Fallen Beauty (14 page)

I will not have breakfast with him in the dining room any longer if I do not wish it, either. Sensible people of means should take breakfast in bed alone. And while I am taking control of my household, I will inform Eugen of exactly what is expected of these horrid, pedestrian people: people without vocation whose lives are spent in toiling misery shining the banisters of others’ homes. I can’t imagine such an existence, but they must be of a different mind from someone like me, so I must instruct them how to exist around me. No more slopping water on the floor and chattering to me like finches when I am trying to compose a sonnet in my head. I can’t think of the thousands of words and phrases I’ve lost to the questions “When do ya want the linens taken to wash?” or “Which brand of dog meat do ya want us to buy?”

Really? Asking me such questions when I have goddesses and muses delivering timeless poems to my brain? Scattering their gifts with solicitations my husband can handle.

Control. I must take control. I have allowed it to slip from my fingers for far too long, and this lack of order poisons everything. It poisons my feelings of power so I cannot properly manage my work or my George.

I gaze out the window and see Eugen walking up the drive. The clouds are moving swiftly, throwing him in and out of shadow. From this distance, I love him wholly. He sees me smile at him through the window, and raises his eyebrows as if to say, “May I come see you?” I nod, giving him permission. In moments, the door opens and he is before me in the front room.

“You are radiant today,” he says. “Your eyes are sparkling. What spells are you at?”

“Sit, sweet man. We need to talk management.”

“This sounds very serious, love,” he says, taking the chair and gazing at me with adoration.

“It is,” I say. “You may have noticed that I have been mercurial lately.”

He laughs in his warm, open way.

“I mean, more than usual,” I say, with a grin.

“I just thought it was the curse,” he says. “No need to explain.”

“But it isn’t the curse. It is this household. It needs tighter management. It’s too noisy and loose. You must explain to the servants that if they wish to stay employed, I have to work, and I can’t work with all of their distractions. You understand?”

“I do. I’ll lay down Edna’s law.”

“Good. Also, my mother is ever in my thoughts. She keeps writing, asking for small amounts of money. This is distracting because of the pain it brings me. I know she needs more but is ashamed to ask for it, and I can’t abide her shame. She gave her life to care for my sisters and me, and I want her comfortable.”

“What do you suggest, Vincie? We’ve tried to have her live in the cottage before but that didn’t work out.”

“No, we all need our own space. I mean that I want to give her a large sum.”

“How much do you mean?”

“A fortune. One thousand dollars.”

He widens his eyes and then smiles. “You are so generous. You know we are not exactly in our best financial place, though, yes? The stock market has gone to hell.”

“I know the numbers, Uge. But since I have claimed more control here, my words are in abundance. When I finish these sonnets, we will have quite a windfall.”

“Then let’s do it. Write her the check.”

We are grinning at each other. The room is lit from warm sunshine. A true radiance. Order. When I do this good, good will come. But I don’t do it for any reward when it comes to Mother. I would give her my very breath if she required it.

LAURA

A terrible wind battered the house, slipping in through windows and flimsy doors in need of sealing. I had boiled hot water over the fireplace to warm the cold tub water, and given Grace and myself a bath. We dressed in our flannel nightgowns, tights, and socks, and sat by the fire eating cold ham sandwiches and apples. She was frightened of the windstorm, so I let her sit with me past her bedtime, braiding her hair, which was growing in and making her look more like a child than a baby, and following the aimless sweetness of her chatter.

“I make purple dress,” she said.

“What dress?” I asked.

“For witchy lady.”

Goose bumps rose on my skin. I wondered if Grace had ever overhead me say Millay seemed witchy or if she’d intuited that on her own. I stopped pondering that question, however, when the front door burst open, causing Grace and me to jump. Marie entered on a gust of wind, and slammed the door behind her.

“Damn him,” said Marie, wiping her eyes with her sleeve. She flinched and held her back, which had been giving her pain. Marie’s angry visits and overnight stays had lessened in frequency with each passing month, but still came, erratic and unpredictable as the currents in the Stony Kill. I wondered what had set her off. When Marie saw Grace sitting with me by the fire, she looked mortified.

“I’m sorry,” said Marie. “I didn’t know she’d still be awake.”

Marie reached for the light switch. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”

“I haven’t paid my electric bill. I’ll run to the office tomorrow.”

“Do you need something from us to hold you over?”

“No,” I said. “Everette doesn’t need to support me. It’s just you that you need to worry about.”

“I’m going mad. I spend half my day wishing for Everette to hold me and half wishing to strangle him. I need a hobby or employment. When I suggested I try to come back to work with you to bring in business, he said it would reflect poorly on him, but the truth is that he has taken a considerable pay cut as town manager since the crash, and we are barely making ends meet. If I could still work with you, I might be able to contribute.”

“As you can see,” I said, “we’d need customers for that to be so.”

“Why haven’t you told me it was this bad?”

“For you to do what, worry right along with me? We’ll be fine. Someone always seems to walk through the door just before I think I’ll need to shut down for good.”

I thought of Millay with guilt, but I pushed her from my mind. Marie began pacing the room.

“It’s time for bed, Gracie,” I said.

“Stay,” she said.

“No, you need to rest so you keep getting better.”

She protested all the way up the stairs, but as soon as I laid her in bed with her blanket, she turned on her side and snuggled under the covers. I kissed Grace’s head and went back downstairs to see to Marie. In the front room, I found her rubbing her back.

“Sit down,” I said. “You’ll have the baby right here if you continue like this.”

“I wish I could. I don’t even care anymore,” she said. “Then he’d really pay.”

I recoiled from her as if slapped. Did she mean that she hoped the child would die? Marie’s eyes met mine and appeared remorseful.

“I didn’t mean that,” she mumbled. “Not at all. I just want him to hurt.”

Her words didn’t soften me. Her willingness to give voice to such a thought chilled me.

The wind rattled the panes like hands shaking the glass, trying to get in. I gazed back at Marie and saw real fear. I realized how horrible it must be for her, circumstances so different from my own and yet somehow the same. While I was alone, she certainly felt alone, and having a child under such anguish was its own kind of hell. I reached for her hand and saw her relief. Our silent remorse knit us back together.

“Would you like to stay the night?” I asked.

“No, I should go back,” she said. “Forgive my tantrum. It’s just that if I don’t let it go here, I’ll fling it at him, and we’re too unstable for more pressure.”

“It’s all right.”

“I hate to leave you here in the dark and cold. Are you sure you and Grace wouldn’t want to sleep at our house, at least until the electricity is turned on?”

“No,” I said. “Thank you. We’ll be fine.” What I didn’t say was that I would rather Grace not see and feel the turmoil in their house. She got enough of that at home with me.

Marie left me with a hug, and I locked the door behind her. Seeing Marie so frantic felt like looking in a mirror. I could understand why she said my bitterness helped cure hers. It was ugly and unsettling to witness, but hard to control.

I knew I should go to bed, but my mind felt too active. I sat by the fireplace and stared into the flames. Then, almost as if hypnotized, I reached for my sketch pad and pencil on the end table. Inside the pad were my ideas for costumes. I’d kept it since that night at the Colonial Theatre. There were hundreds of pages of designs: a parade of costumes for the Follies, Shakespearean plays, interpretation of songs from Beethoven’s
Appassionata
, to Handel’s
Messiah
, to George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” The sketchbook had become a diary of my dreams. I fantasized that if I ever became a seamstress for a theater company, I’d have my design blueprints ready.

I flipped to the next clean page and put the pencil on the paper. As if overcome by a force outside of myself, I drew a curve, a shadow, a bell-shaped sleeve, a fur cuff. I noted
velvet
and
ermine
in the margin, and then retrieved my colored pencils and began to shade in the folds of the gown with a deep, warm shade of purple. A shade that would complement locks of copper hair. A hue that would provide a perfect contrast to the golden green eyes looking out over it.

A gown fit for a Royal Duchess.

•   •   •

VINCENT

I
need this storm. The weather is a mirror for the tempest building inside me.

The household has fallen into line. Silence is my gift. But the words are erratic, in my poetry and from my poet.

Eugen comes from the post every day with nothing from George—not a letter, a note, or even a telegram. My headaches have become so severe that I can only write in the darkness, where the light cannot torture me. It seeks the place in my skull behind my eyes and makes it throb until I can only curl up in my bed covered with the blankets that still hold his smell, which I refuse to have laundered.

George is breaking me. I don’t know if he means to do it, but with every day that passes without a word from him, I feel more sure I will run to the train station and travel to him to force him to look at me, confront me, love me.

The rumble of thunder has called me from my bed. I open the curtains and am able to watch the wind in the stubborn, clinging leaves without the damned sunlight to torture me. I’m suddenly overcome with the need to be in the storm, conjuring, one with nature in this form. We are the same today.

I slide my silk robe around my body and throw open my bedroom door. Eugen emerges from his rooms next to mine but sees the wild look in my eyes and my hair loose around my shoulders, and senses that he is not to impede my progress.

I move down the stairs with the elegance of an apparition, and the maid scrubbing the stone floor looks at me as if I were indeed a ghost. She gasps and clutches her brushes and buckets to move them from my path before I kick them at her. She is no idiot like the cook, and keeps out of my way.

I open the door before she can get to it, and the wind throws it back to slam into the wall and blasts my hair, lifting it up behind me. I inhale deeply and push out into it, feeling the electricity from the clouds and the landscape. A lightning bolt hits the ground so close to me that I feel the earth tremble, but I know it will not harm me. I even court it, wishing it would slice me through so I could exist in the peace of the grave.

The dried husks of my summer flowers have not yet been flattened, so they still conceal me on the path to my writing cabin. My heart is beating fiercely, and I both relish the feeling and wish to clamp my hands around this organ of torment.

My cabin is made of crude wooden boards and heated with the fire of an old stove. Here it is just me and my pencil and my desk. Here I don’t have to feel the pulse of my husband’s energy, disturbances from the help, or predictable knocks on the door from the Fickes, who seem to need us to exist with each other.

Ficke’s wife won’t allow Arthur and me to consummate any longer, and as much as I wish we could reclaim that freedom, we cannot. The past cannot be resurrected. This hurts me because it reminds me of my own fading youth and the death of all of those throbbing bohemian nights in Greenwich Village or the Left Bank or on the coast of Maine, where one never felt the isolation of being surrounded by mountains and forests.

It is there that I will escape soon—the shore. The only place where I can truly breathe.

I will visit Mother. That will make her happy.

I imagine a seaside at night, a woman born of its tides in the stark moonlight, crawling out of the surf spitting shells and seaweed upon the sand, while dry sand clings to her wet hair, her hands, her eyes. I imagine a house with windows lit with the warm glow of fire while the woman shivers on the shore. There is a longing in the woman that the man inside the house will come and minister to her, but he does not come.

In the salty silence, the woman becomes aware of the weight of darkness all around her and sees the truth. Only the night, her sister, will watch with this woman, and she must pick up herself, and dry the briny drippings, and expel the death from her own lungs.

LAURA

My heart banged in my chest and I had difficulty breathing as I approached Eugen. He was waiting for me in his car, behind the cemetery, as I’d asked. He smoked and stared off in the distance. I could have turned away; he still hadn’t seen me. I stopped once, twice, but felt the weight of the sketch pad in my satchel and continued toward him, all the time telling myself I had to survive; I needed money. I thought of the lie I’d told Marie, who was keeping Grace, that I was meeting with a client for some housedresses, an elderly woman who preferred not to come to the shop. Half-truths, full betrayals, a sister preoccupied enough with herself not to ask too many questions.

When Eugen caught sight of me, he smiled and tossed his cigarette out the window. He opened his door and came around to open mine—a true gentleman. I thanked him and faced forward, reminding myself that I was a professional, and this errand was necessary to support my daughter.

“I’m so glad you’ve decided to help Vincie,” he said. “You have brought a light to her that she hasn’t felt in weeks. I was beginning to worry about her state of mind approaching the cold dark of winter, but now, with your kindness, I think you will restore something in her.”

I was coming just to make a dress. Why did he place so much importance on my visit?

“Where is your darling daughter?” he asked, driving fast on the curving slope of road that snaked through the forest.

“My sister has her,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows at me. “And did you tell her where you were going?”

“No.”

“Ah. A secret among sisters. It is for the best,” he said, almost to himself.

He took the next turn sharply, and I fell into him. I scooted back to my side of the seat, and he laughed.

“Feel free to stay there,
chéri
. You are a pleasant weight on my shoulder.”

I inched closer to the window and looked out at the passing forest, the evergreens shrouded in mist, the gray sky looming low over the mountainous landscape. Eugen laughed next to me.

“Forgive me, Miss Kelley. I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable. I want you to be happy. Maybe someday I will make you smile.”

“I doubt that very much,” I mumbled, and was again met with his laugh. He was maddeningly cheerful. His joviality put me off because it disregarded my feelings. But perhaps that was his strategy for calming others. I’d seen him effectively use it with Millay. Perhaps he felt that acting like a child meant he never had to deal in the muddled complications of adulthood.

“How much older than her are you?” I heard myself blurt.

“Twelve years.”

That surprised me. It was quite a gap.

“Vincie needs taking care of—not with money, but with her fragile health. Isn’t she like a tiny girl? A precious, tiny girl.”

The way he spoke of her made me uneasy. These people were not like me. Their natures seemed predatory or spoiled, like large children who wanted to collect things.

I felt nauseous on the fast, twisting ride to Steepletop, and it struck me that if anything happened to me, no one would ever know. If these strange, covetous people wanted to keep me locked up in a basement or prisoner in an attic, I’d have no way of being rescued. But this thinking was ridiculous. I needed to stop reading the whodunits at the library. My imagination was being contaminated with nonsense.

Still, as I gazed over the acres of mountains and trees, and felt my ears pop as we climbed the road, the extreme isolation of the farm weighed on me. I had admired Millay’s freedom away from town, but I realized it might not be as ideal as I’d imagined. As much as I longed to escape the gossips in town, perhaps I did not wish to escape people or civilization. Maybe I needed new people with whom I had no past, people who would smile kindly at me and my daughter, invite us to dinner, not be afraid to take a walk in the park with us, not hesitate to patronize me for my services.

When we finally reached the gates of Steepletop, I couldn’t believe I had managed bike rides up these hills without collapse. My anger must have fueled some well of dark energy inside me. The darkness sat heavy in my chest. I hated myself for being here. I hated Millay and her husband for participating in my sister’s undoing. I hated that I’d ever let myself get into such a situation.

Eugen drove a bit slower as we motored up the driveway, calling my attention to the barn assembled from a Sears and Roebuck kit, pointing out the horses running in a high field, greeting the handsome English setter that ran alongside the car. The bare branches of the dragon willow that hung over the drive parted like a frayed stage curtain as we pulled up to the front of the white farmhouse. As soon as I stepped from the car, the hair rose on my neck.

Steepletop sounded like a hive. Bees infested the air over the flowers and grasses. Gnats swarmed my face, unfazed by my swats. Eugen came around the front of the car and held out a cigarette to me.

“Here,” he said. “Light this. It will keep the bugs from assaulting you.”

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“Of course you don’t,” he said, not unkindly. “Just let it smolder in your mouth. No one will be here to see you.”

I hesitated, then took the cigarette, allowed him to light it, and held it in front of my face, thinking how odd it felt here. How unholy.

I slung my satchel over my shoulder and followed Eugen to the door. He opened it for me and allowed me passage into a stone foyer, where a set of tiny women’s riding boots sat in a border of drying mud next to a .22-caliber rifle.

“She’s a good hunter,” said Eugen. “Bloodthirsty, but with ample remorse.”

I suspected his assessment had as much to do with people as with animals.

“Wait in the dining room,” he said, gesturing through the door ahead of me. “She will be with you shortly.”

While Eugen climbed the stairs to the left, I walked forward into the dining room. The hardwood floor gleamed in the light shining from the windows on either side of the far wall, framed in red-and-cream toile curtains. The wall was painted bloodred beneath the chair rail, and there were many heavy pieces of furniture. On either side of the room at my left and right, corner shelves held rows of seashells, brilliantly formed, creamy as pearls, and somehow at odds with the opulence. A tapestry hung on the wall next to a fireplace, where the hearth blazed, heating the room beyond what was comfortable.

I dropped the cigarette into the embers, removed my hat and coat, and laid them on one of the high-backed dining table chairs. As I slid the scarf from my neck, Eugen returned.

“She wants you to come up to her rooms,” he said, looking subdued and somewhat uncomfortable. “She’s . . . not well. It has been a difficult day for her.”

“Should I come back another time?”

“No,” he said. “She suffers heartsickness. Her lover is not cooperating with her. He is breaking her.”

Her lover is breaking her.
Words flowing from the mouth of her husband as if he were speaking of a coming storm or a farming matter. A woman with men orbiting her like moons while I sat cold and alone with my former lover a gaze away. A woman sulking in her rooms while a doting, indulgent husband made offerings for her amusement.

I rewrapped my scarf around my neck and put on my coat.

“What are you doing, Miss Kelley?”

“This was a mistake,” I said. “I don’t know why I’m here. I wish to go.”

“Please stay. If you leave, she’ll collapse.”

“I hardly think that’s true,” I said, pressing my hat on my head and starting out of the room.

“No, truly. I don’t know what she’ll do if she gets one more rejection,” he said in a quavering but insistent whisper. “Her poetry has been uncooperative, her lover, the weather, her health, her horses, her mother, now you. How much is one woman expected to endure? I’m afraid she will take that gun and blow her own pretty head off; you must help me.”

He had me by the arms, and I saw that there were tears in his eyes.

“Please, Laura. Please. Don’t do it for her. Do it for a husband in agony. Do it for your daughter.”

I pulled out of his grip and moved to the hallway, where I opened the door and started down the stairs.

“I would never have taken you for a hypocrite,” he said.

I ignored him.

“You say you don’t help us because of loyalty to your sister,” he continued, “but you know it is more than that.”

I stopped and stared straight ahead of me, down a hill and into a rose garden. Something in the air had changed. Thorny branches reached toward the sky, and crows moved from the tree limbs hanging over the path. A breeze stirred the willow. Shafts of sunlight dropped from between moving cloud banks. A line of men walked on the crest of the hill and waved down to me. The setter came back, and greeted me by placing his head under my hand. I stroked his silky fur and tried to think what was different when I realized that I could no longer hear the bees. Their terrible droning had stopped. No bugs flew at me. A crisp wind traveled up the driveway and into my face, opening my lungs.

I turned back to Eugen. “What strange magic is this?”

He closed his eyes and inhaled. “I think it is winter, just arriving.”

“But it has only recently turned fall.”

“The seasons are advanced and fickle up here. You are in another world, don’t you know?” He grinned at me, and the tension left my body. I returned his smile.

He clapped and said, “I made you smile!”

I laughed and felt almost drunk from the sensation. When had I last felt a release like this? I walked past him back into the house and removed my hat. He helped me with my coat and scarf and hung them on pegs in the foyer.

“I could kiss you, kind woman,” he said.

“If I’m going to ever return to this place, you’ll have to stop saying things like that.”

“And if you return, you’ll have to understand that I am harmless, jovial, and full of love. It is my nature—I cannot help it, nor do I want to. But I will try to respect your prudery.”

“I wouldn’t call myself a prude,” I said. “I just . . .”

“No, I only tease you. I know you are full of passions. I can see it in your eyes,” he said. “Now, come. We’ve kept the Duchess waiting long enough.”

•   •   •

S
he stood in the darkened room with the curtains drawn, wearing a translucent coral negligee. She stared at dying embers in the fireplace while fondling an empty bottle of wine on the mantel. Shiny tracks of tears lined her cheeks. Then, theatrically, almost as if posing for a movie still, she turned her head. Her copper hair fell in waves to her shoulders, and reached the middle of her back as she tilted her head and finished the clear contents of the tumbler in her hand, which she then held out.

Eugen ran his hand over my back as he passed me. He took the glass and set it on her vanity behind us, where he gave her another pour from the half-empty Fleischman’s Gin bottle. He placed it back in her hand, and she sipped from it before clearing her throat.

“This wine,” she said, indicating the empty bottle on the mantel, “this curved, supple bit of blown glass, was emptied the night we heard that the poet Elinor Wylie had died, and I keep it here always as a reminder of why I must do the things I plan to do the moment I intend to do them. I had planned to save this wine for Elinor upon her visit to my rooms, where she spent so much time in tender communion with me, and she was never able to drink it.”

Millay drank again and looked at me. “Would you like a drink?”

“No,” I said. “I’m here to measure you for your gown, but then I must get home. No one knows I’m here.”

She stared at me for a moment, drained her glass, and placed it next to the wine bottle.

“Oh, the impatience,” she said. “Gene, shut my door on the way out.”

Eugen winked at me as he closed the door to her bedroom, leaving me alone with her. I followed her tiny figure through a door to a bathroom with a black-and-white-tiled floor, two toilets, and another vanity facing a window. I turned my attention back to the dual toilets.

“A bidet,” she said. “Have you ever seen one?”

I shook my head.

She crossed very near to me, filling my nose with the scent of alcohol and an herb of some kind. She turned a nozzle and water shot up and trickled back into the bowl.

“I first saw these in Paris in the twenties, and now I can’t live without them. I love the freshness, the cleanness.” She took my hand. “Come.”

We passed through another door to a workroom, where a large table covered in notebooks, scribbled papers, and ashtrays took up most of the space. She pushed aside the papers and crossed the floor to open the curtain, allowing in the late-morning light. I placed my satchel on the table and removed the measuring tape, relieved to see the light of day, and to be at my business. I pulled my sketch pad out of the bag and opened it on the table to the page with the purple gown, allowing myself to enjoy this moment. It was as close to costuming as I’d ever get.

I turned back to Millay. She stood in front of me, lit a cigarette, and untied her negligee, allowing it to drop to the floor, exposing her nakedness. I averted my eyes.

“There is no need to remove your covering,” I said. “I can get a good enough measurement through your robe.”

She let out a rich, throaty laugh, and put her hands on her hips, clearly at ease with my discomfort. It occurred to me that this need to provoke seemed like adolescent behavior, which made me feel superior to her. In spite of our age difference, I was the mature woman dealing with a naughty girl, and that gave me courage.

I circled her, noting how very small she was, almost freakishly so, like a pixie. She relaxed her arms at her sides while the cigarette burned between her lips. From behind she could have been a young girl, if it wasn’t for the slight spread of her hips. I wrapped my arms around her from either side and pulled the measuring tape across her chest, joining it in the back and noting her bust size.

Thirty-four inches.

Millay had ample breasts for one so small in stature. She turned her head to the side as if watching me, and raised her hand to her lips to remove the cigarette and flick it over the ashtray on the table. As I let the tape slip off her breasts and down to her waist, she sucked in her breath.