The Age Of Desire: A Novel Part 27

"Do you think you might send me postcards of your journey?" he asks at last. "It will give me something to look forward to. And I can imagine my dear Miss Bahlmann in beautiful places doing wonderful things."

She smiles at him, thinking him a very special man.

They walk back to her lodgings together and the silence is companiable, though sad. When they reach the doorway of the hotel, she holds out her hand in farewell. Instead, he steps forward to take her face in his hands. He gazes at her for a long while, as though he is a camera imprinting her image. And then he kisses her lips. Just a moth's wing of a kiss. Later, as she travels through Weimar and Frankfurt, Baden and Rothenberg, she will often fall asleep thinking of that modest kiss-the haunting brush of a man's lips against hers-the first she has ever known.

FIFTEEN.

EARLY AUTUMN 1908.

Sleep will not come to Edith-no matter how she tries to change her habits, her thoughts or even her level of anger at her impossible situation with Fullerton. (Not a letter. Not a card. For weeks and weeks again!) She begins to fear her own bed. Because she knows in it she will wrestle with sleep and lose. When morning seeps through the curtains, it always finds her emotionally spent. She writes, but how difficult it is to remember where she left her characters, what they are thinking or how different they are from one another! Guests come and go, filling her guest rooms and parlor. She laughs with them. Eats with them. But feels nothing. The walking dead. She has heard these words before, but now she knows precisely what they mean.

She hears that Dr. Kinnicut, the doctor she trusts most for both Teddy and herself, has come to Lenox for the month of September. He writes that he's all too happy to see her at his rented house, a stately white colonial right in town. He views Edith over his reading gla.s.ses as she tells him about the torment of her sleeplessness. He nods, the only doctor she's ever known with such sympathetic eyes.

"I'm sorry you're suffering so," he says.

He takes a deep breath and pens a prescription for a sleeping powder.

"Just a few grains before bed and you'll be fast asleep," he says. He smiles, this cheerful reliable man with a bald pate as pink as a rose. "Works every time," he says. Well, why not believe him? If Dr. Kinnicut thinks it will work, it surely will, she tells herself. By the time she is back at The Mount with the packet from the pharmacy, she is immersed in a glow of expectation she hasn't felt in weeks. At this point, sleep seems almost as desirable as a night with Fullerton. After dinner, she excuses herself from her guests and follows Dr. Kinnicut's instruction, stirring the powder into her evening cocoa. Even the few grains infuse the cocoa with a poisonous tinge, but she drinks it down, determined.

She settles into her bedroom armchair to read Jenseits von Gut und Bose while waiting for the drug to take effect. How she's enjoyed Nietzsche lately, even in her wounded state! But suddenly, she might as well be sitting on a high, bright cliff, for her bed appears far away, her dresser, the mirror on her dressing table flickering, dancing, shimmering in lamplight. A wave of nausea overtakes her, but she can't quite understand what she's feeling. She stumbles to the bed, which she thankfully had turned down earlier, but even before she turns off her light, the drug sends her plummeting toward a dreamless ocean. Oh! The feeling of falling is so real. So dangerous. Falling. Asleep. As she says the words aloud, they take on new meaning.

She wakes in the morning and is certain the cliff of her last waking thought has collapsed on top of her. The heaviness of her limbs, her brain, startles her. The morning light feels evil, pressing through the window, reaching out to pry apart her sticky eyes. Her head could not be more swollen and useless if she had drunk an entire bottle of brandy by herself. The light by her bedside is still burning. She never turned it off!

Most mornings, she wakes and grabs a handful of paper from the nightstand, dips her ink in the well she keeps there and begins to write immediately-before her trip to the bathroom. Morning is her best time. The time of her greatest clarity. Even after a sleepless night. But today, she can barely lift her head. And her thinking has been reduced to primal thoughts. Sip of water. Bathroom. Sick. Must be sick.

She wakes again and it is late. The sun has flooded the room. Her head is not as groggy as it was. Someone is at the door. Teddy.

"Do you plan to sleep all day?" he asks. His voice hurts her ears. "Are you unwell?"

"What time is it?" she asks.

He pulls his watch from his pocket.

"Seven minutes after eleven."

She sits up, startled, miserable.

"This won't do," she says aloud.

"I'll say it won't," Teddy agrees. He closes the door and if it is not with a definite slam, it certainly sounds like one to her bruised brain.

The fun Anna has with her cousins Liesel and Lotte! Lounging in a green-hued cafe in Gottingen, sharing feathery potato dumplings, Westphalia ham, and beer-such beer! They chuckle over a mention in Anna's guidebook of Otto-the-One-Eyed's reign over Gottingen-"Imagine. A Cyclops ruled Gottingen," Lotte declares. Anyone watching them could see they have the same happy, drifting laugh, the same soft gray eyes. They could be sisters. Three round-faced, older, single women. In their company, it is easy to put aside thoughts of Thomas. To block thoughts of Edith, except, of course, remembering to send each of them postcards. How Anna labors over the condensed little messages she pens on the back, making sure they are charming and informative. But at night in her room at the Friedrichsbad Spa, she aches, without knowing why.

After two and a half weeks of laughter and getting to know one another far better than they ever have, Liesel and Lotte return to Frankfurt and Anna travels on to Verona and Venice alone. Unafraid. The silence soothes her. The sights are beautiful with or without a companion. "I am a lone animal," she thinks proudly.

Yet sitting in her sparkling room overlooking the Grand Ca.n.a.l, she has a weak moment. How much more fulfilling it would be to share this scene with someone about whom she cares. She pens a real letter to Thomas, describing the sound of the water, the singing, the light off the ca.n.a.l washing her ceiling and gla.s.s chandelier in watery ripples. And she says he would enjoy it all. She wishes he were there. Later in the week, as her elevator cage settles in the lobby, Anna, a pink mohair stole wrapped about her arms, ready to make her way to a cafe for dinner, spots Thomas through the gilded bars. He is leaning on the hotel's front desk, speaking her name.

"Thomas?"

He raises his face, beams at the sight of her.

"My dear," he says. "Don't you look well!"

She feels her heart thudding. He is not a handsome man. His features are weathered, and maybe he was never beautiful. But his eyes are remarkably gentle, and so happy to see her.

"I didn't expect. Why are you . . . ?"

Through the hotel's arched windows, the early evening light on the ca.n.a.l is b.u.t.tery and glowing, as it was when she wrote him the note.

"Perhaps you will join me for supper," he asks, extending his arm.

"Of course," she says. "I'd be delighted." Isn't it best to let gravity take her than to flail, than to struggle? She tucks her fingers into the crook of his arm and they saunter down the dock to a waiting gondola.

"This is my gondolier, Giuseppe." The man nods at Anna and helps her into the craft.

As the vessel swings its way into the heart of the Grand Ca.n.a.l, Anna hears Thomas sigh with pleasure.

"I am a fortunate man," he declares.

Edith receives a postcard from Anna hand-painted in the most glorious shades of sea and sky.

I had a sudden opportunity to run off to Greece and enjoy a friend's hired yacht, and after all you told me about this exquisite country, I didn't see my way to turning down such a generous offer. Athens was marvelous but sweltering, and after visiting the Parthenon-which simply s.n.a.t.c.hed the breath from my lungs-we have driven to Cape Sounion by motorcar. The breezes here are delightful, the pines are as green as parrot feathers and the air is perfumed with "rigani"-Greek oregano. Do you remember the scent? It makes me weak in the knees. Have you ever tasted retsina, the pine-resin wine? It's awful and yet curiously makes me want to drink more! I do so wish you were here to enjoy this. I know it would raise your spirits, dear.

Anna in Greece? Joyous! Having made a friend who can hire a yacht? "We have driven down." Who are we? A party of people? Another maiden friend? And she knows that Edith's spirits need raising. The woman is clairvoyant! Edith, indeed, feels like she's sinking daily. It's been weeks since she felt like herself. Her head hurts. Her heart aches. But Anna has never sounded better! Edith is relieved to find the card lifts her own heart, that she doesn't begrudge dear Anna her glistening fragment of happiness, though her own happiness is so miserably fleeting.

"The woman who loves a fool, is a fool," she tells herself sternly.

I will forget him, Edith vows. I will reclaim myself. After weeks of intense writing despite her exhaustion, she slips the first six chapters of The Custom of the Country into an envelope and hands it to Miss Thayer to ship out to Scribner's Magazine. And thus unburdened, she begins by spending hours in her garden weeding-something she almost always expects the gardeners to do. She had forgotten how much pleasure there is in yanking up weeds, rendering a bed pristine again. At night she focuses on her guests-this weekend an opera singer, a French poet. She reads Nietzsche. In the mornings, she writes a new short story about a woman who misreads a man's intentions. She thinks she is winning the battle.

And then, a few nights later, suddenly heart-thuddingly awake, she finds herself so bloated with anger at Fullerton she paces the room rather than struggle for sleep on her bed of nails. And eventually she descends to the library, seats herself at her desk and picks up her pen.

Dearest HJ, I beg of you. I urge you to help me. I don't know what's happened to Morton. He's broken my heart with his inability, or perhaps I should say "refusal," to answer any of my posts. What could be hampering him? Do you know if he is ill? Or has he found someone else to love? Has he written to you this summer? Would he tell you if it were so? I am at wit's end. I am desolee. I thought we meant something to each other. I thought he felt for me all that I felt for him. You saw us. Did you see deep true affection or did I only imagine it? I feel sometimes as though I am going mad. I don't know where to turn. And so, of course, mon cher maitre, I turn to you. Burn this immediately!

Edith was born to be a lady. And a lady never pursues, never complains, never makes a scene and certainly never makes a fool of herself. So if Fullerton isn't going to be available to her in any way-and surely only a cad could be so callous as to drag her heart through this ditch of incomprehension-then she will have to run the other way. Walter writes from Ma.s.sachusetts, where he is visiting his mother: I know you've told Teddy you wouldn't leave for Europe until after Christmas this year. But in his present state, nothing seems to faze him anyway. Do you think you might get away? You know I must be in Egypt, and the Provence is the last ship I can sail.

It's true, Edith reflects. Teddy, these days, with his pig house and chicken palace, is happy all the time like a five-year-old. And since his fishing trip, he is giddier than ever. The mysteries of his brain are increasingly hard to fathom.

And you, dearest one, are not sleeping. You're quite miserable-though you won't tell me what's troubling you. Didn't the doctor suggest you go somewhere, anywhere else? So break with this scene and join me. You're always happier in Paris. Or perhaps you can cross the Sleeve and visit Henry at Lamb House. He's begged me to convince you to come. It will be much better for you to have a travel companion in the state you're in-why, you'd forget your pa.s.sport, your pearls and heaven knows what else-and there's no one's company I'd prefer to yours. Do say yes before the ship is sold out and they make you sleep in the hold.

So Edith announces to Teddy, and anyone else who will listen, that her insomnia and her hay fever have gotten the best of her. She requires a change of scene and quickly. Teddy shrugs and says he will book into the Knickerbocker Club until it's time for him to go on his hunting trip, and then perhaps go off to Hot Springs for another cure. (Oh, if only he were always so acquiescent!) The servants begin to roll up The Mount's mattresses and bring the oatmeal-colored drop cloths up from the storage room. Usually, this tucking away of her summer life makes Edith sad. But not this year. Teddy bids a tearful good-bye to his beloved Lawton, and the pig keeper reports to Edith that Lawton was literally whimpering at the farewell. Could a pig possibly be so smart?

Edith loves the thought of England, and time with Henry on his own turf. She feels so full of energy at the thought, she even quickly writes a comic story. When was the last time she felt up to that? And as she and Teddy and Fannie Thayer load themselves into the motorcar for the trip to New York, the dogs between them and at their feet, yipping and crazed by all the commotion, she feels as expectant as a young girl heading toward a ball. Teddy will be dropped off at the Knickerbocker Club, and Edith will check into the Belmont-no point opening up 884 for a single night. Besides, at the last minute, they've found a tenant to fill it. The servants can stay at 882 until winter.

And Anna! Anna's ship is supposed to arrive this evening-such good timing! Edith will send Cook down to the pier to fetch her. How she looks forward to seeing her dear friend! She imagines Anna's pale skin burnished by the Greek sun, roses in her cheeks. Tonni's cheeks! How she loved to press her face against her governess's face when she was a child. Tonni's cheeks were always warm and soft as velvet. She would hold Edith close and sing German songs. Hold her the way her own mother never would. As though she were happy to be in her company. As though she were precious. Edith wants so much to show Anna that she still cares about her-that sending her off this summer was a gift, not a snub.

Tonight, she imagines Anna's clear, shining eyes across a restaurant table, retelling her adventures and explaining the mysterious friends who whisked her off to Greece.

But Cook is soon back at the Belmont. Unfortunately, Anna's ship has been delayed by inclement weather in the Atlantic. The Bremen isn't expected to dock until late the next day, two or three hours after Edith's own ship, the Provence, is set to sail. Fannie Thayer, who has set herself up in Edith's hotel room to organize her papers, shakes her head with distress.

"She'll be crushed, you know. Anna's been longing to see you. . . ."

Edith debates. Should she not go? Should she wait until the next ship in one week's time? But how can she? Walter needs to get to Cairo now that he's been elected to the tribunal. There is a job to do! Counting the three days he plans to stay in England, he told her, this is the last possible date he can sail. Still, Edith fears that Anna will think she's been snubbed again. It wounds her to think that she allowed anyone-even Morton Fullerton-to come between her and her dear Tonni, who never wished her anything but kindness.

And so she writes. Writing is her best way of communicating. But not with Tonni! She had so longed to see her face-to-face, to make things right.

Dearest Tonni, The disappointment of not seeing you before I sail! I know it seems heartless, unsympathetic and unnatural. I know Miss Thayer thinks it is.

Well, I've had insomnia badly for two months, and Dr. Kinnicut, who came to Lenox early in Sept., tried different things, of a mild kind, but said, "If it goes on, you must have a change."

It did go on, and got worse, and I came to town to see him about three weeks ago, and he said more emphatically, "Do go away at once." The trouble is that the least little sleep drug stupefies me the next day, and unfits me for my writing, which is such a joy and interest to me-and that makes me restless and bored. So I felt he was right.

At the same time, he urged Teddy very strongly to go back to the Hot Springs for another cure, before going to his shooting in Dec. Teddy has had the best summer he has had in years, as the result of his Hot Springs visit, so it seemed as if he ought to do this. [Isn't it better to tell Anna that he is going to Hot Springs because he has had success there? Why worry her by mentioning his overexcited state, which is the real reason she hopes he goes. Tonni would never approve of her leaving him in the shape he's in.] Therefore I should have had to stay alone in Lenox all of Nov. or go with him, and I disliked the idea of that, as the hotel is very much over-heated, food very indigestible, etc.

So I decided I would go out to Europe six weeks ahead of him; but I should have waited over another week in NY expressly to see you, if it had not been that Mr. Berry (who has been appointed a judge of the International Tribunal at Cairo) suddenly decided to sail on the Provence-that is, as soon as he was appointed, he settled on that date as the latest. It gave me the opportunity of having a companion instead of crossing utterly alone, and as I knew no one going out in Nov. I was very strongly tempted, and decided I had better go with him.

If I had felt well, I should not have minded being alone, but the insomnia has pulled me down, naturally, and it made all the difference having him with me. Dr. K. thinks my bad hay-fever was one of the causes, and he a.s.sures me it will all be over in a short time with complete change, as my general physical condition is good. But I want to break it up before it becomes anything like a habit, because it unsettles my whole mental life, and leaves me so good for nothing.

Miss Thayer will tell you that it hasn't yet affected my spirits, or prevented my writing what she considers a very funny story!!

I write this in great haste, as I was so sure of seeing you today that I didn't allow myself time. But you shall get a real letter from the steamer.

Dear Tonni, I do hope you understand that it is not heartless or inconsiderate of me to go off like this, and that it wrings my heart not to see you, and hear from your own lips the story of your summer.

Teddy will tell you all the details; I only want to a.s.sure you that I wouldn't have gone without seeing you for a few days first if I hadn't dreaded the long solitary days at sea and the sleepless nights.

I have a feeling you'll understand, and not be hurt, and above all, not worry. That's the thing I want most. I am well, essentially, only this special thing has to be cured.

Your devoted EW

Anna is thrilled as they steam past the Statue of Liberty. Oh, to be home at last! She breathes in the oil-infused perfume of New York Harbor, and glories in the crush of buildings and motorcars she spots on sh.o.r.e. What a journey it was, bringing her experiences she never imagined she'd encounter in her life! But during her most rousing moment abroad, she wished not any other outcome than this: to return home to Edith. Edith's most recent letters sounded kind, contrite. Perhaps at last they can be what they were to each other once more. How Anna longs for that.

Cook is waiting on the pier, looking nervous, his hands held behind his back as though he is hiding something.

"Miss Anna," he says, doffing his cap. "Welcome home. Have we many trunks to collect?"

"Just one." She smiles at him, and sees that he's aged: his boyish face has begun to tighten around the eyes, and loosen at the chin. How many years has she known him?

"What is the plan? Are we to go straight away to Lenox? Or are we stopping at 882?" she asks. "There are some books I'd like to pick up there first, if it would be no trouble."

Cook bites his lip. Another steamer moving out of the harbor lets out a low and mournful howl.

"We're only going to 882," Cook says. "You see, Mrs. Wharton's had to go on. She's awfully sorry. She gave me this note to give to you."

"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.