Captains and The Kings (40 page)

Since Senator Hennessey had announced that he was the candidate of his party for the office of governor in the autumn-explaining in luscious tones and with trembling inflections that he wished to be more with his beloved family Katherine had bewitched herself with the delusion that all she had ever suspected, all she had ever known, of her husband, had been the fantasies of her own hard and obdurate heart, her own abominable hallucinations, her own narrow soul. Why else would dear Tom have given up his labors in Washington as a prominent and popular senator, if not for the desire to return more frequently to the bosom of his family? She had been wrong, wrong, wrong, and wicked and full of evil imaginings, and she spent hours on her knees at home and in church praying for forgiveness and doing penance. She only hoped, humbly, that Tom would forgive her if not soon then before she died. She had appealed to her confessor to inflict more penances on her, and he had looked at her with compassion, and very strangely, and had often lifted her when she had thrown herself at his feet, and had held her shaking gloved hands while thinking thoughts which were not priestly but very much the anger of a knowledgeable man. What did even a priest say to an innocent woman who confessed sins of which she was not guilty? How console her, uplift her? He had finally said, knowing it was the truth but in some way a sophistry on this occasion, that all were guilty before God of monstrous sins, that no one had any merit of his own but only that given to him by the merciful Father, and that peace lay in the knowledge of forgiveness and confession. Sometimes he thought Katherine excessively scrupulous, and had once chided her on this, but her insistence on her sins silenced him. However he had marveled at the besottedness of a woman's devotion to a man so unworthy of any devotion at all, so splendidly vicious, so magnificently and triumphantly wicked and exigent. But love, the priest remembered, was greater than faith and hope, and forgave all things, endured all things, excused all things-and finally blamed itself for the evil of others. If women, thought the priest, would love God as passionately as they loved their betrayers then indeed some Grace might come to this terrible world, for the love of women was far greater than the love of men. Tonight, thought Katherine Hennessey as she walked slowly and with a slight panting difficulty across the marble to the bronze doors, dearest Tom would be home for his darling daughter's seventeenth birthday celebration. She smiled fondly as she put her thin white hand on the handle of the door. Seventeen. She, herself, had been a wife and mother just before her seventeenth birthday, but young ladies these days were more independent and saucy and had strong minds. Darling Bernadette! She was willful and not always respectful to her elders, but she had such a spirit, such a liveliness, such a way of tossing her long sleek brown curls, such a sparkle of brilliant defiance in her eyes, that one forgave her on the spot. No wonder dear Tom loved his daughter so much. At her age he must have been her masculine replica, and Katherine pondered, with love, on the young Tom she had never known but whom she cherished in Bernadette. I am, thought Katherine, as she pantingly pulled open the bronze door, unworthily blessed. She was amused at her weakness. I am an old woman, she thought. I am going on thirty-four. That is young no longer. I am beginning to feel the infirmities of age. I must be careful of my health and strength, for my darlings' sakes. She was going to stroll on the lawns and among the gardens, as her doctor had recommended. She had dutifully taken her iron pills this morning. She had forced herself, as her doctor had ordered, "to partake of Sufficient Nourishment to Invigorate the System and the Frame." But she had become disgustingly and violently ill-as usual-and this caused her fresh feelings of dismay and guilt. So she had again forced herself to drink some milk, weeping, and eat some toast, and to take her pills. Neither she nor her doctor ever once suspected that her suppressed knowledge of the shame, brutality, betrayal, rejection, contempt, and humiliation she had endured since her marriage, and the endless exploitation, had destroyed her health and endurance for all time. She was at last able to open the heavy door far enough to let her out. She did not know that young Bernadette had come halfway down the stairs to the hall while she had been feebly making her way across it, and had been watching her mother with a mixture of disdain and cynicism and wondering and contemptuous pity. Mama was such a fool, such an old-fashioned elderly woman, such, really, an imbecile. She knew nothing at all about Papa, whom Bernadette loved very much. (She had little affection for her mother, who was so weak and soft and stupid, so determinedly deluded, so devoted, so gentle, so forbearing, so spiritless, so anxious to run, at any time of the day or the night, to alleviate someone's distress or hunger or homelessness-even if the person was a stranger. She wasted so much money on that miserable orphanage, and other charities, money which she was spending from what would eventually be her daughter's estate. Bernadette often felt outrage over this, and indignation. So did her father, who agreed with her.) Bernadette went to one of the windows beside the doors and watched her mother's piteously thin and fragile figure moving with slow difficult)' across the lawns. The girl shook her head with amused exasperation. Katherine was dressed in a light blue silk frock, with the new big bustle behind and the draped front-all pearls and embroidery-and she looked ike a ridiculous skeleton in it, her feet fumbling under the hem for balance. {Catherine's mass of tawny natural waves and ringlets had been caught up in a huge chignon on her delicate head, and Bernadette again felt resentment that her own hair was straight and shining brown and lank, and had to be put up in rags every night to achieve the long fall of sleek tubes which hung down her plump back. For Bernadette was plump though "pleasingly so, no mere bag of bones," as her father frequently assured her, with a glance at Katherine, who was tall and so desperately frail and thin. Certainly Bernadette had a rounded and mature figure at seventeen, a full and thrusting breast, wide hips, and glossy dimpled arms and legs. Her skin, unlike Katherine's, was faintly golden, another exasperation for it suggested a vulgar exposure to the sun, and Bernadette never exposed herself so. Her round hazel eyes, always sparkling, with short brown lashes, were still another vexation, for her mother had, Bernadette confessed, the most beautiful and changeful eyes she had ever seen, and her father's were light and interesting. Bernadette's face was round-"like a bun," a disrespectful governess had once said-and a little flat in profile, with a small tilted nose, lips too large and red, teeth too large and white, and a chin too aggressive for a woman.
The girl, clad in a morning frock of yellow linen sprigged with tiny roses, fashionably bustled and draped with a moderate simplicity, gave her an air of sprightliness, lively motion, vitality and exuberance, as she watched her mother's progress over the lawns. Now the silly thing was talking to a stable boy, with that deep seriousness and that deep kind smile she always wore when speaking to anybody. Couldn't she ever see how absurd she was, gazing at people like an illuminated saint? No wonder Papa had "associated" with brighter and gayer women! After all, a man can stand so much of a fool, and then he must console himself. Bernadette had not been appalled at the giggling revelations of her schoolmates at St. Amelia's Female Academy in Philadelphia which concerned her father. In many ways, secretly, she was proud of her father's virility and manifest masculinity. At least he was a man, and not a caricature of a woman as her mother was. Bernadette was not deceived that her father was seeking the governorship to be "with my beloved family more often." She knew very well, from reading hints in the newspapers, that Papa was about finished in Washington, and that the State Legislature was no longer in a mood to reappoint him once again. Papa had been entirely too zestful in Washington, though Bernadette never condemned him. She thought him delightful, and justified. She had her father's own exigency, his expedient way of managing things to his advantage, his own gusto, his own lack of conscience and delicacy, his own unconcern for others, his own absence of illusion, and his own cynicism. She also had his charm, which she used deliberately, and was usually laughing saucily or uttering an impertinent witticism, and she had such perfect health that that health alone drew people to her, forgiving her sallies, her impudence, her arrogant ways. The Sisters at her school had often deplored "dear Bernadette's irreverence," but had loved her, as a whole state had loved her father. Bernadette, still watching her mother, impatiently pushed aside a strand of her overly fine hair from her forehead-which was too low, too rounded, and freckled. Now what was Mama doing, for Heaven's sake? Katherine, just joined by a gardener's boy, was bending and seriously inspecting the early roses in a flower bed, and from her slight gestures and her expression, she was being gently earnest. Her waist is like a stick, thought Bernadette. She has no bosom, no hips. Her complexion looked ghastly in the sunlight, for all color had long abandoned it except for the deep rose of her mouth. Her hair shimmered like dark gold in the sun, and she was now absently pushing a curling tendril behind one of her ears as she listened to the boy. Her dress was too elaborate for the morning, Bernadette reflected. But she was always dressed as if about to receive guests-and at this hour, too! The light warm breeze was lifting some of the ringlets and waves on Katherine's head and Bernadette thought, with envy, that she, herself, tried to avoid breezes which could unfurl those careful long tubes of brown hair which hung down her back and make them lank and stringy. Mama never wore snoods. Tomorrow, she, Bernadette, at seventeen, would insist on a snood for herself, which would control her hair and make her a mature lady. And she was damned if she was ever going back to St. Amelia's Female Academy! She had had enough of that. She thought of herself, with a thrill of pleasure, being Papa's hostess in Philadelphia, at dinners and soirees and balls. Later, she would have a husband. She was old enough for marriage, for God's sake. She had a man in mind, and all at once her young strong body was hot and trembling. The man she really desperately loved and desired was Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh, the brother of a girl she tolerated and cultivated assiduously only for one reason. Mary Regina was almost as silly as Mama-and Bernadette resented and envied the other girl's beauty. Regina was sent to no female academy. Her brother kept her at home with a governess to teach her graces and manners, and Timothy Dineen to educate her. Bernadette had long ago discerned Joseph's deep attachment to his sister, and so Bernadette had pursued that sister relentlessly, with sweetness, sometimes even with fawnings, and always with loudly expressed affection and devotion. Regina, who had no love for lavish parties, always accepted Bernadette's invitations, and she had made some friends of her own in Green Hills, girls as quiet and contemplative as herself, and as intelligent. It was not Joseph's wealth alone which had early attracted the nubile Bernadette, but his very appearance, his air of assurance and power and distinction, his look of ruthlessness, of cold dominance. Sean was like a waving blossom compared with an oak, and Bernadette despised Sean, who was now in Harvard and not doing excellently.
(Bernadette knew almost to the penny how much money it had cost Joseph to get Sean admitted to Harvard. Her father had chuckled about it. "They never want the Irish," he had said, "except for-" And he had rubbed his fingers knowingly together. "Especially not Irish born in Ireland." To Bernadette, second generation American-Irish, the Irish-born were greenhorns and rude and uncouth, except for Joseph Armagh.) Bernadette had hinted of her attachment to Joseph a year ago, and her father had laughed. "You could do worse, my pet," he had said. "He has even more money than I have, and is a director and a power in many companies, and is no fool, and has a lot of pride, and will go very far, and is deeply involved in politics-I am relying on his support, I must confess, in his newspaper, the Philadelphia Messenger, which has great influence. He will never run for anything, himself-one must remember his-er- his-" Tom had paused. One didn't mention brothels to one's daughter. He continued, "With his connections. Some of them not quite gentlemanly. Well, we'll see, later." It was now "later," in Bernadette's opinion. Mama had been a wife and mother at seventeen. Why, thought Bernadette, I am almost an old maid! I'm not even remotely bespoken. Who wants callow boys, anyway, instead of a man like Joe, who is just like Papa? Bernadette remembered, with pleasure, that Papa would be coming home tonight for her party. The servants, this afternoon, would begin to deck the huge and glittering house. The lanterns would be hung in the gardens. If the weather remained fair there would be a wooden platform on the back lawns for the musicians and the dancing. There was already a humming and a stir in the servants' quarters and in the kitchen. There would be awnings and tents and candlelight and singing. School friends from Philadelphia were due this afternoon with their chaperones or their Mamas, and every girl who was anybody in Winfield and Green Hills had been invited. Bernadette thought of her gown, which she had selected herself-one of Worth's most beautiful-in New York. It was white satin of a richness like velvet, with loops of tiny silk red roses over the narrow skirt, and roses gathered under the new bustle in the back, and a bodice voluptuously cut to reveal her full golden breasts, and with diamonte tiny buttons, and little flounced sleeves just covering the shoulders. It had been artfully styled to reveal Bernadette's attractions and to conceal her plumpness. Her white silk slippers would have real diamond buckles on them. Her father's gift would be a necklace of fine matched pearls, and her mother's a beautiful diamond bracelet. She would wear long white kid gloves, and roses in her hair. She would be irresistible. To Joseph Armagh. Of course, he was the oldest young man to be invited to the party, and he would accompany that foolish Regina. The rest would be "boys," as Mama thought fitting. Polite, nervous "boys" with clammy gloved hands, and some with pimples. Mama really had no sense. She, herself, had married a man old enough to be her father, and she had murmured something about Joseph's "age." Thirteen years difference! How ridiculous. This was strange, too, for Mama was much attached to Joseph, thank God. Bernadette was the only one who suspected this, for her disillusioned eyes saw almost everything. But they had not detected Joseph's powerful and unshakable love for her mother. They saw only courtesy and courtliness toward Katherine, and deference, and even a slight overt tenderness. Naturally, he would give all this to a woman of Mama's age, though Mama was only two or three years or so older than he. But men were different from women. Bernadette had almost persuaded herself that Joseph's attentions to her mother, so unnaturally gentle, were for her sake. The girl, ardently pursued by young men even from Boston and New York- brothers of her schoolmates-and young men from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and Winfield-had no doubt but that she need only lift a finger and Joseph would fall at her feet. She intended to lift that finger tomorrow. She knew that she amused Joseph with her pertness and her witticisms, which sometimes bordered on his own irony, and that he believed she loved his sister devotedly. She had guessed that at times her effrontery amused him even more, and her liveliness and vitality. With him she was also artless, laughing, coy and flirtatious. She was also, she remembered acutely, very rich and rich men did not marry Cinderellas. Her father was a senator, and he would be governor, and the family had social power in Washington and all over the Commonwealth, and were established- as Joseph's family was not. "Shanty" Irish, Tom Hennessey had once said with indulgence, not knowing that Joseph had applied that term to him on many occasions. "But a good mind, for all that, and some amenities and manners and conduct." He would have preferred that Bernadette had desired Sean, nearer her own age, and very Anglo-Saxon in appearance. "One would never guess he was Irish." She would advance an idea to her father tonight: She wanted to be tutored by Timothy Dineen, too. "He has taught Regina twice as much as I have learned in Philadelphia. It is only a step for me to the Armaghs' house, and you know how dearly I love Regina, and I would be among my closest friends in Green Hills." She would then encounter Joseph more often in his own house, if her little gambit failed tomorrow. But, how could it fail? Who was he, compared with Bernadette Hennessey, in establishment? She loved him, she told herself with virtue, despite what he was. Such pure love must surely be returned. Besides, her house was far more grand, and she had a lady for a mother. It would have amused and amazed Bernadette to know that her mother had guessed, even two years ago, that her daughter was infatuated with Joseph Armagh, and that she considered her daughter tender and loving and single-hearted. (She, like Bernadette, thought all the deference, consideration and courtliness extended to her by Joseph was because of a reserved and growing attachment to Bernadette.) Once she had said to her daughter, "Joseph is so strong and dependable and such a gentleman," and she had watched Bernadette's suddenly flushing face with love and understanding. She also thought Bernadette, the dear child, so shy and so young, in spite of the flippancy and the impertinence and the sometimes vicious impatience, and the severe letters from the Sisters. Bernadette could be difficult, Katherine admitted, but that was the fault of her youth which time would ameliorate, and in the meantime her mother must exercise restraint and be indulgent. She could conceive of no man more worthy of her darling than Joseph. Now, what the hell is she doing? thought Bernadette, watching her mother through the window. Oh, how ridiculous! For the gardener's boy had picked a white rosebud and was tendering it to Katherine with an awkward bow. Katherine looked at him, smiling. Then she took the rosebud and tucked it in her bodice and was obviously thanking the bumpkin. She bent her beautiful head and sniffed at the rosebud. I shouldn't wonder but that there are tears in her silly eyes, thought Bernadette, highly diverted. But what presumptuousness. I must tell Papa tonight, and how he will laugh-a greenhorn and her old mother, bowing and smiling and scraping to each other. Bernadette was suddenly cross. Had her mother no sense of the proprieties? But then, she was always kissing and hugging the ugliest and most snot-nosed brats at the orphanage, and bringing them gifts. She must have some common blood, thought Bernadette. Then the girl's attention was caught by something moving briskly through the gates on the graveled road and towards the house. In a moment or two Bernadette saw that it was one of the better hacks of the depot, and that it contained a young lady. Bernadette thought that the woman was probably the mother or the chaperone of one of her own guests due tonight. But where was the guest? Bernadette opened the bronze doors and walked out upon the white steps of the pillared portico. The lady, assisted by the driver, alighted on the path and Bernadette saw that she was very beautiful and young, and not more than twenty- one, and arrayed lavishly in lavender silk and lace, and that she had marvelous slender ankles and a mass of pale hair under her little tilted hat. Her features, Bernadette could see even from this distance, were small and exquisitely cut, like Dresden, and her gloves were lavender and so was her silk coat and parasol. She was extremely pretty and stylish and her figure was lovely in all its proportions, and she was tall. Though she had a controlled air, and was apparently of excellent breeding, there was something agitated about her, and the inquisitive Bernadette was surprised. Katherine, equally surprised, left the flower bed and went to the stranger, making a soft, self-deprecating gesture with her thin hands. She then motioned towards the house, but the lady-who was regarding Katherine with earnest attention-shook her head slightly. Katherine paused, as if a little baffled. Bernadette could hear their voices, though not their words. Then Katherine was no longer speaking; the wind caught her blue dress and it was as if it had touched the shroud of a dead woman. Bernadette wanted to run to join them but manners had been literally beaten into her by the Sisters, and so she cautiously advanced only to the steps of the portico and strained to hear. The strange young lady continued to speak, and Bernadette saw that her mother was very still, only her blue dress and her hair blowing a little, and that she was, suddenly, dwindled and shrunken in appearance. The young lady's voice rose desperately. "I implore you, Mrs. Hennessey, to be merciful and kind! To understand, to remember that I am a sister- woman in a terrible situation. Not to judge me, or your husband, but only to be kind and compassionate. It was probably most wrong of us-I know it was, and we are guilty, and from my heart I ask your pardon, and even your pity, for one so much younger than yourself. You have a daughter. Consider me as a daughter, too, who comes to you in wretchedness not only pleading for forgiveness, but asking your help." Then Katherine spoke in a dry and almost inaudible voice: "But-what did he tell you, about me, about himself?" She put her hand to her slight breast in a pathetic gesture. The young lady's face was running with tears as she leaned towards Katherine. "Only what you know yourself, Mrs. Hennessey, that he intends to leave you when he is elected governor, and that he has asked you for a divorce and you have refused, in spite of my dire situation and my helpless position. Is it possible that you will continue to deny our child his father's name, you who are a mother, yourself? Could any human being be so cruel? I don't believe it, your face is so gentle, so-tender. Tom must have been mistaken. He has told me that you will not let him go, because you want his money, and that you never loved each other, and it was a marriage of convenience, which he has always regretted. But surely you know this, yourself! He prefers, as he has told you, that you sue for the divorce, but, if not, he will be forced to do so, even at the expense of his career, for he has our unborn child to consider. Mrs. Hennessey, I appeal to your womanly heart, your pity, to let him go at once! He does not know I have come to you, but I was driven I wanted to appeal" Katherine rocked vaguely on her heels. She put her hand to her face, as if in bemused wonder, a dream, in incredulity. Her fragile body swayed. Bernadette started down the stairs, only half comprehending. Then Katherine turned, very, very slowly, her hands fumbling helplessly in the air, and she faced the house and took two uncertain steps towards it, her white face blank and without any expression at all. She staggered. She threw up her arms as if drowning, and then she dropped to the shining green grass and lay there, tossed and thrown, a bundle of bodiless blue. The gardener's boy ran to her, and Bernadette began to run. She reached her mother and stood beside her but did not bend or touch her. She looked only at the beautiful young lady who was staring at Katherine, aghast, her hand to her lips. "Who are you?" she asked of the stranger, and the woman, still looking only at Katherine, said faintly, "I-I am a friend of the senator's-a friend. He wants to leave his wife but she will not let him go." She became aware of the young girl. She looked at Bernadette with stretched green eyes. "Who are you?" she whispered. "I am the senator's daughter," said Bernadette. "And you are a liar." When Joseph Armagh entered the great hall of the Hennessey house he saw that Bernadette, disheveled and weeping and swollen of face, was the only one there. The hall had been partially decorated, and then deserted. There was utter silence in the enormous mansion, a sensation that death was already present. Bernadette, crying wildly, ran to Joseph and flung herself on his chest. His arms rose automatically and held her, and he listened to her incoherent cries with a stunned expression. He listened to her words, finally, with a suddenly sharp attention. "She lied, she lied!" Bernadette half-screamed. "She is an adventuress -my father-she lied. She killed my mother. I heard it all-" "Your mother sent for me," said Joseph, still holding the girl, whose morning dress was crumpled and stained. Bernadette clung to him. "She lied! My father would never do a thing like that-" Her voice became furious, then pleading, as she kept her head rigidly against Joseph's chest. Joseph listened, and as he listened his Gaelic face darkened to bleakness and savagery. He stared over the girl's head as if seeing something unpardonable, something too terrible to be true. The girl continued to pour out her desperate words, her gasping accusations, her defense of her father, her anguish over her mother, and Joseph, all at once, was aware of her youth, her misery, her wildness and hysteria. He put his hand on the head that lay on his chest, and his face blackened more and more. "Hush, hush," he said. "Where is your father?" Bernadette shrieked, "She won't see him! He doesn't dare go into her room! The priest is here-Extreme Unction-and the doctor's with her! To say such things about my father! To think my mother believed them- Oh, my poor mother!" The long tube-like curls had long ago lost their roundness. Bernadette's fine lank hair swathed her like a brown veil, and numerous tendrils on her cheeks and forehead were wet with sweat and tears. Her face was not only swollen, but blotched with red, and she seemed almost beside herself with frenzy, rage and grief and hate. She took Joseph by the arms and shook him and looked at him with starting hazel eyes veined heavily with scarlet, and almost