The Goddess Abides: A Novel (19 page)

Once or twice, perhaps more, she got to her feet and walked about the lawns. The thick growth of late spring shielded her from everyone, even from Amelia, whom she had not seen in weeks. But she always returned to the long chair and lay down, waiting, while the sun rose to its zenith and passing, moved westward.

And then promptly at four o’clock she heard the sound of a car driven to the entrance on the other side of the house, and the doorbell rang and she knew she had been waiting all day for this moment. She did not move, but continued to lie waiting, her eyes still closed, for the sound of footsteps, Weston's soft shuffling and the clip clip of a girl’s heels.

“Miss Blaine has arrived, madame,” Weston said.

She opened her eyes. There the girl stood, a tall slim creature in a very short white dress, a girl with green eyes and tawny hair hanging shining and straight to her shoulders, a girl with a clean, well-bred look but one with a stubborn mouth, unsmiling. She pulled off her short white gloves and put out her right hand and spoke in a decided but pleasant, rather light voice.

“Please don’t get up, Mrs. Chardman.”

“I wasn’t going to, June, is it? I’m lazy today.”

“Yes, it’s June. For the obvious reason that I was born in June. I’ll be twenty-one next month.”

“Draw up a chair and sit down, June.”

“Thank you.”

She drew up a chair and sat down, her back to the garden and facing the graceful woman in the long chair.

“You’re younger than I thought, Mrs. Chardman.”

“Oh, no—I’m as old as you think I am. Didn’t Jared ever tell you how old I am?”

“No. He always talks of you as if you were his age.”

“That’s kind of him.”

A pause, and the girl’s eyes were on her face, she could feel the steady gaze as she continued to look down the long vista of the gardens. Then she made an effort and met the watching eyes.

“Tell me about yourself, June—why you want to see me, anything you like, tell me.”

The girl’s voice was casual, deliberate, clear. “I’ll come straight to the point. I want to see the sort of woman Jared likes. I want to know if you are anything like me. Or must I—sort of—recondition him to another woman—like me.”

She laughed. “Is that what you think you can do, June?”

“I’ll try, if I must!”

“In other words, you’re determined to—marry him?”

“If I can.”

“Do you think you can?”

“Yes.”

The girl’s voice was quite calm, quite firm.

“Then there’s nothing more to be said, is there, June?”

“Yes, because I want him to love me first.”

“And do you think he can be taught to love you?”

“I will teach him, as soon as I know how. That’s why I’ve come to you. You’ve done it. He loves you. But of course he can’t marry you. You’re too old. Still, he’ll have to marry someone. I want to be that someone. That’s why I’m here.”

She was amazed, amused, wounded and even somewhat angry. An instinct of self-defense and perversity compelled her, almost, to defy the girl, to say carelessly with a laugh if she could muster laughter, that she might just marry Jared herself. It had been thought of!

“Did Jared say I am too old to marry him?”

“He’s never mentioned marriage to me. I don’t believe he’s thought of marrying anyone. I’ll be the first one.”

This was said with such self-confidence that again she wanted to laugh and could not. And of course the girl was right. She was too old to marry Jared. Women nowadays did often marry men much younger than themselves, but there was something repulsive in the idea. Love—but not marriage! One couldn’t help loving a certain human being, and it might have nothing to do with marriage. Edwin had taught her that.

“Please teach me,” the girl said.

“Do you love Jared?” she asked.

“Of course,” the girl said. “Else why would I bother myself about him?”

“What is it you love about him?”

“Everything,” the girl said.

“Define everything, please!”

“Well—just everything. The way he walks, the way he talks, the way he looks—it’s just a sort of magic.”

“It’s not everything. It’s only the outside of him.”

“Well, that’s enough for me.”

“Ah, but is it enough for him?”

The girl looked at her stubbornly, her green eyes unwavering. “It’s enough to begin on.”

She returned the girl’s gaze. “Perhaps it is,” she said. And then after a moment she said, “How can I know why Jared loves me? Why don’t you ask him? Certainly it’s not because of the way I walk—or talk—or even because of some sort of magic—which I don’t have, I’m sure. I can’t help you, June. I don’t know how.”

She wanted suddenly to be rid of this girl. She was angry with her—the absurdity of such a visit, the insolence of the intrusion! Young people nowadays thought only of themselves. Yes, she was too old, too old for Jared, too old for this girl.

She rose and walked toward the door. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, my dear. I really don’t know what you’re talking about. You and Jared must settle your own relationship. Now come in. and have a cup of tea with me. Or would you rather have something to drink?”

…It was dusk when the girl left. Hours had passed and she had let them pass, had helped them to pass, because she had reluctantly begun to like this girl. There had been nothing new in her story, for she told it without being asked. Divorced parents, she an only child, about to graduate from a girls’ college.

“I try to be fair to both my parents, Mrs. Chardman, but I live in my father’s house because my mother has married again and I don’t like my stepfather. He’s younger than my mother and sometimes—well, I don’t like to be where he is, because I don’t want my mother to be hurt—not by me, and certainly not by him because she’s terribly in love with him. It’s so pitiful, isn’t it?”

“Where did you meet Jared?” she had asked the girl.

“When we were skiing three years ago. I love to ski. Usually I spend Christmas holidays skiing. Now we play tennis. It was so surprising to find he lives in New York and I live in Scarsdale, you know. He comes to our place on Saturdays sometimes, unless he calls up that he wants to work. My father and he are good friends. My father says he’s the most brilliant young man he’s ever known.”

“What does your father do?”

“He’s a banker in New York. He has an apartment there and I can stay with him if I like, but we’ve kept our house in Scarsdale because we like tennis and the pool and all that.”

“He hasn't married again?”

“Oh, yes—a girl not much older than I—well, Louise is twenty-six.”

“They’re happy?”

“Oh, yes, Louise is so beautiful that I’m glad she didn’t see Jared before she married my father. But all these marriages have taught me such a lot, Mrs. Chardman. I don’t want ever to be divorced. I want to marry someone I shall always love—like Jared.”

“You must also be someone he can always love,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” the girl agreed. “That’s why I’ve come to you. He says he’ll love you forever.”

…“Your little girl spent the afternoon with me,” she told Jared that night at midnight.

“I have no little girl,” he retorted.

“Well,
a
little girl, then!” she laughed.

“I suppose you mean June Blaine.”

“Yes!”

“Yes, well, she’s the one I once told you about. It’s been off and on for a couple of years and now it’s off.”

“She doesn’t think so.”

“She’s strong—that I admit. But all girls are strong these days.”

“And you don’t like that?”

“Haven’t time to think about it. What are you doing this weekend?”

She hesitated, searching for an excuse, even a mild lie. “I’ve promised an old friend.”

“Man?”

“No—woman.” She could summon Amelia and they could go to the summer theater.

“Well—” He was reluctantly giving up the weekend.

“Perhaps June—” she suggested.

He broke in sharply. “Look here—don’t you go matchmaking!”

“Of course not, it’s just loyalty to one’s kind.”

“I’m your kind!”

“I know that, darling, but—”

“No buts!”

“Very well. Shall we say good night on this moment of agreement?”

“I don’t know. You seem different, as though the agreement were only skin deep.”

“Ah, no, Jared! It’s very deep. I’m
for
you—ever and ever. There’s no agreement deeper than that.”

She could hear him draw a deep breath.

“That’s what I wanted to hear. Now I can say good night.”

“Good night, dearest.”

Like an echo his voice came back to her—

“Dearest!”

…“I hear Edmond Hartley was at your house,” Amelia said.

They were sitting midway to the tent-like ceiling of the theater-in-the-round in a suburb of the city. Amelia had decided on the play, a revival of an old musical.

“How did you know?” she asked.

“Oh, our built-in intercom,” Amelia replied. “Your chauffeur to mine and then to my upstairs maid who brings my breakfast when I’m too lazy to get up.”

“Does Edmond Hartley interest you?”

“Once he did—very long ago—until I found out I didn’t interest him. No woman does. But he was charming in spite of that—and rich!”

“He’s still charming.”

“And not married?”

“No.”

This was in the intermission. Amelia had declared that it was absurd to climb down the steps and up again in such a crowd. Besides, there was nowhere to go. She began once more.

“Do you know, Edith, I sometimes wonder if marriage with a man like that, at our age, anyway, wouldn’t be rather pleasant. One would have companionship, someone to travel with, a friend always present—and no demands!”

“I couldn’t endure it,” she said vehemently.

“Why not?”

“I’d want all of marriage—or none.”

Amelia made shrill laughter. “You’re confessing, Edith, you’re confessing!”

“I have nothing to confess except a deep respect for love.”

“Well, I’d settle for diversion,” Amelia said. The audience was swarming up the aisles again and there was a bustle on the stage. But the conversation was background for the following week, the last of June. A letter written on heavy cream paper with embossed name and address announced that the sender was Edmond Hartley, asking if he might call upon her, “to pay my respects,” the next Tuesday, on his way to Washington to judge designs for murals to be placed in a museum there. She would have replied that she was engaged, except that she thought of Amelia.

“And an old friend of mine,” she added as postscript to her own answering letter, “will be here to greet you. I believe she knew you long ago. Do come!”

He came late on Tuesday afternoon, in a small Daimler limousine, driven by an elderly English chauffeur. She saw him arrive and pause to direct the man and then he walked in his sprightly somewhat mincing fashion to the door. Weston opened it and announced him in the music room. She rose from the piano, where she had been working on a Chopin
étude,
and put out her hands, which he took in his cool dry grasp.

“How beautiful the music sounds! This is my favorite
étude.
I must hear it all.”

His eyes were as brightly blue as ever above his white clipped beard and trim mustache. A handsome man, she thought, in his precise, delicate fashion, and she felt a mild affection for him, combined with a real respect. A complicated personality, this! But under the complexities, the result of untold experience, here was an honorable person who had dealt rigorously with himself.

“My dear,” he said, “I am dusty with travel. Let me make myself fit for your beautiful eyes.”

“Then we’ll have cocktails on the east terrace,” she said. “And my old friend, Amelia Darwent, will join us. Do you remember her? She remembers you very well indeed.”

Edmond Hartley looked blank. “I don’t remember—”

“Ah, well, she will recall herself to you. Now go upstairs—the same room and sitting room.”

He went away and she returned to the
étude,
the third. She had begun it after Arnold’s death, when she was learning the meaning of sorrow, and not only the sorrow of death but the deeper sorrow of knowing that what had been was not all that it could have been had there been more understanding and therefore more communication between Arnold and herself. They had both done the best they could together. If she realized there might have been, a deeper happiness, so had he. Of that she was sure, for she had sometimes felt his gaze upon her and, lifting her head, had seen sadness in his eyes, and silently had respected that sadness, comprehending in her own reserve the inexorable distance between them. Neither she nor Arnold had overcome that reserve, but the knowledge and acceptance were painful.

Upon the day of his funeral, she had returned to this house alone, for she longed to be alone and rejected the affectionate offers of her children to come home with her. “No, my dears,” she had told them. “Go home to your children. Be with them, and I shall be happy. Indeed, I am quite all right. I’ll take a sleeping pill tonight—I am very tired”—and there alone she had begun the
étude.
It was divided into three parts, the first the statement of sorrow, a query as to why the sorrow must be. In the second part question rose to protest and wild demand. In the closing third, the question was unanswered, the demand unheeded and the theme was expressed again and finally, this time by acceptance of the inexorable.

When the last chord died under her hands, she heard Amelia’s voice.

“If I had a heart, it would break when you play that.”

She turned. Amelia was sitting in a gold chair, looking very smart in a cocktail dress of silver lamé.

“When did you come?” she asked.

“Ten minutes ago. I wouldn’t let Weston announce me. I haven’t heard you play for a long time—months. You play better than ever, Edith. I’m furious with my parents that they didn’t make me keep practicing.”

“As I remember it,” she said, smiling, “you hated them for making you practice for two years.”

“They shouldn’t have listened to my complaining,” Amelia insisted. “They should have beaten me. As it is, I blame them for my not having the ability now to comfort myself with music. They should have had more backbone.”