The Age of Desire

by Jennie Fields

  “Oh, do tell us, Mr. Gregory,” Sally says. Edith tries to flash a warning look Sally’s way, but she seems not to notice at all. She is practically flirting with Eliot, which of course, couldn’t be more absurd, because Eliot’s only interest in women is to make them uncomfortable or to flatter them into handing over large sums of money for his paintings.

  “Let us all retire to the drawing room,” Edith announces. “It will be much cooler there. The servants will bring the wineglasses. Just leave them. Or some liqueur would be nice, don’t you think?”

  Sally looks a bit perplexed at Edith’s interruption and then it dawns on her that Edith doesn’t want to hear what Eliot is about to announce. Edith can see the awakening in her eyes.

  “Oh yes. That would be lovely. It will be more comfortable there,” Sally says. Edith takes her arm. While Carl and Eliot are arranging themselves in the drawing room, Edith draws Sally through the French doors.

  “Come on, let’s walk out to the terrace. That will be even more pleasant.”

  “Whatever was he going to say, Pussy?” Sally asks.

  “Oh, he’s a troublemaker. The worst sort. You know I’m too proud to be teased.”

  “What does he have to tease you about?”

  Edith looks out over the lake. The sun hasn’t quite gone down and the lake glows strawberry pink.

  “For some reason, he thinks Mr. Fullerton and I spent too much time together this winter. You know, Morton was a great friend to me, with Teddy so ill. I presumed on his good nature to attend plays with me and go out for dinner. Eliot’s just the sort of piranha to think it’s a good reason to take a nip out of me.”

  “Oh. You did mention Mr. Fullerton a good deal in your letters. . . .”

  “Yes. He’s a special person. I felt quite close to him. I needed that, this winter. I really did.”

  “The Fullerton family is confused about his behavior. I mean, the word was he was going to marry his sister, Katherine. Do you know about that?”

  Edith feels herself pale. “Yes, it was mentioned to me. I think it’s all a misunderstanding.”

  “Do you? His mother was already planning the wedding breakfast for this summer. And then suddenly everything was hush-hush about it. I mean initially, she and the Reverend were opposed, and just when they acquiesced, Morton seems to have called things off. Or didn’t call things off, as I understand it. Just walked away from the whole thing as though it never happened, breaking his sister’s heart. I don’t suppose that had anything to do with you?”

  Edith closes her eyes. She feels as though the earth is shifting beneath her feet. Oh, if only it were so!

  Seeing she’s not going to receive an answer, Sally continues. “You once called him mysterious. Was that the word you used? Father always said that he both loved him and couldn’t understand him at all. That no one really knew what was going on in that agile brain of his. I remember he used the word ‘agile.’ I thought it was a strange word to use. But maybe appropriate. Father has always been so good with words, you know. It’s heartbreaking to see Father fail, Edith. It angers me so much. Such a brilliant man. So alive in some ways. Unable to finish any of his projects. Too weak to sit up much of the time. Oh . . .”

  Edith hears the tears in Sally’s voice. Relieved that she’s dropped her inquiry into Fullerton, she puts her arm around her friend’s shoulder. She reflects on how rapidly and urgently Sally’s been speaking. As though she’s barely spoken to anyone but family in weeks. Months maybe.

  “I’m so sorry,” she says. “I wish I could do anything to make it easier for you.”

  “Oh, you do. You do. Inviting me here was the best sort of thing you could do. We shouldn’t even speak of dear Father. It’s just so good to focus on other things. Even Mr. Gregory’s gossip. I’m enjoying it all. I really am.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “There wasn’t anything . . . untoward about your relationship with Mr. Fullerton, was there?” Sally asks.

  Edith feels her blood freeze. Even Sally wants to know.

  “Sally!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I couldn’t help but ask. You blush when you speak of him. I’ve known you too long not to wonder. . . .”

  I’m in love with him, Edith longs to blurt out. I have never loved anyone the way I love him. Oh, if only she could tell her friend! If only she didn’t have to swallow down her misery at hearing about Katherine, her sense of betrayal. If only!

  But Sally is a maiden, never married. A daughter more than a woman. How could she possibly understand that this winter, at the age of forty-six, Edith gloried in taking off her clothes in a rented room surrounded by chestnut blossoms, or that she lay stark naked on a bed of moss under a lilac curtain and in a place where anyone might have discovered them, feeling more ecstasy than she has ever known, an ecstasy that she never imagined possible? Sally loves her. But could not understand. She would try, but she would fail. And it would throw a barrier between them. So Edith merely smiles and says, “Nothing untoward happened. Just good, close friendship. Nothing more.”

  Sally searches her eyes, her face full of questions, and then, with a small pinched smile, says, “Of course.”

  Just as she imagined, the rest of the party goes to bed early, leaving Edith with Carl in an empty drawing room with open doors, a soft caressing breeze blowing in. He helps Edith light a cigarette and then he leans back in his chair and watches her.

  “Don’t you smoke?” she asks him.

  “No, I never took to it.”

  He does look astonishingly young. Maybe he is in his late thirties, but his face is as smooth and sweet as a boy’s, his eyes as trusting and clear.

  “Would you mind if I ask you a question?” he says. He has an open Midwest accent and a formal politeness that pleases Edith.

  “No.”

  “You seem upset about something. I just wondered if there’s anything I can do.”

  “Upset? Do I? Frankly, I’m a little worried about Mr. Fullerton. He was writing me practically every day. And then . . . You haven’t heard anything from Paris, have you?”

  “No.” Carl looks at her with kind, searching eyes. “But with his job, I don’t suppose there’s any way we can know what Fullerton’s up to. He may be involved in some extraordinary story. I’m awfully sorry if it upsets you, though.” Flashing his Midwestern smile, he reaches out and plucks her hand from her lap. She’s surprised how her skin sings from his touch. She lets him envelope her smaller hand between his big farm-boy mitts for a moment. He’s just a young man. Does he think of her as an old woman who just needs his sympathy? When he lets go, she’s almost sorry. She has no romantic feeling toward him. But still, she’s shocked at how much she enjoyed the fire of his touch. She wishes Morton were there to see Carl Snyder holding her hand. To have his heart squeezed by jealousy, if just for a moment.

  “Let’s go out on the terrace,” she tells Carl.

  “Alrighty.”

  She discovers that Mitou and Nicette are already lying like two tiny bear rugs on the cool clay tile a hand’s width apart in the diminishing heat of the day. The moon is just a sliver, barely sending light down onto Laurel Lake. On a quest for mosquitoes, a family of bats are displaying their acrobatics, sending off ear-challenging shrieks of joy.

  “Aren’t they beautiful?” Carl says, his voice young and full of wonder. “People fail to appreciate bats. Do you know, in Australia there are bats as big as cats. They call them flying foxes. They have faces as big as . . . as large as Mitou’s. They are quite beloved.” Mitou lifts his little foxlike face and gazes up at the bats with ennui, then sighs and leans his chin again on his paws.

  “I think it’s just as well we don’t have bats like that here,” Edith laughs. While Carl continues to marvel at the bat display, Edith leans over the banister, looking benevolently down at her garden. Al
l the years she nurtured it! All the seasons when it was her only joy. She watches as a slender moonbeam pierces the lime allée, sending the faintest carpet of light down the aisle between the trees. Carl settles against the banister too, nearer to her than she ever might have imagined. She can feel the pressure of his arm. It doesn’t seem possible he would flirt with her. And yet she feels herself stirring, longing. She thinks about Morton’s visit less than a year ago. And how they stood on this very terrace in the virgin snow. How he grabbed her arm and forced her to turn toward him. She couldn’t have imagined that someday that desire would be met, leaving a bigger hole than it filled. Tears spill from her eyes and she turns her head from Mr. Snyder, horrified that he might see.

  “Mrs. Wharton,” he whispers. “Edith?”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Have I said something? Have I done something to upset you?”

  How endearing of him, Edith thinks, to blame himself. Most men would never have imagined that the cause could be them. In this case, Carl is blameless.

  “It’s nothing you’ve done. I don’t know what I’m crying about. Women cry sometimes.” Lately, too much crying has been done in this house. Yet, how she hates the words that have tumbled from her mouth! What a denigrating thing to say about women.

  “Not you,” he says, his voice shimmering with admiration. “I rather doubt you cry much at all.” She thinks if they stay out on the terrace he might kiss her. He is standing so close. As though a woman who has discovered a taste for lovemaking might give off a scent other men are drawn to. The thought oddly warms her. All these years, no men came within feet of her. Even Walter, who loves her in his own way. But she doesn’t trust herself with Carl Snyder. Her body is interested in him, even if her mind isn’t.

  “We should go in,” she says.

  “Won’t you confide in me?” he whispers. “I’m awfully good at keeping secrets.”

  She looks up at his broad bland face and clear eyes, his taffy-colored hair and small, perfect nose. Most women would call him good-looking. She views him as a child.

  “You are a lovely boy. So kind.”

  His face falls. She realizes the word “boy” has wounded him.

  “It’s just . . .” she goes on, “I’ve never been one to confide. And some secrets are best kept.”

  He nods but his eyes pale with disappointment.

  “I understand,” he says. She shoos the dogs in and nervously finds her way to the sofa. The dogs settle on one side of her, scratching to dent places for themselves in the cushion. Carl sits close to her on the other side. Sofas and chairs all around, and still he chooses to nestle close. How little Edith knows about being the object of interest. She wrote about Lily Bart, who drew men to her like gnats to a fruit bowl. But she has no experience of her own.

  Carl’s face brightens and he strokes the inside of her upper arm with a disconcerting familiarity. The sensation unbalances her.

  “Edith, do you have any idea how famous you’ve become?” he says. “I wonder if you do. When I was in New York, and mentioned I was heading here, the excitement it generated would have stunned you, I think. They say you have become . . . I think the word I heard was legendary!”

  “Legendary?” Edith is astounded and flattered. Could the legions of stuffy, impossible people who surrounded her while she grew up in New York really be speaking of her with words like that?

  “Have you ever met anyone less legendary?” she says in the most off-handed way possible.

  “You are legendary to me,” he says. He leans closer to her, making her catch her breath.

  “So tell me about your work, dear,” she says. “I do want to know all about it.”

  He looks at her querulously, for of course her question has been too broad and clearly a way to put him off, but, taking the cue, drops his hand from her arm and begins to weave a thread about his research, his interests. She breathes a sigh of relief—how distracting it was to feel his touch—and settling into the sofa, allows herself to imagine the vast ocean floor, the prismatic world of fish, seaweed, nets, bubbles, the ocean as the crucible for all the world’s animals, even dinosaurs and birds. Lulled by his even, midcountry drawl, she begins to yawn.

  “I’m boring you,” he says.

  “Oh no, not at all.”

  “Well, I’m boring myself.”

  “It is getting late,” she says.

  “Edith . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “I do have such regard for you.”

  She smiles softly, self-consciously.

  “That’s very kind of you to say. Come, let’s go up to b— Let’s go up to our rooms.”

  She stands and stretches, gesturing for Carl to go first. As she climbs the steps, she knows that if she asked him to come to her room, he would. Once, such a thought would never have occurred to her. Now these depraved ideas follow her as closely as her dogs. After she nods good night at Carl’s door, she picks up Mitou and kisses his knobby little head.

  “Ready for bed, my man?” she asks. Nicette yips at her ankles for equal time.

  Anna’s stateroom on the Amerika is the most beautiful she has ever had. It must have been Edith’s doing, for it’s the sort of stateroom Edith always takes for herself: high in the ship where one can hardly sense the rocking. It feels like a comfortable bedroom in a townhouse, adorned with exquisite painted furniture, hand-decorated cupboards, crystal decanters fitted into silver rails so they won’t slide, Bouguereau-style paintings screwed to the wall. The bathroom is bejeweled with nile green tile and a mammoth tub with silvered faucets.

  In the grand dining room, Anna is seated with couples dressed in satins and furs, the men in patent shoes who set their cigars on the table in anticipation even before the meal has begun. Anna shivers in her own sleeveless hand-me-down evening gown, feeling out of place, even with Teddy’s locket at her neck. Champagne is poured into the flute that sits at the point of her knife and she drinks it to gain courage. Or more accurately, to numb her self-judgment. The champagne persuades her to tell the table that she is an assistant to a writer named Edith Wharton. This seems to elicit little excitement from anyone. Perhaps no one at the table reads. She tells them that she’s taking some time off to see more of Europe than she’s ever seen before.

  After supper each night, she squeezes through the crowded Palm Court where ladies sip velvet-colored cocktails shoulder to shoulder with bored-looking gents tipping back scotch. When she ascends the grand staircase to the door that leads outside, she looks down on the clot of bespangled ocean goers, and wonders what it must be like to have such a social, well-padded life. She feels singled out, utterly different from the rest of the people on board.

  During the day, the deck is filled with loungers and laughers and chatterers, but it’s quieter come nightfall except for a few women smoking together like naughty children, and several couples leaning close, whispering. Standing at the rail, Anna gazes out over the navy nothingness where just that morning the sea sparkled. In her lonely life, she has never felt so alone. As she leans out over the invisible waves, her heart feels as vast and as dark. All her life she has been an optimist. But now, she feels she is tumbling and doesn’t know where she’ll fall.

  On the third evening, standing on deck, she spots an older German man trying to ask one of the crew members if he has seen a walking stick which was carelessly left behind. But the crew member doesn’t speak German, and so she steps in to sort out the confusion. In fact, the crew member knows that an elegant silver-tipped walking stick was found just that afternoon, and he goes inside the ship to retrieve it from the lost and found. The German man is thankful for her intrusion and asks if she would like to stroll with him as they wait for the stick’s return. He is a small man, impeccably turned out, wearing a sharply honed Vandyke and golden-rimmed spectacles. His shoes seem more pointed tha
n his beard and very fine. He smells of leather and starch. She doesn’t think she has ever seen as white a shirt as the one he sports, or a set of buttons as beautiful: made of iridescent nacre and gold. He appears older than she and very wealthy.

  “My name is Thomas Schultze,” he announces. “Can you be so kind as to tell me your name?”

  She tells him, and he asks how she has come to speak German so well.

  “Mein Familie ist Deutsch,” she tells him. She tells him she has spoken German all her life.

  Thrilled he can speak to her in his native tongue, he tells her that he is from Essen, a widower and the proud owner of four factories that manufacture steel. His family has been making steel since the early 1800s. And they are the ones who invented nickel steel, of which this very ship is made. He has just visited steelmakers in America to discuss new techniques.

  “And what else is the steel from your factories used for?” Anna asks.

  “For buildings, motorcars. Soon, steel will hold up the entire world in its unerschütterlich arms.”

  Anna is amused by his dreamy poeticism.

  “A world of steel!” Anna says.

  “In order for buildings to scrape the sky,” he continues, his dark eyes exuding certainty, “they must stand on steel. Motorcars will soon be made entirely of steel. In a car factory in Untertürkheim, they are this very moment experimenting with a hundred-percent steel car. I’ve seen it. No wood at all, even in the frame. Bravo steel!” He raises both arms to the sky in triumph.

  “You like what you do,” she says, amused.

  “It is the greatest gift a man could have: to like what he does. Every day. No one could wish for more. And you, Miss Bahlmann, do you like the way you fill your days?”

  Anna smiles and nods. “I do.”

  “And what is it you do?”

  “I work.”

  “Good works? Charity?”

  “Real work. I am a secretary for a writer. Her name is Edith Wharton.”

  “But . . . you’re joking. . . .”