This Side of Innocence

by Caldwell, Taylor;

  For the sake of Jerome, who held too many of them in his power, the “old” community was severely but graciously willing to accept her children. Invitations were extended to the very young Mary Maxwell Lindsey, but always a gracious reply from the young lady’s mama was returned: “We believe that Mary is not yet of an age when she should attend even children’s parties.” However, it was tacitly understood that when young Mary was older she would be accepted in decent society, despite the ostracism of her mother. Jerome was no fool, said his expedient friends. He knew that it would not be well for his children to be alienated from their proper companions. Besides, Mary would be quite an heiress, and she was her father’s darling, though he had a younger child, a son.

  For some reason, Amalie was not resentful of the fact that Alfred had built within eye-reach of Hilltop. She often sat on the terrace and looked down at the house, with a strange if tranquil expression. Once Jerome had caught her like this and had said, most disagreeably: “I shall buy you a pair of binoculars, so you can distinguish them more clearly.” Amalie, her eyes twinkling, had demurely accepted the offer, and when Jerome had actually given her the binoculars, she had thanked him with more warmth than he liked. He never knew whether she used them or not, but had his suspicions that she did.

  Amalie did. She would sit for a long time, the binoculars clamped to her eyes, herself concealed from her own home by the copse of pines. She could see Dorothea very clearly now in the garden, either strolling alone, or with Alfred. Their faces were only small blurs, but they moved easily and quietly, and Alfred often made one of his familiar stiff gestures. When Philip was home on his holidays, Amalie could see him, sitting alone under bending willows, a book on his knee, his eyes fixed on space. Amalie felt her only sadnesses then, and she would drop the binoculars with a sigh.

  She and Jerome rarely, if ever, spoke of their alienated kinsfolk. But sometimes, when they were alone together before the library fire, Amalie would see that Jerome had dropped his book and was staring before him with quiet savagery. Then the two ugly scars, one on his forehead and the other on his left cheek, would glow as raw and scarlet as if they had been newly inflicted. Amalie knew that he hated Alfred and Dorothea with a voracious hatred, and that he felt his impotence to injure them. It did not matter to him that Alfred, with proud and touching dignity, and with his old sense of justice, had abandoned Hilltop to his cousin. Alfred might have made matters cruelly awkward indeed, for the house had been left to them jointly. But he had remembered, as always, that Jerome was William Lindsey’s son, and he had stepped aside. Amalie knew that Jerome had offered to buy Alfred’s interest in the house, and that he had been coldly refused. She knew, with secret and inner shrinking, that this grip Alfred was retaining on Hilltop maddened her husband, and she feared, not without a sense of justice, herself, that it was for this very reason that Alfred would not relinquish his share. Amalie and Jerome might occupy this house and own a half interest in it. But Alfred would have them remember grimly that their enemy, living quietly below them, was master, in part, still, and that they lived there, unmolested, by his contemptuous and magnanimous consent.

  Each year Alfred paid half the taxes on the estate. When Jerome had had some improvements made—very costly improvements in the way of extra bathrooms, gas and a new well, a new roof and some extensive landscaping—he had been visited by Alfred’s lawyer who formally advised him that Mr. Alfred Lindsey insisted upon paying half of the cost. “His interest, you know, sir,” the lawyer had said. “He must protect his interest.” And the lawyer had smirked. However, Jerome would not accept this or the humiliation attendant upon it.

  Mr. Lindsey, who had had a very strong sense of British tradition, had left the house jointly to his son and his nephew, with the proviso that should Philip die, and should Alfred have no more sons, it would, in the event that Alfred predeceased him, belong entirely to Jerome. Should Jerome have a son, however, that son would retain his father’s interest in the house. After the death of both Jerome and Alfred, if their sons survived, the double interest would continue.

  When Amalie had presented Jerome with his son, little William Lindsey, Jerome’s satisfaction was intense. The child was beautifully formed, which led Jerome to make so savage and vicious a remark that Amalie had felt a strong, if temporary, repulsion for him. Jerome was proud of his son, and loved him, but not as he loved his daughter, Mary.

  Amalie was thinking of many of these things this morning, and they distressed her. She had filled a shallow basket with the garden’s best blooms, for Mr. Lindsey’s grave, for this was the anniversary of his tragic death.

  This August day was not the spectral day, awash with water, that it had been on that terrible occasion ten years ago. The sky now was incandescent with light, so that the whole landscape lost hard contours and seemed made of pure bright light also. The trees were heavy with heat, motionless. A hot breath blew up occasionally from the parched earth. But the gardens glowed with color. Delphiniums were spears of brilliant blue against the red brick walls; early chrysanthemums splashed yellow, tawny pink and burning white in the perennial beds. Pears, with pink cheeks, hung from laden stems like ovals of plump freshness. Marigolds and sweet alyssum bordered every flagged path. The roses were expiring in a last violent bloom, and Jerome’s new marble fountain threw sprays of light into the burning air.

  Amalie’s basket was heaped with fragrance. The gardeners had watered the flowers, and globes of mercurial light stood on tinted petal and green crisp leaf.

  She went into the house and encountered a maid. She enquired for Mary. But Mary, as usual, had disappeared. Amalie uttered an impatient sound. Jerome encouraged the little girl in her seclusiveness and disappearances, for she resembled his father, and Jerome remembered the retiring nature of Mr. Lindsey. Amalie went into the library. The curtains had been drawn against the heat, and the room had a cool dimness pervading it. The leather chairs stood apparently empty. But Amalie, carrying her flowers, knowingly made a tour of them. As she suspected, Mary was crouched in the depths of Mr. Lindsey’s old red-leather chair, and she was reading.

  “Well,” said Amalie, “you are a most odious young lady. I thought you were to help me gather the flowers for your grandfather’s grave.”

  Mary put aside the heavy book and speechlessly uncoiled herself from the chair. She was less than ten years old, but she was very tall for her age, and unchildishly shy and silent. She said, in a soft but oddly penetrating sweet voice: “I’m sorry, Mama. I did not know it was so late.”

  “You never know. You are so very tiresome, Mary. I hoped to walk, but now we’ll have to have the buggy. Look at your frock. Out of respect to your grandfather, you ought to have changed to something fresh.”

  The child looked down at her dress with a bemused expression, but did not speak. She was somewhat afraid of her mother, who was usually impatient with her. But when Amalie stretched out her hand and smoothed the mass of hair on the childish shoulders, Mary detected more love than annoyance in the touch. She smiled shyly.

  Amalie sighed. “Do go and find Jim, Mary, and ask him if he will drive us to the cemetery. And tie on a broad hat. The sun is very hot.”

  She put the basket on the long oaken table and left the room. Mary watched her go. When she was alone, the child approached the basket and delicately fondled the flowers. Roses, delphiniums and early chrysanthemums made a splash of vivid color on the dark oak. Mary bent her head and sniffed deeply of the scent. A look of wild, frail pleasure stood in her eyes, a kind of innocent amazement and joy. She held back the thick smooth mass of her pale bright hair as she inhaled the fragrance repeatedly. She murmured incoherently, feeling a sort of exquisite pain. It hurt her, now, that these lovely things had been torn from their beds to deck a cold, uncaring grave. She glanced about her swiftly. Then she withdrew a single dark-red bud, thrust it under her ruffled pinafore, and ran out of the room. She climbed the great oak staircase with held breath. She saw no one. She peeped into the bedro
om of her mother and father. As she hoped, Amalie had gone for a last fond look at little William. Mary found a water glass, filled it from the pitcher, inserted the rose, and placed it on her father’s dresser. She surveyed it with profound pleasure for a moment, then pulled the bud gently towards her and kissed it passionately.

  Her eyes, so like her grandfather’s, sparkled deeply. But they were not frosted over, stilled, as Mr. Lindsey’s had been. Their light blue was quick and intense, like running water under a summer sky. They changed, deepened, paled and darkened, with all of her silent but ardent moods. Her springtime was swelling in her, but it was a soundless springtime, deep and waiting, pregnant with future potentialities. So Mr. Lindsey had been, in his youth, and this Jerome suspected.

  She saw herself in her mother’s long pier glass. She had a small face, pointed and delicate, exquisitely flushed and sensitive, but with a curious look of inner strength. Yet it was not a noble face, as Amalie’s was. There was a hint of rigidity in it, for all its sensibility and its childish fluidity. Later it might be hard and cold, as Mr. Lindsey’s had been on occasion. Now it was sweet and pure; in spite of its patrician delicacy of feature it was not vulnerable. A light of swift intelligence touched the eyes, the curves of the small pink mouth, the nostrils of the thin straight nose. Jerome called her his “Little Beauty,” with pride and egotism. Quite without personal vanity, she knew that she was indeed beautiful, but she was glad of it, for it pleased her father. Sometimes he called her his “small New England vestal,” hut though he smiled as he said this she was not too certain that there was admiration in his voice. It was very puzzling.

  She shook back the veil of silvery-blonde hair from her hot cheeks. A few radiant tendrils of it stuck to her damp forehead. She would have to comb it, and that was a nuisance. In the curtained light of the room, her hair appeared almost white, so pale was its fair color.

  Yes, as Mama had said, her frock of blue-and-red gingham was rumpled. She smoothed it with her small narrow hands. She pulled out the ruffles of her pinafore. Then, with Amalie’s own impatience, she untied the pinafore and threw it carelessly upon her father’s favorite chair. He was to find it later and to hide it hastily from Amalie’s censorious eye. It touched and delighted him when he found these small evidences of his daughter’s secret visits to his room.

  Totally forgetting that she had decided to comb her hair, Mary ran down the stairs again, and hurried to find Jim, her favorite, and to inform him that he was to drive her and her mother to the cemetery.

  In the meantime, Amalie had gone to the nursery. Little William, five years old, lay sleeping in his crib. She bent over him, her heart melting. If Mary was her father’s darling, here lay her own Benjamin. The little boy was big and sturdy, still retaining the plumpness and roundness of babyhood. He slept lustily, and with complete abandon, his thick black curls spilling over the white pillows, one rosy fist clenched under his scarlet cheek. Black lashes fringed his lids; beneath them were sleeping eyes of dark purple, like his mother’s. His mouth was large and strong, obdurate even, and the lines of his full face, even so young, betrayed that some time it would possess the strong clean planes of Amalie’s own face. The child exhaled the sweetly innocent and animal scent of clean young human flesh. The sheet was wound about his limbs, for he slept vigorously. She touched the damp warm curls with a tender finger, crept out of the room, shut the door behind her.

  Amalie moved swiftly away from the nursery door. She was filled with a sense of the most profound satisfaction and completion. She stepped in her room to tie on a wide straw hat. She surveyed herself dispassionately, but not without pleasure; She was thirty-two now, and childbearing had not injured her full if slender figure. Rather, it had given her a richness, a fruitfulness. Her white lawn dress, sprigged with tiny clusters of red rose-buds, enhanced her natural handsomeness, and she eyed the slenderness of her waist, the curves of her high full breasts, complacently. Her throat, rising from the low ruffles of her bodice, was still without lines or flaccidity, and showed full and white. She saw her smiling mouth, full and ripe as a fresh plum, and her clear and vibrant pallor. Her eyes shone vividly; her dark and glimmering hair was neat under her hat. It disturbed her, however, to remember that she had a few white hairs near one temple. But then, Jerome, at forty-five, was completely gray, and this only added to his distinction. As she thought of her husband, her whole face melted, became young, almost breathless. Even the occasional angry quarrels which occurred between them, and which disrupted the peace of the house, only added to their passion for each other. There might be contentment here, indeed, but there were furious upheavals also, and no real tranquillity. Amalie laughed a little and went downstairs.

  She stood in the lower hall after she had retrieved her basket of flowers from the library. Sometimes she was haunted by ghosts, the ghost of Mr. Lindsey, the remembered footsteps of Alfred, heavy and sure on the stairs, the austere voice of Dorothea, the quiet, deformed shadow of Philip. But Mr. Lindsey’s ghost was always kind and understanding, and Philip’s remembered presence was gentle. She shook her head and sighed, recalling that she never passed the door of the room she had shared with Alfred without a faint inner shrinking and quickened step. Mary slept there now, in the very bed where her mother and Alfred had lain. Jerome, who was no sentimentalist and saw no shadows on his bedroom walls, neither understood nor cared about Amalie’s aversions in this direction. Mr. Lindsey’s room had been converted into little William’s nursery. Dorothea’s room was empty, as were two others on the same floor. These were “reserved” for guests, visiting financiers and industrialists from New York, friends of Jerome’s. Philip’s room was Mary’s “playroom,” elaborately furnished by her doting father, her sanctuary to which none except Jerome came with her complete approval. He had given her on her fifth birthday an extraordinarily beautiful little piano, all rosewood and ivory, for she had marked musical gifts. All the rest of the furniture was of rosewood also, carefully selected by Jerome.

  Amalie, in the hall below, frowned. She was always repressing a most shameful and secret jealousy. Well, some day Mary would marry, and Jerome would have to relinquish his treasure to another man. Amalie laughed in spite of herself, shook out her flounces, and went out.

  The buggy was waiting. Jim, more gnarled than ever, his last fringe of hair quite white, was chattering loudly with Mary. He had brought out the two-seated open surrey, and Mary sat beside him, in front, bare-headed, her bright silvery hair flowing in a warm but strong breeze.

  “You forgot your hat, you tiresome child,” said Amalie, as Jim jumped out stiffly to assist her. “Go in at once and get it. You will have a sunstroke, and your father will blame me. Your cheeks are already too flushed.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  A heavy hot wind had blown up and was now tossing the trees and whitening the grass and turning the few white clouds into driven caravans. The burnished sky brightened into a deeper blue under the flailing of the wind, and the rushing sun hurled shadows wildly over the hills and the, valley.

  Amalie and little Mary clung to their wide hats as the carriage ambled towards the cemetery. When they climbed down to the ground, the warm and roaring wind flung their frocks about them into sculptured lines. Jim and Amalie struggled with the old iron gates. Jim returned to the horse, and Amalie and her daughter, carrying their flowers, moved down colonnades of ancient trees.

  Here the wind was less violent, broken by strudy trunks and low walls. But the flat canopies of elms swung against the sky, ragged and disheveled. The gravestones glittered whitely in the sun. Rabbits and squirrels scurried across the grass. The populous loneliness of death lay all about them, the green mounds lying in light or in deep shade, the silence here as silence is nowhere else.

  The Lindsey burial plot lay at the far end of the cemetery, near an ivy-covered stone wall. The Lindsey gardeners took care of this section, and it was neat and trim, the headstones polished and clear. A semicircle of tall frail willows drooped to the
green earth, guarding the graves and sheltering the white-marble benches. Here stood urns full of ferns and geraniums and bright phlox. There was a small artificial pool, constructed of flat stones, where birds gathered and splashed themselves and gossiped melodiously. After the death of his beloved wife, Mr. Lindsey had had a life-size statue carved, of white stone, in the form of a cowled bent figure with folded hands. This statue stood between two willows, contemplating the graves with hidden face. The folds of its garments were green with lichen.

  Amalie went to Mr. Lindsey’s grave, accompanied by her little daughter. She stood there and read the script on the headstone: “William Montgomery Lindsey, 1800–1870.” That was all. There were no flowery sentiments on any of the stones. Amalie laid the flowers gently on the grave. But as she bent to do so, she saw that someone else had been there before her. There was a sheaf of white summer lilies already there, at the head, only a few lilies, but exquisite in their pure whiteness and stillness.

  “What pretty flowers,” said Mary, with love and regret. “What a shame to let them die here, where nobody can see them.”

  Amalie secretly approved of this realism, but she said with hypocritical reproof: “Don’t be silly, Mary. We see them, don’t we? The flowers are for the living, not the dead.”

  “Then why put them there?” asked the girl, in her high, sweet voice. “Why can’t we take them home? We haven’t any lilies like these.”

  Amalie was about to embark on a reproving lecture about robbing graves, even of flowers, and then did not speak. Jerome was right: it was foolish to be sentimental with children. They always saw through it, and laughed at you in their hearts.