The Age of Desire
Page 40
She rarely thinks of Morton these days, though when she does, she always feels a faint bruise on her soul. Still, she can’t regret it. Morton helped her taste the best of life, if only for a moment. She risked, and reaped the reward of that risk. In the process, she was scarred. But scars are beautiful, she believes. They are the marks of having lived. Teddy, sadly, is the one who wears the most gaping wounds.
Three years earlier, she finally divorced him after more threats, more madness. When the papers were signed, what she felt most of all was a sense of failure, hopelessness, exhaustion. Last she heard, he was making a spectacle of himself in Boston, holding up his stockings with gold garters, escorting a fancy woman on each arm. Someone said he threatened a prostitute with a knife. She knows she could easily fritter away more years regretting all the time she wasted with him. And rue her part in his demise. Instead, the war has given her focus. Together, she and Anna have done so much, making a difference for thousands of people in a terrible time.
And what it has meant to have Anna stand by her side! From the very beginning of the war, Anna was furious at the Germans. There was such loyalty in the way she raged against her own people, pledged her loyalty to France and to Edith’s causes. Knowing Anna, Edith would have expected no less.
Now she is gone. When Anna asked to travel to America, against all warnings, across a sea teeming with torpedoes, what could Edith say? She knew Anna’s cancer was advancing.
“I’ll give our speech in Kansas City,” Anna said hopefully. “We’ll get the good ladies of K.C. to reach into their pockets. Please let me go. The Captain and Aennchen want to see me one more time, and then I’ll come back.”
She packed her speech in her valise—the speech she gave again and again over the last year traveling from women’s club to women’s club throughout New England. Raising money for Edith’s charities, calling on a bestilled and safe country to help people whose lives had been torn apart by a war thousands of miles away. American soldiers are yet to fight. No one is certain if America will join the war. But Anna helped them to see it. To feel it.
Little Anna, tinier than nearly every woman she encountered, already in pain, her bones growing tumors all around them, but not saying a word about it, standing again and again before skeptical crowds, speaking out like an orator. Heartfelt. Proud. A tear escapes Edith’s eye, thinking of those meetings, the officious women presidents. The call to read the minutes of the last meeting. And then Anna stepping up to the podium, smiling her heart-shaped smile. Speaking up for women so far away. And she did it because Edith’s cause had become her own.
Walter says Anna was the engine behind Edith. Even when Tonni had gone nearly deaf, when her illness made her moody with pain. When her typing had grown slow and sloppy and Edith didn’t know what to do, Walter says the charity couldn’t have happened without Anna. Because somehow, her kindness made everything work. She soothed weeping workers whose husbands hadn’t written for weeks. She told orphans about her own childhood, and about her life, of which she was quite proud. There was much to look forward to.
In the end, Edith frequently grew cross with her. She got in the way too often. Anna wept because she felt herself useless.
“I’ve lived to be useful. And now this . . .” What could Edith say, because at the very end, it was true: she was no longer effective.
Walter, a glass of wine in his hand, his voice low so Anna couldn’t hear, said, “Let her go to her family, Edith. She wants to see them. You owe her that.” And Edith acquiesced. These last few years, Walter has been Edith’s strength. Through the divorce she never imagined would happen. Through years more difficult than she could have plotted in her books. Teddy so dangerous the doctor told her he was a danger not just to Edith but to society. Morton more unpredictable than ever. And the war tearing apart her beloved France. While she wrote Ethan Frome, back in the miserable summer of 1910, Walter read her pages every night. Nodded with approval. And Anna wept when she typed the ending. Together they held her up when Edith didn’t think she could stand.
And when HJ died just this February, Anna was there to remember the list Henry had made her jot down for his funeral when long ago he had a mere cold. Black horses. No cars. They laughed together. And wept together.
“You come back,” she whispered to Anna at the dock at Bordeaux.
“Of course,” Anna promised. Her face was as diminutive as a child’s. Had it grown smaller with pain and age? Edith settled her in her cabin, stayed at the dock and watched the SS Espagna sail out into treacherous seas.
Without Anna by her side, and her war charities straining forward, Edith has hired a new secretary, so much more efficient than a fading Anna. And she has found the perfect woman to help her run the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee, a woman who has become her dear friend. Another to run the hostels. But no one can read her face and mood as fluently as the quiet bystander who watched her grow from child to woman. It could be a burden sometimes to be seen so clearly as Tonni saw her. Yet no one has ever made her feel more beloved.
Then, just a month ago, on a night as soft as a cashmere blanket, Edith received the cable that Anna had slipped into a coma and died. Walter held her all night long. And she told herself it was best that Anna hadn’t suffered. That she was with family. But what makes a true family? Wasn’t Anna’s true clan populated by Edith and Walter, Gross and Cook and White? She wrote to Anna’s niece:
Dear Mrs. Parker,
The cable announcing Anna’s death came last night, and you can imagine the shock it gave me. I was so reassured by your letter that I was looking forward to the possibility of seeing her here again as soon as it was safe for her to cross. I wrote her a long letter, telling her all my gratitude for the share I know she must have had in obtaining for the hostels a generous gift from the Kansas City Relief Fund.
You know, to some degree at least, what Anna has been to me for so many years, what a friend and helper and companion, and you will understand how it adds to my sorrow that she should not have been with me when the end came. Yet I am glad for her sake and for yours and your father’s that you were all together for the last months of her life, after so many years of separation; and her letters show me how happy she was in this reunion, and how much your affection and your devoted care were appreciated by her. I let her go reluctantly only because of her insistence, and because I thought she might be right in thinking that the Paris winter climate aggravated her illness, and I was much worried at the idea of her undertaking so long a journey. But alas, I think for a long time the end had been inevitable and I can only be thankful that it came suddenly since I knew she foresaw and dreaded much suffering.
I shall never have a friend like her, so devoted, so unselfish, so sensitive and fine in every thought and feeling. I send you all my deepest sympathy, dear Mrs. Parker.
Yours very sincerely,
Edith Wharton
Every day since, she has thought of Tonni too often, bitter that their last few months together were strained, that maybe Tonni escaped because she no longer felt valuable.
But how stunning that Anna, in her last and pain-filled days, had still managed to raise so much money in Kansas City! Such a genuine outpouring of interest and support—who could have imagined it in a small Missouri city! When the money arrived in an envelope, Edith thought: Her speech must have been extraordinary. The stack of money was wrapped in a glued paper band with Anna’s handwriting on it: “The Kansas City Relief Fund’s donations for our charities, Herz.”
Herz. Edith has always been Anna’s heart. How lucky she was to have Anna’s love all these years. When other loves failed her, Anna’s was unbending.
And now this letter from Mrs. Parker today telling her the true source of the money. It has shaken Edith beyond words. Almost too tired to get up, she does, walks wearily to her desk, pulls out her desk chair and picks up her pen. Her hand is shakin
g. But she must write it, while the news still rattles her heart.
Dear Mrs. Parker,
I am deeply touched by what you tell me as to the origin of the sum from the imaginary “Kansas City Committee.” I never dreamed that this was a gift from Anna, but I know nothing more characteristic than her sending me the money in this way.
Anna’s own money. All she had in the world! Sent to fund the one thing Edith cares about most. Anonymously.
She seems to have had a premonition that the talk she was to give for the benefit of my work would never take place, and to have wished that the refugees, in whom she took so much interest, should not be the losers. It was a beautiful thought, and just like her.
She did it for me. The words echo in Edith’s brain. She would have done anything for me. Edith is too tired to finish, as though her heart is squeezed, unable to pump out enough blood to sustain her. She sets down the pen and blindly finds her way to her bed.
In the morning she will have to dictate the words anew to her secretary. The letter in her own handwriting is too pocked by her weeping, and the only person capable of reading the crabbed and tearstained loops is forever gone.