A Prologue To Love (39 page)

He knew that a crisis had arisen in this house. If Caroline had her way, if he took her part and pleaded with Beth to stay under the present circumstances, then the future would be frightful. It was hard not to comfort Caroline, heavy with her child, and with her tear-stained face turning confidently to him now for his reassurance and promise to persuade Beth to accede to Caroline’s stubborn blindness and desperate penury. There was more at stake here than Beth alone. There was Carrie herself, and her husband, and the baby about to be born, and future children.

So Tom said very gravely, “I’m afraid that Beth is right, Carrie.”

Carrie was aghast, and she pulled herself from Tom’s arms. “But I can’t get along without Beth!” she cried.

“Yes, I know. So you must have Beth. But you’ve got to meet her terms, Carrie. I’ll go to the agencies in Boston myself tomorrow. And now I’ll have a little talk with Beth about how many servants we’ll need.”

Caroline’s love for her young husband had a slavish and unhealthy quality in it. She was still young; deprived of love all her life, she had given love to Tom with a kind of helpless frenzy and devotion. That love, after a year of marriage, was still strong enough to make her say now, though with dread and reluctance, “Very well, Tom. But it does make me worry so, spending all that money. I’ll never really forgive Beth. We shouldn’t have built that house at all! Sometimes the very thought of it makes me frantic.”

Tom knew that she was not speaking extravagantly, for Caroline was as economical with words as she was with cash. For the first time he, too, was frightened. He said, “You mustn’t be frantic, Carrie. You must be sensible.” His tone was so stem that she became silent again and later tried to appease him. She was like a child who has been unjustly and cruelly punished and is bewildered, and when she shyly and timidly caressed and kissed him, Tom felt his first despair.

During all these later years he had tried to change Carrie, relieved now of the terrible influence of her father. He had tried, not for his own sake or the sake of their three children, but for Caroline herself. But each necessary purchase had sincerely shocked her; on several occasions she had become ill with fright. She haggled with the cook about the food the household consumed. If she succeeded in reducing expenditures for the food by only a single dollar a month she was radiant and triumphant. If she replaced a servant with one willing to accept a little less she was as joyous as a young girl on her bridal morning and could not understand why Tom did not share her joy. She would even spare time from her work and expend endless energy and hours in shopping in Boston for a cheaper article. She became extremely interested, almost absorbed, in Tom’s own business. She would pore over blueprints with him; she would point out that a little more sand in the concrete mixture, ‘just a tiny little more’, would save him at least ten dollars on a small house. “It wouldn’t harm the quality,” she would plead. “But it would harm my opinion of myself,” said Tom, and she would stare at him, baffled.

She actually found a place where he could purchase slates for less than he was paying. “But the slates are thinner and weaker,” he said. “They would have to be replaced constantly after the winter.” “Who cares?” cried Caroline. “But I advertise lifetime roofs,” Tom replied. “I am not a cheat, Carrie.”

“I am not a cheat, either,” she said angrily after the argument had continued many months. “I resent your implication, Tom.”

“No, you are not a cheat, Carrie. You are scrupulous about your affairs. But I don’t want you to make me a cheat. I have to live with myself.”

She thought the prices of his fine little homes too low. “If they can pay two thousand dollars for a house, they can pay one hundred more.”

“But why should they? I get a reasonable profit, and a reasonable profit is all I want.”

“That’s foolish. You should get everything you can.”

“Why?”

The arguments always ended on that, with Caroline glowering and perplexed and Tom despondent. They had been married almost eight years now. Caroline still did not understand her husband. He understood her only too well, and his compassion was still strong and protective. But his fits of despair and hopelessness had shorter intervals between them. He knew now that Caroline was becoming less confiding in him, less trustful. Once there had been some communication between them, but as Tom did not know the source of that communication in Caroline he could not help it increase. He had thought it came only from love. A fearless man himself, he was bewildered by the demonstrations of Caroline’s terror, which seemed utterly senseless to him. When a stock she had purchased dropped a few points, she was frenzied. “But it’ll rise again,” he would say, disturbed. “But, Tom, if I needed to sell now I’d lose a lot of money!”

“But you don’t have to sell, Carrie,” he would say patiently.

“That’s not the point, Tom! They’ll have to pass the next dividend if the stock doesn’t rise again.”

“You won’t starve,” Tom would remark with indulgence.

Then Caroline would stare at him, thunderstruck, and appalled that he did not understand; and, seeing that look, Tom was also appalled that she could be affected so violently. She would retire into sullen silence and would sleep only fitfully, and Tom, lying beside her, would be afraid that she was losing her love for him. He had no way of understanding that her love was as strong as ever and even more possessive, and that her diminishing communication with him was not due to loss of love but increase of fear. She was becoming distrustful of him, not as a man and her husband, but as a person who did not understand that money must constantly grow, must double itself, must be viable and dynamic, and that it was the most important thing in the world. Her distrust increased her fear; she often thought: If I should die Tom would squander everything. And so she changed her will. Tom would have only an income from her estate in the event of her death, an income to be predicated exactly on what his own business earned, year by year.

But all this had taken over seven years, almost eight, to happen.

The house had been built, had been comfortably furnished by Tom out of his own funds and the money he had borrowed from Caroline, and was adequately staffed at least part of the time. There was also a house in Boston, where Caroline stayed when it was necessary to spend a few weeks there on business or even a few days. It had a single elderly servant in charge. It took many years for Tom to realize that Caroline was more comfortable in that penurious house in Boston, old, drafty, and molding, like the abandoned house in Lyndon, than in her great mansion by the sea. When she went to New York she continued to patronize the shabby pension of her unmarried years. Here, too, she was safe. It cost so little money.

They lived an isolated life. Tom had no friends but the villagers and his workmen; Caroline had no friends at all. She never saw her former schoolmates in Boston. She had never been part of the living world of warm humanity; she was not part of it now. Her world was her money, her husband, her children. Her associates were her bankers, her stockbrokers, her lawyers. She saw no reason to broaden her horizon, to chop down the weeds and underbrush and fertilize the wilderness which had surrounded her all her life. Those who had another kind of living evoked her scorn and contempt. They were light-minded, without value, full of frivolity, and spendthrift. She loved art galleries and visited them in Boston and New York — on free days. She liked music and would take Tom with her to Boston and New York for concerts and operas. They sat in the highest and cheapest seats. She bought secondhand books for pennies, to fill the fine library at Lyme. She and her children were clothed less extravagantly than her servants. The clothing was of good sturdy material, without beauty. She employed a seamstress to make and remake it until it was worn out. She was pleased that her last child, Ames, was a boy. She had put away John’s outgrown clothing in moth balls in large trunks in a separate room, to be made over for the youngest child.

Quite often the dark isolation of his home made Tom desperate, and he would drive down to the village to meet his workmen in a saloon and drink beer with them and laugh a little. Or he would visit his old friends in the village. They never asked him why he brooded so silently, why he laughed so seldom now, why he appeared to forget them in some desperate thoughts of his own as he sat among them. They would say among themselves, “Poor Tom. He ain’t been the same since he married that rich Ames woman.”

Part of his misery came from the fact that he thought Caroline loved him less and needed him less. He turned hopefully to his children. He would cultivate them, play with them, love them extravagantly, indulge them. The great tragedy of his life deepened. He did not know that his children, young as they were now on this Fourth of July, 1892, respected and feared their mother and had no love for him at all. They had caught the infection of Caroline’s mistrust of him. Their corruption was already firmly established, though John was hardly more than six, Elizabeth only four, and Ames just three. They romped with him; if they thought of him at all it was as someone to be exploited, to be cajoled for advantage, to be slyly manipulated. A buffoon; a simple person; a big playmate.

Tom’s taste did not run to the magnificent, the exquisite and precious, or the ponderous and heavy in furniture, which was now so fashionable. His mother had been able, through some special genius of warmth and love, to make even her poor house comfortable and kind and peaceful. It was in this manner that Tom had furnished his house, of which he was so proud and which he had believed would bring tranquility to the beset Caroline. There was not a room in his house which was not sunny for at least part of the day and filled with light even in the gloomiest weather. He had chosen pleasant furniture. The morning room, paneled in glossy pine, was filled with Pennsylvania Dutch pieces, unpretentious yet comforting. When Caroline had seen the furnishings of the drawing room and parlor she had said doubtfully: “Sheraton? Weren’t they terribly expensive?” “No,” he said doubtfully, “they aren’t Sheraton. I think the dealer called them replicas.”

Caroline was appeased. Then she saw the furniture in the dining room, more ornate and graceful, and she had exclaimed: “Chippendale! The Chinese period!” And Tom had said, “I don’t know. But I thought of us and our children looking at this furniture three times a day, and it seemed beautiful to me. I admit it was very expensive.”

Caroline hated the dining room. It reminded her of her Aunt Cynthia.

The bedrooms were very simple but had the solid elegance of poster beds, canopies, good plain rugs, small mahogany commodes, and easy chairs. Tom had not neglected the servants’ rooms, to Caroline’s outrage. She did not like the draperies in the house, bright and colorful and silken. “No privacy,” she said. “Anyone outside will be able to see our lamps through them.” “And,” said Tom, “if they do they will know that people live here and are a family.”

Caroline had shrugged. The outer world of people was of no importance to her; they had no verity in her world. She insisted upon dark velvet draperies for her bedroom, and Tom, listening to the hidden sea at night, would feel stifled. But they had no quarrel until Tom bought an authentic Aubusson rug, all pale gold, dim blue, and muted crimson, for the drawing room, and Caroline immediately recognized it for what it was and was infuriated. “Why, it must have cost my dividends for a year on my New York Central stock!” she cried. “How can you be so profligate with my money?”

“I borrowed that money from you,” said Tom. “I’m repaying it, with interest.”

He came into the morning room this Fourth of July morning in 1892 and found Caroline studying some of her interminable papers and frowning. She ate her frugal and tasteless breakfasts here; Tom’s dream of the children about the table had never been fulfilled. Caroline had insisted from the very beginning that they eat alone in the upstairs nursery with their nursemaid. She did not wish to hear their chatter. She did a great deal of her work in the mornings, before the stock market opened. She had the first telephone in Lyme, with a direct line to her brokers, and the telephone was in the morning room, on the smooth Pennsylvania Dutch table. “I think you should be interested,” she told Tom, who had protested. “When you have surplus funds, if ever, you should give some thought to the stock market yourself.”

“I’d rather put any surplus funds into more building,” said Tom, “and more land.” He had looked at Caroline earnestly. “Oh, you’ve explained, Carrie, that your money is alive and invested in growing industries and railroads, but it isn’t the kind of life that appeals to me.”

Caroline was not interested even in the ‘life’ of industry and the rail roads. She could not translate them into flesh and blood, into workers and producers and executives and businessmen. To her, they were figures that rose and fell and brought profits, and without any human animation at all.

Caroline was deeply concerned about her children, though she would not have them ‘underfoot’, as she explained to the baffled Tom. He thought her tremendous anxiety about them, her fear for their safety, arose from love. It did not. They were merely her ‘natural and legal heirs’, protecting her father’s fortune from those she hated. She had no actual love for anyone but Tom.

This morning, as usual, Caroline was carelessly dressed in an ugly cotton wrapper, which swathed her majestic figure meagerly and fell open to reveal the plain white cotton nightgown she always wore in the summer. She lifted her wide blunt face to Tom when he entered, and immediately her smile made her beautiful, brightened the childish freckles on her strong nose, gave radiance to her lovely hazel eyes and a glisten to her big red mouth and clean large teeth. Her braided black hair hung over her shoulders, and some of it had loosened about her olive cheeks, so that she appeared almost girlish. When Tom kissed her she put her hands about his neck and held him to her fiercely and briefly, then pushed him away.

“Why are you working on this fine morning, and on a holiday, too?” asked Tom, seating himself near her and awaiting his breakfast. He looked about the table and, as always, he wished the children could be here, laughing and chattering.

“I detest holidays; they’re so dull, and they’re a waste of time, and they get in the way,” said Caroline. Then she frowned. “Didn’t I hear firecrackers a little while ago? Did you actually disregard my wishes and buy John some fireworks? You know how dangerous they are! He could get lockjaw.”

He looked at her carefully with his kind eyes, then lit his pipe. His thick black hair had been ruffled by the sea wind, and his face was brown from the sun.

“Yes, dear, you heard firecrackers. I bought some for John, and I have Roman candles and other things, such as sparklers, for tonight. Why should you deprive him? Dangerous? Of course they are. But life is dangerous; it always was, it always will be. Children must learn as soon as possible that danger is everywhere and that death as well as life is everywhere too. Then they’ll be able to guard themselves. You can’t create a secure world for children; that’s foolishness.”

“You mean you are deliberately exposing the children to death and danger?”

“I mean I am exposing them to natural hazards so they’ll be conscious of them and be careful. They must learn that they aren’t going to live forever, either, and that someday, sooner or later, they’ll die.”

“How can you speak of death to children?” cried Caroline.

“Because it’s here,” he said patiently. “Sometimes you aren’t very realistic, Carrie.”

“You always say that,” said Caroline sullenly, and she lost her fugitive beauty, and her face was heavy and impassive again.

“As for lockjaw,” said Tom, as if she hadn’t spoken, “I’ve already explained about that to John, and he understands that a firework’s burn isn’t a trivial thing. I’ve bought some fresh iodine, and he knows how that smarts and he’ll be careful.” A maid brought him some bacon and eggs and coffee, and he began to eat.

“You always have such a careless approach to life,” said Caroline.

“Not careless. Accepting. You and I aren’t going to live forever, either, Carrie.”

She was silent. He ate with pleasure, but she was frightened. She could think of death for herself and even for her children, but not for Tom. Never for Tom, who was all she had. He was thirty-four, and so no longer young. He climbed about his houses and worked with his men and chipped stone and laid bricks with them. He could be hurt. She visualized Tom dead, for the first time, and the old familiar terror took her.