Ceremony of the Innocent (36 page)

Ellen and Annie returned to the nursery, where the nurse busied herself with the child. Ellen watched all this; her breasts were aching with milk. She said to herself: I wonder why I don’t feel the way other women say they feel about their children? Why am I always so frightened, like a premonition? I do love the baby; I’d die for him. But there’s really no one for me but Jeremy. He is always first, all the time. It seems to me far more important to be a good wife.

While she nursed her son Ellen’s thoughts were engrossed with Jeremy, and she smiled, and Annie thought with tenderness: Her face shines like the sun. Never saw anything like it before. It’s her goodness, that’s what it is. Hope her kids appreciate that later, but you can never tell with kids. Serpents, mostly, that’s what, when they grow up and smell their parents’ money. Wish I could put some sense in her, poor darling. The good get all the kicks in this world, and all the hate and robbery, and mostly from those they love, too.

Ellen’s face changed. Suddenly she was crying, and Annie came to her and put her firm plump arm about her shoulders. “There, there,” she said. “Every new mother feels like this for a couple of months, dear. After-birth melancholy. There’s no need to feel sad. This’ll be the first dinner you’ve had downstairs with Mr. Porter since the baby was born. We want to look pretty, don’t we?”

Ellen tried to laugh, then was depressed again. “It’s just—I’m afraid. I don’t know why, but I am afraid for Mr. Porter, and in some way for myself, too.”

“Don’t you worry about Mr. Porter,” said Annie in a sturdy voice. “By the way, I don’t like that maid of yours, Clarisse.”

Ellen was surprised. “Why not?”

But Annie was discreet. She could not tell Ellen that every day Clarisse had a hushed conversation, accompanied by derisive giggles, with Mrs. Wilder, whom Annie despised. It was all about Ellen, and Annie knew that though they spoke in French. Annie’s young face tightened and she pressed Ellen’s shoulder with more protectiveness, “Oh, I don’t know,” she answered. “Guess we’re not fated to be friends. Anyways, I wouldn’t trust her too much if I was you. Don’t talk to her so sweetly, and so kindly. Don’t chatter to her about what you think and feel all the time, and confide in her.”

Ellen gave Annie an indulgent smile. “Oh, Annie, Annie,” she said. “What a cynic you are. I’m very fond of Clarisse.”

All at once Annie felt helpless. How did you warn the good—they were so uncommon—that their very trustfulness was destructive to them, dangerously destructive, and often fatal? If they listened, and they very seldom listened, God help them, it might change them and they would be as wicked as the general run of mankind, and in some way the world would be poorer after their full knowledge and their loss of innocence.

Maybe, thought Annie, God will reward them someday, but I doubt it. She was an agnostic, something which shocked Ellen, as did Annie’s lack of idealism. Annie’s pink and pudgy face, with the pert upturned nose and shining gold eyelashes and eyebrows, and forthright gaze, would change and harden when Ellen talked of the “innate nobility of mankind,” and her expression would become old and withdrawn, and her sense of dismay for Ellen would increase, and her incredulity. She knew Ellen’s history by now, received from Cuthbert, Clarisse, and Miss Ember, and it seemed incomprehensible that one who had endured so much, and with such loving candor, could be so naive and so defenseless and so ominously vulnerable, and so incapable of drawing grim and obvious conclusions. There was a certain stupidity in innocence, and Annie sometimes suspected it was this that aroused the ridicule of others.

Thank God she has a husband who is no fool, Annie would think. But what of the day when she doesn’t have him? If there is a merciful God, and I don’t believe there is, He will let her die before her husband does. She has no idea how to protect herself. She doesn’t know how to be careful. Once it came to Annie, dismally, that if everyone “watched” each other, and there was no trust or love anywhere, misery and despair and hatred would overwhelm the world of men and there would be nothing but death. Ellen, in her own gentle insidious way, born of blamelessness, had given Annie her own doubts and uncertainties about her robust view of life, though Ellen was impervious to Annie’s common sense. Neither girl understood that there must be a balance between love and trust—and realism. The ultimate in each destroyed the world as effectively as any plague. Christ was the God of wrath as well as the God of love, Ellen had yet to learn. But an absolute realist deprived the world of fantasy and beauty and mystery, and the immanence of God. Annie did not know that now. Still, in her generation she was wiser than Ellen, and much better armed against her fellow man.

Kitty Wilder affected to be overwhelmed by the “honor” bestowed on her and her husband on being godparents of the baby. “Oh, how adorable!” she would croon over the infant’s crib. “How beautiful he is, Ellen, just like you! Imagine you choosing us for this darling’s godparents! You know I don’t like children much, but I am simply mad over this precious little one!” She would regard the child with secret detestation. How ugly he was, resembling his mother. He had none of Jeremy’s handsomeness, Kitty would think. And what an awful name—Christian, which Ellen had chosen.

Ellen and Jeremy, remembering Kitty’s forced helpfulness at the birth of the child, had given Kitty a bright diamond lavaliere in gratitude, and Kitty’s little eyes had actually glowed, for she was not only rich but avaricious. “Ellen selected it,” said Jeremy. Kitty did not believe it; it was so very tasteful—and expensive. She kissed Ellen rapturously. She looked at Jeremy with an almost abject adoration, and he smiled in himself.

The weeks on Long Island were blissful for Ellen, though she saw Jeremy only at the weekend, for it was too far and too long on the train from the city. She walked over the lawns and on the beach, and helped in the garden, and regained her vitality. She slept happily every night, waiting for Saturday and Sunday. Her hair took on its brilliant sheen again, and her blue eyes were radiant with light and joy. She ran like a child, and played tennis with neighbors, and cuddled her son. Watching her, and hearing her free and melodious laughter, Annie would feel old and battered by life, despite her own youth. Sometimes the girls would throw a ball to each other and shout and laugh, and Annie became rosier. She could not, however, rid herself of a portent of disaster.

The neighbors became fond of Ellen, and indulgent, but it was a fond indulgence which inevitably became wryly amused and somewhat ironic and touched with disbelief at her ingenuousness. Seeing this, Annie once said to Ellen, “Mrs. Porter, dear, don’t be so outspoken and kind and affectionate to these people. They don’t understand you. They think you are a little—foolish.”

“No,” said Ellen, with her own indulgence, “they are only very good and pleasant to me, and why should I distrust them or think nasty things about them?”

Annie shrugged. “People are all the same. These neighbors of yours are no better than the Mrs. Eccles you told me about, or Miss Ember, or even Mr. Porter’s father and mother. I know, believe me!”

Agnes and Edgar Porter had come to the christening in the nearby Episcopal church, and so had Walter Porter. Ellen tried to please Jeremy’s parents, and had been overcome with shyness and awkwardness, and a deep old sense of inferiority, for they treated her with offended superciliousness and Agnes remarked on the lack of resemblance between the child and his father. So Ellen felt guilty in some manner, and Jeremy said, “He is beautiful, like his mother, and not an ugly monster like me.”

The meeting had been constrained, to Ellen’s suffering. She was glad when her guests departed. She said to Jeremy, “I don’t think Mr. and Mrs. Porter care for me much, even now. Perhaps they are right. I am really nothing, you know.”

“You are all the world,” said Jeremy with some impatience. “At least, to me. Now then, smile like the silly angel you are.”

His fear for Ellen was increasing. He was not alone. He had the company of his uncle, Walter Porter, and Annie Burton and Cuthbert. They circled the girl with protectiveness and hoped that time would make her less trusting, more cautious, and less intense in devotion to anyone who showed her the slightest acceptance and kindness. To Ellen the world now was a place of joy and delight and love, filled with friends and honor and spontaneous affection.

She was forgetting to be afraid of her child, in her happiness. She would rock him on the wide white porches and look at the sea, marveling over its changefulness. There were sunsets when the water resembled hammered gold under the golden light, or it would be running brass or whitely flowing beneath a white sky. Even the storms entranced her. She wanted to cry in ecstasy. She would sing, and her marvelous voice would echo in the wide and tranquil evening silence, and Annie would listen and tears would smart her eyes. Dear God—if there is a God—the older girl would pray—don’t let her know. Never let her know what the world really is.

For Ellen had almost forgotten her wretched childhood and girlhood. She was even forgetting Mrs. Eccles and Wheatfield. If she remembered Mrs. Eccles at all it was with pity, for Mrs. Eccles, Ellen would think, had lacked all joyousness. In her way, she had been kind, Ellen would force herself to believe. This was Ellen’s method of coming to terms with the years of her persecution and labor and hunger and despair: If people really “understood” they would love and trust each other. It was sad if circumstances forced them to be wary and malicious and greedy, and even cruel.

Ellen, who had never had a childhood, became a child. May complained to Miss Ember: “I think Ellen’s lost her wits, I really do.”

C H A P T E R   16

“WELL, HOW DOES IT FEEL to be a Congressman?” Walter Porter asked his nephew.

“You ask me that every time you see me, Uncle Walter. Do you expect a different answer each time?”

“Of course,” said Walter. “Who can stand Washington? Terrible city. White sepulcher of rotting bones, stinking with liars and thieves and charlatans and the endlessly exigent. Does Ellen still dislike it?”

“Yes. She’s never complained, but I know, even though she professes to be delighted with our house in Georgetown. I think it’s the commuting between New York and Washington that really bothers her. She never had a home until she married me, as you know, and so New York, her first home, is the place where she lives, and Washington is only intangible and temporary. There’s something she seemed to be afraid of there, too.”

“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Walter Porter. “It scares the hell even out of me whenever I visit you there. Ellen’s very sensitive; she doesn’t know what is going on, but she senses it, intuitively. I sense it from observation and objective knowledge; Ellen knows the presence of evil subjectively, and it frightens her, as it would any other innocent. Is she getting along any more comfortably with your colleagues and their wives?”

Jeremy hesitated. “Well, yes and no. The men admire her, but are amused by her lack of sophistication. Most of them are kind to her, though, as one is kind to a child who is also beautiful and unaffected. But—their wives! When they’re not snubbing her they arc covertly ridiculing her, out of envy or malevolence, or patronizing her. The poor girl still hasn’t learned why, and so she shrinks or hides or says nothing. I’ve never seen anyone so lacking in self-esteem, and I worry about it more and more. I’ve done my best, and I’ve had hopes, for under all that gentleness and genuine magnanimity there is a core of iron. I’ve seen it glitter a few times. But the hell of it is that she’s always so confoundedly contrite afterwards and makes a fool of herself trying to conciliate and placate.”

“Her grandmother, Amy Widdimer, was exactly like that, so you can’t blame Ellen’s childhood for her shyness and timidity. They’re aristocratic traits, sadly lacking among American women, especially the suffragettes and the ‘new women.’ We’re a plebeian country. Ellen’s a lady, and what’s a lady doing down there in Washington?”

Jeremy laughed. The two men were sitting in Jeremy’s office in New York on this bleak and brown autumn afternoon. The sky was a sullen saffron, the streets were sepia crevices, and a dull ocher light lay over everything. The street traffic had a somber flat note, subdued and cheerless (like the Panic which had overwhelmed America this year), sometimes rising to a frenzied clatter, then subsiding again to a listless monotone, as if resigned. Jeremy found it very depressing, even more depressing than Washington. He said, “I wonder why the people keep sending such clowns to Congress and the Senate, and even to the White House. If they’re not naive and as mindless as puddings, though usually hysterical, too, they’re vicious and corrupt scoundrels. Present company excepted, of course.” He smiled. “They bore me to death,” and now he was not smiling. “Especially since I’ve found out what is going on among the ‘quiet men,’ nationally and internationally.” He paused. “I can’t understand the general public, which is comparatively intelligent and decent and hard-working, with a sense of honor and patriotism.”

“It’s because the rascals, and the fools, are such good actors, so earnest with their constituents, echoing what their constituents say and demand. Then behind the backs of those constituents they do whatever their foolish or black hearts prompt them, out of exigency. I wonder if we’ll ever again have the kind of government we had following the Revolution. I doubt it.”

“So do I.” Jeremy drank deeply of his whiskey and soda. Walter said, “Any regrets?”

Jeremy hesitated. “Well, no. I know damned well I can’t do anything about what is going on down there, and now I know that if I should open my mouth and shout it from the Capitol I’d either be kicked out of Washington or murdered. Or, worse yet, laughed at. I’ve tried to hint it to a few newspaper correspondents, and they just stare at me incredulously. Well, I shouldn’t blame them. No politician is ever honest with the newspapers. He’s either afraid, or prudent, or just a liar. No, you can’t blame the newspapers. But a lot of the newspapers have good fun lampooning many politicians, and I’d like to tell their editors that they’d better make the most of the freedom they have now. It won’t be long before they’re regimented and threatened or browbeaten into submission to politicians, and government.”