The Age of Desire (6 page)

The next morning, he called for her to come to his study. She’d barely slept all night. She would have to leave, she knew. She would have to find a new post after all these years. Would she have to be a governess again? Would she find someone to whom she could be a secretary? Would Edith even write a letter to recommend her? How could she explain to Edith why she needed to leave?

Teddy sat at his desk, penning a letter.

“Sit down,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” She was quaking. She wondered if he could see it.

“Last night I said some things I wish I hadn’t said. Would you be kind enough to pretend I didn’t say them, dear Anna? Would you erase last night’s conversation, so we can be good friends again?”

She was silent. He smiled at her. It was the kindest smile she’d ever seen.

“I’m sure I offended you, and I’m sorry, Anna. You’re a proud woman. I recognize how you must have felt. Please forgive me.”

“Of course,” she said.

“I have something for you,” he said.

“Some work?” she asked.

He laughed. “No. Not work.” He opened up his desk drawer and drew out a velvet box and set it before her on the desk.

“What is it?”

“Open it,” he said impatiently.

Even the luminous blue velvet of the box was magnificent. She picked it up gingerly and unlatched the tiny case. Nestled against white satin was a beautiful gold locket on a thick chain adorned with a white enameled dove holding a letter in its beak. The letter was sealed with a tiny perfect ruby. Anna gasped.

“Mr. Wharton, I couldn’t take this.”

“Why not?”

“Surely it was meant for Mrs. Wharton.”

“I think it suits you. Please understand, this is a gift to say I’m sorry. That’s all.”

A bribe. The gift was a bribe. It couldn’t be a love token. . . .

“I don’t think I could . . . take it.”

“Of course you can. If you don’t, my feelings will be hurt. Plain and simple. You type Puss’s letters every day and make our lives so pleasant with your quiet and constant companionship. It’s just a gift of friendship.”

He got up and came around the desk. Taking the box from her, he opened it, released the pendant, worked its clasp and hung it around Anna’s neck. She felt the weight of the heavy, twisted chain, the cool solidity of the pendant even through her dress. She touched it with her hand. She had never owned anything so valuable.

“That’s a good girl,” he said. He handed her the box. “Now, not another word about it. All right? Go see to closing up this house.” He turned back to his desk with a grin. “There’s so much to do and hardly any time.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

Since that morning in his study, when his kind fingers brushed her neck as they fastened the heavy clasp, not a day has passed that Anna Bahlmann hasn’t worn that beautiful pendant beneath her clothes. She hasn’t slept a single night without its comforting weight nestled between her breasts. It’s grown as smooth as a river stone, stays as warm as her heart that beats against it. So many years have passed, the pendant no longer makes her feel miserable or embarrassed or ashamed. It makes her feel beloved. And sometimes when she sees Teddy Wharton smile at her at dinner or in the hallway, she knows that all these years later, he remembers that they share a secret.

THREE

EARLY SPRING 1907

D
elighted by an invitation from Anna de Noailles for tea, Edith rings the bell and a gypsy-eyed
bonne
ushers her into an entrance hall draped in striped silk like a Bedouin tent and redolent of cinnamon. Edith feels as though she’s visiting another country. The neighborhood is nothing like the Faubourg. No musty eighteenth-century courtyards or high, forbidding walls (which she, in truth, has cherished). Just a sunny front stoop and window boxes adorned for the winter with fir boughs.

She follows the
bonne
into a drawing room where a roaring fire licks the walls of a seven-foot fireplace. Anna de Noailles leans over her desk, pen in hand. Wrapped in a turquoise silk shawl, displaying bare feet, she seems completely unaware that anyone has joined her.

“Madame,” the
bonne
says after a moment.

The Comtesse looks up with a start.

“I’ve interrupted your writing. I’m sorry,” Edith offers.

“Don’t be silly.” She stretches like a cat. “I invited you to interrupt me. Come sit down, Madame Wharton.”

The rumpled sofa is dressed in the same Caribbean turquoise as the Comtesse’s shawl, and is strewn with pillows of brilliant yellow. Like fields of Maine sunflowers opening to summer skies, Edith thinks. The lacquered coffee-bean-colored walls reflect the flicker from the hearth. It’s a dazzling room. Edith could live here, she thinks—though it is nothing like any place she’s ever inhabited. The Comtesse slinks over to the sofa. Her feet are brown and sinewy, as glossy as polished bronze. Edith doesn’t think she’s ever been greeted by bare feet before. As a matter of fact, she’s seen few unshod feet in her entire life. She never once saw her own mother’s. There is something louche about bare feet—and thrilling.

“Since last we met, I finished reading
Les Éblouissements
and was enchanted,” Edith announces. She feels passionate about de Noailles’s poetry. She is galvanized by her ability to marry nature with sensuality. The simple, organic poems remind her again and again of Walt Whitman, whom she desperately admires. “Were you writing poetry just now?” Edith asks.

“I couldn’t write a thing today,” de Noailles says. “Do you have days where no words will come when you beckon them?” She stares directly into Edith’s eyes. “One’s heart is a shepherd. If only the words would follow like a docile flock. Too often they wander off on their own and we spend days looking for them.”

Edith laughs, and can’t help feeling that though Anna de Noailles is much younger, she is the wiser.

“Are you living in Paris now?” de Noailles asks.

“Just until the end of spring.”

“And then, New York?”

“And then we go to our country place in Massachusetts, not far from New York.”

“And what do you think of Paris?”

“I feel at home here. I spent a lot of time in Paris as a child.”

“I could live nowhere else,” de Noailles says. “But the French are a locked house. I was born in France, yet my father was a Romanian, my mother Greek. They think me a foreigner so I’ll never be invited inside.”

“And if they don’t accept
you
, Comtesse, it’s certain
I
won’t be allowed beyond the front gate,” Edith says.

“And yet Paris is the center of the world,
non
?”

The
bonne
reenters the room balancing a heavy silver tray. Plates of sweets accompany the service: petits fours and biscuits with jammy centers. De Noailles poses high her birdlike wrists to pour the tea. Falling from so far above, it sings a melody into the cups.

“Since Rosa’s, I’ve spoken often of your book,” de Noailles says. “I was surprised how many people have already read it. You should hear what they say! I’m angry at myself for not knowing English better.”

“It won’t be long until the French translation is done.”

“And where will it appear?”

“Perhaps the
Revue de Paris
, if they are willing to publish it.”

“They published my first poems. I was just a girl. But it seems they publish little by women these days.”

Edith takes a sip of tea, which seems particularly strong and fortifying. “Does anyone publish much by women?”

De Noailles shrugs and nibbles at the edge of a petit four. “There are so few of us who write, Madame Wharton. Or perhaps many women write—but only a few put their work up for public inspection. Are you mostly read by men or women?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’d wager women. Women read with their hearts. They’re more eager to journey on words, because their lives are narrower.”

“I never thought it mattered,” Edith says. “As long as people were reading my books.” But as Edith ponders it, in fact she has been most pleased when men think her worth reading. She feels herself redden with guilt.

Anna de Noailles glances up.

“Men validate us, don’t they?” she says, as though Edith had spoken her thoughts aloud.

Edith nods.

“Ah,” de Noailles says. “We are traitors.” And then she laughs. Her laugh is free and young and full of hope.

De Noailles gets up suddenly and walks to the cabinet by the fireplace. She exudes the darkest mysteries of sensuality in every move she makes. In some odd, subtle way, she even stirs Edith. From a shelf she draws a hammered-silver flask. It sparkles in the firelight. Without asking, she pours some of its contents into Edith’s tea and then into her own. “We were missing something, weren’t we?” she says with a wicked smile, and when she offhandedly touches Edith’s hand, Edith feels electricity pass through her fingertips.

“Anna de Noailles is like no one I’ve ever met,” Edith tells Anna Bahlmann the next afternoon when her secretary carries in her newly typed pages. “Perhaps I will invite her for dinner. You can meet her.”

“She would pay no attention to me,” Anna says.

“Nonsense. You must see her face-to-face to truly understand her poetry. It’s as if she’s neither a woman nor a man, but another sex entirely. She’s got the mind and the desires of a man and the drive to be heard like a man. And yet all the beauty and allure of a woman. The extraordinary thing is it’s all unstudied. She’s a force of nature.”

“She sounds frightening,” Anna says.

“I’ll invite her to meet Henry when he’s here.”

“Well, then, you surely wouldn’t want me at the table.”

“Of course I would, Tonni. Henry finds you very calming.”

“Herz, if you wouldn’t mind, may I talk to you about this scene?” Anna asks, selecting a few pages from the batch she’s typed. Edith has nearly worn herself out trying to prepare her new novel,
The Fruit of the Tree
, for serialization in
Scribner’s Magazine
. The new book is bolder and more important, she deems, than any book she’s written before.
The
Fruit of the Tree
is about industrial reform, and even addresses a nurse choosing death over life for a patient and friend who suffers after a crippling accident.

But Edith’s editor isn’t satisfied with the ending. He wants Edith to make the main character’s feelings clearer. As a nurse, Justine has opted to give her friend a deathblow of morphine she feels her friend is begging for, rather than force her to live in excruciating pain. After Justine ends up marrying the woman’s widower, she never finds the right time to tell him what she’s done. When he discovers the truth, she must make a series of confounding choices. Edith has always resisted overexplaining her characters’ intentions. Let the psychology speak for itself, she thinks. In life, no one explains themselves, and rarely are people insightful enough to question their own motives. But she has decided this one time to give Mr. Burlingame what he’s asked for. He has been annoyingly insistent. Like a fly in her ear. And now she isn’t feeling very good about the changes. How disconcerting to have Tonni call it out.

“Have I failed at it?” she asks Anna. “It was a fool’s mission.”

“Failed. No, but . . .”

Edith feels herself biting her lip, just as she did as a child when Tonni corrected her German grammar or urged her to better support her main theory in an essay on Goethe.

“I wish Burlingame hadn’t asked it of me. . . . I think he’s wrong.”

“So why change it?” Anna says.

“Burlingame thought . . . you agree with me then?”

“It was clear enough before.”

“And now it feels like a diatribe.”

“He isn’t reading carefully enough. It’s all there,” Anna says.

Edith reaches out and gives Anna a hug, clutches her for a moment as someone might grab a life preserver.

“I shouldn’t need a backup on these things. . . . I don’t know why I let him talk me into it.”

“We all need a backup sometimes.” Anna’s eyes are as clear as water. Her lashes almost transparent. She stands there, blinking in the sun. “Shall I retype it as it was, then?” Anna asks in a whisper.

“Yes,” Edith says. “Please, please do.”

Henry James arrives at the Whartons’ door with two trunks, four hatboxes and a stained and rather nasty-smelling half-eaten train lunch which he insists be placed immediately on ice. One cannot entirely prepare for a visit from Henry James. He is a jumble of strength, intensity, neediness and vulnerability so tangled, so exquisitely bright, so sharp, so insistent that no matter how well one plans, there is simply no way to know what to expect. Edith sees him as brilliant and flawed. Kind and selfish. Both master and child. Approaching the age of sixty-four, he has grown stout and unwell. During the cold spring trip they took with him the previous year, he was often dyspeptic, and had moments of what Edith thought of as thermostatic issues: he would suddenly and dramatically become hot. Itchy. This would usually occur after dinner. If he was in familiar company, he would apologize profusely, remove his jacket, then his waistcoat and then, with nothing else to remove, he’d go to bed. Edith remembers her mother going through a similar phase as part of “the change.” She didn’t think men experienced this too.

But if any man could, it’s fitting that it be Henry, for, despite his rich masculine voice and dominant presence, there is a femininity about him that Edith can’t help noting. She sees it in his sensuous lips and his perfectly manicured hands. And in his eyes. Henry has the clear, gentle eyes of a child.

Henry once confided in Edith that as a child he was mortified by a stammer so profound it took a Herculean effort for him to share even the simplest thoughts, so even now each spoken word bears the weight of a dictionary falling off a shelf. It often takes him so long to get to the point, a simple story can grow to four, six, eight times its natural size. While Edith knows she’s in for an exquisite ride, others are often not as indulgent.

At the dinner party she throws on the night of his arrival, Henry is in grand form, spinning a single story that dominates the entire dinner from soup to dessert. It is a long-winded narrative, even for Henry, and though to Edith it seems wonderful, she sees it strains the patience of even the most tolerant of her guests.

After Henry has retired, Teddy, still pale from a week’s bout of influenza, struts into Edith’s boudoir and perches heavily on the edge of her bed, sighing.

“Must everything Henry says be a literary reference?” he says. “I never had a class at Harvard so wearisome.”

Edith takes a deep breath. “Some things are worth waiting for.”

“But every time he speaks, I fear the train will
never
reach the station.”

She rises and comes over to him, pressing her hand against his forehead. “You’re still feverish, dear,” she says. “Go to bed. We want you well for our motor trip.”

“Promise me you will not let Mr. James go on while we are trapped in the motorcar with him, Puss.”

“I can’t control Henry,” she says.

“Well, give it a try.” He sniffs, shuffles into his own room and closes the door sharply behind him.