“You’re welcome, Mr. Grimaldi. I’m sorry”—the apology was complicated, and I stumbled. “I’m sorry for your loss. And I’m sorry for how my friend treated you.”
He smiled briefly, then got back into the charabanc.
Going around to the servants’ entrance, I found the inestimable Mrs. Briggs in the kitchen. She was taking stock of the pantry, but seeing me, she said, “Thank God. You’re to report to Mrs. Benchley immediately.”
“Not Miss Louise?”
She paused a moment to count jars. Nothing, it seemed, stopped the lady in her task. “Miss Louise is out at the moment. She is spending much of her time ‘out.’”
This was unusually crafty of Louise. I knew there was little hope of an answer, but I asked, “Do you know what happened?”
“I couldn’t say. You’ll have to ask the mother.”
And with that ambiguous statement, I headed upstairs—first to unpack Beatrice’s suitcase, then to face Mrs. Benchley.
I found Mrs. Benchley lying on her bed. As I came in, she managed to lift her head from the pillow and whimper, “Jane, you’re here!” I fetched a fresh cloth, patted it with lavender water, pulled a chair close, and spoke the words few dared say: “Tell me everything, Mrs. Benchley.”
“Well,” she said, “it all started with the music. Or was it … no. No, we were talking—Mrs. Tyler and myself, oh, and Louise. We were talking about that poor girl, the Italian, and I suggested we tell the staff not to mention it to anyone before the wedding, and Florence, Mrs. Tyler, said, ‘I’m sure they understand without being told that the girl’s tawdry scandal is not to be discussed.’ Because you know, Jane, that’s how she is, she always has to have the last word.”
“Yes, Mrs. Benchley.”
“Then I said that I had been thinking that perhaps during the reception, we might make a plea for contributions to the Titanic memorial. You know the committee I’m on with Mrs. Borcherling.”
“Yes, Mrs. Benchley.”
“But Mrs. Tyler said we could never ask for money and besides, weren’t we just saying death was not a suitable subject at weddings? And I said, But this is quite different. I mean, no one’s ever heard of the Italian girl. And that was when, for some reason, Louise went to pieces and said we were all being horrible.”
She turned damp, anguished eyes on me. “Can you believe it, Jane? Mrs. Tyler said she had no idea it was such a sensitive matter. Louise shouted—my Louise—saying, Of course it’s a sensitive matter, a woman has died. And I said, Well, we know that, dear, and we are trying to decide the best way to handle this very difficult situation. But she spoke right over me, saying it was a … a mistake and false and we were all pretending.”
I frowned. “Pretending?”
“I’ve no idea what she meant. The poor girl was hysterical.”
Mrs. Benchley smacked the coverlet with her handkerchief. “And that’s when she said she wouldn’t go through with it and that if someone would tell William, she would very much appreciate it.”
I took this in. “And has Mr. William been told?”
“Of course!”
“And he’s spoken to Miss Louise?”
“She won’t let him near her, the poor man. I keep hoping her father will come and talk sense to her, but he’s in Washington, of all places!”
“Mrs. Benchley, where is Louise now?”
“Oh, I don’t know. By the water, I expect. She seems to spend all her time there. Reading!” She uttered this last as if her daughter were one step from debauchery.
“I’ll go to her.”
A hand landed on mine. “Please, Jane. You may be the only one she’ll listen to.”
Walking down the hill to the edge of the water, I rehearsed what I hoped to say. The words “false” and “pretending” hinted that Louise might have discovered the … ambivalence I had heard in William’s conversation with his mother. That wouldn’t be welcome news for any bride, but especially not one as sensitive as Louise. Still, if the damage wasn’t too great I felt I could persuade her that pre-wedding nerves were a perfectly understandable and forgivable error.
I found Louise sitting on the same bench Mr. Behan and I had shared. As I approached, I was met by Beatrice walking in the opposite direction. Catching my eye, she said only, “Good luck.”
Louise smiled when she saw me. I said, “The latest petitioner has arrived.”
The smile dropped. “Oh, then you’re here to try and change my mind.”
“That was my plan,” I admitted. I looked at the ground. Louise indeed had been reading. The House of Mirth, as it happened.
I asked if I could sit down despite my plan and she said I could.
“Did you talk to Beatrice?” I asked.
“I did.”
“Was she of any comfort?”
“She’s not a very comforting person. But she listened.” I felt the pinch of rebuke. “Do you know she loved Norrie very much?”
I did and said so.
“I didn’t. Oh, I knew she expected to marry him and that she was disappointed, but I never thought of it as love. So, she and I have that in common. Loving someone even when you know you’re going to lose them.”
“Norrie Newsome and William Tyler are entirely different young men. There was nothing honorable about Norrie Newsome, and if Beatrice Tyler was deluded into thinking there was, it was an insult to her own intelligence.”
Louise was silent a long while before saying, “And you think William Tyler is an honorable man.”
“I do.”
“Would you be surprised to hear that his sister disagrees?”
“No. She never had a very high opinion on anyone’s character.”
“Then would you be surprised to hear that I disagree?”
My silence spoke for itself.
Louise picked at her skirts, rearranged her feet on the ground. “That is, I think William is an honorable man. But I think he is also…” She frowned, trying to choose the right word. “Weak. He doesn’t mean to be. And he’s quick to admit his faults, almost too quick. But he has great faith in his ability to overcome those faults.”
“And you do not have that faith.”
“I would like to be clear-eyed. It’s not pleasant, but far better than the shock that comes when you’re not prepared for it.”
“And have you had … a shock?”
“I have been made aware that William can disappoint.”
This was impossibly priggish; all men—all women, for that matter—had the capacity to disappoint. Just as all men and women had the capacity to expect too much. I was about to say so, when Louise said, “William himself made me aware of it.”
It seemed time for the bare truth. “What happened, Miss Louise?”
“I don’t want to speak ill of him. He values your good opinion so much.”
“Then he shouldn’t do things that will lose it,” I said. “What happened?”
She told me—and I realized that what I had on some level feared was true.
* * *
Banished from Louise’s company, William had gone to stay with his mother at the Biddefords’. So I was denied the chance to tear his arm from its socket and slap him with his own hand, which was the activity that preoccupied my thoughts as I marched back to the house. His absence made me even angrier; the situation was dire, but not without remedy—if he tried. Fleeing to his mother was not trying.
It was a hot day, and I was panting slightly as I returned to the house after my unsuccessful talk with Louise. Alva Tyler sat on the porch, doing needlepoint. Dressed in a white linen gown, her hair high and proud, she looked more at ease. “Restored”—that was the word that came to mind. Here, I thought, was an unorthodox woman, who was also married and a mother. She lived with fears and anxieties, but she had not given in to them. Approaching, I said, “Mrs. Tyler?”
“Jane. Welcome back. Is it dreadful in the city?” She fanned herself with her straw hat. “It’s stifling here.”
“The
air is better here,” I said, walking up the steps. Alva Tyler appeared to be wrestling with a stitch in her needlepoint. She ran the needle through, realized it was still wrong, pulled it out, slid it back in. Her hand grew shaky with frustration as she failed time and again. She began pulling senselessly on the needle, as if that would make the thread behave. One hand clenched into a fist and her fingers curled around the edge of the frame.
“Can I help?” I asked. “Sometimes you just need a fresh hand.”
Exhaling, she passed the frame to me. “I never have and never will be any good at needlework.”
Untangling the thread, I saw that it was a circlet of flowers around the words “My darling.”
“But this is so pretty. You must have some skill.”
“Thank you. It’s for Mabel. I feel so dreadful sending her and Freddy away. She doesn’t understand why, and I thought perhaps if—”
“She must understand that it’s for their safety.”
“Perhaps what she doesn’t understand is why they are in danger in the first place. But then, neither do I.”
Then shaking herself out of her bitterness, she said, “Oh, look how you’ve fixed it, thank you.” She took it back from me. “I shall set it aside before I do any more harm. Now, you didn’t come to fix my needlework disasters. Did you find Louise?”
“I did.”
“And?”
I hesitated. “I was hoping you might talk to her.”
Alva Tyler looked surprised. “I can’t imagine she wants to hear my opinion. The poor girl must be positively fed up with other people’s views.”
“I thought you might talk to her about what it means to be married.”
There was a long pause as the hoped-for offer of help failed to materialize.
“Mrs. Tyler, you have a courage that Miss Louise doesn’t yet possess. If you could just—”
Alva Tyler turned her beautiful eyes on me. “Tell her she needn’t be afraid of marriage? Why shouldn’t she be? I think it argues great intelligence on her part.”
“But you and Mr. Tyler are so well suited.”
She paused the briefest moment, before nodding. “We are. But I would not tell any young woman that married life is something to be undertaken lightly. Especially if she has a personal income and needn’t rely on a husband for her support.”
“From what Miss Louise told me, it was a lapse, but not an unforgiveable one. Mr. William has told her how much he regrets it.”
Alva Tyler was quiet, her needle poised over the taut linen. Without looking at me, she said, “I don’t find regret a particularly satisfying admission. I always wonder if the person understands—truly—what it is they have to regret. Or if they simply offer up their regret instead of admitting the truth.”
“But Mr. William admitted what he had done.”
She gave me a curious look. “Did he?”
I did not know why she should ask such a question. And before I could find the words to ask, Alva Tyler observed that the snapdragons would bring some nice color to the dinner table and the conversation was over.
* * *
That night, I asked Mrs. Briggs if I might have the day’s newspapers before they were thrown away. She gave them to me with a small smile and the observation, “I thought I was done with such requests now that Miss Mabel’s in Saratoga.”
Michael Behan’s article was nowhere to be found. Clearly, he was still working on it.
16
Emily Tyler arrived the next day, giddy and full of herself in her second semester at Vassar College. With the women assembled—Mrs. Benchley, the two Mrs. Tylers, Beatrice, and Emily—a picnic on the beach was proposed. “Picnic,” of course, being the polite term for what was to be a full-scale intervention. Such a frank encounter could not take place near the house, and Emily was keen to see the ocean. So the ladies were driven to the southern shore.
When I first met Louise Benchley, she had described herself as a girl who hung back terrified as her bolder sister flung herself into the waves on summer vacations. That memory came back to me as I packed her swim costume and she sat on a wicker chair, tense and watchful.
“You have to be there,” she told me. “Someone has to be on my side.”
And so, with sewing as my cover, I took my place on the blanket, slightly apart from the larger party. The older ladies had not bothered with swim costumes, each attired in white linen dresses and large hats, which blew back in the strong ocean wind. The younger women had changed into blue swim costumes with white piping and stockings to hide their legs. During the polite chatter that made up the preliminaries, I gazed out at the expanse of water, wondering at what lay on the other end if one swam straight into the horizon. It felt at once impossible and imperative; no wonder people had been driven to cross oceans from the very first. Vikings in their longboats. Columbus, searching for the Indies. Today, the waves were high, gathering into a towering height before falling with a crash. The sound was tremendous, violent; it put me in mind of vengeful gods. Poseidon, Neptune … the Titans, offspring of the earth and sea, for whom the Titanic had been named. The sea was adventure, opportunity—and graveyard. My mother lay out there somewhere. And my sister.
But this was all loss, and turning away from these thoughts, I listened for the sounds of persuasion. The intervention had been delayed by Emily, who had either not gotten the message as to the purpose of this picnic or had decided to ignore it in favor of something far more interesting: namely, herself. Somehow between making daisy chains and dancing with the young men at West Point, she had gotten hold of something called sociology and someone called Durkheim, who, from her mother’s expression, was not the sort of man she had hoped to be hearing about.
“You see,” said Emily, as Alva Tyler passed her a small plate, “it’s all about society and culture and a collective consciousness.”
“Collective,” said Beatrice, biting into a sandwich. “Isn’t that a bit … socialist?”
“No.” Emily was scornful, but I had the feeling that if asked to explain the difference between sociology and socialism, she would be hard pressed to answer. “What I’m learning about is what holds societies together, how we can be both ourselves as individuals and part of a larger thing as well.”
“And how do we do that, dear?” asked Mrs. Benchley politely.
“Well, it’s … shared beliefs and everyone agreeing that while we all want different things because we are individuals, we all want the same things as well and we all have a function in the group, a role to play.”
“That’s pre-posterous,” drawled Beatrice.
“No, it’s not. When something happens, you can’t simply say oh, that’s good or bad, you have to look at it in terms of society. What’s normal in, say … Africa, might be horrible here. But the reverse is also true. And what we consider deviant now might be completely normal in a hundred years.”
Alva Tyler’s needlepoint became quite focused. Mrs. Benchley’s smile rather strained. Beatrice reached for a biscuit. Louise dug in the sand with her toes. Mrs. Tyler was just about to open her mouth, no doubt to tell her daughter to close hers, when Emily announced, “He even says that crime is a good thing.”
Gratified to see shocked looks all around, she added, “He says that crime can show us what’s wrong with our society and force us to make changes. He says it’s a way of challenging societal norms.”
I was interested, but the other ladies clearly felt Emily had gone so far beyond the bounds of acceptable conversation that they were no longer obliged to even pretend to listen. Turning to me, Emily said, “Isn’t it fascinating, Jane? To think even the worst crime could have some kind of societal benefit?”
“Benefit, Miss Tyler?”
“Yes. Because in an ideal society bound by common beliefs, everyone is happy with his—or her—function in the society. Aunt Alva should be happy being a wife and mother, I should be happy to be a student, you should be happy to be a maid. But in a modern society like ours, people
are forced to do work that does not make them happy.”
It occurred to me to ask how happy the Israelites were building the pyramids in that “modern” society, but I didn’t want to knock Emily off her stride.
“So, when someone commits a crime, it’s an act against the social order that alerts us all that something is wrong. And that’s how change happens.”
Beatrice said, “So if Jane murders us in our beds, it means she wasn’t being paid enough.” She made a great show of removing the butter knife out of my reach.
“Maybe it means Mrs. Benchley ought to think about giving her a raise before it gets to that point,” said Emily, smartly putting the butter knife back in its place.
Mrs. Benchley looked at me. “You’re happy with your salary, aren’t you, Jane?”
“Yes, Mrs. Benchley.”
Beatrice argued, “So no one ever commits a crime for less than admirable reasons?”
This, as I understood it, had not been Emily—or Durkheim’s—point, only that crime had a societal value. But Emily took the bait and answered airily, “Well, I can’t say. What would cause you to commit a crime, Bea?”
“I’m sure nothing,” said Alva Tyler.
“I’m not so sure,” said Beatrice, glancing at Louise. “We all lose our heads now and then. Certain feelings are so big, you feel you must take action.”
“I’m certain I’ve never had a feeling as big as that,” said Mrs. Benchley.
“Really? How about anger? Envy. Or—jealousy. That feeling of being cheated. Someone taking what’s yours.”
As everyone could guess that Beatrice was referring to Charlotte’s theft of Norrie Newsome, the silence was long and heavy.
Until Louise broke it, saying, “Jealousy is a terrible thing to feel.”
Alva Tyler tied off a thread, breaking it neatly. “Which is why no woman should waste a moment on it.”
Emily said, “Have you really never felt jealous, Aunt Alva? Uncle Charles is a handsome man. I’ve seen women fawn over him.”
“No. I never have, and I never will.” Mrs. Tyler kept her gaze down as she said this. “I don’t believe in feeling emotions that can only do harm. Jealousy, anger, regret—what good do such feelings do? They just eat you up inside.”
Death of a New American--A Novel Page 16
