“He sees through us,” Florence Newbold told Lavinia one night when she had been unable to avoid the boredom of two minutes’ talk with her. “He sees through us all!”
In a way it was true. Chambers was shrewd about people. But what was unfathomable to Lavinia was how anyone, having once seen through Mrs. Newbold’s set, could want any part of it. All during the Plandome years Chambers had shown a lack of interest in his neighbors and in their trifling advancements, in whether they had one car or two and how soon they could afford a summer cabin in the White Mountains, which she had interpreted as the lofty disregard of the dedicated professional man for the outward indicia of success, a disregard, too, which had seemed to her totally consistent with the unflinching stare of that high school boy’s unimpressed eyes. And now it seemed that all the while his scorn of the different gradations of Plandome success had been merely the snobbishness of one who had no intention of remaining there, or, worse, the cautiousness of one who wished to avoid too many Plandome ties that might be troublesome when he had moved to the greater world of East Side Manhattan. And the moist eye, the gesticulating hand, the oddly high, post-cocktail laugh were like those wedding presents that had been considered too grand for the young couple and been put away for twenty-five years to be brought out now, out of date but usable, to adorn the long fancy table whose image, unbeknownst to her, had been fixed in his mind as the goal of a lifetime that she had believed consecrated to more serious things.
She got little enough sympathy from her children. Judith, married in Plandome, was a small, pretty, cool blond version of her father, and she and Chambers liked to play at what sometimes struck Lavinia as a rather cynical pantomime of the close, excluding, American father-daughter relationship.
“You mustn’t be jealous of people liking Daddy,” Judith warned her, “or of his wanting to go out more. He’s entitled to branch out a bit now. Lord knows, he’s worked hard enough for it.”
“But I’m not jealous,” Lavinia protested. “I’m envious. I only wish people liked me. How do you suppose he does it?”
“By being big and healthy and outgiving. By being so obviously a man who knows what he’s after and gets it.”
“You mean they want to touch him for good luck?”
“You must fight your habit of sarcasm, Mummy,” Judith reproached her. It was amazing, Lavinia reflected, how quickly Judith’s bright little box of domestic happiness had isolated her from human sympathy. “If you’re bored, you should develop a hobby. Something with your hands is always best. What about those flower paintings you used to do?”
“Oh, Judith, they were terrible!”
“What about pottery, then? Charles has an invalid aunt who can make the most beautiful ash trays you ever saw!”
Fritz showed more feeling for his mother, having inherited some of her intensity, but he was a melancholy young man who worried about his advertising firm and a cross, plain wife who had taken it firmly into her head that Lavinia’s sole purpose in life was to recapture and redominate her son. He hardly dared to see his mother except in his wife’s presence, and Lavinia did not find the atmosphere receptive to any discussion of her own problems. Nor could she very well complain to the abandoned friends of Plandome or to the wives of Chambers’ partners. She was truly alone.
Her need for communication came to a burst at Ada Tilney’s annual tea for the office wives. Lavinia had always found these gatherings difficult since her junior days when she had been afraid of the older women, and now she hated to think that she struck the younger wives in the same way. That day she felt particularly low, having had a terrible row with Chambers at breakfast. He had criticized her for contributing nothing to a conversation at Mrs. Newbold’s about a Samuel Beckett play.
“You’re always telling me those people discuss things you don’t know anything about,” he had observed. “But you’d been to that show, hadn’t you? Couldn’t you have said something?”
“I could have if Mrs. Newbold had been serious. But she admitted she hadn’t seen the play.”
“What of it? She had everybody roaring at her take-off of those two men in barrels.”
“And being funny is all that counts, isn’t it?”
“What else, at parties?”
“Chambers,” she had protested desperately, “I tried to tell you about that play, and you wouldn’t listen. You’d rather hear Mrs. Newbold talk about something she hasn’t seen than your wife about something she has!”
“There you go, making a drama out of it. Lord knows, that’s one kind of theatre I get enough of. Why can’t you make just a little effort to be the kind of wife a successful man needs? Is it a sin to be attractive and gay? Is it a sin to be popular? Is it a sin to make your husband proud of you when he goes out?”
“You should have married a woman like Mrs. Newbold!”
“I wasn’t in a position to. Then.”
His brutal adverb dazed her, and at Ada Tilney’s she found that she was still in a state resembling shock. Yet for the first time, as she sat at the end of the dining room table, taking her turn serving tea, murmuring inquiries and greetings as she handed out cups, it struck her that there might be something in common between her plight and that of the other older women. Mrs. Waldron Webb, for example. Not even the shyest clerk’s wife could have found anything formidable about her. She looked at every woman who approached her as if she expected to be slapped in the face. And even Ada Tilney, for all her seeming serenity, gave the appearance of one faintly surprised to find herself dispensing hospitality. Had either of them ever really expected to end up where she now was?
A little group of younger wives gathered cautiously about Lavinia, and she heard herself asking the questions that she had been asked two decades before. “Do you think your husband will be able to get off this summer? No? Isn’t it terrible? What slaves we women are. Perhaps we should all stand together and strike for better hours.” It was the standard partner’s wife’s comment, to pretend to the juniors that they shared a prison. Some of the inmates, to be sure, had better cells than others, but cells were still cells. The Tilneys were the wardens, to be criticized only with a smile that meant one was making conversation. One could be anything, even a Communist, for the sake of keeping up the conversation at an office party.
“You must be sure always to keep that figure of yours, my dear,” Lavinia was surprised to hear herself say to a young woman with bright brown eyes and soft brown hair and the whitest skin of the party. The group of wives had moved away, and Lavinia found herself alone with this obviously intelligent, lively creature whom she could not remember having seen before. “No, I mean it,” she continued, reaching to take a macaroon from her hand. “Don’t ever lose that figure. You’ll never get it back.”
The girl laughed, a pleasant rough laugh. “But why should I worry about my figure, Mrs. Todd? Isn’t it better to lose it once and for all and get it over with? And then relax in a heaven of macaroons?”
“What about your husband? Won’t he object?”
“I don’t have one yet.”
“Oh?” Lavinia felt even more confused. “Are you one of the lawyers, then?”
“Not even that. I’m Fran Tilney. I just came in to help Mother out. As you see, by eating her macaroons.”
“Oh, how silly of me. Of course I know you. But then, as Chambers says, I’m hopeless about names. As a matter of fact, I’m hopeless about everything.”
And then it happened. Lavinia had never done such a thing in public before, and what surprised her most was how little she cared. She simply sat there, perfectly erect in her chair at the end of the long table, tears running down her cheeks, and emitting a series of gasping sobs. Nobody but Miss Tilney seemed to notice her, and Miss Tilney was magnificent.
“Let’s go upstairs, Mrs. Todd,” she said as easily as if it were a question of adjusting a slip. “Let’s get away from all these people. Of course, you’re not feeling well. It was very good of you to make the effort to come at
all.”
She took Lavinia by the arm as firmly and quietly as if she had been a nurse and, after helping her to her feet, led her slowly from the room. When Ada Tilney moved swiftly to the door to meet them, her daughter nodded her away with an abrupt little headshake. Lavinia, grateful and ashamed, half expected to find a clean, turned down bed in the little den on the third floor to which she was taken. Miss Tilney made her sit on the sofa and got her some whiskey.
“Would you like me to sit with you?” she asked. “Or would you prefer to be alone for a bit?”
“Oh, no, please stay, dear. You’re such a nice girl, and I feel quite at ease already. In spite of that ghastly scene. I’ve been tired.” She sighed as she gazed into the younger woman’s bright, sympathetic countenance and wondered what she could do in return for such kindness. “Don’t marry a lawyer, my dear. Not if you can help it.”
“But I can’t.” Miss Tilney’s laugh was easy and gay. “I’m engaged to one.”
“Well, maybe it’s all right if he’s not in a big firm.”
“But he is. He’s in Tower, Tilney.”
“Oh, my dear,” Lavinia groaned. “You look to me as if you were made for better things.”
“You think I should get out of it?”
Lavinia could see by her smile that it was all a joke to her. A joke at which she would have laughed aloud had she not wanted to be nice to a pathetic old woman. “All I can do is tell you what happened to me,” she said dolefully. “Perhaps you would come and see me some afternoon.”
“Why not tell me now?”
Lavinia, looking deeply again into those kind brown eyes, suddenly felt that she could. “You should go down to the others,” she murmured doubtfully.
“I’d much rather sit here with you.”
Lavinia finished her small glass of whiskey and then proceeded, in sentences that seemed to spring from her lips fully formed, as if prepared for a year, sentences whose structure astonished her, to tell this charming girl the story that she had never told to anyone before. Miss Tilney said nothing; she did not even nod. She simply sat, absolutely quiet and absolutely serious, until Lavinia had finished. Then, after a pause, she said gravely: “You should write that down, Mrs. Todd. Just as you’ve told it to me. Every word of it. And more. Much more.”
“What would I do with it?”
“That doesn’t matter. You would have expressed your problem. I’m a teacher, and I can tell you how rare that is. Perhaps in simply expressing it, you would solve it.”
“You don’t mean I should show it to people?”
“If you wanted to, why not? But, as I say, it wouldn’t matter. You would have had your moment of truth, and that doesn’t happen to one in a million.”
“What a funny girl you are,” Lavinia mused. “You have no other comment than that?”
Miss Tilney shook her head emphatically. “How could I presume to offer you advice? How could I, who am not even married yet, tell you what to do? Besides, most people’s problems don’t have practical solutions. I only hope you may have helped yourself by helping me.”
“How could I possibly have helped you?”
“By warning me. Of what can happen.”
Lavinia clasped her hands in dismay. “Oh, my dear, I hope I haven’t made any trouble between you and your young man!”
“No.” Miss Tilney’s smile was radiant. “You couldn’t do that.”
What Lavinia would have done without the extraordinary lift that Fran Tilney had given to her spirits when she came home that night to find that her dreariest apprehension had at last been realized was something that she was often to ponder in the months that followed. For she was met at her door by the maid who told her that Mr. Todd had departed with two bags and left her a note. This was nothing in itself, as Chambers frequently left home on business trips without notice, but the moment she felt the envelope that he had left, she knew that he had written her at least four pages, and this had not happened since their marriage. She had the presence of mind, however, born of her talk to Miss Tilney, to betray nothing to the maid, but went to her room to open and read the document that she was now convinced would change her life.
The first shock was to find that it was typewritten. Chambers had not thought it worth his valuable time to spare her the humiliation of being arraigned before his secretary. As Lavinia, with reddening cheeks and coldly staring eyes, read through those terrible pages, she was conscious at all times of Mrs. Peters, so small and poised and competent, so superior to every weakness and divagation, so perfectly adapted to be the amanuensis of Chambers Todd who never had the time to smile at a subordinate, much less joke with one. She thought of Chambers, striding up and down his office as if he were dictating just another memorandum to just another difficult client, rolling out the dry words that were supposed to put the mother of his children out of his life forever.
He began by calling to her attention that they had never been really congenial, never shared the same tastes or interests, never even agreed on the simplest ways of enjoying themselves. He suggested that all real feeling had been dead between them for a decade and that nothing but good manners and a respect for the welfare of the children had prevented them from openly recognizing the fact. He pointed out that the children were now independent and that there was no reason that they should not go their separate ways. He admitted that he would like to consider an early second marriage to a more congenial spouse and hoped that she would do the same. He generously went on to state that what had happened was the fault of neither, that there was enough money for both and that they each needed a new opportunity in life. He ended the first section of his memorandum with the avowal of his determination not to allow the success for which he had worked so long to be gutted by domestic bickering.
So far she was not entirely without sympathy for him, except for the bitter fact of the dictation. She was perfectly modest about her own accomplishments as a wife and willing to recognize that if their new life had been hard on her, this very fact had made it hard on him. No man wanted to go to a party with a wet blanket. But what now followed in the memorandum was a blunt demand for her surrender. Chambers had never shown his arrogance more repulsively. He offered her an income for life of twenty-five thousand a year in return for a Mexican divorce. He warned her flatly that his terms were final and that if she went to a lawyer she would only make things harder for herself.
“He won’t get away with it!” A terrible shaking fit of anger descended upon her, and she tore the memorandum into tiny pieces. The attitude of her family seemed to be that now that her function as a wife and mother was over, why was it necessary for her to embarrass them with her continued presence on the stage? Had the curtain not risen on the glittering third act of Daddy’s success? Well, they would see that she still had a function! They would see that her function might precisely be to keep them from becoming the barbarians that they wanted to be!
She knew of no divorce lawyers but one whom she had heard her husband and Waldron Webb call a “shyster,” and she assumed that this meant that he had once worsted them, or at least held them at bay. She went to the Manhattan directory and sought out the number of Clarence Cup.
He was a small, quiet, reassuring man who sat at his desk with his plump little white hands folded before him while she told her story. Then he read through the memorandum which she had stitched together with Scotch tape.
“Obviously, your husband is anxious to remarry,” he said, pursing his lips. “I can promise you, his divorce will cost him a great deal more than he estimates.”
“But I don’t want to give him a divorce at any price!” Lavinia protested indignantly. “What can I do about it?”
“Do? My dear lady, you do nothing. Nothing at all.” Cup raised his clasped hands a few inches from the desk in token of the beautiful simplicity of it. “Go home and go on with your life.”
“And if he comes home?”
“Let him. Isn’t that where you want him?”
“Then telephone me.” There was a little flash in Cup’s dull eyes, and Lavinia sensed for the first time how such a man could stand up to Waldron Webb. “Then we will bring suit for support. But don’t worry. He will pay your bills. He’s only bluffing.”
Lavinia felt better than she had felt since the move from Plandome as she rode home in a taxi along the glittering blue of the East River. For what had happened, sordid as it all might seem, was that she was living again. She was again in relation with her fellow beings, even if it was a bad relation. It was better to be fighting Chambers than to be resenting him.
Mr. Cup proved to be quite right. Chambers was bluffing. In two days’ time, having heard nothing from his wife, he sent Judith to her as his unaccredited ambassador.
“I want you to know right off that I think Daddy’s behaving outrageously,” she began to her mother in a tone too cool to carry the least conviction. “I’ve told him so myself. I’ve said: ‘Daddy, you know perfectly well that you’ve taken the best years of Mummy’s life and that she’s been a wonderful wife to you.’ He didn’t even attempt to deny it. As a matter of fact, that’s what convinced me that he’s absolutely determined to go through with this thing. He’s so cold about it all. If there was any feeling left that I could work on…”
“Never mind about his feeling, Judith. Let’s simply consider his duty.”
“But, darling, I’m thinking of you.” Lavinia shuddered at the term of endearment. Judith had never used it in addressing her before, and it fairly bristled with the superiority of the happily married for the abandoned woman. “I’m thinking of the position you put yourself in. How can you want to hang on to a man who—let’s face it—doesn’t want to stay? What does it do to your dignity?”
“Only a very young woman would think of her dignity at a time like this.”
“Well, of course, Mummy, if you don’t want my advice.”
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