understand how disoriented he feels.

  Edith wants to find sympathy for him. But the disappointment is too bitter. Maybe he is escaping her. Maybe it’s just Morton’s oblique way of ending things. Who imagined her despair could grow so large?

  She writes him, her pen stabbing at the paper:

  Don’t write me again. Let me face at once the fact that it is over. Without a date to look to, I can’t bear to go on; and it will be easier to make the break now, voluntarily, than to see it slowly, agonizingly made by time and circumstance.

  For a good two hours after the letter has been handed to White, to be stuffed into a mailbag destined for the next steamer, she believes she has done a noble thing, that in order to maintain her dignity she simply had to cut off the one person in her life who made her feel truly alive. But then, the plates of the earth shift. And all she wants is to be in contact with Morton Fullerton.

  She sends for White.

  “Did that letter go out?” she asks, hearing the wobble of desperation in her voice.

  “Of course, Madam,” he says. “It went out a few hours ago.”

  “And there’s no way to stop it?”

  White doesn’t speak for a moment. He licks his lips and looks at her as one might observe a mad person.

  “Not that I know of,” he says. His voice is forcedly soothing.

  “Thank you,” she says, but she cannot even look at him. Now she is lost, bloated with despair and self-loathing.

  And her day gets worse: White brings her a cable that states that the motorcar which, after some mechanical work, was to follow her on the next ship to the States has burst a tire on the way to Le Havre. The mechanic then lost control and smashed the poor blue Panhard into a tree. He, fortunately, sustained only minor injuries. But the car needs extensive repair, and won’t cross the ocean for weeks. In her misery, Edith finds it too easy to envision herself in the backseat of her plush car, lifeless and bloodied against the red leather, her head thrown back on its broken stem, her eyes open and staring. And the vision gives her relief. A cessation of pain. A dramatic ending to all that seems too much to bear. She wallows in the apparition for a long time, like a child splashing in a warm bath.

  As Anna types the new pages Edith hands her, she’s struck by how selfish and unlikeable Edith’s character Undine Spragg has become. Her God is money. Status. Fashion. She doesn’t even care for her own child. Edith is heeding Anna’s warning to make sure that Undine is unlikeable. But maybe she’s gone too far. Such an odious character to be the eyes and ears of a novel! Anna sees something else that surprises her: every time Undine opens her mouth, Anna is sharply reminded of Lucretia. She’s never mentioned the likeness to Edith, but it’s clearly so. Lucretia was not ungenerous to Anna. And she had beautiful bearing. But she could be harsh. And selfish. And oh, how she longed for acceptance from the wealthy and mighty. It was her goal in life to be important in society. To be considered among the finest, even if the family couldn’t afford her aspirations. She bought too many meaningless things to fill a strange, growing emptiness. She found her husband disappointing, too bookish, lacking in ambition, just as Undine finds Ralph Marvell in Edith’s book.

  But the thing Anna found most reprehensible about Lucretia was that she was unkind to her own daughter. Lucretia made it no secret she thought Edith a changeling. In Lucretia’s eyes, Edith read too much for a little girl. She thought too much. She cared too little for fashion and standing. Just like her father, George Jones. They were two of a kind and made Lucretia feel like she was the one who was lacking, the outsider. Of course, they were the outsiders in the real world. They were dreamers, wallflowers. Good thing there was a governess to deal with Edith, because Lucretia didn’t have a thing to say to her.

  Whether or not Edith has recognized Undine as Lucretia’s very double, she’s grown angrier and angrier at her protagonist as the pages of the book compile. In the chapters that Edith’s written since her return to The Mount, Undine has become a scapegoat for all of Edith’s anger and misery.

  And miserable Edith is. Short-tongued, snippy, icy, silent. Anna wants to speak to her the way they used to, share books, thoughts, ideas. But now is clearly not the time.

  “Undine has certainly become a handful,” Anna tells Edith one day when she can hold back no more.

  Edith sets her pen down, pushes back her chair and sits in silence for a moment. “And shouldn’t she be? You were the one who said . . . ,” she asks.

  “It’s not a criticism. I find her interesting. I find it interesting that you’ve chosen to make her so utterly . . . abhorrent.”

  “I don’t really wish you to judge my characters,” Edith says, her voice as gelid as Anna has ever heard.

  Anna is crushed. She’s been judging Edith’s characters for years and years.

  “I just was commenting. . . .”

  Edith looks up with raised brows. “Is there anything else you wish to say?” she asks.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it.” Anna, close to tears, heads for the door.

  “Tonni.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll have to forgive me just now.”

  Anna nods. But she’s shaken. Confused. Just as she does with Teddy, Edith is blocking her out. Blocking them both out. And it hurts.

  The Mount is beautiful, the lime trees just leafing, the first of the perennials in the fountain garden tender as babies. But Edith has never felt more blind to what’s on offer. Except for one day, out in her garden, when she thinks she hears a nightingale. Its haunting melody dilates her heart like a flower bursting its bud. Do nightingales live in New England? And sing during the day? It can’t be. And yet she perches on the stone bench, eyes closed, sucking in the sound. Oh, how it recalls to her the radiant moment on the night train from Senlis, side by side with Morton, his warm hand in hers.

  Her eyes fill with tears. They spill and spill with longing. She stays out in the garden for a long time afterward, waiting for the tears to dry, for her eyes to clear, afraid of running into Anna.

  If only Anna would go away. Every time she steps into the room, Edith knows she’s sniffed out her b
lack mood, and thinks she’s getting her due for ever having loved Morton Fullerton. It doubles her misery to feel sorrowful in front of Anna. Anna is too kind-hearted to indulge in schadenfreude, but considering how she protects Teddy, how she warned Edith about Morton, surely she feels that Edith’s despair is a natural conclusion to her folly.

  Teddy chews at her nerves even more. He strikes Edith as simply too excited. At dinner, he talks and talks about things that don’t interest her at all. He laughs at nearly everything, as though the world is a comedy written just for him. He has taken to calling her “Pussycat,” which makes her want to knife him. And he can’t sit still. He can’t read a book. He wanders around the house wraithlike at night. More than once she’s felt his presence and has awakened, startled, from dreams to find him standing in her open bedroom door, staring. When she asks, he says he’s just checking on her, enjoying her presence.

  “Awfully sorry if it disturbed you,” he chuckles. His jollity is what disturbs her.

  “Don’t you ever sleep anymore?” she asks him, wondering whether or not this is an improvement over the man who did nothing but doze in the armchair in Paris, hardly moving all day long.

  “I don’t need to sleep these days,” Teddy says. “I feel perfectly fine with hardly any sleep at all. Aren’t you glad, Pussycat?”

  She wakes in the morning and things are moved, disturbed, opened, eaten. How easy Teddy makes it to hate him! It’s almost too much to bear: comparing this hollow fool to Morton. She is grateful for one thing: that Teddy pays no heed to her melancholy, seems entirely unaware of it. He has no ability or interest in knowing his wife in depth. What a blessing!

  At least more letters from Morton arrive.

  “I passed through the Rue de Varenne yesterday and felt certain that you would come to the window of 58 if I stood there long enough.” “I bought myself an entire box of raspberry macarons yesterday and ate every single one like a lovesick girl. Today I feel miserable. I shall have to buy a new waistcoat.” She inhales them, rereads them, sleeps with them by her bedside in a neat stack hidden beneath her Line-a-Day diary. Sometimes, half-awake, she reaches out and touches them.

  And then suddenly, Morton stops writing. It’s like a faucet squeakily shut off after flowing freely. Not a word. At first she thinks he’s merely busy. Tangled in an annoying assignment from the Times. But then three days pass, five, ten. Despair falls on Edith like a blanket of wet snow. She’s terrified that he’s seriously ill, or maybe has had an accident. Perhaps he is the one in the backseat of a car, dead, twisted, broken. Just the thought of it takes her breath away. Destroys her.

  She goes to her library and sits at her desk, where the corner windows ensure a breeze. Even as she picks up her pen, her hands are shaking. She knows how important it is to display an even tone, a detached good humor in every word. Still, how painful it is to sound objective when her heart is crashing at every possibility for his lack of communication! She cannot, as hard as she tries, imagine a positive reason why he hasn’t written.

  When I sent you, eight days ago, that desperate word: “Don’t write me again!” I didn’t guess that you were already acting on it! Not a line from you in nine days—since your letter of June 2d. Eleven days at least must have passed without your feeling the impulse to write. . . .

  You know I never wanted you to write unless you wanted to. And I always understood it would not go on for long. But this is so sudden that I almost fear you are ill, or that something has happened to trouble you.

  Think! You have not even answered my first letter, my letter from the steamer, which must have reached you on the 10th; and five steamers have come in, that might have brought an answer to it.—Don’t think I don’t mean what I said when I last wrote, or what I reiterated to you so often before we said good-bye: that I don’t want from you a sign, a gesture, that is not voluntary, spontaneous—irrepressible!—

  No—I am still of that mind. Only, as I said, this is so unbelievably sudden. My reason, even—my reason much more than my feeling—tells me it must be some accident that has kept you silent; and then my anxiety begins its conjectures.

  Send a word, dear, to reassure me. And if it’s not that, but the other alternative, surely you’re not afraid to say so? My last letter will have shown you how I have foreseen, how I have accepted, such a contingency. Do you suppose I ever have, for a moment, ceased to see a thousand reasons why it was inevitable and likely to be not far distant?

  Allons donc! You shall see what I am made of—only don’t be afraid to trust me to the utmost of my lucidity and my philosophy!

  —But no! I don’t ask you to say anything that might be painful to you. Simply write: “Chère camarade, I am well—things are well with me”; and I shall understand and accept—and think of you as you would like a friend to think.—Above all, don’t see any hidden reproach in this. There is nothing in it but tenderness and understanding. I am well, and the week since I wrote last has managed to get itself lived. And the novel goes on. And people come and go.—I can’t tell you more now, but another time, perhaps—

  And now and always I am yr so affectionate E.

  But still day after day passes with no word. She lies in bed and wonders: how could he have taken her literally when she wrote “Don’t write”? Yes, her words have been misleading, contradictory. But Morton understands women better than other men. Surely he knows she breathes for him. Surely he knows.

  “Since when have you not been able to decipher my handwriting?” she finds herself storming at Anna. “I’ve never had pages back from you so mistyped!”

  Anna seems to shrink before her eyes. And she is already the smallest adult Edith knows.

  “Have I truly misread your pages?” Anna’s voice is so tiny it’s barely audible.

  “Yes. Here. I wrote, ‘He found her less restless and rattling than usual.’ But you typed ‘He found her less restless and railing than usual.’ Railing. What on earth were you thinking?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “And here. ‘The other lay cold in his clasp, and through it there gradually stole on him the benumbing influence of his thoughts. . . .’ ‘on him,’ Tonni? I wrote ‘to him.’”

  “I . . . I don’t know how I made the mistake. ‘On him’ must have seemed right. ‘Stole to him’ . . . didn’t seem right perhaps. . . .”

  “Oh, and are you choosing my words now? You wish to redirect my life, comment on my characters and now redirect my writing? Why don’t you just write the book yourself. Perhaps you think yourself better qualified.”

  Anna gasps and steps backward. “I . . .” And then she turns and runs from the room. Later, the pages show up at Edith’s bedroom door, retyped. And Anna seems to disappear. For two or three days, Edith doesn’t see her at all. Her pages are typed and set at her door each day, but Anna isn’t apparent at all.

  Anna can scarcely leave her room. Her limbs are heavy. Her heart doesn’t seem to work hard enough to sustain her. Sometimes she peers out the window and sees Teddy, so jolly these days as he tramps to the barns and back. Perhaps they have exchanged sturdiness and misery. He is fine, and she has sucked up his wretchedness like a leech used to suck out bad blood.

  She attends dinner with the servants but hardly touches the food, rarely speaks. When Gross stops her in the hall to ask if she’s all right, she says, “Of course.” But her heart is in pieces. Too shattered to mend. If she went back to New York, she could find a room in a boarding house. She has saved some money. Surely she could become a social secretary to someone. Perhaps the Lawndale children will need a full-time tutor? No. Far too close to 882, and memories. She will have to be strong. She will have to begin again. How tired it makes her feel.

  At last, Edith resolves to cable Morton. He’s left her no choice. She must make a trip to town to do so. She could never give the task to White. She could never expose herself so.

/>   She stands in the cable office shaking, trying to pen the note. Why didn’t she compose it earlier, at her desk? Why did she wait until now, with the telegraph man standing at the counter on the other side of the room, watching her?

  Am concerned for your safety STOP No word for days STOP Tell me you’re alive and well STOP Nothing else matters STOP

  Ridiculous. Too dramatic. She tries again.

  Haven’t heard from you in weeks STOP Am concerned STOP Please tell me you are well STOP That’s all I need to hear STOP

  No. There isn’t enough urgency. She must let him know that he has made her suffer! That he has withheld from her the one thing that keeps her alive. Otherwise he might not respond! And how would she feel if he didn’t respond even to a cable! She dies a little just imagining it.

  No letter for three weeks STOP Am sick with worry STOP Have I done something to upset you STOP Please let me know if you are all right and ease my mind STOP Always yours STOP

  No words will ever be right. She’ll just have to send it flawed. She hands the paper to the operator and he nods, counts the words, tells her how much she’ll owe. She is quivering as she draws the appropriate bills out of her purse, fumbles with the change. She wishes she had the courage to grab back the cable request sheet. Surely it would be better to send nothing. How desperate will she appear to Morton, if indeed he is alive? And yet, she must do something. She can’t go on not knowing if he’s dead in the backseat of a car. Angry or in love with someone else. Could he be with Katherine? She feels her skin growing damp. Her hairline, her neck, her breasts are prickly with perspiration. She is breathing as she used to in those dark Newport days when she could barely draw air in and out of her lungs. She finishes paying and forces herself to go outside and sit on the bench by the Lenox post office. She prays no one will come along and spot her. Sitting perfectly still, she stares at the ground, waiting until the feeling of dread passes.