When they made it, at last, back to the beach, all three of them were exhausted, their clothes covered in green and brown smudges and their hair full of salt. Clara had been angry. Look at the state of you, she said to Mary. Look at your dress. It’s filthy.
We were having an adventure, Edward said, and he came up and kissed her on the cheek despite her glowering expression. Isn’t that right, girls? Yes, yes, said Mary. That’s right. Kate grinned and nodded. You can’t worry about your clothes, he told her, when you are on an adventure. He was determined not to let her spoil the beauty of the afternoon; he wanted to have peace, he didn’t want to deal with her sudden peevishness, her dissatisfaction that seemed to take in the whole world: her husband, her daughters, herself. He took the girls both by the hand and kept walking down the beach away from her.
What if the tide had come in while you were out there? she called after him. I couldn’t even see you from here. How could I have known to call for help? Edward? Why aren’t you listening to me? Her words followed them over the sand until the wind blew them out to sea.
He carries the plate back to the darkroom and inserts it into the enlarger, focuses the light onto the printing frame, then flicks it off again. He opens the drawer where he keeps platinum paper and fills a developing tray with potassium oxalate. He’s irritated to find his mind occupied again with Clara: he had come in here to escape her. Never mind, he thinks as he fits the paper into the frame. What had he said this morning that upset her so much? He goes over the scene in his head. She had been playing the piano in the front parlor. The children were at school until noon, and he’d just come in to tell her that he’d invited a couple of additional guests to stay at the house, Mercedes de Cordoba and Arthur Carles. They would be coming up that very afternoon from the city. They probably wouldn’t be staying long, and they were such close friends; it wasn’t necessary to make a big fuss for them, or any elaborate preparations. He thought she’d be pleased. She likes both Mercy and Arthur a lot; she’s declared it loudly, in that way she has at the end of an evening, when she is tired and a little drunk: I really do love Arthur. He is such a dear man. It didn’t occur to him that the news of the impending arrival would be a cause for anger.
But when he told her about it, Clara had stopped playing and looked at him with an expression of disbelief. Then she put her head down on the keys of the piano, so that a chromatic mass of notes rose out of the instrument and engulfed her, filling the room with dissonance.
IF SHE OPENS her fingers just a little bit, she can see the corner of the room where the walls join the ceiling, each making a triangle of gray. Isn’t it peculiar how, even though they are covered in the same paint, each surface looks like it is a different color? She has never noticed this effect before; she has never had time to notice. Of course, on the other hand, if she closes up her fingers again, the whole world goes dark. Bruise-colored, black and red, the room vanishes, and takes the rest of the house with it. No more beds to make. No more silverware to polish. If she just stays here, like this, with her hands over her face. That, she thinks, is really a good trick.
She starts to shake again. Is she giggling or weeping? She isn’t sure until she feels tears start to slide across her face, dripping sideways over her nose and down onto the pillow beneath her head. How ugly she must look with her nose pouring and her eyes all red, with her blotchy cheeks and the skin around her eyes puffed out, bulging and discolored, her face practically falling off her bones—each time she looks in the mirror, it has collapsed a little further, until she can hardly recognize herself. Never mind—it will match her ruined figure, won’t it? It has been ruined really since her second pregnancy six years ago, and no amount of medicinal strengthening compound has given her back the pretty waist that was so admired when she was younger. Stocky, she has become stocky; that is the word. Hasn’t she grown stocky since her marriage, people might say, and they would be quite correct. She has become a fat frump, a woman of middle years with her charm fading out of her. With each passing year she is becoming more hideous. And as she does, his regard for her is dwindling, she knows; she feels it in his carelessness toward her. Eventually, when he cannot even bear to look at her, then he will at last find someone else. Oh, maybe he won’t leave her and their children. He has promised many times that he would never do such a thing, but what difference would that make? As she knows only too well, it isn’t necessary that a man should leave home entirely for him to begin keeping his heart elsewhere.
Her throat constricts and she lets out a sharp involuntary sob. She knows that her weeping can be heard all through the house. The interior walls are thin and sound carries. Edward has chided her about this before: You know Louisa can hear the racket you are making all the way down in the kitchen. What if the girls hear you? How will they feel, to hear their mother so upset? Always thinking of someone else’s feelings, never hers.
She doesn’t care. Let them all crowd around the door and listen with their ears pressed up against it if they like. She has decided never to leave this room again. She will become a recluse, starting today, so what does it matter what people out there think of her, Edward or that silly girl Louisa or old François. She is going to stay right here and to hell with them! She imagines staying in this bed for the rest of her life. They will try to get her to come downstairs. Edward will coax her, plead with her; perhaps he will get angry and shout and storm around like he does when he is upset. Still, she will just smile and look at him sadly, as though he could never really understand, and turn away from him.
Her daughters might be confused at first, but eventually they will get used to it. Mary won’t miss her all that much anyway—that girl has never really appreciated her; she has always been her father’s favorite, with eyes only for him. She thinks of Clara as mean-spirited and conventional, always wanting her daughters to keep their clothes clean and behave themselves, and wasn’t Edward forever undermining her attempts to bring up her daughters with a bit of decency and decorum, always dragging them through swamps and across rivers on his confounded adventures, never thinking that the ruined clothes would have to be washed, and the cuts cleaned with iodine and dressed, and the children calmed and put to bed so they wouldn’t be too tired for school the next day—oh, she could just shriek with frustration when she thought about it.
And what about little Kate? Well, she can come and see Mama upstairs if she wants to. Clara decides she will receive visitors; she’ll greet them all with the same even temper, never showing so much as an ounce of impatience or sadness. She just won’t come downstairs, won’t cook another dinner for them, won’t clean the kitchen or churn another load of laundry that Louisa has not had time to finish and hang up to dry. She won’t make up another bed for a guest invited unexpectedly at the last minute without consulting her. The endless extra chores that the running of a big house demanded from her—those she is done with.
Gradually, she thinks, the mattress will begin to bow around her, as though it’s cradling her in a deepening embrace. Through the window she’ll see the seasons change, watch the sun trace its path across the sky. She’ll become wise with watching. She will no longer be concerned with making a good impression on their friends and acquaintances; not worried about reading the latest books on art and politics and psychoanalysis. It won’t matter that Alfred never speaks to her directly if he can help it, or that Arthur is forever interrupting her in his enthusiasm to talk to Edward. She won’t care about that tinge of condescension she feels from so many of the women in their social circle: Gertrude Stein, Katharine Rhoades, even Mercy, recently. She doesn’t know why, but she suspects it is because she is not an artist. She is just a wife. Only Mildred, and of their Paris set, Marion Beckett, are truly her friends as much as they are Edward’s. Only Marion, she knows, comes to the Marne to visit her first and foremost, not just to bask in the glow of her gregarious husband, a man whose charm means he can get away with almost anything.
He’d come in when she was beginning t
he third movement of a Franck composition for solo piano, the fugue, and stood beside her with one elbow leaned on the top of the unraised lid. That was her stolen hour, the first she’d had to play all week, and she’d been congratulating herself on having salvaged it by getting up early and finishing the silver before the first of their summer guests arrived. One hour was not much, but somehow it would have to be enough, and she had begun with scales, running her fingers lightly up and down the keys, then moving up a semitone. She imagined the notes like water in an ocean wave, caught and held aloft, then gently dropped back down to be picked up again by a different current, another key. C, C-sharp, D, E-flat—her fingers worked unconsciously, and she felt energy begin to flow through them. She started the piece, sightreading as she went, but pleased to be beginning something new. And then there he was, standing too close for her to ignore, flipping through the scores stacked on top of the piano, glancing idly at the titles and waiting for the chance to speak to her.
This appeared to be the nature of the day, then, that everything she tried to do would be interrupted. Earlier, after getting the girls breakfasted and off to school, she had been seated at the kitchen table polishing the last of the silverware, watching her reflection come up clear and upside down in the faces of the spoons, when she heard voices in the kitchen yard. Louisa, and then a deeper voice, male, that she couldn’t identify. She went to the window and looked out. Louisa was leaning on the fence talking with a man dressed in the dark rough coveralls of a farmhand. Clara didn’t know his name, but his face was familiar: he must work on one of the farms nearby. The two of them were standing very close together. Then the man leaned back and swung lazily on the fence, his arms making the radius of an arc traced by his long body. He said something she couldn’t hear and then burst out laughing, the sound harsh in the quiet. Louisa laughed too, high and nervous. Behind her, the laundry Clara needed for tomorrow lay half-finished, shirts and underwear floating in a tub of soapy water, the plunger beside it on the ground, discarded.
Clara had gone to the door, opened it and closed it again hard. The sound of it slamming shut was enough: Louisa started up and looked around, and the man took off hurriedly toward the road. Clara watched him go off across the fields, headed away from the town. He must have come, she thought, from the farm belonging to Claude Perrine, the man who also served as the local garde champêtre. They were on good terms with Claude. If she saw him, she would speak to him about the man. But Louisa, she was another matter.
Clara stopped playing and looked up at Edward.
“I found Louisa chatting to one of Claude Perrine’s men this morning,” she said. “Could you speak to her about it?”
“Why?” he asked, turning the pages of some Chopin piano pieces. “Is she not allowed to speak to men now?”
“Of course she is. But not while she should be doing the washing.”
“You’re too hard on her,” Edward said. “What harm can it do for her to talk? Will you play this nocturne for us this evening? Arthur loves Chopin when you play it.”
“Please, Edward. If I say anything about it, she’ll just glare at me.”
“I’ll speak to her,” he said. “I promise.” He promises things when he doesn’t want to talk about them anymore, she knows; it is his way of ending the conversation and moving on to something that he thinks is more important.
“Darling, I’ve asked a couple of extra people to come up from the city this weekend. Arthur wrote and said he so wanted to come and paint here again this month, so I told him he could if he liked. He and Mercy are going to come up by train this evening. You can put her in the bed next to Marion and Arthur can sleep in the study. Could you make up the bed in there for him?”
So there it was, her precious hour, gone.
“How long will he be staying?” she asked.
“For the rest of the month, I should think; not too long. I didn’t really ask him.” He opened the book to a polonaise and held it up for her to see. “Or you could play this one.”
Clara put her head down on the keys of the piano. Around her she felt the notes coming up and covering her, as though they wanted to drown her. She wished they could. Above her she saw her husband gazing down with a perplexed look on his face.
“What on earth is the matter?” he asked.
“Nothing.” She felt tears rising in her face, her throat tightened. “I just sat down to play. It’s been my first chance to practice for days.”
Edward nodded. “Well, maybe you should try to practice a little earlier in the day,” he said, “when there is less going on. What have you been doing this morning while I’ve been out?”
He doesn’t understand anything. He doesn’t even know what she does with her time, and no wonder really, since, in the last year, he has spent so much time traveling.
If she is honest, she knows that her greatest fear is that she will decide to stay in bed forever and he won’t notice that she is gone. After all, Louisa can cook and do the chores; he’ll have his friends for company; and she is absolutely sure that more than one of the women they know would happily provide the other thing for him. She knows, of course, about Isadora Duncan; that news had reached her about a year after the affair ended. Quite casually, one of their acquaintances, Judith Cladel, who wrote for the newspapers, mentioned that she had seen Edward with that woman at a party in Paris the summer before Clara had become pregnant with Kate. Oh, she had said, I didn’t know that she was in France then. Judith had turned bright red and stuttered, well, I’m sure he simply forgot to mention it—but the embarrassment had already told her everything she needed to know. Other bits and pieces of evidence had assembled into a story in her head: other meetings he had “forgotten.” Letters he’d gone to his studio to read. The worst of it, she sometimes felt, was how little he had tried to hide it: prancing around with that woman just as though it was the most innocent thing in the world, as though it was absolutely right for him to act that way.
She thinks that the affair had ended by the time she put its pieces together, and she is also fairly certain it hasn’t resumed since, if only because Isadora (amazing, shocking woman) has moved on to other liaisons far more notorious. At the time of her discovery she had tried to talk to their friends about it, to find out more of what had gone on; she had written to Alfred Stieglitz, who she’d been told had seen Edward and that Duncan woman together in New York some years before. He had written back, telling her to dismiss such thoughts from her, as he put it, silly head. He did not deny that the affair had taken place: You married him, knowing all his faults, he wrote instead. He loves you as well as he knows how, and works hard to support you. What more can you ask?
And in the end, she supposes, he is right, for what was there to say, or to do? She had two small children and nowhere to go, and anyway, for a while around the time of Kate’s birth he had seemed much more present, had almost loved her the way she had always imagined. But the world encroached: he became distracted again by travel and work. And for all she knows, there may be other women; she no longer feels that she can entirely dismiss that possibility. Women love him, dote on him. If she were to seclude herself she would merely be getting out of their way, making it a little bit easier for them.
From downstairs she hears the sound of the girls arriving home for their midday meal. Louisa would give it to them in the kitchen, and then they would go back to school for their afternoon lessons. She rises quickly and locks the door: she doesn’t want to see her children now. Then she flops back down onto the bed and puts her hands back over her face so the world goes dark again.
THE NOISE OF an automobile reaches across the quiet of the valley. Edward hears it approach from where he is standing over a developing bath watching an image rise out of the paper: hard verticals and scattered chevrons coalesce until he can recognize cliffs, wheeling seabirds, the ocean. The rough sound of the engine gets closer.
He waits until the picture has reached its point of greatest clarity, then plucks it
from the developer with his tongs, immerses it in fixer, then in water. He clips it on the line above the sink, rinses his hands, dries them on the front of his trousers, and slips out of the darkroom. The brightness of the day makes him blink. He puts up a hand to shield his eyes from the glare just as the car turns into the end of the drive.
Edward still finds automobiles wonderful. He has never owned one himself, but once at a state fair in Milwaukee, he and Lilian climbed into the driver’s seat of a Model T when the owner wasn’t looking and rode very slowly around the fairgrounds in it (neither of them knew how to shift out of first gear), until the owner and a local policeman caught up with them and showed them, insistently, which one was the brake pedal. This car is black and red, with a raised front seat; it looks like a crossbreed of an insect and a cow. It sputters to a stop in front of the house, emitting one last fierce bang as Marion cuts the engine. The silence that surges up in its wake feels peculiarly empty, as though the world had made room in itself for the sound and wasn’t sure how to close it up again.
Marion stands, pulls driving goggles from her face and waves to him across the lawn. She shucks leather gloves from her hands and folds them into a traveling bag beside her on the seat. Her movements are precise, and she has about her a sense of calm order. He remembers all at once how much he likes this quality of hers.
The Last Summer of the World Page 18
