The Age of Desire (40 page)

“On? Go on to where?”

“To France. On the
Provence
.”

Anna feels as though her feet have been knocked out from under her. The late October wind whips up the river, forcing her to pull her wraps more tightly.

“To . . .” Her mouth is dry. Her heart is slamming too loudly. “To France?”

“Then back to England on the ferry.” Cook holds out the letter. “Take it. Please.”

She accepts the ecru envelope. It says in large looping letters, “Tonni.”

“She knew you’d be upset,” Cook says sotto voce. “It worried her.” He looks away as he scrabbles to find a cigarette in his pocket, then takes it out and lights it.

“I’m . . .” Anna feels slapped.

“She says the letter explains everything.”

“I’m sure it does.”

“You don’t want to open it now? I can wait.”

Anna presses her lips together. Perhaps coming back was a mistake. Perhaps she should have more seriously considered her other options.

“I’ll open it when we get to Park Avenue,” she says. She folds herself into the motor.

“I’ll come back for the trunk,” he says. “Could be a long time until they winch it down. “Ready?” he asks.

She closes her eyes. The letter burns in her hand.

SIXTEEN

LATE WINTER 1908

A
ll through the autumn and winter, Edith steeps herself in the social swirl of England to make up for the one wretched afternoon she spent in Paris with Morton Fullerton after the
Provence
landed. She had persuaded Walter, against his better wishes, to accompany her on the train to Paris rather then heading straight across the Channel on the boat-train as planned. It came to her on the
Provence
that she simply couldn’t go on to England without knowing why Morton had stopped writing. It isn’t that I want his reassurance, she told herself. I expect the worst. I merely deserve an explanation. Then I can cut him out of my life with certainty.

“Just one day. Honestly. I have to sort out hiring a cook for the coming season,” she told Walter. “We’ve never had a good cook at the Vanderbilts’ and it’s essential I find one this year. Teddy’s spirits are at stake. Besides, don’t you want a day or two in Paris before you go off to Cairo?” It did indeed turn into two days, as Fullerton couldn’t see her on the first, and hardly found time, he told her, to see her on the second.

She and Walter had to hole up at the ridiculous Hotel Dominici because the Crillon was fully booked. And then there were those few miserable moments with Morton. Oh, if only she hadn’t insisted! But she shook it off. She had to. And went on with Walter across the Channel to England, which has never been more welcoming. The country suddenly seems to suit her so well. She can stupefy herself with the parties, with the introductions, with the glitter and glamour and joy of the place. England joyous! She had never imagined it could be so.

There are dinners with Lady this and Lord that. Time alone with HJ, and time to meet and befriend his crowd: Gaillard Lapsley and Howard Sturgis (who crochets and has a hulking male nephew named “Babe”); and time to meet new friends, like young John Hugh Smith, who, like Carl, seems surprisingly drawn to her. And the people she meets! Legendary. At one dinner, she is seated between Philip Burne-Jones and John Galsworthy.

“My maiden name is Jones. Do you think we may be related?” she asks Burne-Jones.

“If you are hoping for an inheritance, I can say certainly not,” he mutters, sipping his wine.

She and John Galsworthy have much more to share, observing everyone at the table with whispered irony. She thinks she must read his books in case they meet again.

If only she could tell Morton all that she has done and who she’s met. But no. The very
thought
of Morton is indigestible these days. The way he sat across from her at Le Fouquet that night, and had nothing to say to her. Nothing. When she begged him for an explanation of his curtailed communication this summer, his nostrils flared. His lips pressed together.

“Don’t ask me,” he said at last. “I told you I’m having problems. I’m probably harming myself just
being
here with you. You don’t understand.” She can see him now. How his face looked mottled, how his eyes darted to the door again and again.

“But dear, I
want
to understand.”

“Well, you can’t,” he said, his words breathtaking in their chilliness.

“Is it Katherine?” she finally blurted out. “Are you in love with Katherine?” Edith was mortified for asking. Why, oh why had those words fallen from her lips?

He closed his eyes and shook his head. Disdain. That’s what his face read. After all she gave him! All she trusted in him!

“Then just say it’s over. Say it.”

Again, he just shook his head.

“You won’t? You won’t put me out of my misery.”

“If you just give me time . . .”

“Can’t you be honest and say it’s through between us? Are you too much of a coward?” She wanted to pummel him. To slap him. Her first instincts were physical and childish.

“Is that what
you
want?” he asked drily.

“Of course not.”

“Then I won’t say it. Edith, I must get back to the office.” He rose and put on his coat. He didn’t offer to pay.

The word she came away with from the meeting was
cruel
. He was outright
cruel
to her.

So she swallows England whole, dancing and dining, saying dry, witty things to aristocrats, poets, novelists and hangers-on. In London one night, a week before Christmas, and after two glasses of red wine, in which she almost
never
indulges, she sits down at the lovely little writing desk in her room at Lady St. Helier’s house and writes:

Dear Mr. Fullerton,

You have, if they still survive—a few notes and letters of no value to your archives, but which happen to fill a deplorable lacuna in those of their writer.

I shall be in Paris on Monday next—the 21st—for a day only, and I write to ask if you would be kind enough to send them to me that day at my brother’s.

Perhaps the best way of making sure that they come straight into my own hands would be to register them.

Yrs sincerely,

E. Wharton

But of course, when she arrives in Paris, there are no letters from Morton.

Edith hastily escapes Paris for a tour of Provence with the crocheting Howard Sturgis, his outsized nephew and Cook, who’s arrived early with the motorcar to whisk them all away.

While Edith steeps herself in distraction, Anna is left to wrestle Teddy. Though he is staying at the Knickerbocker Club and she at 882, he visits the very first day after her arrival. Knocking on the door around teatime, he appears stiff and uncomfortable in his city clothes, his slender-cut suit which barely accommodates his expanding belly, his sharp-folded collar and silky tie. She hardly recognizes him.

“I want to welcome you, dear little Anna,” he says, lifting Nicette, who has appeared from behind Anna’s skirts. “How I’ve missed your face,” he says, holding the little dog and looking right into her delicate foxy countenance, making Anna wonder if he is referring to her or Nicette.

“I want to hear every single detail of your infamous journey.” He looks at her now with mischievous eyes.

Anna is warmed by his attentions and finds some Louisiana crunch cake in the kitchen that Gross bought at the Charming Door bakery and lays it out like daisy petals on a china plate. They sip tea together. He eats three pieces. And then asks for brandy, which White provides from his own stash.

Swirling the brandy snifter, Teddy tells Anna how crushed Edith was that she missed seeing Anna.

“I’d say she was crying. She was disappointed, I’ll tell you that. I was already at the Knickerbocker, and we were on the telephone, so I didn’t see tears myself. But she begged me to explain to you that it was a matter of timing, and to read nothing whatsoever into it. Those were the words she used.”

Anna nods and traces the rim of her cup with her finger. She wants to believe him. But she can’t know until they are face-to-face, until she can see for herself if Edith will look her in the eye. She shivers.

“Cold?” Teddy asks.

She shakes her head. “Maybe someone is walking on my grave,” she says.

“So tell me about the trip. I read some of the postcards. I want to know more.”

Looking up, she sees he means it. So she launches in. Avoiding any mention of Thomas, she describes her reunion with her dear cousins, the German castles and Roman ruins she found most memorable. She describes how the taste of the beer in Munich seemed to her bitter and refreshing, the way rain smells on cement when it hasn’t rained for a long time.

“Ain’t that the grandest description! You should be writing, instead of Pussy. Maybe you’ve been writing all her books and I’m the only one that didn’t know it.”

Anna blushes.

“Now, Mr. Wharton, you know that’s not true,” she says.

She goes on to depict the shimmering light in her ethereal hotel room in Venice. The taste of the retsina in the Peloponnese. He sighs. He lights a cigar. He pours more brandy.

At six o’clock he rises and straightens out his too-tight jacket.

“Miss Anna, seeing you is, without a doubt, the nicest thing that’s happened to me all month.” Anna can’t help but be pleased. How lucky she is to have dear Mr. Wharton as a friend!

But then, Teddy starts showing up nearly every day to see her. To the point that Gross says, “He’s here again? Whatever for?”

Anna shrugs. “He must miss Edith. That’s the only explanation I have. And the dogs. Maybe he comes to see the dogs.”

He does make a fuss about the dogs every time he comes. Holding and kissing them. Getting right down on the floor to play with them sometimes.

One afternoon, rising from a rip-roaring session with Mitou and Nicette, he sits down in the chair across from Anna and looks her in the eye. She notices then that he is looking drawn and cheerless.

“Truth is, I only feel settled these days when I’m around you,” he says.

She is taken aback. “That’s very nice,” she says as neutrally as she can.

The overexcitement of the summer, the alarming way his eyes used to glimmer with manic jolliness, is now fading to a heavy glare, a rounding of his shoulders, an undeniable sadness.

“Edith don’t care for me. That’s what’s weighing on my mind, Miss Anna,” he tells her. “I don’t think she’s written me a single letter in two weeks. I bet she wrote you.”

Anna says nothing.

“She has, hasn’t she? Tell me.”

“She does care for you,” Anna says. “You just need to see her again. When we reach France in February, you’ll be reassured.” But Anna knows it’s not true. Edith has written her a number of times. Nice full letters of her whirlwind tour of England. Why should she lie to him? Because he is too fragile to be slapped with the truth. She tries to talk with him about happier times, about things to look forward to. But for all her struggle to uplift him, his spirits seem to be sagging more daily, like a broken roof in the rainy season.

One night in December, just as she is brushing her hair for bed, the bell rings. In a few minutes, Alfred White knocks on her bedroom door.

“Mr. Wharton’s here. He insists on seeing you, Miss Bahlmann.”

She pulls on her wrapper, shaking. She fears he’s bearing bad news from Edith. A car accident in France? A fire at The Mount?

When she comes into the drawing room (Alfred insists on staying as well), she sees he’s sallow.

“Mr. Wharton. Are you all right?” she asks.

“Sit, Anna. That will be all, Alfred.”

White leaves reluctantly; Anna still sees him peeking in from the hall where Teddy can’t detect him. The fire in the drawing room is just sputtering. It’s cold enough that the draperies are puffing out with the draft from the poorly sealed windows. She shivers even in the chair she chose, the farthest away from the window. Teddy hasn’t taken off his coat, or sat down. He’s pacing. He comes toward her.

“I don’t feel safe when I’m not with you,” he says. “I wonder if I can’t move in here.”

Anna gasps.

“Mr. Wharton. You can’t possibly move in here.”

“Why not? I own the place.” She stands to see him better, to not feel so small beside him, though even when she stands, she’s inches lower. She smells the liquor on his breath.

“I think maybe . . . perhaps you’ve had too much to drink,” she says.

“I haven’t. I haven’t.”