Often, after the lecture was over and the last question answered, the two of them would go out for conversation and coffee and sometimes a slice of pie. Mavis would take Lavinia to the Automat, where, amid the aluminum clatter and the steam of pressed humanity, she explained to Lavinia why it was her obligation as a woman to fight for her own happiness.
“Look,” Mavis said, “think of it this way: no one else can. And besides,” she added, “forget the moral imperative. Can you think of a better use of your time?”
When Lavinia tried to counter with arguments on behalf of altruism she was waved away by a fork or napkin or sandwich, whatever Mavis grasped in her hand at the time.
“But you enjoy the fight,” Lavinia pointed out. “You seem to thrive on confrontation. Just think about how many ladies’ clubs you’ve been asked to leave.”
Mavis liked to say shocking things. She liked to watch the different ways her audience would respond with a bristle in the shoulder or a tightened jaw or their hands nervously busy with the search for something elusive in a handbag. Even among those who petitioned for women’s rights, Mavis was considered too controversial to be included as a speaker at the meetings organized by her political colleagues.
“Masturbation should be mandatory for women until they learn to orgasm with the same facility as men,” Mavis had pronounced at the Women’s Philosophic League. At a rally for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Mavis had shouted out slogans so crude Lavinia hid behind a leaflet so that no one could see how aflame her cheeks and neck were. What had offended her, however, was not the message Mavis was imparting to the crowd but rather the coarseness of its expression.
Lavinia carried within her a secret and passionate love of words; an elegant phrase or beautifully turned sentence thrilled her in an almost visceral way. She was, therefore, especially intolerant of the clumsy or careless use of language. It was one thing to be merely prosaic, but to use words in a way that perverted their potential or denigrated their power was something that violated Lavinia’s aesthetic principles. A particularly ugly coupling of words or leaden phrase could make her cringe, as if registering for the speaker the shame they ought to for speaking in such debased diction.
With Mavis, though, more than with the few girls from Miss Dillwater’s Academy whose friendship she still found rewarding, Lavinia found herself able to confide for the first time without fear of judgment or gossip. It was the first time too that Lavinia had cause to consider and question her assumptions about the nature of friendship and to recalibrate accordingly.
“Your problem,” Mavis diagnosed loudly, in an elevator ascending the Chrysler Building, “is that you are simply too philosophical about life.”
Lavinia had tried to shush her, as she often did when Mavis became loud enough to attract the attention of strangers, but Mavis was undeterred by the discomfort of others. Embarrassment was a sign of repression she felt it her duty to expose.
“That’s all well and good in school,” she continued, ignoring Lavinia’s distress, “but on the street it’s a different matter. Unhappiness is a luxury you can’t afford. If that’s the bride price you have to pay to become Mrs. Shelby Sterling, I would say you are overpaying. You don’t have to be a bookkeeper like me to know a loss when you see it.”
Despite injunctions and caveats from Mavis, Lavinia plodded forward with the preparations for the wedding, collecting pleasure where she could: in the selection of linens and a china pattern, the musical arrangement for the processional or the choice of bud for the ushers to wear in the buttonhole of their morning coats. She found, however, these moments of satisfaction were fleeting and ephemeral, like the breath exuded from an old atomizer in which the perfume has long vanished but its memory remains, or lines of poetry which rose from her unconscious as she fell asleep but disintegrated like smoke before she could write them down.
It was not until after Shelby finally kissed her with open lips that Lavinia finally understood she would have to break off her engagement. Throughout the preceding winter she had been troubled by Shelby’s lack of ardor. Grace had teased her about how impatient Shelby must have been with such a long engagement, alluding to the lingering good night embraces in taxi cabs that had already reached their destination, or in unheated vestibules, or the furtive clutch in the parlor in a moment it was empty of others.
“Enjoy those tokens of thwarted passion,” she had counseled Lavinia, “because they won’t be repeated in marriage.”
For months Lavinia assumed it was her own deficiencies that had dulled Shelby’s desire. Twice she had changed her perfume and the colors of her wardrobe. She had included more daring necklines in the patterns she took to the seamstress and had had her hair styled in keeping with the leading ladies on Broadway. Shelby, however, didn’t seem to notice.
Mavis had been blunt: “A regular guy will take what he can get. Something’s not right.” Mavis advised her to contrive a circumstance in which Shelby could not avoid the availability of her upturned mouth. “If you have to seduce your fiancé you probably shouldn’t be marrying him. But if you are going to marry him, you really should know what kind of a kiss you can count on.”
Lavinia might have found Shelby’s kiss less objectionable if a series of small events had not burdened the moment with their cumulative weight. The day before the kiss, she had tried to buy a bag of roasted chestnuts from a vendor hawking his goods before the entrance to the park. Lavinia had avoided eye contact, as she usually did when dealing with merchants she did not know by name. It was nothing she did consciously; in fact, it would have dismayed her to recognize in herself some of the haughtiness with which her mother dealt so efficiently with tradesmen.
Her gaze noted that his jacket was stained on the sleeve and there was dirt under the nails of the hand proffering the brown bag of nuts. As Lavinia offered him the appropriate coinage to conclude their business, he closed her gloved hand with his. “No, Miss,” he said, with a heavy accent she could not place, “my gift to pretty lady.” He had held her hand for what seemed like too long a time. It was long enough for the warmth gathered in his palm from warming it over the fire to be transferred to hers, even through the cotton glove she wore as a membrane protecting her from the world’s touch.
Instantly, she snatched her hand away and looked at him with more shock than indignation. He had very dark eyes and a thick mustache and she dropped both the change and the bag of chestnuts on the tray that separated them. As she hurried away she could hear him calling out to her, “Please, Miss. Your change. Please, I make you gift.” His voice had a pleading quality that was unfamiliar to her, carrying in its timbre such eloquence that she lifted her gloved hand to her cheek without thinking, as if the heat of his touch were still to be found there.
She was several blocks away before her heart stopped pounding in her ears and she was able to collect herself. It would have been easy to dismiss the incident had she not gone to visit her brother Gordon and his wife that evening. Lavinia was not particularly close to any of her siblings, although she continued to present herself at family occasions, arriving dutifully with a gift in her hand for the niece or nephew, and a determined smile for the adults. That evening, while her brother Gordon was preparing cocktails and his wife had repaired to her vanity to remove the lipstick left on her cheek when they greeted at the door, Lavinia ventured down the hallway leading to the farthest reaches of the apartment, where the laundry, the maid’s room and the nursery were sequestered.
The parquet flooring abruptly gave way to linoleum, dulling the crisp percussion of Lavinia’s alligator pumps as she strode purposefully past the “public” rooms, to the quarters where the baseboard molding disappeared, and the walls waited to be repainted, as though the decorative impulse had so thoroughly spent itself in the living room and library and the rooms facing the park that there was nothing left with which to enliven the rooms withered from lack of light and a sooty view.
Lavinia was squatting awkwardly in he
r moiré cocktail dress, looking for an earring she had just heard fall when she felt a breath on the back of her neck and hands reaching into her hair. Lavinia shivered involuntarily and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she found Spencer, her five-year-old nephew, tilting her head back to see him standing behind her in rumpled blue flannel pajamas.
“Your hair is as soft as a rabbit,” he said quietly, with a disconcerting earnestness, as if he had applied a poet’s exacting consideration to all other comparisons before choosing this one as the most apt.
“Thank you, my dear,” Lavinia replied, rising to her full height so that she towered over him like a giantess.
“I think that is the best compliment I’ve ever gotten from a fellow. Now show me your toys before I return to the adults,” she commanded, offering him a hand by which to lead her. Lavinia was not fond of children generally because their innate capacity for cruelty and unchecked candor was usually a steep price to pay for their company. She was also aware of how a stinging nickname or sullen rejection could reverberate, echoing through a social world which occasionally deemed children and pets to be the secret dowsing rods for a collective discrimination.
Lavinia was therefore all the more surprised to find Gordon’s young son had, with his one remark, touched her so deeply she felt tears well up and sting her eyelids. In the child’s voice Lavinia had heard such a genuine expression of admiration she couldn’t help but feel beautiful. As she paused to replace her earring and pat her hair before crossing the threshold back into the realm of parquet, she reflected on the fact that not once had Shelby ever said anything that had made her feel that particular pleasure, yet it was something a five-year-old had done with ease.
Then, on a cloudless afternoon after three days of rain, Lavinia had an argument with Mavis that had turned unaccountably bitter. They had spent the day together riding the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and back. Mavis had been horrified to learn that Lavinia had never descended into the nether world of the subway, or ridden on the Cyclone roller coaster or gone to a game at Ebbets Field. Immediately, Mavis had appointed herself docent and mandated a series of excursions.
It was on the way home, as they walked up Madison Avenue that Mavis insisted, with an aggressiveness Lavinia found offensive, that Lavinia had made a Freudian slip and said, “Don’t speak that way about my beloathed.”
“Beloathed,” Mavis repeated stridently. “Don’t you hear yourself? You said beloathed instead of betrothed. How can you deny it?”
Mavis was shouting by the time Lavinia had crossed the street, walking as briskly as possible without breaking into a run. She held her arms crossed protectively in front of her and hunched her shoulders as if her back were registering, like armor, the strike of words Mavis spat across the street.
“You said it. I heard you say it, beloathed.”
When Shelby came to pick her up that evening she was still feeling protective of him. She noted how striking he looked in his evening wear, and how he moved with an elegance that was effortless and enviable. He had brought her a wrist corsage of variegated ivy and sprigs of lily of the valley, and that, too, had pleased her. She had not expected anything and would have been happy with even the standard fare: rosebuds and pink ribbon.
As she emerged from the ladies’ cloakroom at the Metropolitan Club, she felt a surge of elation at the notion that perhaps something as simple as a romantic kiss would break the barrier preventing her from loving Shelby the way she wanted, in requited ardor. After her first glass of champagne, Lavinia had persuaded herself that Shelby had only been waiting for a sign. He was just shy and old-fashioned, holding himself back out of respect until such time as she offered herself. He was too mature and dignified, she concluded, to paw a person without invitation, like the swains Grace used to complain of when they were girls.
At dinner, Lavinia could barely eat; instead she restlessly separated the corn from the succotash, lining the withered kernels up along the gold band that rimmed the plate’s porcelain lip. She spoke little throughout the meal, even when Margaret Fogg was deliberately provocative, making inflammatory remarks about Roosevelt. Lavinia was too distracted by the sense of imminence that permeated the evening to be engaged by the conversation that wove around her. Without noticing it, Lavinia had absentmindedly buttered three dinner biscuits, before she realized they were noticeably crowding her plate. She managed to hide the rolls in her evening bag without losing the thread of the conversation Shelby had just commandeered to his end of the table. The butter would stain the satin lining of her evening bag, but she didn’t care. It didn’t matter that he had seated her at the far end of the table, next to a boring couple.
By the time the dancing started, Lavinia was suffused with a giddiness she hadn’t felt since she was twelve, at Louise Buck’s birthday party, when she’d won the relay race and her team had borne her across the lawn in a clamor of raucous excitement that was almost dizzying. During their first foxtrot Shelby held Lavinia more firmly than usual, and it had all the portents of an omen. When he asked her to recall the name of an acquaintance he had forgotten, Shelby had said, “It’s an anapest and it’s foreign. That’s all I can remember about his name.”
“Auguste Delaguerre,” Lavinia replied, flattered by his assumption that she would know what he meant, as if he were speaking in a dialect that most people wouldn’t follow but in which they shared a fluency. It attested, she felt certain, to an intimacy of mind.
Throughout their time on the dance floor, Shelby was charming. His observations struck her as clever and his humor, always dry as bootleg gin, had an added piquancy and spark. From the corner of her eye, she saw the swirl of other couples, the pale palette of taffeta and silk organza framed against the black background of men in tailcoats. She saw, too, the blur of women still seated at the tables who watched with longing, whose feet, she supposed, tapped out the rhythms of the band under the drape of tablecloth which hid them. For the first time that she could recall, Lavinia felt lucky.
As they left the dance floor, the band struck up a waltz, and she recognized it as the same Lehár tune to which she had danced with Jasper Perkins, years before, in her girlhood, when the world was still full of untested promise.
The kiss, therefore, when it finally happened, behind a Corinthian column, was all the more disappointing to her. She would never again see tongue in the butcher’s shop without thinking of Shelby’s kiss, and the way he had lodged his tongue in her throat and then left it there, motionless and flaccid until she thought she might choke. When she pulled away, she had to restrain herself from the powerful urge to wipe her mouth with the back of her evening glove.
In that instant, she knew she could not marry Shelby and she knew her family would consider her breaking off the engagement unforgivable. In the ladies’ room to which Lavinia had retreated, breaking away from Shelby’s embrace with such force that he inquired with concern, “Are you ill, Cricket?” she contemplated herself in the mirror, as if wanting to see herself as she was, one last time, before she changed her life irrevocably.
When the attendant, an elderly woman with a face made florid by years of drink, asked, “Shall I get you some smelling salts, Miss? You’re looking a little peaked,” Lavinia said firmly, “No thank you, that won’t cure what’s wrong, I’m afraid.” Then she opened her evening bag and removed from her change purse enough coins to leave a small tower, precariously stacked, beside the three squashed dinner rolls on the cool marble top of the vanity.
From the upper deck of the Queen Mary, Lavinia leaned over the rail and watched her past recede. None of her family had come to see her off, though an expensive fruit basket had been sent to her stateroom as well as a few farewell bouquets. It had been suggested in certain circles that her family’s letting her make the crossing unescorted was tantamount to disowning her. Lavinia knew better: the Gibbs family would never compound one scandal with another. She’d been given a modest income by her father; enough, he had said, to keep her out of troubl
e but not enough to attract it.
Her mother had given Lavinia the address of the best Episcopal church in Paris and the American Hospital at Neuilly, as well as some insignificant names at the American Embassy and the Consulate, but had not included a letter of introduction. Certain social contacts had deliberately been withheld from her, as if her expatriation alone would not sufficiently ostracize her. “They’re all bores anyway,” Grace had offered by way of consolation, and it was mostly true.
While the ship was leaving its berth Lavinia had waved to the well-wishers crowding the dock, calling out names and throwing streamers. It had seemed odd to be the only one at the rail not vigorously signaling to someone on land, and joining the boisterous activity of it made the departure seem a little less like an exile. When, however, her new green tam blew off her head and into the gray waters churned up by the ship’s powerful engines, she decided it was time to go inside and unpack her toiletries.
Lavinia prided herself on being practical, and after she had had a loud, unattractive cry, she opened the complimentary bottle of champagne the purser had left in her room. While she drank a glass, she used some of the chips of ice from the silver bucket to make her eyes less puffy. Then, following a beauty tip Miss Kaye had imparted long ago, she dutifully held a sliver of ice against her upper lip until it was numb and slightly swollen. “Bee stung” was the way Miss Kaye had described the effect. “For those whose lips are on the stingy side.”
Eliza Hatch and Dora Fell, friends from Miss Dillwater’s Academy Lavinia had once asked to be her bridesmaids, had both sent carefully worded notes in which their wishes for a safe voyage barely concealed the somber tone of a condolence card. Mavis had sent a telegram with six words and no signature: “Good work, good luck, good-bye.” Reading the message, so brief it had not even enough syllables to make a haiku, Lavinia realized how alone she now was. The force of it, the grief and fear, knocked the wind from her as though she had been struck on the chest.
Twilight Page 3
