Ceremony of the Innocent

by Taylor Caldwell

  “You, Francis? You?” She was stunned. Her mouth fell open.

  “Is that so frightful a thought, Ellen? I love you; I have always loved you.”

  She could not believe it. She felt dazed, removed from reality, strange, alienated, floating, whirling in a confusion that made her numb.

  “I have always loved you,” he repeated. “From the moment I saw you, kneeling on the summer grass in Preston. You do remember Preston, don’t you, and the Porter house? Or have you forgotten that, too? Jeremy’s parents? They are old, and forgotten. They see their grandchildren rarely. Whose fault is that, Ellen? I know they have said disrespectful things about their grandparents, who have no one else now, and you have never corrected them. Oh, Ellen. You, too, need guidance and care, as well as your children.”

  Her eyes were stretched and wide, and there was a wildness, a shifting in them.

  “I love you,” he said. “I want to be your protection; I want to help you. I’ve always wanted that, Ellen. I’ve always stood near you, in thought if not in physical presence all the time. Surely you remember that I helped you many times. That was because I love you. You were never out of my thoughts. Did you never know that?”

  She shook her head. She was crying silently, the tears running down her cheeks. He let her cry and still held her hand. Then she said in a far and shivering voice, “You don’t know, Francis. I—I can have no more children. I would not really be a wife to you.”

  “Let me be the judge, Ellen. Let me be your husband—to care for you and be your strength.”

  He drew her gently towards him and slowly put his arms about her. He bent his head and kissed her mouth, but with the artfulness of love he did not let her guess his passion for her and the urge he felt to take her lips fiercely with his own, and his overwhelming desire to stroke her breasts and kiss them.

  She was suddenly conscious of a powerful exhaustion, even a prostration. She felt herself being torn away on a dull wind that would not release her. Her will was torpid. She closed her eyes and wanted only to sleep, be nothing, and forget.

  “Ellen? Will you marry me? Tomorrow?”

  “Yes,” she whispered to the hollow darkness before her eyes. “Yes.”

  Cuthbert, frail and old, came to the door to announce dinner. Ellen never remembered if she ate that dinner or not. She did not remember even going to bed. She slept that night in a sort of stupor, comatose, unfeeling, and without a single thought.

  They were married hurriedly the next morning in City Hall, by a judge hastily summoned by Francis, while the city continued to rejoice and celebrate the end of the war. That night the newspapers carried, on their front pages, news of “the quiet marriage of Congressman Francis Porter, to the widow of Jeremy Porter, once a Congressman himself, and a notable lawyer, who was murdered by persons unknown, four years ago, in New York. The Congressmen were cousins—”

  Kitty Wilder read the paper that night. She could not believe it at first, and then her friends began to call. Her maid was told to inform those friends that Mrs. Wilder was out of town, briefly, for a few days. Kitty took to her bed, overcome by rage and hatred and mortification, frustrated as she had never been before in her life. She wanted to kill. She could not decide whom she hated the most-Francis Porter or Ellen. She decided later that night that Francis was the most hated by herself, after he had called to tell her, politely.

  He had kept his promise.

  C H A P T E R 32

  “I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE IT,” said Maude Godfrey to her husband, Charles. “How could Ellen have brought herself to marry that man?”

  “God knows,” said Charles glumly. “Francis Porter, of all people! I see he whisked her off to Washington fast enough, to let the dust settle, I suppose. Poor Ellen. He must have given her drugs, or something. I suspect she didn’t know what she was doing. Well. I’ll soon be out of this uniform, love. I’ll try to find out where they are staying in Washington, when I go back.”

  But Francis had taken his bride to Baltimore, to a secluded hotel the management of which was discreet.

  Ellen remained in the dusky if luxurious suite for the entire week after her marriage to Francis, and could not be persuaded to leave it even for the dining room. She moved in a semi-stuporous state as if her vital forces had been suspended. She thought of nothing; she could repeat only over and over to herself, “I did this for my children.” There were dim nights when she was briefly aroused to a vague aghastness and cowering at the lascivious violence Francis displayed towards her in their marriage bed. He had become a total stranger to her, a man she had never known. Sometimes she was brought to an obscure awareness of his sweaty probing and searching of all her body, his loud panting, his gripping hands on her flesh; he would bury his face in her breast, hurtingly, and would groan over and over, “Oh, Ellen, Ellen!” Driven by desire and love, he could not have enough of her; he seemed to have lost his mind. She endured all this flaccidly, like one in a drugged dream, sometimes weakly trying to avoid kisses that cut and bruised her mouth, her neck, her legs, her arms, even her feet. He would light the lamps the better to see her and examine her; sometimes she would protest faintly, conscious of shame, but this only increased his avidity. He seemed to want to devour her; there was a ferocity in his breathless lovemaking, a savagery. It was as if he hated and adored her simultaneously. He would wind his fingers in her hair and shake it, then, when she moaned and tried to free herself, he would soothe her incoherently, crushing her body to his, half smothering her.

  “You don’t know, you can’t know, how long I’ve waited for this, my darling, all these years! You can’t know how I’ve dreamt of it through the long, long nights! Give me your hand; I’m your husband, give me your hand! I love you, Ellen, I love you! Do you understand? I love you!”

  He was insatiable. He would rouse her several times at night from a heavy and sodden doze. His body appeared to loom over hers without surcease. His lean face was constantly red and swollen out of recognition. At times she would feel a fleeting but intense fear of him, for not even Jeremy had displayed such wild abandonment and passion for her. Mute at last, she would lie supine, not resisting, no longer alert as to whether it was day or night. She was like one given up to immolation and she would think: For my children, my children.

  Had she been less innocent and naive she would have come to pity him, to feel a deep compassion for this overwrought man who loved her with so much brutal ardor and treated her with such barbaric hunger. She would have understood that only a man of intense rigor, a man who had denied himself for so long and had held himself in such cruel restraint for too many years, could bring himself to these excesses, these gasping, almost insane, exclamations, these shameless explorations. Her pity, then, would have evoked a kind of profound tenderness and perception in her, for all her profaned body. She would not have felt so ravished and degraded. She might even have arrived at a deep affection for him and would have soothed him, comprehending, and would have been moved by his frantic excitement, his violent and painful activities, his tireless hands and mouth. She might even have been flattered, a little later.

  But she was innocent and inexperienced; she could not understand such self-abandonment in a man she had considered excessively controlled and aloof. She could not imagine such love, such impetuous lust which seemed to be a terrible force apart from him while it drove him. Had she understood, even mildly, their future years might have been entirely different, both physically and mentally, their lives transformed.

  She could feel only fear and repulsion and disgust, and a confused desire to escape him and never see him again, and forget him forever. Therein lay their mutual tragedy. Totally depleted, she could not resist, could not speak to him, not even when they dined together. She was conscious, always, of his eyes seeking out her flesh; he was always lunging at her in the midst of a meal, dragging her back to the disordered bed, while the food cooled and congealed and the wintry light was subdued by shutters which never opened. There were times,
in the midst of her submissive silence and surrender, when she longed to die, to remember nothing, not even her children, not even Jeremy. There were other times when she would have recoiled from him. But she no longer had the strength, or the will.

  They had no conversation together in the midst of the storm, no exchange of smiles, no remarks on the weather or their future. There were only brief dozes, then renewed and frenzied copulations. There were a few times when, momentarily depleted, he would look at her with beseeching eyes and say to her almost timidly, “Ellen? Ellen?” But she would not and could not meet his eyes and was incapable of answering that pathetic plea, and he would be silenced, seeing her white face gleaming expressionlessly in the gloom of the large bedroom, her still hands, her collapsed body. Then he would take her to the bed again, in a bewildered effort to get her to respond to him by the slightest gesture, the slightest shadow of a smile, the smallest word. But she never did; he was bereft and did not know why, and anxiously hurt, and could not understand.

  On the last day, after a night that was endless to Ellen, he said, “We must leave this afternoon, at four, for New York. Ellen?”

  She nodded mutely and docilely began to pack. She had the appearance of one who was gravely ill and broken. She seemed to have retreated to the day when she had left the sanitarium. He watched her, and could have wrung his hands. He had given her all of which he was capable, and she was like a woman who had been violently assaulted, then thrown down. She did not speak to him on the train. Lifelessly, she stared through the sooty windows. He took her gloved hand in his and her hand was dead. I don’t know, I don’t know, he thought to himself. There is something wrong—and I love her. Surely she knows that now.

  Christian and Gabrielle were delighted, and laughed gleefully together while their mother was on her honeymoon with their stepfather. Gloating, Christian said, “Now I can have what I want. My dear new papa will be under my thumb.”

  Gabrielle was more discerning. Her piquant dark face glimmered with mirth and her black eyes glinted. “I hope so,” she said in her light and pretty voice. “We’ll be so sweet and nice, won’t we? Let him think we admire him and will obey him. Never let him know what we honestly think of him. He’s such a fool, isn’t he? He’s even more foolish than Mama. Or maybe he isn’t. We’ll see.”

  “I wonder how dear Aunt Kitty is taking this, Gaby.”

  “Her maid still says she’s out of town. But I’d bet anything she is pounding her pillows in bed and chewing her claws off and cursing Mama. I’d love to peek into her room right at this minute! She should be quite a sight. Such fun.”

  “I have a feeling,” said Christian, rubbing his hand through his brilliant red hair, “that we should still continue to cultivate Aunt Kitty.”

  “Of course. I have a feeling, too, that she’ll be even more valuable to us now than she was before.” Gabrielle twisted one of her black curls about her finger, and looked thoughtful. “She’s hated Mama enough. This is much worse. We must plan how to use her.” She laughed. “Did you notice how miserable Uncle Charles looked when he told us we must be ‘kind’ to our stepfather? And that awful old Maude of his, who sees a lot more than she seems to see. Well, they are out of our lives now, and let’s be thankful.”

  Christian said, “Now I must start working on Papa to let me out of Groton. I can’t stand it much longer.”

  “I hope,” said Gabrielle, “that Mama won’t oppose him, not that she ever did very much. I hope you won’t laugh at this, Chris, but there’s something deep down in Mama that can’t always be moved.”

  “Oh, the stupid can often be stubborn, like mules. I know that myself. But Papa is even more stubborn. He thinks he owes it to himself and his convictions. So we’ll just have to convince him that what we want is his own decision and not ours. It should be easy. He thinks he’s an intellectual when he’s really only a fanatic and chews other men’s thoughts. I don’t think he ever had an original idea of his own during all his life. He gave me a book on Engels, and when I innocently asked the meaning of something Engels wrote Papa looked confused and changed the subject. I understood it, all right. We’re not going to have any trouble with dear new Papa, Gaby.”

  “Nothing is simple,” Gabrielle replied, frowning. “Nothing is direct and clear. We only fool ourselves when we think it is. You can say that Papa is an idiot, even worse than Mama, but an idiot can be dangerous and slippery. Let’s be careful.”

  “I’ll be careful,” her brother promised. “I have to go back to that damned school on Monday, before Mama returns with her beloved. I think we should pay a call on dear Aunt Kitty and cry in her arms.”

  Gabrielle considered this in her usual shrewd and thoughtful manner, then her lively face lighted and she nodded. She put on her dark-red wool coat with its beaver collar and her broad beaver hat, while Christian tugged on his school coat and cap. They set out gleefully together, to Kitty’s brownstone house, so like their own. Snow was swirling fitfully along the windy street, setting up small ground blizzards on the sidewalks. A holiday air still enlivened the city. The sky was darkening and streetlamps started to blaze out in the early dusk. A red two-decked bus roared down Fifth Avenue, marked “Riverside.” Shopwindows began to shine, and the crowds thickened.

  Kitty’s maid hesitated when Christian politely asked to see her mistress. “I don’t think she’s to home,” said the girl. “I’ll see.” She reluctantly let the children into the small warm hall with its gay wallpaper, stripes of red on a white background, and went up the narrow steep stairs. A few moments later she returned, nodded, and led brother and sister into the long and narrow living room where often they had visited Kitty. A low fire was burning here and a lamp or two was softly lit. Gabrielle always appreciated the taste with which the house had been furnished, a taste which was elegant but not intimate. She thought the house much quieter here than the house of her mother, though it was not the quiet of repose. It had an expectant aura, like Kitty herself. It seemed to promise some latent excitement.

  Kitty entered the room, wrapped in a dark-blue gown of rustling silk. She had hastily applied rouge and powder and lipstick which made her yellowish pallor more intense. But her huge smile filled her face, almost obliterating the dark marks under her eyes and her reddened lids. “My dears, my sweet dears!” she cried, holding out her extremely thin arms, from which the silk sleeves fell like the sleeves of a kimono. Gabrielle ran to her at once and buried her face on Kitty’s shoulder, while Christian advanced with a sober expression and kissed Kitty’s cheek.

  “What a shock this must be to my darlings,” Kith’ said. “Do let us sit down and have tea together, and we’ll have a little talk.” She sighed significantly. “What a shock,” she repeated. “And young people are so sensitive.”

  “Mama never said a single word,” Gabrielle wailed. “Cuthbert had to tell us. It was the crudest thing. Christian and I feel so—so betrayed. We don’t think we like Cousin Francis any longer. We just can’t believe it!”

  “We can’t believe it,” Christian affirmed.

  Kitty had come to the conclusion that Ellen was not only stupid, as she had always believed, but sly also. What else could explain this sudden and incredible marriage, if not cunning? Ellen had expertly deceived everyone, and Kitty was mortified that she had not detected that slyness in Ellen long ago. Those empty blue eyes of hers were really an ambush from which she had craftily watched others, laughing in secret. Kitty moistened her thread of a scarlet mouth and her own eyes narrowed vindictively. She listened with pleasure to Gabrielle’s tearful accusations against her mother, and she watched the slow and somber nodding of Christian’s head. She sighed over and over as she patted Gabrielle’s hand.

  “Well,” she said at last, “we mustn’t judge, must we? But not even to tell me, her best friend! Her most loyal friend. The things I hear others say—Never mind. What’s done is done, and we must make the best of it. Francis—it was all so precipitate, so unlike your cousin, who never struck me as
an impulsive man. Rather too controlled, I thought. I sometimes wonder—”

  “Mama must have promised him something,” said Christian. Kitty gave him a sharp look and he faintly colored. “I mean,” he added, “that she persuaded him she would be a fine wife for him, and perhaps she will be. He’s very simple, in a way. I do hope he is a little fond of Mama, and will make us a good stepfather. But it wasn’t a very kind thing to do to Gaby and me—not to tell us but to leave a message with an old servant.”

  Kitty regarded him sorrowfully. “There must be an explanation, dears. We must wait until your mother returns. Then in a day or two I will call on her. One must forgive, you know.”

  When the children left, Kitty felt some satisfaction. She would never be able to marry Francis, but she would have her revenge, someday. She poured a second cup of tea for herself and hummed under her breath. Yes, she would have her revenge.

  When she learned that Ellen had returned to New York with her new husband, Kitty waited three days, then called on her friend. She was not too surprised to discover that Francis had hurriedly left for Washington that morning. She was delighted to see that Ellen appeared to be in a state of lethargy and dull confusion, all her color vanished and her hair less dazzling and somewhat in disorder. Those great blue eyes which Kitty so detested seemed to be filmed over, like the eyes of the very old, and she hardly was aware of Kitty’s presence.

  “You naughty thing, running off like a delicious schoolgirl with no warning to your friends!” Kitty exclaimed, grasping the limp arms of the younger woman. Her vivacious voice rose a pitch. “The whole town is talking and twittering over it all. Such speculations! No one ever believed that Francis would marry anyone. And all the time, you sly things, you were plotting this! Naughty, naughty.” She held Ellen off at arm’s length and was happy to notice that Ellen was wearing an old brown wool frock, very unbecoming, and no jewelry except for the gold wedding band. She seemed very ill and distracted and kept pushing back locks of her loosely pinned hair, and glancing aimlessly about her. Kitty’s curiosity became avid and she stared at Ellen eagerly. But Ellen sat down in her chair near the library fire as if she had crumpled in herself and all life had seeped away from her. She had, as yet, said not a single word.