Villa America

by Liza Klaussmann

  “I know you’re right—” She was interrupted by a knock at the door.

  Sara Sherman rose to answer it and, after conferring with her maid, came back and sat down.

  “Now,” she said, “there’s someone here to see you and I must make myself scarce.” She squeezed Sara’s hand. “What was it the Romans said? Fortune favors the bold? Be brave, darling Sara.”

  Then there was Gerald’s dear, dear face at the door: the long, aquiline nose and serious brow, currently furrowed; the lovely bowed lips, just a bit too full, that kept his expression from looking too ascetic.

  Sara was scarcely aware of her cousin’s exit as she met Gerald across the room and put herself into his embrace.

  “What a day,” she finally said, pulling away from him.

  “An autopsy and coroner’s inquest in one,” he said darkly.

  They sat close together on the sofa.

  “What did your mother say?” Sara was thinking of her own mother.

  “She seems to think we’re playing a scene from Romeo and Juliet. Never mind her. It’s my father that’s the real problem. I was told in no uncertain terms what a disappointment I have been and continue to be and that he blames himself for my lack of any fundamental grasp of my duties in this world.”

  “Oh, I got that too—a little less harshly, perhaps—from both of my parents.”

  “The trouble is, how is one able to live up to one’s duties if one isn’t given any?”

  She traced a fine line in his brow, trying to smooth it away. “Do you think…” She wanted to say this carefully. “I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps…perhaps I may not be the best wife for you.”

  He looked at her sharply. “Do you want to get out of it?”

  “No. No, I don’t. But…well, do you?”

  “My God, I do not.” He held her gaze.

  “We’ve never talked about religion.” She toyed with her tea doily. “Yours, I mean.”

  He let out a sigh. “Is that all? I was afraid you might be beginning to agree with my father.”

  “I don’t care one bit what your father thinks about you,” she said fiercely.

  “And I don’t care one bit about the Catholic Church. The only thing it has given me is cold, distant parents and floggings in the woodshed by nuns too dense to know when a young boy misses home, such as that home may be. You will never have to set foot in one if I have anything to do with it.”

  Sara laughed.

  “Well, I’m glad you find it funny. You wouldn’t have found Sister Martha and her nasty switch all that amusing, I can tell you that.” But he smiled at her.

  “No, it’s just…” She felt relief, not just because of his words, but also because they were them again, together against the world.

  “Sara,” he said, his face serious, “this is important: the only life I want is the one we invent for ourselves. I don’t want what my parents have or what your parents have. I want something entirely of our own creation. I’ve felt inauthentic for most of my life and I want to be finished with that.”

  She took his hand: “You will never, ever have to be other than you are with me.”

  “Truly?”

  “Truly.”

  “My God, Sara, we’re really going to do it.” He laughed, a bit crazily. “I feel slightly hysterical.”

  “Well, don’t get too hysterical. We have to come up with a new plan now. I’m afraid you’re going to have to become a serious businessman, at least for a little while, if we’re going to convince them.”

  “I can be anything you want. Anything.”

  In the days and weeks that followed, their parents showed little sign of relenting. Gerald was working hard at Mark Cross to prove to Patrick Murphy that he was deserving of promotion, or at least favor, but to Sara, he seemed to grow more and more depressed, suffering bouts of what he called the Black Service. She wasn’t happy either about keeping their secret when what she wanted to scream was I am loved; I am lovable. But she had decided: she was not going to be at the mercy of fate one minute longer.

  So, in between private lunches at La Goulue and tea at Sara Sherman’s and evenings out under the veneer of family chaperones, they wrote to each other.

  Dearest Jerry,

  I visited the studio of H. Mann (horrible man) yesterday and caught my heel on his unfinished floor and have been thinking ever since how much I love boards with knots in them, unfinished, imperfect. In our house, I don’t want everything polished and trussed up. When I think of all the chintz in the world…

  Dear Sal,

  You and I prefer the imperfect, the lady without her corset, to the grande dame roped and hemmed and hoisted. Shabby genteel, as I like to think of our style. I don’t want a house that reeks of Vogue’s latest hints to the housekeeper. You, Salamander mine, shall never again live in a tableau vivant.

  Smart chintzed apartments. Bah. None of these for us. I was just at Billy Forsythe’s place this afternoon, which is indeed just a bit too “smart apt”—shall this become a popular phrase?—and when I was finally at liberty to flee said abode, I came across a wonderful antiques shop. I went a bit nuts and, in a fit of optimism, bought the first things that will (they shall!) adorn our home: two milky-white glass vases for your room, a terrifying stuffed pheasant, a silver box for your dressing table, a set of six pewter goblets, an octagonal ashtray, which you’ll love, one gold-flecked lamp, a set of glass bottles the color of sea, and a miniature tureen decorated with the bust of a family dog.

  I’ve had them sent to the familial manse, although I have no idea where I’ll hide them from prying eyes. It doesn’t matter, it gave me such comfort because I felt your presence so clearly while I was choosing them, it was as if you were next to me…

  Dearest Jerry,

  I am coveting a set of Sheraton benches. But where to keep them? I really can’t alarm Mother any further. Also—a lovely, sturdy bassinet, made of some kind of reeds that could have come from the Nile.

  Does that alarm you?

  Dearest Sal,

  I love the bassinet already. And what will go in it. My God, can’t you see them? Curious, creative, humorous, lithe, and clean…

  Dearest Jerry,

  Most of all, loved and kept safe. Their life—our life—will be loaded and fragrant, filled only with everything that is beautiful and different and wonderful…

  My darling Sal,

  I think it’s the details in life that are important, all the small things that create the larger picture. When I think back on my own childhood, it’s my father’s study I see: the bust of Emerson, the small, mean black notebooks full of his limericks, that smooth cruel desk. All of it adding up to a controlled distance we were kept at. All that contained sadness.

  I’ve never said this to anyone before…

  Dearest Jerry,

  It’s so strange to think of our lives before we knew that we loved each other. For me, it’s almost unrecognizable, and there are times when I wonder that it took us so long. But I can’t be sorry about anything, because it brought us to this point.

  I feel only with you have I become an actual living, breathing woman. Dearest Jerry, I want to be the best wife to you, to make a home and a place in the world for you where there are only round edges…

  Dear Sara,

  I fear I am getting nowhere with the paternal figure. I want to believe in these things, but truly I am losing faith. I feel that all the secrecy, the playing of games, playing the bachelor in New York among men who not only don’t understand me but seem to regard me with suspicion, is breaking me down. I’m not certain of anything anymore. I wish I were stronger for you, for us…

  Dearest Jerry,

  None of this is easy; not for you or me. It feels unjust, but it will come right. I promise you…

  Dear Sara,

  I know I sound petulant and pouty, which only makes me feel worse, because it’s small and I hate anything that’s small. But at times you leave me a little frightened—frightened by you
r goodness, your discretion, your self-containment, while I go all to pieces. At times your perfection leaves me wondering what I can offer you in return…

  Dear Gerald,

  Don’t talk nonsense.

  The problem was, of course, that she knew exactly what he meant. As time dragged on with no resolution in sight, it became harder to sustain the fantasy, and despite herself, Sara began to feel like she was back in that Whistler painting, a sense of inertia slowly overtaking her.

  Then, one morning, she found she couldn’t, or just didn’t, get out of bed. She lay between sleep and waking, without even the energy to write Gerald, who, needing to escape the city and their predicament, had gone off on a retreat with some former members of his Yale secret society.

  She missed breakfast, and when lunch was threatening to pass by as well, her mother knocked at her door. Sara expected a reprimand, but her mother’s voice was gentle.

  “Sara, dearest,” she said. “May I come in?”

  Sara turned on her pillow and regarded her mother. “Of course.”

  “Are you unwell?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know.” She felt sleepy, that was really all. Her limbs were heavy, sinking into the mattress.

  Her mother at first sat on the edge of her bed, then lifted her whole self in and wrapped her arms around her eldest daughter. She stroked her hair.

  They lay like that for a while, listening to the traffic outside the window, watching the afternoon sun move against the wall. Sara was reminded of the time, so many years ago now, that her puppy had been run over by a sleigh, the tiny little body crushed and bloody under the cruel metal runner, all the warmth gone out of her pelt. Sara had carried the dog all the way back to the house and collapsed at her mother’s feet. Adeline had lain in bed with her for days, just as she was doing now, cradling her daughter until Sara’s grief had lightened.

  She wanted to tell her mother that it might not work this time, but Adeline spoke first.

  “Is it really so untenable here with us?”

  Sara squeezed her mother’s soft hand. “Unbearable, you mean? No. Of course not.”

  When Sara didn’t say anything else, her mother started again. “You are our dearest child, and we want you to be happy. That’s all.”

  “I know that, Mother.” She felt safe there in Adeline’s arms. “It’s just I want my own life. And…”

  “And children,” Adeline finished for her.

  “You do know how old I am.” She turned and looked at her mother. Then, feeling that hard little shame that had been lodged in her for years as she’d been passed by, she said quietly: “This might be my last chance for happiness.”

  Adeline looked away, as if she couldn’t bear to see that pain. She sighed and then nodded. “I forget, I suppose, sometimes. You girls have been my greatest happiness, my favorite accomplishment.”

  “I know.”

  “Yes,” she said after a while, “you’re right, after all. You are a woman. You must have a household to manage.” She kissed Sara’s head. “I’ll speak to your father if you promise to rise for tea.”

  “I love you, Mother.”

  “Yes, yes.” Then: “My darling girl.”

  Sara lay there for a while longer, then rose and began to dress herself. She picked through the post lying on the silver tray in the hall and found a letter from Gerald.

  My dearest Sal,

  I am writing this from Deer Island, with an enormous mounted bear head hanging over me. You know that I was rather dreading this retreat; I do hate the awful feeling of being “inspected” when I’m with a group of men, the feeling of being incomprehensible to them, such as I am. But it has turned out to be a relief, for I can finally speak to men I admire about the woman of my life without the hush and secrecy that has been following us.

  I just wanted to write and tell you: you have kept alive the man in me. Everything else I have done and appeared to be has not been real. I will return to you with the full confidence that what lies ahead of us will be new and good and will erase the smudged years that have gone before.

  All my love,

  G.

  When she finished reading it, she went to her writing desk and took a pen and a piece of stationery. She sat for a moment and then put her pen to paper.

  My dearest Jerry,

  Do hurry home. I believe the storm has broken. I love you.

  Sal

  1918

  Gerald stood in the mess line, the bright Texas sun beating down and making his skin itch under his wool flannel shirt. He was trying to read Sara’s latest letter amid the cacophony of hungry, waiting men.

  It was a warm January day, somewhere in the sixties, he guessed, and the light bounced off the flat, yellow landscape of Kelly Field, forcing him to squint whenever he raised his eyes.

  He was jostled by some other trainees fooling behind him, and he moved up a bit and redoubled his efforts to concentrate. Since he’d shipped out to the Ground Officers Training School at the beginning of the month, Sara had written him almost every other day, long letters crammed with details of her life—which was mainly taken up by their three-week-old daughter, Honoria—as well as her views on the politics of the war and her concerns that he would be shipped off to Europe.

  What remained unsaid in her correspondence but was nonetheless apparent between the lines was Sara’s lingering sadness over Adeline’s death from pneumonia, a year ago now. Her mother had never been exactly robust, but her sudden decline came as a shock, and Sara didn’t seem to have fully come to terms with her passing, even if she rarely mentioned it.

  In her latest “report,” as Gerald had come to think of them, fondly, Sara wrote that she’d dined with some visiting Columbia professor of Russian studies, and she cheerfully passed along his views.

  Of course, Father had no idea what he had let himself in for, agreeing to dine with this “friend of a friend.” He was quite the radical, but I found him marvelous. Anyway, Jerry, he says that no matter what happens between Russia and the Central Powers, just the proximity of the German and Austro-Hungarian soldiers to the Bolshevik revolution has hurt them. Apparently, hundreds of thousands of workers in Berlin are preparing to strike for peace soon, and the idea of revolution has “infected” the armies and navies of the Central Powers.

  Imagine! What a triumph it would be for socialism if the war was won by psychology instead of steel. Of course, I know you are anxious to do what’s right and fight alongside our men, but I, for one, can’t say I’d be glad of it.

  You see, I can’t be happy if you are not with me, and if anything were to happen to you to prolong that indefinitely…

  Honoria is gaining weight fast and furiously and becoming so beautifully fat. We both loved your night letter wishing her a happy three-week birthday. She must be bathed in front of the fire in my room now, as the bathroom is too cold—the gas is weak, owing to the positively arctic temperatures here. Olga and Hoytie are coming to lunch tomorrow, to see myself and the delicious one, and we’re planning a stroll around the park. Only a week ago, I could barely walk between the nursery, the bathroom, and our bedroom. Then yesterday a dinner, and real outdoor tromp tomorrow. So you see, I’m getting so much stronger, and you aren’t to worry.

  We both love you and miss you. Do write or, better yet, send a telegram so that I can have your news soonest.

  Love,

  Sal

  Gerald folded up the letter and put it in his shirt pocket. He was nearing the opening to the mess tent, but he couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for the beans and anemic pork waiting for him inside.

  He was now strangely grateful for a childhood that had prepared him for what he’d found when he’d arrived at these desolate airfields outside San Antonio. It wasn’t the freezing nights, cold showers, and small canvas cot that were familiar; it was more the feeling of isolation, the flatness of emotional life—here reflected in the dusty, open spaces of these former cotton fields—that resonated with him.

  The
same couldn’t be said for some of the men, who took the conditions and the uncertainty hard. One of them, Tom Wilson, had been among the twelve trainees in Gerald’s wall tent. No one knew much about him or where he came from, but he was soft-spoken and always shared his care packages around.

  After a week at camp, however, they’d woken in the night to his cries. He was standing in the middle of the tent between the two rows of cots, completely naked, screaming: “It drops down. It drops down. It drops down on you.” Eventually a medic was fetched to take him away to the infirmary. They’d all agreed the defect must have been there before, but it had unsettled them nonetheless.

  A Jenny passed overhead and Gerald looked up, using his hand to shade his eyes. He watched the small biplane circle over Kelly Field’s barracks and tent cities before coming in for a bumpy landing in the distance. He felt a shiver of possibility pass through him. He’d been accepted to the Signal Corps’ School of Aeronautics in Columbus, and if all went well, he could be up in one of them in less than a month.

  Still, he had to get out of Texas first, and he didn’t know when that would be. In the meantime, drills, bayonet and rifle training, and fieldwork lay ahead. It was a strange place, this camp. Two thousand acres of drought-afflicted land holding ten thousand men from all over, but it didn’t feel like America at all. It seemed more of a twilight country between what had been and what was coming, between his former life and war.

  He would barely have recognized the Gerald Murphy of two weeks ago, the man who had blithely stepped off the train in New Orleans and bought, as he’d written Sara at the time, a marble-top sofa table (for the hall?), a pair of silver grape scissors, a claret jug engraved with the initial M, a set of ivory oyster forks, a strange lavender pitcher for Honoria’s bath, and a small agate box carved in the image of a lady’s head, trimmed with diamonds, and inscribed with Walk on roses and think of me.