Ceremony of the Innocent (38 page)

The young man was shorter than Jeremy, but as firm and muscular and as masculine in appearance, and he moved with quiet and sure authority. He possessed a solid square face, grave and certain, though there were humorous trenches about his large mouth. All his features expressed strength and an enormous intelligence. He had a short, powerful nose, and his gray eyes were quick and thoughtful. He is a man, thought Walter, and could think of no greater accolade. He is a man as Jeremy is a man, and God knows we need such men in these days and in the days to come. Why in hell couldn’t I have had a son like either of them?

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Porter, from Jeremy,” said Charles as the two men shook hands. His voice was resonant with command, though agreeably respectful, and Walter’s admiration increased. “I think you knew my father slightly, Charles also, in Boston?”

“Why, yes, I did,” said Walter with pleasure, and his tired face brightened. “Old Chuck. A devil on campus, too. And off campus. With the girls. I often wondered how he settled down with just one of them.”

“Mama’s a very masterful lady,” said Charles. “You knew her?”

“Yes. Very handsome; a fine figure of a woman, as we used to say. Geraldine Aspenwall. Yes. I remember dancing with her. I think she led me, instead of vice versa.”

“She doesn’t lead Papa,” said Charles, and as he smiled his face became amused and excellent to look at, even charming. “Though she is a suffragette. Heaven help our poor Congressmen if Mama, and ladies like her, ever get the vote. She even dominates her pastor, unfortunate Father Malone, though the Sisters are less cowed. Mama would like to rewrite the liturgy. Outdated, she says. Very formidable, Mama. I think she could set the Pope running if she made up her mind to it and could get entrance to the Vatican.”

The three men sat in warmth and comfort, drinking their whiskey and smoking and listening in peaceful contentment to the traffic below and the rustling of the fire, and watching the sparks blow upward.

Perhaps, thought Walter, enough of these men now and in the future can save my country. Perhaps.

Then he shivered. Perhaps not enough, not enough. He felt a sick presentiment.

C H A P T E R   17

EARLIER THAT DAY, WHEN a faint sun set its feeble flickerings over the buildings and the street, Ellen went upstairs to see her aunt before accompanying Annie Burton during the children’s daily airing.

“I thought you’d come earlier,” May complained.

“I’m sorry, but I have to lie down after lunch, Auntie,” said Ellen. “You know that. But it won’t be long before I have all my strength back, the doctor says. May I bring the children upstairs tomorrow? You haven’t seen them for a week.”

May threw up her crippled hands and shook her head. “No, please, Ellen. They give me a headache; all that shouting, and the way Christian runs about. So restless.”

“Well.” Ellen smiled. “He can’t do that when Jeremy’s home. He’s a very active little boy, and the weather’s been’ so bad that we couldn’t go out the last couple of days or so, and he finds the nursery very confining.”

“The little girl’s just as bad, though she’s only a year old,” May whimpered. “Children in my day—seen but not heard, and seldom seen, either. You’re too indulgent, Ellen.”

As Jeremy also said that to her, repeatedly and with sternness, Ellen answered nothing. Then she changed the subject, and tried for brightness. “You look very well today, Auntie. Did you sleep well? Did you enjoy your lunch? Cuthbert ordered it especially for you.”

“Well, tell him not to do it again,” said May with a glance at Miss Ember, who was standing nearby, her heavy arms crossed over her big breast, as if with defiance. “Miss Ember didn’t like it, either. The broiled chicken was overdone, and the cauliflower had such a horrid sauce on it, cheese or something, and the potatoes—au gratin, do they call it?—had a very funny taste, and the soup had mushrooms in it, and you know I don’t like the mushrooms, you should have watched, Ellen, but you never have time for anybody but yourself, and the good Lord knows I didn’t bring you up that way. It had wine in it, too, strong drink, and the fish was too crisp and the rolls too hard, and I don’t like that sweet butter, and the coffee was too black, and the salad had a perfectly horrible dressing—the girl said it was Italian, heathen, I call it. Thank goodness I’m never very hungry, anyway.”

But you ate it all with relish, you old bitch, thought Miss Ember, and grinned and nodded. “I agree with Mrs. Watson, Mrs. Porter. Revolting. Maybe you should supervise that Cuthbert, him and his terrible cooking. Or let the regular cook do it. Good American cooking—that’s what we like, isn’t it, Mrs. Watson?”

“Yes. Just good plain food. That’s what I like best, with my poor appetite. Do try to spare a little thought now and then for others, Ellen. You do get more selfish every day.”

Ellen’s face became sad and depressed. She said, with apology, “I’ll tell Cuthbert, Auntie. What would you like for dinner? We’re having guests, I’m afraid, and there’s partridge, and I know you don’t like it. Does a thick bean soup appeal to you, and some steamed cod with cream sauce?”

Miss Ember was vexed. It was quite in order to criticize the resented Cuthbert’s excellent menus, while secretly enjoying them’ with intense satisfaction, and it was quite another thing to have to eat “plain food,” which Miss Ember had grown to dislike. May said, with a sullen downward glance, “All right, Ellen. Anything will do, except those fancy dishes. Maybe a wing of that partridge? I hate being so much trouble, and I know you get impatient with me, with all your fine friends and having to bother about me. I know I’m a burden.” She gave Miss Ember another enigmatic glance, and Ellen uneasily was aware of it. She felt an air of conspiracy in the dusty and untidy sitting room.

“You know you’re not a burden, Auntie,” she said. “You’ll never be a burden.”

Good, thought Miss Ember. Hope you holds to it. “I think,” said the nurse, “that your aunt has something to tell you.”

May hesitated. She folded a section of the shawl on her knee and stared at it with a martyred and melancholy expression, which made Ellen feel acutely at fault. “I’ve been writing to Mrs. Eccles,” said May, and glanced up sideways at her niece and there was a triumphant exultation in her red-rimmed eyes. “Yes?” said Ellen, more and more uneasy. “I know you write her, dear.”

“I’ve been writing to tell her how miserable I am.”

“Oh, no,” said Ellen, distressed. “How could you do that, Auntie?”

“So,” May went on, as if she had not heard, “she is willing to take me back.”

Ellen’s blue eyes stretched and widened in disbelief. “Take you back?” she exclaimed. “You, Auntie, who can hardly walk to the bathroom? Take you back!” She put her hand to her head, dazed.

“I don’t mean to work for her,” said May, not able to meet Ellen’s confused and aghast eyes. “I mean—well, I wrote her how I long for our lovely rooms in her house, and Wheatfield, and I said I remembered how good she was to us—how really good!—and I want to live in peace and quiet, away from those little children and all the noise they make and all the noise your friends make, and your piano playing and singing—well, she understood. I hate New York, and always did. You and me, Ellen—we got no right to be here at all, and you know it in your heart. Yes, you do!”

Now she stared at Ellen with bitter accusation and open hostility. “It’s all your fault, Ellen, and someday God will punish you for your hardheartedness—no consideration for others. Everything just for yourself—greedy, greedy, greedy. Your airs, and everything, just as if you was a lady born. I told you from the beginning, and someday you’ll admit it, on your knees, when it’s too late. Well, I’m not the one to judge you. God’ll do that—vain, conceited, proud, due for a fall.”

Ellen had heard these accusations before, but never before had they struck her so painfully. She shrank visibly; her sense of nameless guilt made her feel quite ill. She moistened her lips, but could not speak. May thought her crushed, and she experienced a happy thrill of vindication. Ellen’s long convalescence had dimmed much of her color and she was still thin and even her hair was less radiant and her eyes less lucent. Now her cheeks and her lips were pallid. “I think,” said May, “that you’re beginning to understand—when it’s too late.”

To the incredulous Ellen her aunt’s ugly words had no meaning at all, but Jeremy would have understood at once: Ellen had corrupted her aunt’s integrity with undeserved love and kindness and trust and devotion. May only knew, and without shame, that Ellen’s increasing grayness of cheek and lip pleased her, and exonerated her, for since uttering her accusations she believed she was justified and that they were true. Ellen’s very silence assured her of this. She had, in Ellen’s childhood, lifted her hand to the girl only once or twice. Now she longed to do it again, but with vigor and emotional outrage, and her drawn and sunken face flushed with righteousness. She raised her voice and spoke with emphasis.

“So, I had to think of myself, Ellen, just once, though you think only of yourself all the time. Well, anyway, to make a long story short, and after many letters, Mrs. Eccles replied graciously, out of her Christian charity, and has agreed to accept seventy-five dollars from me, a week, for those two lovely rooms and my board. And she wrote—I showed it to Miss Ember—that she’d be willing to let Miss Ember come, too, and ask her for only a few hours a day’s work, maybe four or five, and let her have your old room, and board. And Miss Ember will help me, too.”

Still speechless, Ellen looked at Miss Ember, her eyes glazed with shock and her mouth dropping, so that she appeared, to the nurse, to be more “foolish than usual.” May continued: “I said I’d help pay for Miss Ember’s keep. I’d give her four dollars a week. You can afford it.”

Now Ellen, swallowing drily, was able to answer. She said to Miss Ember in a tight and dwindled voice, “And you—you think—you want to do this?”

Miss Ember’s bulk appeared to increase, to swell, to fill half the room. “What do you take me for, Mrs. Porter? An imbecile? Of course I don’t want to do that and I won’t do it! Never heard so much crazy nonsense in my life! I think your aunt’s lost her mind, indeed I do.”

May regarded her with blank horror and amazement. “But,” she stammered, “only this morning when I got the letter—I showed it to you—you said, you said, you thought it was the thing to do, and you said you’d go with me, and you’d help Mrs. Eccles—I told you what a wonderful Christian lady she is, and you said—”

“I was just humoring you,” said Miss Ember, giving her a terrible and inimical smile. “Just as any nurse would do.”

Her voice was rough and cruel. She tossed her small head, so like a ball perched atop her enormous frame, and regarded both aunt and niece with smiling contempt. “What should I have done, Mrs. Porter, when she told me about it this morning? Called for a strait-jacket? I did my best. I soothed her, calmed her down, best I could, promised her anything, she was like a kid, clapping her hands—so silly. I did my best; I always did my best. I thought she ought to tell you herself.”

It was very rare for Ellen to see anyone with a clarified vision, to see another in all her ugliness, without gentle-hearted illusion, and with total recognition. The sight made her ill, caused an actual physical pain in her heart, and actual dread and loathing, as if she had encountered something unspeakably vile, beyond mortal capacity to be vile. It shattered her, made her want to run away wildly, and not to see at all, for the encounter of innocence with human evil was unbearable to her and violated her. She could not remember being so frightened before.

Now her innate fortitude returned to her, high and clear and condemning, as she looked at Miss Ember with brilliant eyes. “You know you lie,” she said. “You wanted my aunt to believe you, so you would have the opportunity to hurt her, she who had never hurt you. You wanted the opportunity to make me wretched, too, though I have always been kind to you. You are a hateful woman, a wicked woman, and I give you notice now. A week’s notice, with pay, and I want you out of this house by tomorrow morning.”

Never had she spoken like this to anyone before, and Miss Ember gaped, astounded. Then her small eyes glinted cunningly. May had begun to cry and whimper like a sick child, her face in her hands. “You’ll pay for this, madam,” said the nurse, in one of the ugliest voices Ellen had ever heard, and one of the most intimidating. “I know all about you, my fine madam. Everybody does. I don’t know why I’ve stayed so long, in the same house with a shameless creature like you. Everybody knows. I know what really made you so sick when you had those kids. After all, I am a nurse. You’ll pay me for a month, and give me a good reference or—”

“Or what?” asked Ellen, freshly stricken. She felt as if she would faint. The woman appalled her.

Miss Ember nodded and smirked. “I’ll tell the whole town about you. You won’t be able to lift your head again in the high society that laughs at you behind your back, anyway.”

What could she possibly say about me? thought Ellen dimly. But it came to her then, for the first time in her life, that lies and calumnies are accepted joyously by the majority of people, and the truth is ignored or denied. Jeremy! she thought. His enemies will believe anything that would discredit him, even though it is just about his wife.

Her fear rose to terrified heights; her heart lurched and pounded in her throat. Miss Ember watched her with pleased exaltation and hatred, seeing the girl swaying and trembling. “A month’s pay and a good reference,” she repeated.

Then suddenly the iron which underlay Ellen’s magnanimity and genuine solicitude for all that lived flashed visibly into her face. She clenched her thin and delicate hands at her side. She looked at Miss Ember and her eyes were dark with anger and disgust.

“You utter one lie about me, and this household, or anyone in it, and I will have you arrested,” she said, and her voice hardly shook. “Who are you? You are nothing, nothing. My husband is a respected Congressman, and a lawyer. Pack and go at once or I’ll call him, and you’ll spend a considerable time in jail, for dangerous threats. Threats. Get out! There’ll be no recommendation from me. But I will be merciful enough not to expose you to the hospital who sent you here. Go, before I lose what little patience I have left.”