A Prologue To Love (72 page)

My help cometh from the Lord,

which made heaven and earth.

Psalms 121

Ames Sheldon, this warm late-summer Saturday afternoon, was carefully examining some fine late-sixteenth-century Italian enamels under his magnifying glass. Excellent! The Boston Museum had made a bid of twenty-five thousand dollars for them, but the dealer with whom Ames always dealt had confided that Ames could have them for three thousand dollars less, out of ‘old’ friendship. But twenty-two thousand dollars, thought Ames, frowning. That would be his entire net profit for a year, excluding, of course, the income from his wisely invested three million dollars which his mother had given him. (He reinvested the income, for it was sacred and not to be used even for treasures.) For a moment he considered using that income for the purchase, but with a revulsion which would have pleased his mother he put the thought aside. He considered his bank account. It held nearly fifty thousand dollars. He sighed. A loan? He shuddered from that thought also. There was nothing to do, of course, but to use half his bank account.

He suddenly felt poverty-stricken and degraded. And, so feeling, he was both frightened and humiliated. No money had been forthcoming from either Timothy or Amanda. Of course, on Amanda’s death, there would be a certain portion of the estate in behalf of her daughter, but Amanda appeared in fine health. Timothy had made it quite clear that he would leave Amy only one thousand dollars; the word had come from his wife. He had never forgiven his daughter for her marriage. So he, Ames, had literally a penniless girl on his hands who had brought him nothing. He discounted the three million dollars his mother had given him; that was a separate department entirely.

Not only was Amy penniless, but she was a fool. Ames concentrated on Amy’s ‘foolishness’ and on an even worse crime she had recently committed. He reached out to his desk and restudied a physician’s report, only another report to add to the unbearable six other reports he had received over the past five months. I’ve been had, thought Ames with sudden bitterness, indignation, and disgust.

Everything was lost. That damned John’s wife, Mimi Bothwell, was already doing her duty, John had happily written his brother from New York. (Ames overlooked the fact that his mother had not only violently opposed the marriage but had again vindictively informed John that he would not receive a penny from her, now or after her death.) Yes, thought Ames, I’ve been had. Saddled with a fool for a whole lifetime, a penniless fool. He felt so alarmed and so poor that he could think of Amy with quick hatred. He thought of her ‘silly’ face, with the dark eyes growing so witlessly large and enormous over these months, the lost color in her cheeks and lips, her thin young body that could no longer entice him. Prattler! Stupid! Not even a whole woman! He would look at her with disgust when she was in her pretty, girlish night dresses and turn from her, revolted.

John could afford to be triumphant. There was that enormous Bothwell estate which Mimi would partly inherit! No wonder John was as smug as a tomcat who had drunk deeply of cream. Then John would have children, and they would inherit Caroline’s vast fortune. Leaning back in his chair, Ames tapped his teeth with a pencil. He could divorce Amy, who infuriated him with her foolish adoration and clinging. What then? Ames considered his mother. How would she look upon a divorce? Why, thought Ames with a sudden surge of hope, she might even approve of it! That would be more revenge on Timothy — a rejected and despised daughter again on his hands. He must consult a lawyer at once. He pulled a sheet of thick ivory paper toward him and wrote a rapid letter to his mother.

“I am enclosing a final report . . . Under the circumstances, I am considering divorcing Amy.” He paused, glanced at his enamels. The sunlight streaming through a window in his elegant flat struck them, evoking blue, crimson, scarlet, green, and golden fire. Those old monks and artists knew how to do these things with infinite artistry and genius and taste. No one any longer took the patience to work like this, and in this tumultuous twentieth-century world no one even cared to learn. The enamels would grow increasingly priceless with time. Ames touched them with real love and reverence. He glanced at his cabinets. He had already prepared a shelf for his new treasures. When he had finished gloating and admiring he would draw tight curtains over his cabinets. He would not share their glory with others, and his cabinets were always in his library, and the library was always locked and he carried the key with him. He himself cleaned the library and the cabinets and the treasures, as Caroline cared for her secret hoard of paintings.

He looked at the letter he was writing to his mother. Then a restless impatience came to him. Why write? He could go to her. His impatience increased. Go to that decaying huge hovel again? He had been there only three months ago and had felt a smothering. He remembered how that house had been during his early childhood, pleasant, sunlit, warm, polished. But his father had been alive then. Yet the house had begun to decay and sift even before Tom’s death. How many rooms did the old hag use now? Two bedrooms, one for herself and one for the maid from the village, and the kitchen, her gallery, and what used to be the ‘breakfast room’, and her locked study. That was all. The rest of the rooms, all fourteen of them, including the ‘help’s’ rooms, were never entered, never cleaned. They were as molded as tombs and as earth now. They loomed over the old hag like a towering and powdering and moss-grown mausoleum, and she huddled in the depths beneath. Toad, thought Ames.

Yet, she still had power. Houses were streaming up from Lyme and from other directions, smallish and cheap little houses crowded with laughing children and inquisitive adults who possessed the repulsive American spirit of neighborliness and friendly curiosity. Ames chuckled. The old hag had handled the matter deftly. She had actually spent money to wall in her property, high stone walls with splintered glass on their tops, the walls extended to the very shore. The walled property was like a moated castle in the midst of a teeming town of barbarians, its massive iron gates always locked. There was a bell on the gates; one yanked it and Caroline came to admit a visitor — rare, indeed — or a tradesman. Sometimes the sullen maid strolled out, glowering, her hands wet and grimy.

But it protected Caroline, and that was all that mattered. There was one way to reach her which the walls could not stop, and that was the telephone. Ames went into the beautiful hall, stopped to admire his genuine C
é
zanne for a moment, and lifted the receiver of his telephone from its hook. He called his mother. While waiting he studied his cool pale reflection in the very fine Florentine mirror which had cost him five hundred dollars and which reflected the C
é
zanne. The hard slate-colored eyes stared back at him, unrelenting. There was not pity in him for the girl whom he had married less than nine months ago and who was growing quieter, more timid, and thinner each day.

“Mother?” he said in his light and charming voice.

“Well?” Caroline grunted. “What is it now?”

He raised his eyebrows humorously at himself in the mirror. “Now, Mother, you know that this is almost the first time I’ve ever called you. This is serious — ”

“Make it short,” said Caroline impatiently. “I thought you were the important call I am expecting from New York.”

“Investments again?” asked Ames, as though there had ever been anything else but investments. “Anything worthwhile?”

“Bethlehem Steel,” said Caroline with slightly less impatience. “It’s high, but I expect it to go much higher very shortly. Well? What is it?”

“Bethlehem Steel,” Ames repeated, remembering that he was invested quite heavily in that stock. “You’d advise me to buy more?”

“Did you call me to talk stocks?” his mother demanded. “Don’t you have a broker in Boston?”

“None as perspicacious as you, dear Mama,” said Ames.

Caroline said nothing, but he could hear her rasping breath clearly. “I am really calling for some advice,” he said, looking at the fingernails of his right hand. “I am thinking of divorcing Amy.”

He could not see Caroline’s sudden violence of expression. He could not know that she was again standing at her dying husband’s bedside and that Tom was speaking of divorcing her, almost with his final breath. She was feeling once more the awful, incredulous despair, the bitter anguish, the tearing sorrow, the sense of complete abandonment and loss.

“No! No!” she shouted at her son, and he had to pull the receiver from his ear. “How dare you say such a thing! It’s all wrong — No! No!”

He was deeply shocked, almost frightened. It was as if Caroline’s monumental personality had surged into this small but beautiful hall with its sacred C
é
zanne, its Florentine mirror, its gleaming Kirman rug, its chartreuse-colored damask walls. He actually glanced over his shoulder, more than half expecting to see his mother rushing at him.

“Divorce?” she cried. “No, never, never, never!”

“I’ve been thinking of it for a considerable time,” he said, trying to ride over that furious voice. “I didn’t know you objected to divorce. Of course First Families don’t indulge in it often,” and now his own voice turned vicious. “But I wasn’t aware we were First Family. That was Timothy’s main objection to me, you know.” He tried to laugh.

But the furious voice thundered at him again. “He isn’t First Family! He’s nothing but gutter blood!”

“Oh?” said Ames, standing up very straight and beginning to smile. “Tell me. I’m curious.”

But Caroline had fallen silent. “Hello, hello?” said Ames, and jiggled the telephone hook eagerly.

Then Caroline spoke derisively. “It won’t do you any good,” she said. “Don’t you remember that I’m supposed to be an Esmond too? His mother and mine were twin sisters.”

He looked at his smooth long face, so like Timothy’s except for the sharp triangular chin with its deep if narrow cleft. His grandfather and his father had been ‘nobodies’. He had entry in Boston because of his ‘Esmond blood’. A nervous and infuriated itch began between his lean shoulder blades. “I hope I’m no fool,” he said, trying to keep his tone reasonable. “But I’m married to a fool and I’ve reached the end of my endurance.”

“But not the end of my three million dollars,” said his mother brutally. “What’s wrong?”

The itch subsided a little. “I’d stand even a fool if she could give me children,” said Ames. “But Amy can’t.” He winked at himself in the mirror as he said, “I want children, deeply. Deeply.” He put a note of baritone sincerity in his voice.

“Oh, you do, eh?” said Caroline. “Why? You’d make a dreadful father; you were a dreadful little boy, and I have no doubt but that you are a dreadful man.” She paused, then said abruptly, “You haven’t been married a year yet. Give the girl time.”

He wanted to say, “I can’t bear sleeping in the same room with her; the very air becomes sticky with sweetness when she breathes it. I detest her.” But he held the words back and said instead, “You will remember that I wrote you last March that Amy had been seriously ill with pneumonia. We had the best men caring for her. She recovered her strength very slowly, and then they gave her a most complete physical examination. She’d become lifeless — ”

“I shouldn’t wonder, with you as her husband,” said Caroline. “Well? Go on.”

“Is it necessary to go into painful and intimate details?” asked Ames, who knew his mother to be excessively prudish. He could not see her dark flush, but he had no doubt that it was there. “Since the first verdict that she’d never be able to have any children, we’ve had several consultations with other specialists. We even went to New York, to the best. Amy will never have any children.”

“Um,” said Caroline. She considered. She said, “I think I understand. You aren’t thinking of children, you’re thinking of natural and legal issue to inherit the Ames money. Don’t bother to try to deceive me with sentimentalities.” She paused. “I won’t bother to deceive you, either. You were born for the very same reason.”

“I gathered that. Over all the years,” said Ames. He fumbled for one of his delicate Turkish cigarettes. “Pardon me a moment.” He let the receiver swing as he lit the cigarette. He looked, a little startled, at his fingers. They were trembling. He wondered why. It was a very warm day; he had a slight headache suddenly. “Yes,” he said, speaking again to his mother, “I think I first knew when I was about four years old. I heard my father accusing you of that very thing. Elizabeth wasn’t the only one who listened at doors, you know.”

He could not see his mother at her desk in her study; he could not see her shut her eyes as if she had been struck by a powerful pain which was almost unendurable. She had known so much tormented and abysmal sorrow. But this was quite different, and she could not recognize it as grief and the instantaneous black flowering of remorse. The pain did not ebb quickly. It retreated but remained as a vast dark haunting in her mind, only a shadow waiting for features and form.

“ — all the time,” Ames was saying lightly.

“What did you say?” asked Caroline in a voice so dull and empty that Ames became alert again. He repeated patiently, “We all knew it, even John, who had the least brains in the family, the least perceptiveness. Why, Elizabeth was only ten, and I was younger, when we discussed it. We thought it great fun to be born as cattle are born, for a definite purpose.”

“Elizabeth?” said Caroline so faintly that he could hardly hear her.

“Why, certainly. She was a girl. And so she was more sensitive than we boys. That’s what made her a bloodless fiend. Probably.”

The vast shadow sharpened in Caroline’s mind. Ames smoked rapidly; he felt a trifle breathless, as if he were suddenly running. He regarded the thought with surprise. He recalled that when he had heard his father’s accusation he had had this sensation, this quickening to flight. He became suddenly reckless. He said kindly, “It’s much harder on a girl, you see. She had no — what do they call it now? — yes, resources. I don’t know why she went out of her head; she was always peculiar, though, I remember. A girl likes to think she means something important to her mother besides her actual existence. So when whatever it was that came up, she hadn’t any strength to fight it. I wonder what it was.”

His mother was silent. Ames smiled to himself. He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. He smoked again, rapidly. Then Caroline said in that same faint voice, “Don’t pity yourself, Ames. Your father loved you and wanted you, and you all repaid him with contempt. Is that the return a parent can expect from children? You at least respected me. Or my money. That’s better than contempt.”

“You taught us to despise our father,” said Ames. He no longer, at this moment, cared for his mother’s money. He would care later, he knew, but not now. “Yes, we respected you and your money. We also hated you, all of us.”

He felt vaguely nauseated. This damned heat! “What did you say, Mother?” he asked gently.

He could not see the enormous effort Caroline was making to speak through the huge pain.

“Don’t divorce Amy, Ames,” she said, and he was astonished to hear the pleading in her voice.

He said, “I want a woman who can give me ‘natural and legal heirs’, Mother. Just as you wanted them. I thought I explained.”

“You mustn’t divorce Amy. She’s a good little girl. I’ve not seen much of her, but she’s good. And she — cares — about you. You can’t throw that away.”

“Is my staying married to her worth a little money, Mother?”

He waited. “How much?” said Caroline, and she was defending herself and not only Amy.

“Well, seeing that I’ll never have the managing of the Ames estate because there’ll be no children, I should say a few million dollars.”

He knew his mother was flinching and cringing, as she always did at the mention of large sums of money. He let her suffer, and winked and smiled at himself in the mirror.

“Twenty-five thousand dollars a year, from this year on, as long as you remain married to Amy,” said Caroline. Her voice had become stronger and firmer. “Even after I’m dead. I’ll call my lawyers now.”