The Age of Desire (3 page)

Edith knows Teddy dislikes Paris and misses The Mount, the house they’ve built in Lenox, Massachusetts, with its horses and pigs and chickens. He seems happiest where there’s land and animals, and mud on his boots. And unlike Edith, he wouldn’t even have minded spending the winter at their house on Park Avenue, where he could have at least found solace at his Knickerbocker Club just downtown.

“Are you all right?” she asks him.

“I’m fine.” His receding hair is a faded gold, as is his thick, bristly mustache. His eyes are an empty sort of blue. A jolly man, she once thought him. A good enough sort of fellow. When he’s in fine form, he can tell a rousing story. But on the table by the chair, there’s the brandy—which always has a place on that table these days. It’s changed him. Edith has noted his face has become coarser and more red lately, the heavy pouches beneath his eyes weightier; his hands have grown shaky. He’s twelve years her senior and every year shows on his face. The brandy has done him no favors.

“Did the cook feed you?”

“I think she’s attempting to poison us,” he says. “I don’t know what it was she gave me.”

“Did you eat any of it?”

“Not much.”

The cook, like the
bonne
, was hired locally, the recommendation of a friend of a friend, but so far she’s been a disappointment. Shouldn’t French food be delectable, delicate, digestible?

“Well, she’s not the best
cuisinière
we’ve had,” Edith says, sighing. Still, Edith doesn’t think Teddy’s trouble is the dinner. She can’t help feeling the burden of his melancholia more and more. A dark sail coming closer and closer to shore. It’s even harder to bear because she herself has lately been so happy. But after what Teddy’s father did to himself, well, she knows she has to watch him. She hates the thought that maybe she shouldn’t have insisted they spend the winter in Paris.

“HJ’s coming next week,” she says in her most cheerful voice. “And we’re going on that motor trip. You’ll enjoy that.”

Teddy always perks up when they travel. When the Whartons experience new things together, they feel harmony, become suddenly suited to each other. Teddy’s a “game” man. He likes new things, new places, and lights up when Edith is delighted. But after a trip, the dullness separates them once more and they simply tolerate each other.

“Henry’s such an old lady,” Teddy declared after their last trip together. And Edith recognizes that Teddy and Henry haven’t a single thing in common except perhaps an interest in whatever touring cars the Whartons employ.

“I walked down to the water today,” Teddy says, dreamily.

When she looks at him, her heart prickles as limbs sometimes do when too much has weighed on them for too long.

“Well, that’s good. At least you got out,” she says.

“Do you think, Puss, we might take a boat ride down the Seine sometime? There are those big public boats. It might be nice.”

“Those boats are so vulgar, though.” Edith is surprised to hear these words coming from her mouth. She had intended to be gentle with him. “Isn’t it too early in the season? I mean, dear, wouldn’t it be cold?” How hard she tries to soften her tone.

He closes his eyes sadly. “I suppose you’re right.”

Yet she feels regretful. She could have been kinder, could have imagined how sparkling Paris would look from the water. Dusk. The fairy-tale turnings of the Beaux Arts buildings. Mansard roofs, glass doors reflecting the plashing of river water, graceful vinelike balconies. Why has she lost all patience with him? She struggles harder and harder to find it.

“I’m getting ready for bed,” she says.

He sits there, watching her, not moving. “Go on then.” She sees something in his eyes that throws her.

“Are you all right?” she asks again.

“Don’t fuss,” he says. “You know I don’t like it when you fuss.”

TWO

E
dith Jones married Teddy Wharton for all the wrong reasons. She was spending the summer in Bar Harbor the year she turned twenty-one, getting over an unhappy, mistaken engagement to Harry Stevens. And she was “seeing” Walter Berry, a lawyer. Walter seemed like Edith’s mirror image: sprung from the same New York society, having spent much of his childhood in Europe. All through the cool blueberry-graced summer of 1883, she and Walter walked side by side, poetry books in hand. They paddled in canoes. They sat on the Jones’s rented porch overlooking the ocean and talked and talked.

Unfortunately, even their most placid discussions turned into shouting matches. Once he took her out in a canoe, and they argued so vociferously that a flock of birds rose from the water, spattering silver drops on them, so they had to laugh at themselves. But soon enough, they were at it again.

The reason Edith didn’t fall in love with Walter then, and she’s somewhat ashamed of this now: he intimidated her. He was so bright, so sharp, he made her feel small. He challenged her too well. He made her see herself as less than the person she wanted to be.

She couldn’t help wishing for someone like her father instead, someone kindly and unchallenging who thought she made the world spin. Walter would never think this. He would make her feel too often like a fool. And then, Walter didn’t really declare himself. Maybe it was because back then he was a penniless lawyer. And proud. Not the sort of man who would take money or rely on his bride’s.

Teddy Wharton, her brother Harry’s friend, was also in Bar Harbor that summer. She had known him for a good decade since she was just a little girl tagging along. He was older, in his thirties, an easygoing fellow with golden hair and a mischievous smile. He often led Bar Harbor’s young elite on adventures: the scavenger hunt everyone talked about for the rest of the summer, the cake-eating contest on the Van Degan’s whitewashed veranda. She was just Harry’s little sister. She didn’t expect him to pay any attention to her. In fact, she was not the sort of girl who participated in his variety of escapades. But he looked charming and funny in his straw boater. He smelled good, like cinnamon and lime (cologne, she suspected). And she did enjoy the times he insisted she join them in their mad schemes. He told her once when she arrived on her brother Harry’s arm to a shoreside dinner at Eleanor Allen’s house that she looked “somewhere beyond beautiful” in her kelly green dress. She could feel his sincerity, his admiration. It was as palpable as the spicy scent that rose from his skin whenever she came near.

She was not used to people telling her she was beautiful. Her mother made a point of saying she was a disappointment, in need of constant improvement. The night of the dinner at Eleanor Allen’s, Edith looked in the mirror as she removed her pearls, and—staring as dispassionately as she could at her too square, too masculine jaw, her heavy brow, her thin lips—she felt blessed that Teddy Wharton could see beauty in her.

When, at the end of the summer, Walter Berry went back to Washington to pursue his law, Teddy Wharton came to New York and started paying attention to Edith. She thought him kindly, and being older, he gave her a sense of safety, ease. That winter, he escorted her to the Patriarch’s Ball at Delmonico’s, where he proved himself a fine dancer. He told her that her tiny waist was perfect in her lavender taffeta as he held his hands around it, his large fingers nearly meeting, his eyes lit with pleasure.

Months later, when they became engaged, word came to Edith that Walter Berry was “heartsick” and literally got right into bed with the flu and would not get out for a week. Eventually, she received a letter from him in a thick cream envelope: “I wish you all the best, my dearest dear. Teddy is a fine fellow, and I know he will treat you handsomely. Yrs. W.” The letter made Edith furious, somehow. Even in his magnanimous note, he was attempting to get the upper hand. Calling her his dearest dear! The nerve. She would never win when it came to Walter Berry!

And then there was the business of being married. Her mother felt it was her duty—no, her
right
—to choose where and when the wedding would take place, what the guests were to eat, and how Edith herself should dress. Edith let her. There was no winning over Lucretia. She was even more formidable than Walter Berry!

Three days before the wedding, as the dressmaker placed the finishing touches on a high-collared elaborately pleated gown, as the cooks gathered provisions for Lobster Newburg and Cherries Jubilee, as the diamond tiara that Lucretia had worn for her own wedding already sat aglint on Edith’s dressing table, Edith simply needed to speak to her mother.

“I wouldn’t go in there right now,” Anna Bahlmann said, standing by the door of Lucretia’s boudoir. “I believe she would not be good company.”

“But I
have
to see her, Tonni.”

“You know as well as I do, Edith, that one must pick one’s times with your mother.”

Anna often gave sage advice when it came to Lucretia’s unpredictability. But Edith couldn’t heed her today. She was about to vow to love, honor and obey Teddy Wharton and she had no idea what that meant. She knew
something
would take place in the marriage bed, but what? She had asked her mother vaguely in the past and had been told it was unseemly to bring up the topic. Now it was imperative.

Edith stepped quietly past Anna and knocked on the mahogany door.

“Come in if you must,” Lucretia said. She was sitting ruler-straight at her silk-skirted dressing table, pinning up her graying hair. Lucretia had a maid, but she always took her hair down as soon as the maid left the room and redid it.

“Mama. Do you have a moment to speak with me?” The pounding of Edith’s own heart deafened her.

Lucretia spun around and her slate eyes flashed with annoyance. “You can see I’m dressing to go out.”

“It’s important.”

“And what’s your idea of important?” Lucretia asked. Her voice sounded to Edith like the snap of dried twigs in a frosty forest.

“The wedding. I need to know . . . what’s expected of me. . . .”

“What’s expected of you?”

“I need to know . . .”

“You’re expected to keep your head high and say as little as possible. Your role as bride will say enough. Chatty brides are intolerable.”

“I mean after the wedding. I mean . . . on my wedding night. I need to know . . . what will . . . happen to me!”

“I never heard such a ridiculous question!” The icy shatter of her words fell as she turned her back on her daughter and continued stuffing pins into her silver hair.

“But I don’t know what will happen, Mama. I’m afraid!”

Her mother made a noise that could have been a sigh, except it came from the vicinity of her nose and sounded irritated and damning. She did not speak for a long while, and Edith had to stand and listen to the pump of blood in her ears. “You’ve seen enough pictures and statues in your life, Puss. Haven’t you noticed that men are—made differently from women?”

“Yes.” Of course she’d noticed. She’d stared at Michelangelo’s
David
when she was twelve. She’d seen paintings of naked men. And she had brothers who didn’t always lock the bathroom door, much to her mortification and their amusement. But what did it mean? So what if they were made differently?

“Well, then,” Lucretia said, as though that settled everything.

Edith was speechless. She fished hard for a question that would not make her a fool. “But . . .”

“For heaven’s sake, don’t ask me any more silly questions, Edith. You can’t possibly be as stupid as you pretend! I never had to tell the boys a thing. Hand me that hat.” Edith lifted a beautiful black hat off the hat stand, fluffing the osprey feathers before she passed it to her mother. “And now leave me alone,” Lucretia said, pinning the hat to her just refined hair. “You’re tiring me out.”

The wedding reception was held at the house on Twenty-fifth Street. Through it all, Edith felt as though there were a pane of glass between her and the festivities. She did not take well to champagne, or to any wine for that matter. And her discomfort was heightened because the maid had winched in her corset even more firmly than usual to make her look sylphlike in her gown. She could barely take a breath. By the second hour of the reception, Teddy was not himself either. He had drunk too much, and was loud and clownish. This from a man who could normally drink to excess without evident behavior. He was showing Edith off as though she were a new toy, or a possession. “My wife, Edith. Have you met my new wife, Mrs. Edward Wharton?” he asked the guests, one after the other. Before everyone fled out of sheer annoyance, the newlyweds were tucked into a carriage to wave good-bye and head for their “secret” destination, Pen Craig Cottage, the musty little house that sat across the street from Pen Craig, her mother’s manse in Newport—an endless journey by carriage. There was no money after the extravagance of the reception for a night at a fine Manhattan hotel.

It was late April, so not yet warm, but with the rocking of the carriage and the bumpy roads, they were soon both asleep. When Edith woke, it was dusk outside and she felt sick to her stomach. Her throat nearly closed with panic. She was alone in the carriage with Teddy Wharton, who was still fast asleep, his mouth agape, looking perfectly absurd. And she was terrified.

She scanned the landscape out the window, and though she couldn’t tell where they were, she knew they had a long way to go. It would be nearly morning before they’d arrive at Pen Craig. The little cottage would be theirs as long as she wanted, her mother had said, because, frankly, she and Teddy had no money for a place of their own. Edith had never loved Newport. Year after year, she fell ill there. The moldy sea air exacerbated her breathing problems. But worse, at this moment, observing the slack face of the man she’d just married, she was uncertain about whether she loved him. When she’d agreed to marry him, she had imagined a grand life together: travel and beautiful houses and teas with the two of them gazing adoringly. Now he felt like a stranger. And she had no idea what was expected of her . . . intimately. Teddy woke to a weeping wife.

“Puss, what is it?” he asked. Edith, who often translated for others, could suddenly find no words for herself.

“A little of the wedding nerves?” he asked. He seemed kindly but foolish to her, with his reddish-gold mustache, his glazed blue eyes. She wished she could go home. Even if it meant going back to Lucretia and the house on Twenty-fifth Street.

“I don’t feel very well,” she said softly.

“You just settle back and enjoy the ride,” Teddy said, patting her hand. After a while he added, “You needn’t worry about me, dear,” he said. “You’re lucky, because you’ve married a patient man.” She was stunned he had read her fears without her bringing them up, but also mortified that he was even speaking about it—what she feared, what she didn’t know.

When they arrived, right before the sun rose, Teddy tucked her into her bed with a pristine kiss.

“You see, I’m not going to do anything but give you a kiss. Tomorrow night, we’ll see what happens.” She slept with utter relief.

It was two weeks before Teddy Wharton finally gave up waiting for Edith to give him the signal that she was ready for him. Nearly every night she’d have a full-fledged asthma attack and push him right out of her bed. She’d flail. She’d even slap him. She was mortified by her own behavior but equally outraged by his. She would apologize in the morning. She would say it was the overripe air, or the cottage at Pen Craig; that Newport was anathema to her and she had often had breathing issues in the past. But after days and days of this, which he had come to call her “histrionics,” he’d found it was better to call her maid and go back to his own room. And then one night, after three glasses of brandy, he came into her bed in the middle of the night.

“No, Teddy, it’s late,” she told him. “I was sleeping.”

“I don’t care, Puss. A married man has his rights. This has to end.”

“You said you’d be patient,” she said.

“No one is this patient. Not even me.”

“You’ve been drinking.”

“Of course I’ve been drinking. It’s the only way I’ve been able to bear this nonsense.” Tonight, he didn’t even kiss her, he merely climbed atop her, as though she were a mountain he must conquer and he had a flag to thrust into her soil. She cried out at the pain. There was no touching, no caressing. It was more awful than she’d imagined: the bucking, the sharpness, the grunting. No wonder Lucretia couldn’t even speak of it! The searing pain served one good purpose: it did distract her from the fact that she couldn’t breathe. When he was done, which was in very short order, he pulled himself off her and lay on his stomach on the bed, his head away from her, and was very silent.