The Age of Desire (24 page)

“You
do
make me happy.”

“And that’s why you’re crying, I suppose.”

Edith searches for a handkerchief in her purse and dabs her eyes. By now they have reached the carousel, and the colors and sounds of small children full of delight wound her more than soothe.

“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to irritate you or wheedle or make things difficult. That’s the last thing I want. I want to be valuable, to be supportive. I thought with Teddy gone now you would be happy. . . .”

“My upset has nothing to do with you,” he says.

“Really?”

He looks down and his eyelashes glisten in the light. Then he raises his eyes with unexpected tenderness. His mouth softens. “I’ve been harsh. I’m sorry. There are things you couldn’t possibly understand. Once they’re settled, we’ll be like we were. But better . . . because Teddy’s gone.”

She nods. “That’s all I want.”

“Have patience with me, my love,” he says. “As I’ve had patience with you.”

“Yes. Fair enough,” she says before her voice trails off and the sadness feels once again like sacks of rocks weighing on each of her shoulders.

She doesn’t hear from him at all for four days. And then Morton’s sister, Katherine, arrives.

“Will you join us for dinner?” Morton bleus her one morning. “My sister wishes to meet you.”

Edith is stunned and thrilled. If Morton is choosing to introduce her to his sister, the clouds of their previous meeting must have passed. They agree to dine at Gerald’s, a restaurant with dark velvet booths and quiet carpets that reminds Edith of the theatre. Edith picks up the Fullertons in her motor. Morton gets into the car first, settling next to Edith. Oh, the feel of him, the warmth of him beside her! Quietly, she slips him a note.

He takes it, but, worrying over Katherine’s entrance into the car, he holds it in his hand, between his index finger and middle finger like a cigarette, rather than sliding it into his pocket for later inspection.

Earlier in the day, after receiving his petit bleu, Edith had thought it important that she bridge the gap between their miserable meeting and this dinner. Now she wishes she hadn’t bothered. For whatever reason, she hadn’t imagined that slipping it to him would have been so awkward.

Dearest
[she wrote on this, her third attempt]
,

Are things better now? I have been worried far too much about you since our last meeting. I was reluctant to write. But when you told me you wanted to meet for dinner tonight, it stirred my courage like embers in a fire. I do hope you’ve forgiven me for whatever trespasses I’ve committed.

Your E

When Katherine has fully gathered her skirts into the motor and Cook has closed her door, Edith leans over to see her. Tiny and beautiful with dark wavy hair, which she wears pinned up in front but loose around her shoulders, she seems more like a child than a woman. Her face strikes Edith as an Italian cameo. Perfect and unlined with a sweet, mysterious smile.

“My sister Katherine,” Morton proclaims. He is more than a little proud of his sister, presenting her to Edith like a decorated cake. “Two great women meet.”

Edith reaches over and shakes Katherine Fullerton’s tiny hand.

“I hope you are enjoying Paris?”

“I love Paris,” Katherine says. “I’d be happy to make it my home.” She glances over at Morton with a knowing smile. Has he offered to have her come to Paris for good?

As they are getting out at Gerald’s, exiting on Edith’s side, Morton, perhaps having forgotten he was holding her note, drops it on the motorcar floor, and Katherine says, “Oh!” right before she steps on it and picks it up. Thank God Edith didn’t write “Morton” on the outside of the envelope.

“Is this yours, Mrs. Wharton?” she asks, holding it out as she slides from the car, her blue eyes wide and innocent. “I’m awfully sorry I stepped on it.”

“Oh dear. It certainly is.” Edith feels the vein in her neck pulse with warning. She should be angry at Morton for carelessness, yet she finds even this pleases her. Perhaps he
wants
Katherine to know that they are more than friends. She tucks the note into her purse, wondering if she should give it to him at all.

Later, Katherine announces over soup in a voice as soft and melodious as a girl in her teens, “My brother says wonderful things about you, Mrs. Wharton. In practically every letter. He sent me
The House of Mirth
last year and I was quite taken with it.”

Edith looks fondly over at Morton, but he is too rapt with Katherine to share her smile.

“I’ve even passed the book on to other women at Bryn Mawr. There was a great deal of excitement about it. It’s rare to find a book by a woman. But to find one so accomplished! It’s presently everyone’s favorite book at the college. And to think you’re friends with Will! It’s so clever of him to acquire such illustrious friends.”

Edith is amused how formally she speaks. Though her voice is soft, she carries more authority than most young girls. Morton said she is a lecturer at Bryn Mawr! Edith tries to imagine how her life would have been if
she
had had the opportunity of such a notable job and so much freedom. Edith can’t help being impressed.

She is surprised how physically protective Morton seems of Katherine, touching her blue silk sleeve often during the meal, especially when she says something he deems clever. Katherine clearly adores him, glancing over often for approval. “Don’t you think, Will?” she asks. And yet she is brilliant. Sharper than almost any woman Edith has known. She meets Edith measure for measure in discussions of Dante and Meredith. She writes poetry. She teaches at a university. She has decided to write a novel, which she has already outlined. She has hands as delicate and white as porcelain. Edith wonders why just sharing a meal with Katherine should give her a jealous ache. Maybe it is simply Katherine’s shining youth, and the aura of possibility she wears like a halo.

“Mother says that Will is not living up to his potential at the
Times
,” Katherine says in a semi-teasing voice over dessert. “She thinks if he came back to Boston, he could be a professor at Harvard. And then she could see him more often.”

“Harvard!” Edith says, surprised.

“I could never leave Paris,” Morton says flatly.

“Charles Elliot Norton would vouch for him. He’d be employed immediately. He told mother so. Especially now with all of Will’s worldly experience. He’s always been fond of Will.”

“Is it something you’ve considered?” Edith asks, bewildered.

“It’s something that Mother and Katherine have cooked up to control me,” Morton says. “And nothing more. Now don’t go spreading unfounded rumors,” he tells Katherine. She sighs and pushes her mouth out into a pretty pout.

“Katherine thinks if she keeps saying it aloud in front of others, it will come true,” Morton says. “I’m afraid that would be a
different
Morton Fullerton.”

“A happier one, perhaps,” Katherine says.

“A miserable one with a very large belly stuffed by motherly love and sisterly intrusion. No thank you.”

“Mother says Will is the most stubborn Fullerton in the history of all Fullertons. And you should meet Father!” Katherine says.

“Please stop quoting Mother, or I shall have to leave the table and go to the bar and chat up the barkeeper,” Morton counters.

“Because he’s the eldest, he’s very spoiled,” Katherine confides in Edith.

She laughs. “I can see that,” she says, but Morton doesn’t look like he’s in on the joke.

The next morning on Edith’s breakfast tray is a petit bleu.

Dearest,

Thank you for being so thoughtful as to meet my sister. She can speak of nothing but you. Was there something in that note I should see?

Yrs. MF

“I met Fullerton’s sister,” Edith tells Anna. Maybe if she begins to speak of him, Anna will see him less as a threat. “As lovely a girl as you can imagine. And do you know she teaches at Bryn Mawr? She can’t be more than in her early twenties, and yet she has a job teaching at a college.”

“Is she terribly brainy?” Anna asks.

“Oh yes, but not at all worldly. Rather naïve, I think. But Morton is so proud of her. His whole face lights up when he speaks of her accomplishments. Can you imagine, Tonni, if I’d been able to teach college? Or you? If such a thing had been possible when we were young? I wonder what our lives would have been like.”

Anna nods. “It’s hard to imagine.”

“Ah, if I were younger,” Edith says. “I’d do it all over again. Every part of my life, except for the writing, of course.”

NINE

SPRING 1908

T
he following weekend, with Katherine on her way to a convent in Tours to work on her novel “without distraction,” Edith finally has her full day with Morton: a motor trip to Montfort l’Amaury. It starts out like many April days, the Paris streets veiled in rain, but by the time they reach Montfort, the sun is brilliant. Leaving Cook far below in the motorcar, Edith and Morton take the stone path up the hill to explore the ruin of an old castle built in 996. They laugh at how winded they soon are, trudging up the rocky lane.

“Two old folks on holiday,” Morton says.

“Must . . . see. . . . the . . . sights!” she pants. At the top, they find themselves deliciously alone. The castle towers catch the April wind with a harmonic whistle. Early flowers, violets and woodcock orchids ruffle the bases of the rustic old structures. He picks a fat fragrant violet and slides it through the buttonhole of her shirtwaist. She touches it with delight.

“I’ve never been here,” he says.

“It’s wonderful,” she declares, knowing that anything would seem wonderful to her today. All the clouds between them seem to have parted. And the sweetness has blessedly returned. They walk the perimeter of the ruin. Morton holds Edith’s hand as she balances along a line of mortared stones that once were part of a wall. Ducking under an old doorway, they find themselves within a reverberating silo-like expanse.

“Hallooo there,” he calls.

“Hallooo there,” she repeats.

“Ah, see,” he laughs. “The perfect echo.” He laughs aloud and indeed his laughter is multiplied. They peer up into the furnacelike structure, and as their eyes adjust, they see that windows from upper stories send down faint beams of light, but not enough to warm them. Edith shivers. He takes her into his arms.

“Mine,” he whispers and holds her against his chest. She can feel his heart beating against her own through his clothing. His hands slip beneath her wraps and study the line of her waist, then ride back up to her bosom, cupping each breast. A sensation so exquisite it makes her gasp.

“Ah, so there
is
someone alive in there,” he whispers. He pushes her stole from her shoulders and it drops carelessly to the stones, but she is hardly aware, focused on his hands, which radiate a special power. He tweaks her nipples through the fabric of her bodice. Blood rushes to them, and she knows they are changing form, blooming like flowers, pressing forward into his teasing fingers. Not once in her life has she ever felt this quickening, this ripening, this surge of feeling. That night in the library with Walter, she felt something. A longing. But this is so much more. This is what women know that she has never known! This is what Anna de Noailles celebrates! No one has touched her like this. No one.

“Don’t think,” he whispers. “Just feel.”

“Morton . . .”

He brings his lips to hers, parting them with his tongue. Feeling. Just feeling. Not thinking! She is drawn to search the soft insides of his lips with her own tongue. She can hardly bear the satiny sweetness she finds within. They have kissed deeply before, but she has never given back. How extraordinary it feels to give! At last, to
want
! He sprinkles light kisses along her neck, brushes her ear with his lips, sending fire all through her.

“This is what we’ve been waiting for,” he says, having trouble finding his breath. “What we’ve needed.” He unbuttons her shirtwaist. As he does, the violet falls. She thinks to stop him and rescue it. But no. He is worrying the layers of her clothing. Like peeling leaves from a cabbage! The lace-encrusted corset cover. The tiny-buttoned chemise.

“But here, Morton?” she asks. “What if someone else arrives?”

“Just this,” he says. “Let me. I must . . .”

He pushes her farther into the darkness. The walls give off a smell of old smoke and damp earth. Finally freeing one breast into his hands, he holds it like a precious treasure. How round and fruitlike it looks in the dusky light, cupped by the elegant beringed fingers of both his hands, her nipple a perfect coral rosebud. He leans down and kisses it and accepts the hard nub into his mouth, his tongue caressing round and round. A sound leaks from her throat, so sudden and unexpected she wonders if it’s coming from someone else.

He lifts out her other breast, still caressing the first. If he hadn’t, she would have done it for him. How hungry she is to have him kiss it too, to feel his tongue anoint and tease her nipple. More than twenty years of privation, of dull despair melt from her, leaving her throbbing and damp and aching.

And then she hears voices. Coming up the hill, it seems.

“No!” she utters.

“No?” he asks.

“Someone’s coming!”

Laughter, voices. Quite a few voices. She turns from the doorway and struggles to hide her breasts beneath her chemise, to resettle her corset, to button her lacy
cache-corset
, to fasten her shirtwaist. She wants to cry.

When she turns back, Morton looks mussed and annoyed. He pulls a cigarette from his silver case and sets it between his lips, watching her. His face is blotched with color. She feels as though her own lips are burning. She pats at her hair, uncertain how she must look.

“Maybe they won’t come in.”

Morton shrugs. “What if they do? You look fine. You’re not a marked woman yet.”

Edith shivers and retrieves her stole from the ground, shakes it off. And she lifts the violet. Somehow in their moment of passion, it’s been stepped on. The purple petals have been crushed to grapey juice. She drops it and watches it fall limply to the stones. She is struck by how distant Morton seems. Having felt like one single being for a glorious moment, she can hardly bear the distance! If only he would touch her. Or take her hand. Or smile. Instead, he offers her a cigarette, and she accepts it, finding comfort in the distraction. The shivering inside doesn’t want to stop, even with the hot, calming draw of the smoke.

He must note it because he gestures for her to follow him outside. “Come on,” he says. “Let’s sit in the sun.”

They step out of the same door they entered what seems like hours ago. Sunlight is flooding the grassy space beyond the castle, warming the castle walls. Morton settles onto a white stone doorstep polished by a thousand years of footfall and holds out a hand for Edith to join him. In the distance they see their intruders, a band of local boys, laughing and slapping each other’s shoulders, tossing stones down the hill and at each other. Perhaps they never would have entered the castle structure after all. Edith’s heart is still beating as though she were in the path of a train. She feels she will never be the same.

Knee to knee, hand in hand—oh, how happy she is that he’s taken her hand—they bask in the piping sun.

“Tell me,” he says finally. “Are you happy?” He does want to be close. He
does
have feelings for her! How could she have doubted?

“I didn’t know I could feel this way,” she whispers. Morton brings her fingers to his lips and kisses them.

“It’s just the beginning,” he says. “Maybe those fellows are right. Maybe one
can
awaken desire in a woman. I thought it a myth, like unicorns.”

“I am your unicorn,” she says.

Glancing at his watch, he frowns. “Time seems to have gone mad,” he says. “It’s nearly one. Aren’t you hungry?” She nods. “We’ll eat somewhere in town, then walk in the forest before we go back.”

“What’s it called? La Forêt de Rambouillet? We could get lost in the forest like Hansel and Gretel. I wish we never had to go back.”

“I wish that every night in my dreams,” he says. “Come on. Even unicorns must eat.”

If Edith has known joy, it has never felt like this. For this sensation is a mixture of ecstasy and misery she could never have foreseen. She tries to shake off the latter, but it simply won’t retreat. Having tasted just a sip of the nectar, Edith is ever more aware that soon it will be gone. It is early April. By the end of May, she will be on an ocean liner heading to the United States. But she
must
enjoy the journey. It is all she has, all she may ever have.

A note comes almost every day now. It is brought in on my breakfast tray with other letters, and there is the delicious moment of postponement, when one leaves it unopened while one pours the tea, just in order to
savourer
longer the joy that is coming! Ah, how I see in all this the instinctive longing to pack every moment of my present with all the wasted, driven-in feeling of the past. How I hoard and tremble over each incident and sigh! I am like a hungry beggar who crumbles up the crust he has found in order to make it last longer! . . . And then comes the opening of the letter, the slipping of the little silver knife under the flap (which one would never tear!), the first glance to see how many pages there are, the second to see how it ends, and then the return to the beginning, the breathless first reading, the slow lingering again over each phrase and each word, the taking possession, the absorbing of them one by one, and finally the choosing of the one that will be carried in one’s thoughts all day, making an exquisite accompaniment to the dull prose of life. . . . Sometimes I think the moment of reading the letter is the best of all—I think that till I see you again, and then, when you are there, and my hands are in yours and my soul is in my hands, then what gray ghosts the letters all become! . . .

Edith knows that happiness is as rare and slight and fragile a thing as a Bernardaud teacup. One unfortunate tap can shatter it to useless shards, never to be drunk from again. For years, she’s sipped life from an ugly earthenware bowl. There was no pleasure in drinking from it. But no matter how often she dropped it, it did not break. In some ways, that was easier, for there was nothing at risk. Now that she’s held such blinding bliss in her hand, can she ever go back to supping from that heavy, ugly vessel?

After her honeyed Saturday with Morton, Edith wakes from the dream of such rare happiness giddy and oddly nervous, lost in all but the simplest conversations, unable to read a word on a page (except for his gorgeous, wonderful letters—he writes full letters now, not just petits bleus), or work on her own writing with any momentum. Her writing time is consumed by lingering moments of blind staring, trying to recapture the rapture of their prismatic day together. And as the days of the week pass, she finds her joy exacts a toll.

I am a little humbled, a little ashamed, to find how poor a thing I am, how the personality I had molded into such strong firm lines has crumbled to a pinch of ashes in this flame! For the first time in my life I can’t read. . . . I hold the book in my hand and I see your name all over the page! I always thought I would know how to bear suffering better than happiness, and so it is. . . . I am stupefied, anéantie. . . . There lies the profound difference between a man and woman. What enlarges and enriches life for one eliminates everything but itself for the other. Now and then I say to myself, “Je vais me ressaisir”—mais saisir quoi? This pinch of ashes that slips through my fingers? Oh, my free, proud, secure soul, where are you? What were you to desert me like this. . . .

Anna, also, feels unmoored. Without Teddy to care for, worry about, she too has lost her focus. She can envision his face as she types Edith’s business letters, as she walks the streets of Paris. She carries this emptiness wherever she goes. It becomes a bubble through which she sees a faded world. The gay cafés of Boulevard St. Germain and the beautiful quiet parks near Les Invalides are softened and altered by this sad gray lens. She waits anxiously each day to hear if he has landed in the United States, whether he has arrived at Hot Springs and if the warm, flowing waters have given him relief at last. She even thinks of writing him herself. To remind him why he must get better: so that he can be there for the unveiling of the swine house at The Mount. So he can introduce her to dear fat Lawton.

Once long ago when Edith wasn’t well and she was in Europe, Teddy wrote Anna a letter. He addressed her as Miss Anna. His handwriting was simple and blocky like a child’s. His spelling was execrable. She remembers he told her that he was concerned because Edith “don’t seem like herself these days,” utilizing for one of the first times that glib, ungrammatical way of speaking that irks her. That letter sits in a box on the top shelf of a cupboard in the house on Park Avenue, where Anna has stowed a cache of Edith’s letters too. She wishes she had Teddy’s short missive now, so she could trace her finger along the curls of his words to her.