The Age of Desire (10 page)

“Something for your journey,” she says, then a peck on the cheek and nothing more. Teddy merely nods and in his jolliest voice says, “Have yourself a fine time, Miss Anna.” Oh, how Anna wishes she could linger, watch them, watch over them.

At the sparkling new Pennsylvania Station she finds a café where she can sit and sip tea. Pigeons have already gotten in and beat wildly beneath the glistening glass roof. One settles right at her feet, pecking at a crust of bread. She’s surprised at the clanging loneliness that surrounds her in the vast station. How long until she sees the Whartons again? She draws out of her carpetbag the neat red leather book of Meredith poems Edith handed her on parting. On the flyleaf, Edith has written, “Dearest Anna, May all your journeys be memorable and bring you safely home. For you will always have a home with us. And for me there would be no home without you. Edith.”

If you were on that platform, that afternoon in May, you would have observed a woman no larger than a child, sitting alone in a shaft of light, weeping and smiling and drinking every last drop of good old American tea.

FOUR

SUMMER 1907

LENOX, MASSACHUSETTS

W
hen Edith was just five, Lucretia taught her that unhappiness is a moral failing.

She recalls the scene of her indelible lesson: they were living in an ornate hotel suite on the Right Bank of the Seine. Her mother had filled the social season with dinners and balls, and endless rounds of dressmaking and shopping. Edith was given a sealskin coat and hat, a china doll with pink cheeks and a silk velvet pillow the color of raspberries that she took to bed at night. On this winter day, as snow fell outside their window, her father stepped into the drawing room with tears in his eyes and announced that the family’s money had run out. Lucretia had bought too many dresses and pearl rings and hand-sewn kid gloves. Instead of being angry at his spendthrift bride, George was devastated. He had married a woman who didn’t appreciate art or literature or music. She loved
things
. The family was penniless, about to be homeless, with not even enough money for the fare back to the States. George fell into the big carved armchair by the fireplace, his head in his hands. Choking sounds leaked from his throat. Edith didn’t know that fathers were able to cry. She came to him, sat at his feet and began petting his ribbed socks, whispering, “Hush, little Papa.”

Her mother rose sharply with a rustle of silken skirts. “Get up, Pussy. Young ladies do not sit on the floor.” Her voice was stony and threatening, but Edith didn’t want to leave her father.

“Get up!” Lucretia bellowed. “With enough fortitude one can find reason to be happy even in the direst circumstances. And I do not want you to witness this ugly example of self-pity.” Her father raised his head, and Edith looked into his eyes. Even at the age of five she could identify hopelessness. Was her father at fault for not being able to mend his own broken heart?

As it turned out, some relative eventually sent money before the family was evicted from the hotel, and the Joneses were able to stay in France for another year, until things began to “look up.”

But Edith never forgot her mother’s disdain for her father’s tears. And her message:
If one is unhappy, it’s one’s own fault.
Edith therefore can’t help but define her own state this summer as an unprecedented bout of weakness.

Summer in the Berkshires has always given Edith pleasure. But this July, she often stands on The Mount’s terrace awash in sadness. So much about the house of which she was once so giddily proud now seems a mere impersonation of the beauties that line George Vanderbilt’s apartment in the Rue de Varenne. The boiseries in The Mount’s library, the regimented allée of lime trees—the very backbone of The Mount’s garden—have been transformed by her newly Europeanized eyes into the faux and the failed.

It is a perfect day, glorious without an ounce of disagreeable humidity. Her eyes take in the geometry of her once-beloved gardens; her ears are soothed by the music of the stone fountains. Laurel Lake dazzles like a diamond tiara. But none of the beauty reaches her soul. Her heart is blocked and she feels ashamed.

She’s begun writing a new book about a headstrong, social-climbing, money-burning woman. She is taking a risk: this self-absorbed woman is her heroine.

When she’s writing, she finds her only pleasure these days. She loses herself in the music of her words, her characters’ thoughts, their faces. She sees them all so clearly. Undine Spragg’s strong, almost manly hands, her petulant mouth. And dear, weak Ralph Marvell. She can hear his voice as if he is in the room, broken by his disappointment that Undine will never be the woman he wishes she were. Sometimes, when the writing truly flows, it’s as if Edith enters a place out of time. She has no sense that hours have passed. Bodiless, she floats above the world of her characters. This is the greatest ecstasy she knows, the reason she returns again and again to the page. But even these ecstatic journeys feel empty without Anna to comment on her writing at the end of the day.

She recalls that when she was a child, she and Anna would be parted while the Joneses summered in Newport. They would reunite in the autumn, but oh, how she missed her Tonni on those long, hot summer days. She would compile notes to share about what books she was reading, the thoughts she had. She remembers writing, “We can read German together and collect autumn leaves and do a thousand things which are nothing to me now, but so much with you.”

What a lonely little girl she was! And how utterly Tonni filled that loneliness with her patience and abiding interest. Edith would dream as a child that she could cast a spell on Tonni so she’d never want to leave Edith’s family. If she could speak that incantation now, she’d chant it until she could at last see Tonni alighting from the wagon, a soft and expectant smile on her face.

Arriving in Kansas City dirty and exhausted from her train journey, Anna is greeted by her niece’s husband, Charles, whom she has only seen in photographs.

“We’re so glad you’ve come,” he tells her on the ride home. “You see, William has simply stopped speaking. Anna Louise thinks you’re the one person who can make a difference.”

Indeed, when Anna is face-to-face with her brother, the first thing she notes is the milkiness of misery in his eyes. Mourning his son, his wife, years past the fact. How grief can still the tongue, limit the soul!

Anna presses herself to him and feels him relax into her arms. Her closest kin, crushed and brokenhearted.

“Here I am, William,” she says. “I’m so looking forward to spending time together. It’s been too long.”

He doesn’t say a word. But she feels his acceptance in her presence. She knows that somehow, in time, she will reach him.

Later, in her room, unpacking her clothes into the oak armoire, she can hear, threaded through the Victrola’s wheezing Mozart, a countermelody of family conversation. Her niece, her great-nephews, her niece’s husband, chatting about ordinary things. A suffusion of hot pleasure runs from her throat to her belly, as though she has been drinking boiling tea. For the voices that sift up through the floorboards belong to her family! It makes no matter if raising her brother’s broken spirits seems herculean. Or that she has not seen any of them for years and years. They are her blood. What most people take for granted every day knocks the wind out of her. How ironic that the only person Anna wants to tell is Edith. “There I was,” she imagines confiding, “like a girl in love, because my family was just feet away. Edith, oh Edith! My heart rose like a hot-air balloon!”

Just two weeks into the summer, Edith finds that she no longer just misses Anna but is irritated by her absence. When she writes now, she must work off her own handwritten pages instead of crisp typewritten copies. She wastes precious time copying pages when they get too garbled. And there is no one to question her, no one to say, “Surely you didn’t mean
that
, did you?” Or “I don’t understand why she would do such a thing. Perhaps a little explanation would help?”

There is no one to keep her social calendar. No one to neatly copy letters. Alfred White brings her mail now, but he doesn’t want to disturb her until she’s dressed, so she receives no letters until nearly noon. When she’d told a weeping Anna that
of course
she could go to Missouri, Edith didn’t realize how much hardship she herself would incur. One night, she mentions her annoyance to Teddy.

He takes a sip of brandy and laughs. “Imagine that! Our little Anna having the nerve to live a life of her own. Serves us all right for taking her for granted.”

“Since when is she
our
little Anna?” Edith says with a huff. “She’s
my
little Anna and I want her back.”

“Funny. I thought slavery was abolished.” Teddy must be on his fourth glass.

Edith glares at him. “I have a book to write. You have no idea how hard it makes things for me.”

Teddy’s voice deflates and Edith can barely make out his response. “No, dearest, only you know that. Is there no one you can hire from town? Surely there’s someone who can type.”

Two days later, an officious little woman with a birdlike face and a smashed hat arrives at the door—the results of Albert White’s inquiries in town. Edith tries to explain to her what she must do.

Pushing a pair of pince-nez onto her nose, she scans a sample page of Edith’s work. “If you presume I can read this handwriting, you’d be wrong,” the woman says. “Perhaps if you printed it out for me.”

“But there are pages and pages. My scribble isn’t so terrible, is it?”

The woman harrumphs and shakes her head. “You may be a famous writer, Mrs. Wharton, but you certainly could learn a little penmanship.”

Edith gasps.

“Never you mind, though. I’ll work through it. You may have to reread it to make sure I got the gist.”

“I need more than the gist, Miss McCrae. I need every word
as written
.”

Miss McCrae looks at her with an arched brow.

“I can do only what I can do. Do you take me for a psychic? Please show me the typewriting machine.”

By the end of the day, Miss McCrae’s pages are neatly typed without a smudge. But three or four times a page, there are words that have been misread, altered, transposed. There are no comments about the material. No suggestions. But only Anna could have softly, respectfully, provided that.

Anna discovers that living with her brother is like living with a photographic negative, a shadowy ghost of the man she once knew. So she brings him books from the library. She sits for hours talking in a pure, happy voice—as one might converse with a small child who cannot yet speak—recalling his trips to Germany, the poems and philosophers they’ve always both loved. And she sees that she’s making progress. He begins to speak. Just an assent here or there. An occasional dark smile.

And then one evening, a full sentence is born. “Dear Anna,” he says, interrupting her reading aloud. “You remind me . . . you remind me of our mother.”

“Do I?” she says, smiling. “Can you tell me about her?”

And with that one query, the dike is breached. A flood of memories pour out of William. How their mother had the tiniest teeth, like a child’s, and showed her pink gums when she laughed. How everyone remarked that her English was so perfect, so unaccented that she could easily have been born in America. She was proud of that. Their father spoke with an unmistakably German accent, as did all their friends.