A Prologue to Love

by Taylor Caldwell

  It was one of the major delights of Cynthia’s day when Melinda returned from Miss Stockington’s. She carefully recorded in her memory any unusual remarks the child would make so as to repeat them to John Ames, who would listen to them and smile. Only Cynthia and Melinda knew how much he loved this graceful and beguiling child.

  “Tell me, darling,” said Cynthia today as she smoothed Melinda’s curls, “did anything interesting happen at school?”

  “Everything,” replied Melinda with enthusiasm. “Miss Stockington has the very first hyacinths. Ours are just green leaves; she puts glass jars over them when they first push up. Why don’t we do that, Mama?”

  “I like things in their season,” said Cynthia, smiling. “Why hurry them? They know better than we do when they are ready.”

  She looked over her shoulder at the long windows leading to her narrow garden. The crab apples were still chill and empty of the many-colored blossoms they would display in a few weeks; sun lay golden on the branches of the maple tree, and its buds were like small and wrinkled garnets, darkly red in the wide spring light.

  Melinda chatted softly. It was a sweet and murmurous sound to Cynthia. John Ames had wanted a governess for Melinda, but Cynthia insisted upon Miss Stockington’s. “I am not bringing up a recluse like Caroline,” she would say, and her large eyes would become less smoky and take on the hard brightness of an implacable stare. When Cynthia looked at him that way John always retreated.

  The child, who liked to please others, not to gain their approval, but because she was instinctively tender, talked to Cynthia about some ‘new’ children from New York whom she had met at Papanti’s dancing school. They were nice, said Melinda, but only two of them could be called First Families. “Their grandfathers came from Boston,” said the child.

  “Truly?” murmured Cynthia, abstracted. She was examining Melinda’s profile. The profile was exactly like her sister Ann’s, and Melinda had Ann’s gentle spirit and great sympathy even at this early age.

  “The others are only rich,” said Melinda.

  “That should not stand against them in Boston,” said Cynthia wryly. “It depends, of course, just how rich they really are. Or if they have committed the unpardonable sin of having anything else but an English ancestry.”

  Melinda was puzzled. She leaned back in Cynthia’s arms to look at her closely, and Cynthia laughed. “I am a wretched cynic, darling,” she said. “I hope you won’t be. It’s salvation to be a cynic, but it can sometimes be very sorrowful too.”

  “What is a First Family, Mama?” asked Melinda.

  Cynthia hugged her. “That depends on the locality. In England it has something to do with the Normans; you’ll learn about that later. In France, with the nobility. In Germany, with the high military class. But in Boston it means being rich for two or three generations and never spending your capital, as I do always, and getting richer all the time. And being constipated.”

  Melinda blushed vividly. Cynthia was delighted. “Ah, I’ve said an improper word, haven’t I, pet? You see what it means to be a cynic? You are always improper and always at the wrong time, deliberately.”

  “Are we First Family, Mama?”

  Cynthia shrugged. “My status is in chronic doubt. My ancestry is impeccable — you must ask Miss Stockington what that means — but my finances are deplorable. I am afraid I am a great trial to my friends and occupy a lot of their anxious conversation. Fortunately Uncle John is very rich. Does it matter to you, love, if we are not First Family?”

  Melinda considered. She knew she was adopted; she remembered the pleasant years at Miss Christie’s very well. She took her life and all the love which was given her for granted, for she loved in return. “Do you mean, Mama, if we weren’t First Family no one would love us?”

  It was on Cynthia’s tongue to say, “Of course they wouldn’t.” But she looked into the eyes so like Ann’s and she could not say it. She kissed Melinda lightly. “No one could help loving you, dear,” she said. “And love makes a first family of anybody.”

  Caroline was crying in her room.

  She hated this room where she had spent the past few years. It had little color, and this alone would have been offensive to a girl who was moved unbearably by passionate hue and strength of line, and to whom the scarlet flare of trees in the autumn was an exquisite and joyous anguish. The room was excellently proportioned and quite large, and looked out upon a garden which Caroline always thought too pale and restrained, and its walls were of smooth ivory faintly touched with silver at the moldings and along the panels. Caroline, who never spoke of what she felt to anyone except one person, would have preferred walls of a deep and singing yellow, a ceiling of strong blue, and furniture simple and upholstered in intense colors of crimson and green and gold. She disliked the dim Aubusson rug with its muted soft tints; she would have liked a floor of black lacquer strewn with little carpets of absolute luminosity. She had never seen a room such as she imagined, full of light and vigorous color values. But she imagined it with a nostalgia that became agony to her. Everything in this room she occupied was a misery to eyes yearning for ardent vigor and emotion, for graphic affirmation. Its cool bed of neutral wood with its spread hangings of faded blue velvet seemed to suffocate her. Here in Boston she lived in what she believed to be a designedly blanched house in a city of brownness.

  Her father wished her to be here. That was enough for her. He appeared to have respect for her Aunt Cynthia, of whom she was afraid and whose wit tortured her spirit and whose humor was beyond her understanding. All that was earthy and powerful in Caroline was repelled by the cool sophistication of Cynthia Winslow which affirmed nothing and denied nothing and regarded raw feeling as something offensive. Cynthia was too civilized, and in many ways too attenuated, for Caroline’s comprehension. Cynthia’s laughter bewildered Caroline, who saw no humor in what Cynthia considered humorous. The older woman’s love of clothing baffled Caroline; what did it matter what one wore? An orange sunset glittering behind black winter trees was surely more important than the proper way of waltzing. Cynthia, with some sardonic wrinkling about her eyes which Caroline never appreciated or even saw, had explained that someday Caroline must ‘take her place’. Caroline had no desire to take any place whatsoever. Had she been articulate enough to tell this to Cynthia, she would have found instant sympathy. But she was not articulate. Between the woman and the girl there lay an area of exasperation bounded by the impassable walls of semantics.

  Caroline was now always afraid. Her foremost and overpowering terror was the terror of being poor, of being at the mercy of relentless horrors in the shape of men. She remembered a certain day last December, and the memory never left her; it woke her in a nightmare in the middle of the night. It haunted her life without surcease. The experience removed forever any doubts she may have had about her father’s convictions concerning money.

  It had been a few days before Christmas. She had found, to her surprise, that her father did not particularly object to gift-giving in Cynthia’s house and that he gave gifts to her aunt, her cousin, and Melinda. (In her simplicity she had not as yet asked herself what status her father occupied in this cool and well-bred household on Beacon Street.) So Caroline was confronted with the fact of Christmas-giving beyond the gift she usually bought for Beth Knowles. She had saved the greater part of the allowance her father grudgingly gave her. She had assigned one dollar for her aunt, seventy-five cents for Timothy, from whom she shrank in real fear, and the same for Melinda, whose beauty and grace alarmed as well as entranced her. But she would spend two dollars on Beth, thriftily and sensibly, buying her some black cotton stockings and a box of the tea Beth especially liked.

  Shyly one day she told Cynthia that she would do her Christmas shopping in town after school. Cynthia immediately made plans. Both Caroline and Melinda would be brought home as usual from Miss Stockington’s in the carriage. Melinda would be dropped off, and the carriage would then convey Caroline to Boston’s ‘nicest sh
opping district’. Caroline was not so unworldly as to be unaware that shops recommended by Cynthia would be fearfully expensive. She knew the shops Beth patronized, in a very sleazy neighborhood, where gifts could be bought cheaply. So she hurriedly told Cynthia that she particularly liked to ride in the horse cars and that the carriage would bring Melinda home alone. Cynthia had wrinkled her brows at this and thought of the dangers to unaccompanied young girls in the crowded streets. Then she studied Caroline, her clumsy clothing, the broad strong face which only the beautiful hazel eyes saved from absolute unattractiveness, and the occasional charming smile, and decided that Caroline was plain enough and appeared poor enough not to draw hostile or thieving glances. She was certainly old enough, thought Cynthia. “It will be a long walk to the best shops from the streetcars,” she had warned the girl, but Caroline, who knew it was only a very short walk to the shops she preferred, had only smiled.

  Caroline had saved seventy-five dollars over a year from her allowance. She carried her money with her always, in a deplorably cheap and battered bag made of coarse carpeting and snapped together with a brass-plated lock. Caroline, in spite of paternal neglect, had never really been much alone for a considerable period of time until she had come to Cynthia’s house, and even there there were servants all about her when Cynthia was away attending many parties. So she was unused to isolation, in the full sense, and quite unused to being alone on the streets of a city. It was this which had partly led Cynthia to give her permission to this lonely shopping. It was time that Caroline developed self-confidence.

  A feeling of freedom came to Caroline when she boarded the horse car for downtown Boston and the area of cheap shops in a frowzy neighborhood. Not even the strange and resentful faces about her in the car made her shrink too much. She found a secluded rattan-covered seat over the rear wheels and huddled herself together for warmth. Her ugly brown coat, too short, too tight, hardly met across her body; her long plaid skirt just brushed the tops of her buttoned boots, and as she sat an area of coarse black stocking was revealed. Her velvet hat, too wide for her face, its blackness too old, was tied down firmly under her thick chin with cotton ribbons, and her gloves were of black wool made by Beth. There was nothing in her clothing to distinguish her from the others in the car; she was as poorly dressed as they, and as dun-colored. She had the aspect of a strong kitchen maid on a half day’s outing. Nothing that Cynthia had been able to do as yet had brightened Caroline’s wardrobe, nor had Cynthia been successful in persuading the girl to abandon her old clothing. “They are still wearable,” Caroline had said stubbornly, surprised at Cynthia’s suggestion.

  A dull, brownish mixture of sleet and rain was falling over Boston. Out of this disheartening murk the buildings emerged in chocolate shapes; the brick walks glimmered wetly; the cobbled streets appeared smeared with grease. Umbrellas bobbed everywhere; the horses clopped wearily. The stench of wet hay, wet old clothes, and wet wool pervaded the horse car; the windows steamed from the miserable little heat emanating from the passengers. Aunt Cynthia, reflected Caroline, might call Boston a sherry-and-topaz city. To Caroline it appeared liverish and snuff-colored, with an overtone of rust. Caroline’s thoughts were not happy. She was homesick for Lyndon at this time of the year, where Beth, in John Ames’ absence, would keep fires going, and there was a gaiety in running from icy narrow halls into a firelit room, and a pleasure in dashing down from a frigid bedroom into a warm kitchen full of the smell of porridge and hot bread and coffee. Caroline had discovered the harsh joy of contrasts which Cynthia would never understand in her uniformly warm and pleasant rooms, in her guarded and comfortable life.

  Caroline’s thoughts turned to Beth, to whom she hardly wrote any longer but whom she still loved. Beth was too sharp; she sensed too many things, and her tongue was too ready. She would, given time, understand from Caroline’s face and even from letters, the sorrowful transformation as sorrowful; she thought it sensible. Yet she did not want Beth to know of it, Beth who would argue and try to convince her to the contrary; Beth who loved. As yet, Caroline had no arguments of her own to counter Beth’s arguments; she had only the fearful instinct born in her on the night her father had spoken freely to her. Loyalty to her father also prevented Caroline from seeing too much of Beth now or writing to her regularly; everything that Beth said was a refutation of John’s philosophy of fear, mistrust, and penuriousness.

  The horse car came to a stop with a clang of bells, and Caroline started, jumped to her feet, and ran out of the car on her strong young legs. She was in her chosen neighborhood. Here the sleet and the rain seemed to have concentrated in a muddy downpour. The little murky shops winked feebly in the gloom; they were like evil old men loitering under streaming eaves. Caroline had no umbrella. She was jostled by dubious throngs who never gave her a second glance. No lecherous young laborer winked at her. Her head bowed against the icy sleet, she scurried into her favorite shop, one larger than the others, where one could buy anything from cotton and lisle stockings (seconds) to used coats and dresses, men’s fusty suits, rough cotton and wool underwear, children’s cheap toys, some groceries, and mended ancient furniture long thrown out of servants’ attics and rudely repaired here. Gaslights, yellow and unshaded, blinked down on the heaped and scarred counters, and shopgirls and salesmen, shivering and chapped and white with hunger and cold, hovered about, waiting like starved spiders for customers. The wood floor was slippery with mud and damp; the few windows were blurred with filth.

  Caroline paused in a crowded aisle for a moment and was promptly and profanely pushed aside by a woman with a following of many starveling children. Caroline had a problem. She had decided quite suddenly to send a gift to Tom Sheldon, who would be home this Christmas in Lyme. She had not answered Tom’s last three letters; he, like Beth, was a threat. But he seemed beside her now, a vital presence, and she saw him as clearly as if he were actually there, and her young heart rose poignantly. She would buy him a secondhand watch. It would not be a new dollar watch; that was too much to spend. But somewhere in this shop she would find a repaired nickel watch for seventy-five cents or even fifty cents. She remembered having seen these watches before.

  She was methodical. There was a rule in this shop that one could gather up his own purchases, take them to a counter near the door, where they were itemized and counted and paid for. It was a very efficient arrangement, invented by the proprietor, who could then hold only two clerks responsible for any losses. It also minimized stealing by both clerks and customers. He had strong men — three of them — patrolling the aisles, men with brutal faces whom he had recruited from the docks. Sudden cries and screams were not unknown in this shop; in fact, the customers barely looked around in curiosity to see who was caught in the act of thievery, for thievery was a way of life in this neighborhood. The men were armed with short clubs which they only partly concealed in the pockets of their coats. It was not customary to call the police; the guardians of the wretched stock were quite sufficient either to seize the stolen goods and beat the customer thereafter with dispatch or to force payment. Caroline did not know of this arrangement; she never knew that it was the voice of a thief which was occasionally raised in dismal fear or pain. She knew only that the prices here were ‘reasonable’.

  She was shy and afraid of strangers. So she kept her head down and only mumbled at clerks as she purchased three pairs of black cotton stockings for Beth, a sewing box with a japanned lid, all chipped and crocked, for Melinda, a box of tea also for Beth, and an anonymous little wicker basket for Cynthia. It would be handy for buttons, thought Caroline. She admired the basket. A bunch of flowers had been painted on the uneven lid, and their colors were vital and alive. This part of her shopping concluded and the unwrapped purchases in her arms, she looked for the counter where the secondhand watches were for sale.

  It was then that she became aware that in her meanderings she had lost her purse, which contained every dollar she owned. The purse, in truth, had been deftly cut from her
arm during her preoccupation. This did not occur to Caroline, to whom theft was only a word. Her first panicked thought was that she had left it on the counter nearest the door, where the stockings were sold. Her purchases jostling in her arms, she raced back to the first counter, and in so doing attracted the attention of one of the burly men, who followed silently but swiftly on the heels of a girl whose clothing proclaimed her a servant wench, a kitchen maid lowly and badly recompensed.

  Caroline, gasping and quite livid with panic, reached the stocking counter and stammered out her loss to the cynical clerk. “Seventy-five dollars!” cried Caroline as the clerk stood immobile and grinning into her face. Still clutching her purchases, Caroline began frantically to paw at the heaped stockings with her right hand. The purse was not there. “But I must have left it here!” she sobbed, frightened by the loss of the money. “It must be under something!”

  A hoarse voice spoke easily beside her. “And where would you be gettin’ seventy-five dollars, miss?” Caroline swung to see a huge and ugly man beside her, teetering on his heels. “Maybe stole it, eh, from your mistress?”