Ceremony of the Innocent

by Taylor Caldwell

  Kitty always angrily wondered why Jeremy had married “such a dolt, such a big huge thing, so unpleasing in her face and her figure. She is like one of the young laundresses my mother employs. She reeks of harsh soap, at least in temperament, and new-cut grass and starchy clothes.” Kitty was very urban; she was not fond of the country, of simplicity, of sunshine in long golden shadows on green lawns at sunset. Though her family had an enormous “country cottage” on Long Island facing the ocean, surrounded by bountiful and glowing flowers and trees, she disliked the place and rarely visited it even in summer. The heat of New York in July and August pleased her, for she was averse to cold or even to the apple-scented autumn. She would laugh gaily at herself when speaking of this to friends. Let them desert the city in the summer if they wished. She found no place on earth more delightful than New York at any season, and was happy when summer departed and all her friends either returned from abroad or “from the country.” She avoided all lakes, streams, and the ocean as much as possible, for she had a catlike aversion for them.

  “Her head is too large for her body, and she emphasizes it with that gigantic black pompadour of hers,” Jeremy said once to his wife when she had expounded on Kitty’s beauty.

  “She has the loveliest black hair, dear,” Ellen said, “so sleek, so shining, so straight and always in order. Not even a high wind can ruffle it.”

  Jeremy did not try to discourage the incongruous friendship between the worldly and sophisticated and, he suspected, evil woman, and Ellen. He was conscious that Kitty was polishing Ellen in her manners and was giving her poise and some assurance, which all his love could not do, for Ellen believed it was only love which made him praise her and not truth. But when Kitty sometimes affected to admire her she was overwhelmed with happiness, and believed the falsities. Had not Kitty told her over and over of her affection for the girl?

  “I wish, sometimes,” Jeremy said, “that you’d be a little more cautious about people than you are, Ellen. It’s all right to ‘love and trust,’ provided the few persons you encounter are worthy of it.”

  “Kitty is worthy,” said Ellen with conviction. “Why else could she endure me?” Jeremy did not laugh at this, as he would have some months before. He only looked at Ellen with somber apprehension while he wondered what more safeguards he could put for her in his will, in codicils.

  Kitty was always very careful not to let Ellen suspect that she thought her gauche and “impossible,” and “a disgrace to poor dear Jeremy.” Ellen had confided in her utterly, and this Jeremy deplored, though he had never found a way of successfully intimating to Ellen that her background and earlier employment as a servant were not the best tactics in attracting admiration in the society of New York.

  He had tried, as delicately as he could, to advise her. He had said, “No one, my darling, is really concerned with anyone else, and a little air of mystery about you, and your origins, would perhaps be more interesting.”

  But Ellen, with her acute sensitivity, had immediately cried, and with tears, “I know, I know, you are ashamed of me and that’s always been my deepest fear!”

  He had sworn at her then, for perhaps the first time, and had said, while he alternately embraced and shook her, “What an idiot you are, really, Ellen. I am just trying to protect you from the malice of cruel people, and most people are cruel.” But she did not understand, and only cried the harder. It took him several exhausting nights to reassure her that he adored her, would never have married another woman, and that she was the joy of his life.

  May was more direct. Ellen had made the error of taking Kitty upstairs to see her aunt, and though Kitty had been all solicitude and bantering vivacity and grace and perfume and impeccable manners, and had told May of her “devotion to your charming and delicious niece,” May had hated her immediately and had mistrusted her. But she was “quality” and therefore entitled to obsequiousness and open respect. She said to Ellen later, in her dark and warning tones, “Mrs. Wilder is a lady, Ellen, and she don’t show that she don’t think much of you, but I know. I can tell. She wants something, and it isn’t you, Ellen. Her airs aren’t put on, like yours, dear. She comes by them natural—family, schools, money, blood. But she hides what she thinks under those manners. All the real quality do that, but you weren’t in service long enough to learn. A lady like Mrs. Wilder isn’t nice to somebody like you, Ellen, without a reason, and the reason isn’t that she thinks you’re worth it, for yourself.”

  “Oh, Aunt May, what on earth could be the reason?”

  May shook her head. “That I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s good for you, Ellen. I have a feeling—”

  Miss Ember, the nurse, also had a “feeling.” She, too, had not been deceived by Kitty Wilder, though she had been properly awed by her, recognizing her class immediately. She wondered what a lady like Mrs. Wilder could “see” in a lumbering hulk like young Mrs. Porter, with all that awful red hair and the too colorful face and the lack of sophistication. Miss Ember, having seen a great deal of life, shrewdly suspected that it was “the master, Mr. Porter, who’s the attraction.” Miss Ember smiled lewdly to herself. She hated “people of quality” while she served them with true devotion and humility.

  Kitty did not gossip about Ellen to her friends or make fun of her. She was far too shrewd for that, for even the best of friends had a way of repeating tidbits, not out of malevolence but for the pleasure of it, and without a sense of betrayal at all. She well knew, also, that gossip had an unpleasant way of reaching the object of it sooner or later, with sometimes disastrous results. So, though she smiled when others wondered about Ellen and her origins, she merely shrugged and said, “Well, who knows? There’s many a skeleton in everybody’s closet, to coin a brand-new cliche.”

  “But one does like to know about someone’s family and background,” a lady had once said to Kitty. “It is only proper, to know.”

  “We all know that she came from some little godforsaken town in Pennsylvania, of a poor but respectable family of some consequence. Jeremy has said he knew them well, and even hinted of a very illustrious ancestor.”

  “She is very well behaved and deferential to her elders,” admitted one elderly lady, “and has refinement and a natural aristocracy, though most of you younger women do not credit that. I can tell good blood. And she has an excellent mind, if a little timid. It is such a mystery.”

  “Let it remain so,” said Kitty, who had no intention of having Jeremy belittled by her friends and made uncomfortable. Though, I suppose, she thought, he wouldn’t give a damn. No, they couldn’t make him uncomfortable. He is too assured in himself, too potent in himself.

  Jeremy noticed her more when she was with Ellen and that was temporarily sufficient for her. She felt she was making progress in both her aims. In the meantime her husband was becoming more and more tedious and hesitant with her, and she would lie beside him thinking it was Jeremy there, and her whole meager body would glow.

  “What! You are enceinte?” exclaimed Kitty Wilder when Ellen shyly told her. “What a contretemps! How unfortunate! With the season at its highest now.”

  “Unfortunate?” said Ellen, and all her apprehensions about her child came acutely alive again.

  “Yes. Just a bride still. How old did you say you were, my dear?”

  “Eighteen. But what—”

  Eighteen, very, very plus; I can trust my observation, thought Kitty. But her sort always lies. They think youth is everything; she’s at least twenty-four. Kitty said, “I know a very fine, discreet doctor, and I’ll be happy to have a word with him in your behalf.”

  “What for, Kitty? I have a very good doctor of my own, a friend of Jeremy’s. He thinks I am in the most perfect health. I—it is my fourth month now.”

  “Not too late,” said Kitty with briskness. “It can all be managed.” Her polished, round agate eyes glittered on the girl. Then she saw that Ellen had totally misunderstood her and her dislike and contempt quickened. She leaned towards the gi
rl and whispered, “I mean—it can all be eliminated. I have had it done three times.”

  Ellen stared at her, confused. Then suddenly she colored deeply and turned aside her head, vaguely comprehending. She was sick with horror. “I—I couldn’t,” she stammered, and felt overwhelming shame because she now understood. “Jeremy—wants—it.”

  Kitty was very quick, and she laughed and all her monster teeth flared out in the lamplight of Ellen’s boudoir, wet as a tiger’s.

  “But you don’t?”

  “I—don’t know,” said Ellen. “You see, I am afraid of children, remembering how they were when I was a child. They weren’t ‘angels’ at all, in spite of what a lot of women say. Many of them were devils.”

  “Then, do as I suggest, dear.”

  Ellen shook her head. “Jeremy would never forgive me. Did your husband forgive you?”

  “I never told him.” Kitty reflected. A child might bind Jeremy closer to Ellen, and then again it might not. Men like Jeremy were not fatuous fathers. They frequently found their children distasteful or boring, and fled their milky wives, who usually preferred the nursery to their husbands’ company. Ellen was just the kind to be such a wife, with that great breast of hers. Kitty made a slight mouth of disgust.

  “Well, perhaps you are right,” she said, patting Ellen’s hand. “You will make a wonderful mama.”

  “I don’t feel like a mama,” said Ellen. “I am only Jeremy’s wife, and that is all I ever wanted to be.”

  Have a few brats, and he won’t be much of a husband to you any longer, sweetheart, Kitty thought, and smiled with satisfaction in herself. Her husband, Jochan, was become more friendly day by day with Jeremy, and admired the younger man greatly. Kitty believed this was her own doing, for had she not deftly arranged it so that the Porters dined at her house at least twice a month and she and her husband dined with the Porters that many times, too? The four were becoming very “intimate.” Jeremy was being spoken of as the next Congressman for this constituency, where he was highly respected. Once she had had hopes that Jochan would show some political acumen and ambition, but he did not possess the ruthlessness of Jeremy Porter, nor the disciplined intelligence nor the potency. He would also never risk anything; he was caution itself, admirable in a lawyer but fatal in a politician. He loved his money more than Jeremy loved his. Kitty, a gambler herself, had recognized a gambler when she had met Jeremy.

  But a successful politician had the power of distinguished appointments, and Kitty was determined that her husband would have one of them, through Jeremy. After New York, Kitty was fond of Washington, where her father had once been a Senator. The family had often been entertained at the White House.

  When spring came, Ellen knew it was no longer possible to conceal the bulge of the child in her belly, no matter what swirling house robes she wore. Moreover, she suspected that Miss Ember, her aunt’s nurse, had already guessed and was waiting malevolently for May to receive the news. She had her suspicions that Ellen believed her aunt would not rejoice in the coming child and that Ellen was sparing her as long as possible.

  One day Ellen asked Miss Ember timidly if she would leave the room for a few moments, and Miss Ember left promptly but took up a convenient spot near the door. She heard Ellen inquire about May’s pain and what the doctor had said this morning and May petulantly answered, with sighs. Then Ellen began to murmur and stammer a little and Miss Ember smiled to herself and leaned her ear to the door. There was a small sharp silence, then May exclaimed as if in mortal anguish, “No! Oh, dear me, no, Ellen! How did that happen?”

  I could tell the old bitch, thought Miss Ember, laughing to herself. She could visualize Ellen’s embarrassment, the clasping of her hands on her knee, her wretchedness.

  Ellen was sitting with her aunt before the perpetual fire, but the windows were open to the bright spring air and the curtains blew and the traffic below and on Fifth Avenue came clearly and buoyantly to them. Ellen said, pleadingly, “People usually have children when they marry, Aunt May, don’t they? And Jeremy is so happy about it. I don’t understand why you think it is such a tragedy, a misfortune.” The spring wind raised her ebullient hair and brushed it across her cheek, and her face was full of anxiety for her aunt, who was more than distressed.

  “Yes, he’d be happy, wouldn’t he?” cried May, sitting up in her chair and trembling. There fled from her her final hope that she and Ellen would be banished and would return to Wheatfield and the house of Mrs. Eccles, and tears began to roll down her dried gray face. Ellen went to her at once and knelt down beside her like a penitent child, but one also baffled and confused. She tried to take May’s hand, but May pulled it away from her and covered her face with her hands.

  “I don’t understand, Auntie,” said Ellen. “Of course, Jeremy is happy.”

  “Have you no shame, Ellen?” May demanded from behind her hands, using the very phrase she had used to the wanton Mary.

  “Do women usually have shame when they are going to have a child?” asked Ellen, more and more bewildered.

  “Yes, they do! They know—they know—what started it!”

  Ellen’s cheeks felt hot, but she smiled faintly with remembrance. “We are all born that way, Auntie. There’s no shame in it.”

  May dropped her hands and glared wetly at her niece. “A lady feels shame, Ellen, but then you are not a lady, as I’ve always told you, and that’s why you don’t feel any shame.”

  Ellen stood up slowly and went back to her chair and considered her aunt with gentle candor. “I know three ladies who are going to have children, too, and they aren’t ashamed. They talk together about it—and to me. Of course, they don’t go out in public or to parties any longer, but neither do I. I just take walks with Jeremy in the evening, as the doctor advises, for fresh air and exercise.”

  But May was back some nineteen years ago when her young sister had confessed to her “shameless condition.” It was Mary whom May addressed now, and not her niece, and it was in piercing agitation.

  “What shall we do? What can we do?”

  Ellen was amazed. “I don’t understand what you mean, Auntie. There’s nothing we can ‘do.’” Was her aunt hinting what Kitty had hinted? “I’m a married woman; I am Jeremy’s wife. This is our child, and I am so pleased that he is happy over it.”

  May cried, “Children are a curse! It is terrible to have them!”

  As Ellen was always assailed by fear of what his child would do to her husband, she turned pale. But she said sturdily enough, “Not everybody feels that way. Jeremy doesn’t.” She thought to herself, with compassion, that her poor aunt had never been able to please her own husband that way, and she tried to take May’s hand again but was repulsed.

  “What will you do with that—that child?” said May, thinking of her sister. “Where will you go?”

  Ellen’s beautiful face became blank. “Why, this is my home, Aunt May. I won’t go anywhere else. Jeremy and the doctor have already engaged my nurses—”

  But May interrupted her wildly. “He’ll throw you out when he knows!”

  Ellen’s confusion grew. “But he’s known from the beginning, Auntie. Why should Jeremy throw his wife and child ‘out’?”

  “Men are all alike! It’s all love until they get a girl in trouble. Then it’s out with them!”

  Again Ellen was amazed. “But, Auntie, I am not ‘in trouble.’ I am a married woman. And Jeremy is my husband, and this is my home.”

  May was sick and trembling. She struggled to focus her eyes on her niece, but overshadowing that brilliant face was the face of the beloved sister, Mary. “We can’t stay here any longer.” She paused, then saw Ellen clearly. She began to stutter. “We should never have left Wheatfield and Mrs. Eccles. I warned you, Ellen.”

  Now the iron that lay so far beneath Ellen’s gentleness and innocence momentarily emerged. Her voice was still kind and patient, but she said, “I think you are unwell, Auntie. I’ll call Miss Ember,” and she stood up. May grasp
ed her hand, and the thin twisted fingers were feverish.

  “You never listened to me, Ellen! You were always willful and determined on your own way, and look what has happened to you, as I knew it would. Ruin.” She cried again for her bare little room in Mrs. Eccles’ house, where she believed she had been safe, and at peace. Nothing was “right” in her present world; all was chaos and uncertainty and suspicion of fate, and the conviction of catastrophe.

  Ellen said with great quietness, “I am not in ruin, Auntie. I am the happiest woman in the world. I adore Jeremy; he is, as it says in Romeo and Juliet, ‘Lord, lover and friend.’ That is how I feel about him. I know he loves me, too. Why else did he marry me? No one forced him to do that. He came for me in Wheatfield, and took me away from misery and hopelessness and gave me—bliss. I never told you all that I felt in Mrs. Eccles’ house. The misery and despair. The blackness of my existence. I’ve tried to tell you, but you refused to understand. If for nothing else I would love Jeremy, that he took me away from there, and married me.”

  But May was hardly listening. “You can say all that about a lady who was so good to us? Gave us shelter when no one else wanted us?”

  Then Ellen spoke her first harsh words of anyone: “She is a hateful woman, Mrs. Eccles, as bad in her way as is Mrs. Porter!”

  She was immediately stricken by guilt and felt quite ill. She turned towards the door but again May grasped her. “Mrs. Porter! What can she possibly think of this—this—She’ll never speak to you again, Ellen, and it is all you deserve. The shame—”

  Ellen said through lips cold and stiff, “She already knows. I wrote her a month ago.”

  “And what did she say in return?” May leaned eagerly towards her niece.