The Goddess Abides: A Novel (11 page)

She laughed once more but he did not laugh with her. He looked at her gravely, scrambled egg poised on his fork. “He’s a damned fool, I’d say!”

“Oh, no, Tony’s not a fool. Just had enough of his mother! I felt quite pleased—an only son not attached to his mother? That’s success for the mother these days.”

He ate the egg, reflecting. “I wish you wouldn’t talk about husbands and wives, sons and mothers,” he said peevishly.

“Only about you and the girl—” she said.

“Not even about her. All right, let’s go riding now. I have an appointment this afternoon.” He rose and pushed his chair in as he spoke.

…Riding, she thought remorsefully, was not a good idea after all. He rode superbly, his slender figure erect and elegant, the reins loose in his hand and yet controlled. Then there was the weather, a warm bright day, sunlight dappled through the trees on either side of the trail, the autumn-tinted hills rolling away to the horizon. She knew she looked well in her riding clothes and at the thought was severe with herself again. Had there been some secret impulse of coquetry which she had not recognized this morning at the breakfast table? No, she had simply been happy, a bright morning, a comfortable, even beautiful house, a pleasant companion. And surely there was no danger in admiring this companion, young and handsome, oh, very young and very handsome!

“Why are you smiling at me?” he demanded.

“Secret thought,” she said. “Come, let’s gallop!”

She touched her whip to her horse’s flank and led the way down the trail and into the valley. And flying along under the cloudless sky, she thought of the house on the cliff, nonexistent and yet as real to her imagination as though it stood there. Should she tell him of that house? Yield to the impulse to reveal herself to him? No! The decision cut clean across the impulse. She would not reveal herself—not yet. She slowed her horse to a canter and glanced at her wristwatch.

“It’s noon—you have an appointment.”

“Why do you try to escape me?” he cried.

“Do I?” she asked, and then, avoiding his eyes, she touched the whip to her horse’s flank and broke again into a gallop.

…“You do try to escape me, you know,” he said an hour later. He had declined luncheon, declaring that he had no time and now he was taking his leave. They stood at the door and he looted down into her upturned face.

She met his gaze frankly. “I don’t try to escape you—it’s just that I—”

She broke off, he waited.

“You’ll be late,” she said.

“I’ll be late,” he agreed, and waited.

“I don’t know how to answer you,” she said at last.

“Ah, that’s better. So next time we’ll find out why you can’t answer me.”

He stooped and kissed her mouth, very swiftly, very lightly, so that she could not step back or turn her head to avoid him. Then he was gone.

…He left an effect behind. She felt his absence so strongly that it became a presence. The silence in the house, his firm declarative voice no longer to be heard, his restlessness, moving from his chair, getting up to look out a window, to play for five minutes at the piano, to go to a bookshelf and pull out a book and glance through it while he talked and then put it back without speaking of it while he talked of something else—an infinite restlessness of the mind invading the body, his whole dominating, brilliant, demanding personality everywhere in the house, all this suddenly no more, was only an affirmation of himself.

She sat down when he was gone, her lips tingling with the kiss, and then as abruptly rose, refusing to recognize the surge of physical longing in her body. Let her recognize its meaning! There had been no great personal excitement in her life with Arnold, but there had been sexual content. He was not distasteful to her, and his approach was with a mature man’s understanding of a wife’s need. He had been considerate and appreciative, and she had been the same toward him, she believed. Certainly she did not want an extramarital love affair as so many women did nowadays, not merely on moral grounds but because she had no need of it. Now let her face the fact that missing the regularity of her somewhat placid life with Arnold and perhaps even the stimulation of Edwin’s touch, her natural desires, long awakened and customarily assuaged, were making demand upon her.

There was no need for shame or even embarrassment in this, a situation severely common enough, she reflected, when a wife lost her husband or a woman her lover. She had simply to face life as it was now and make her choices. She had chosen to live alone and explore her freedom. Therefore she must turn her mind, her imagination, away from Jared as a male. Let her put it as frankly as that, let her think of him as a human being, a friend and no more. Thus she admonished herself. Think no more of how he looks, she decided sternly; think instead of his mind, his interests, his career, all the aspects of his strong personality. There was no reason why she should not enjoy these, in freedom, instead of allowing an emotion to seize control of herself.

I shall prepare myself to be his friend, she thought, and remembering his admiration for her father, she slipped back into the days when she had been her father’s daughter, the only one in his house who understood what he was talking about when he spoke of his work with cosmic rays, the only one who wanted to understand. And she had wanted to understand because she loved him and knew that, successful scientist that he was and famous everywhere in the world, he was lonely in his own house.

“Your mother is a darling good woman,” he used to say to her, “and I’ve been a poor sort of husband, to her, my mind always somewhere else, even when she’s talking to me. It’s no wonder she loses patience with me. I don’t blame her a bit.”

Her answer to this had been silence, then throwing her arms about him, then finally an endless patience with Arnold when he wanted to talk with her, though his work as a lawyer was monotonously dull, she thought, yet if she felt impatient, and she had, very often, she had only to remember her lonely father, and, yes, her impatient, lonely mother, filling her days with household detail, and her own impatience died. Yes, her father was lonely as only scientists can be lonely, working as they do and must with the vast concerns of the universe.

It occurred to her now that Jared, too, must be lonely, young though he was, but so much more brilliant than his fellows and living alone, too, with an old uncle. She could easily mend that loneliness and without thinking of it as a love affair, which indeed was the last experience she wanted. Once during her marriage she had been strongly attracted to a handsome man of her own age, a bitter time it had been, she hated the very memory of it, for the attraction had been purely physical, and she was thankful for that, for if she had been able to respect the man, she could not have resisted him. She had resisted, but she remembered and would always remember the frightening power of her own impulses, compelling her to yield herself until the impulse, resisted, became an actual pain, so intolerable that she had begged Arnold to take her to Europe that summer. Whether he knew why she had been so importunate she never knew and did not want to know even now. He had listened to her pleading, and had not asked why she was weeping while she talked, nor could she tell him why.

“Of course, my dear,” he said. “I shall enjoy a vacation myself. There now—you’re in a state of nerves—I’ve noticed it lately. You do too much—so many charities and so on and the children are at a trying age. I don’t at all like the way Millicent answers you when you speak to her.”

Millicent! That daughter of hers, now a complacent wife and mother, had she known why her mother had been so impatient and abstracted in those days? Had she perhaps ever seen them together, her mother and the extravagantly handsome man with blue eyes and dark hair silvered at the temples—a thin, aggressive, sharply pretty adolescent Millicent, critical with love for her father and jealous of her mother—

She put away such memories and thought of Jared in other terms. She would learn to know his mind, his thought, and in such ways assuage his loneliness, and her own need.

…“But you’re looking so well,” her daughter exclaimed.

“Should I not?” she inquired.

Millicent herself did not look well, she thought. The young woman had let herself gain weight, and her hair, dark as Arnold's had been, looked unbrushed, even unwashed, and she wore a dull blue suit that needed pressing.

“But you’re rejuvenated,” Millicent insisted so accusingly that her mother laughed.

“And is that sinful?”

They were in her upstairs sitting room, and here Millicent had found her not fifteen minutes ago. But it was her daughter’s habit to let months pass without communication and then drop in upon her without warning.

“No,” Millicent said reluctantly. “Not exactly,” she added. She glanced at the papers on the desk where her mother sat, leaning forward and craning her neck to do so. “What are you drawing?”

“Plans for an imaginary house,” she replied.

“House—that’s what I’ve come about,” Millicent exclaimed. “Your looking so blooming put me off. Tom wants a week’s deer hunting in Vermont and I thought I’d go along with the children if you can lend us the house.”

“Of course,” she said. Then moved by a sudden and inexplicable impulse, she continued, “As a matter of fact, I’ll give you the house, if you like.”

“Why?” Millicent asked bluntly.

She hesitated. “I don’t know exactly—except it’s too lonely there for me.”

“I can understand that,” Millicent said. “There’s no one in the world who could take Father’s place.”

“No. Nor would I wish it otherwise.”

“Of course not.”

They exchanged looks, hers smiling and a little sad, Millicent’s almost curious. Then her daughter rose and, approaching, stooped to kiss her cheek. “I can’t stay, Mother.”

“You need a new suit,” Edith said gently.

“Do I? Well, I won’t get one! Tom’s thinking of a new job. We’d have to move to San Francisco, though.”

“Oh—so far?”

“It is far, but what can I do?”

“Go with him, of course—what else? But when?”

“That’s the question. Tom said not to tell you until it’s certain. But it slipped out.”

“I’ll keep it to myself. And what’s distance nowadays? Or time?”

“True! Well, good-bye, Mother. Of course I’ll see you before we go, if we go!”

They clasped hands and she clung to her daughter's hand.

“And if it’s to be, when would it be?”

“We count on the end of the month, in time for Christmas in the new place.”

Her daughter was gone, and she was alone again. Christmas? It meant then that the house would be empty. Tony’s wife wanted their children to have Christmas in their own home. Arnold’s death meant one change after another in her life. This old house remained as it was but everything in it was changed. It had really been his house, then! At least without him all its ways and habits were meaningless. If she continued to live here, she would live in a growing melancholy that in the end would stifle her. She took the receiver from the telephone desk.

“Is this the Wilton Real Estate office? Yes? Then may I speak to Robert Wilton, Senior? A few minutes? I’ll wait—”

She waited until a hearty voice resounded at her ear.

“Yes, Mrs. Chardman! What can I do for you? Do you want to sell your house? I could make a fine sale for you if you—”

“Not yet, thanks! On the contrary, I want to buy.”

“Well, now! You’re moving?”

“There’s a piece of land I want to own. Perhaps I’ll put up a house of sorts, just for myself. It’s by the sea—”

“Understandable, entirely understandable—a place by the sea. I seem to remember you always hankered—but I think Mr. Chardman didn’t quite—still and all, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have what you want now.”

“None at all,” she agreed.

“Where is this land?”

“It’s in North Jersey, near a town but not in it. A part of a great estate, I think, on a cliff with surrounding forest. One passes several of those great old houses—”

She gave exact directions, and heard him breathing heavily as he took notes.

“What’s your price range, Mrs. Chardman?” he asked.

“I just—want it,” she said.

He laughed. “Then I suppose you must have it! Why not?”

“Why not?” she agreed again.

…The filmy flakes of an early snowfall were drifting through the morning air. The sky was gray, a November gray, that morning as she opened the heavy front door. Even the door seemed heavier than usual, and she had more than once complained to Arnold about that door, hanging on immense brass hinges. Weston held the door open a moment now.

“I’m glad, madame, that you decided against driving yourself. It looks like a real snow—so quiet and all.”

“Please tell Agnes not to disturb the papers on my desk upstairs when she is dusting.”

“Yes, madame.”

“I’ll stop somewhere for luncheon but I should be home for dinner.”

“Alone, madame?”

She hesitated. “I think I’ll ask Miss Darwent to dine with me tonight.”

She went to the telephone in the hall and dialed. “Amelia? Yes, it’s Edith. I have an errand today in Jersey, but I’ll be back in time for dinner. Will you dine with me? Eight o’clock—that gives me plenty of time. Oh, good—”

She hung up, and turned to Weston, patiently waiting. “She’ll come, and she likes fresh lobster, remember!"

“Yes, madame.”

She was off, then, and the heavy door shut behind her. The driveway made a circle and from the window of the car, through the drifting snow, she saw for an instant the formidable house of gray stone, standing like a German baronial castle in the midst of tall dark evergreens. Somehow she must escape that castle, but which way escape lay she did not know. And why was she pinning her faith on a house? The land was now about to be hers, however, the site, the place, the view over the ocean, the cliff, the small semicircular steps to the beach. Wilton Senior had accomplished that much. The estate was in the hands of heirs, and they had been eager to sell and, learning of this, she had offered to triple the acreage upon which she had first planned. She now owned sixty acres, far more than she needed, but they gave her room, and a wider view. She would let it grow wild. There would be no formal gardens, no cutting and clipping.