Ceremony of the Innocent (81 page)

But Ellen was preternaturally calm and dignified. She stood up and faced the three of them, her children, her friend. She said, “Please leave my house, and never come here again. I do not know you. I will never know you.”

The tears were faster now. “If only you had let me believe a lie! If only you had come to me and told me openly, and honestly, that you needed money! I, your mother, would have helped you as much as reasonable. But I am no longer your mother. The mother you knew is dead. This woman wants nothing of you any longer. Please leave my house.”

The firelight danced over Ellen’s expressionless face, that newly formidable face, and her children knew they were defeated and they were frenzied with despair. Their hatred was mad. Then Christian lost control of himself. He struck his mother fiercely across her composed face, and she staggered and she would have fallen but that she grasped the back of a chair in time. But she continued to look at her son, and there was no fear in her face, that still and quiet face.

“Damn you!” Christian screamed “You bitch, you nothing, you thief! Why don’t you die and make us all happy with your money, our father’s money, which belongs to us and not you? Why don’t you die!”

He would have struck her with his clenched fist, aiming at the breast which had nurtured him, but Gabrielle interposed “Christian! Do you want to kill her? She isn’t worth your going to prison or to the electric chair!” She seized the upraised arm of her brother, and clung to it when he would have thrown her off “Christian!”

“You have already almost killed me, my children,” said Ellen “But I will live so you will have nothing, until what is left of me dies.”

“Die!” shouted Christian. “Of what use are you, you miserable whimpering wretch?”

Gabrielle looked at her mother, the stillness of her, the deathly whiteness of her face, the distended eyes floating with tears, and for the first time in her life Gabrielle felt a hint of shame, a hint of remorse, and it almost unnerved her.

“You have always wanted me to die,” said Ellen, looking only at her son. “It was there for me to see, all these years. You didn’t dare kill me openly, as an honest man would do. You tried to kill me through your doctors, with drugs and threats and cruelty. You didn’t succeed, for God was with me, and my friends.” Something enormous broke in her, separated, bled, but she did not weaken.

She looked at Gabrielle. “My daughter,” she said without emotion. “You, too.”

Gabrielle’s olive face was the color of saffron. She looked away “Let’s go, Christian,” she said. “It’s all over.”

“No,” said Kitty, “it isn’t. I have something to say, too, to this woman who has denied that you are her children any longer, and wouldn’t lift her hand, now, to save you from ruin. For you are ruined, you know.”

She took a prancing step towards Ellen, almost daintily. Never had she looked so triumphantly evil. She cocked her head, pointed at Ellen with her fleshless finger, and grinned.

“Now it’s my turn. You’ve always said that only the memory of Jeremy’s love kept you alive You still speak of him as if he still loves you, and lives.

“Now I will tell you the truth. He never loved you! He despised you! He ran from you, whenever he could—to other women. You bored the life out of him. He couldn’t stand being with you—”

Ellen’s voice was loud and clear. “You are a liar, Kitty. You were always a liar.”

“Aha! Am I? Here I am a woman with a good reputation, which I could lose, am about to lose. I was his mistress for years, you fool! I slept with him in my bed; he held me in his arms; he kissed me and confided in me. Because you were sick, because he couldn’t stand you any longer. He kissed my breasts; he lay on me, in my arms. You don’t believe it?”

Ellen was silent. Her blue eyes seemed to fill all her face.

Kitty laughed aloud, her laughter shrill and wicked. She lifted her hand and swore, “Before God, I am telling you the truth! He was my lover, for years and years. There were times you enraged him, with your stupidity. I wasn’t the only one. His other mistress was Emma Bedford—and there were others, too. Does a man take mistresses, and keep them, if he loves his wife? Even you, you imbecile, know better than that!”

She thrust out her hand on which a large opal flamed, surrounded by diamonds. “Look at this! He gave it to me for my birthday, two years before he died.” She put it to her mouth and covered it with openly desperate kisses, and now her own tears ran down her face. “My darling, my Jeremy, my lover! I shall never forget you.”

Ellen believed her. It came to her with gigantic force that Kitty had told the truth. She felt herself floating in darkness; she felt a frightful pain in her head and her heart; she felt herself dying. Jeremy had not loved her. He had betrayed her. It was not his fault, her husband. It was her own. She had had no right to marry him, to destroy his life, to make him wretched. Her aunt had been right in the beginning. His life had been a curse and a misery, because she had married him. All those years—he had endured her, for he had been an honorable man and had taken her in marriage. She remembered how somber he had often seemed, how abstracted. She had done this monstrous thing to him, and he had remained with her because he pitied her, and not out of love.

She closed her eyes, clinging to the chair. She did not feel the pain in her face where her son had struck her. Slowly, she did not feel any pain at all. When she finally opened her eyes it was to see that she was alone.

Alone. She had never had a husband; she had never had Jeremy. She had never had anyone at all. She felt no pity for herself. She felt only a guilt that was mortal, an anguish that no name could describe. And yet, there was no real pain in her. She was disembodied.

She had lived a lie, she had lied to herself all her existence. She had believed herself beloved by an unfortunate man who could, at the last, not endure the sight of her, but must take a woman like Kitty for consolation. Kitty Wilder! But it was all a dream.

Dreams must end. But so long as one lived, one would dream. Only death could end illusions. Only in death could agony subside. But first, one must do penance for crime against others. Then, peace and forgiveness.

“Forgive me, Jeremy,” she whispered to the empty room, which was filled only by firelight. Then she turned and went upstairs, moving slowly but steadily.

The housekeeper appeared. “Shall I serve tea now, madam?” she asked. But Ellen did not hear her. She went upstairs and never once hesitated, never looked back.

C H A P T E R   45

MOVING ALMOST SERENELY, Ellen went to the beautiful German music box which Jeremy had given her many years ago. There was a china figure on the gilt top, which, when the music played, slowly and delicately and airily rotated, lifting fragile pale arms and gently bowing. Secreted within it lay a handful of yellow tablets, which she had begun to save years ago, small lethal sleeping tablets. She counted them and her fingers did not falter. There were twenty-five. She even smiled. She said, aloud, “I knew I would need them someday.”

There was such a calm in her now, even a peace. She stood and looked at Jeremy’s portrait. She climbed on the bed and humbly kissed, not the portrait’s lips as usual, but the painted hand. “Do forgive me,” she said. “Please forgive me, for the wrong I did you, my darling.”

She undressed. She was conscious of no emotion in her at all, no agony, no terror, no grief, no despair, no betrayal. She was not even conscious of the house about her, and the servants within it. There was only a void, softly echoing with the music-box strains, and nothing else existed anywhere, not in the world, not even in herself. She put on her silk-and-lace nightgown, neatly hung up her dress. She brushed her hair. The image in her mirror was not Ellen Porter. It had no existence; it belonged to another woman. There was an abeyance in her, like a silent dream without substance. She filled a glass with water and, standing, slowly and methodically swallowed all the tablets, her eyes fixed and vacant and unseeing. Reality had left her. Yet, she felt she was living in the only true reality which she would ever know.

She had no thoughts. Thoughts were for the living, she said to herself, and she was already dead. She sighed. It was the sigh of a child who had given up all things, and was tired, and would soon sleep. In her sleep she would forget the nightmare of living. She repeated what Pope had said, “This long disease—my life.” Now she was free of that disease, of that mortal illness.

She turned off her lamp and lay down on her bed and covered herself with the silken quilt and closed her eyes. Very slowly, a delicious warmth came to her, a softness, an enveloping night like a murmured tenderness, and she smiled, slept, and murmured once.

She was walking in the old garden she remembered, across long lawns on which the last sunlight fell, and there was a fragrant mist in the trees and the grass was alive and sweet under her feet. There was no end to the gardens. She wore a long pale dress sprigged with violets and a broad straw hat on her head, ringed with the same flowers. She carried a single white rose in her hand, its stem swinging in her fingers, its leaves like polished emeralds. Her step quickened; she began to run a little, breathless and smiling, to a rendezvous. The sun came more resplendently through the boughs of the trees and birds had begun to call and there was the distant sound of fountains.

A tall young man appeared across the lawns, emerging from the forest, and moving quickly towards her, holding out his arms and laughing.

“Jeremy!” she called. “Oh, Jeremy!”

He ran to her, as she ran to him, and he caught her and embraced her, and she felt the warmth of him, the strength of him, the surety, the joy, and the limitless peace and love. His lips were on hers; she raised her arms and put them about his neck.

“You found me. You never forgot me,” she said, and her face was the face of a young girl of seventeen.

“I never lost you,” he said. “I knew where you were all the time. And now, my love, we will go home, together, and never lose each other again.”

“It was such a terrible dream, Jeremy,” she said, holding his hand.

“Yes. But it was only a dream. Now you are home with me.”

It was an accident, they said. She had been very ill, they said. But “they” did not include Ellen Porter’s murderers, and they did not speak to each other of it. However, from that time on Gabrielle was estranged from her brother. She, too, was cured of an old disease.

Francis Porter was broken. He had arrived home to hear from the housekeeper that Mrs. Porter had seemed tired and had gone right to bed. She had been called for dinner, but “she was sleeping so peacefully and I didn’t want to wake her.” Francis himself had gone to Ellen’s bedroom at midnight, for he had become anxious. No one answered his knock; he looked within the room and by the dim light of the hall he saw his wife sleeping. He whispered, “Ellen? I’m home, from Washington.” She did not answer. There was such a profound silence in the room that he did not want to disturb it. He had shut the door gently, and with love, and, weary from his journey, had gone to bed. He had been able to see no one of consequence in Washington, which was in a state of black panic and fearful rumors.

“Why did she do it?” Maude asked her husband, weeping, but he had no answer. Nor did Dr. Cosgrove. “No one,” he said to Charles, “has any answer to anything that happens in the world. At least, Ellen is done with all the weariness of living, and the disappointments and the betrayals. She has peace. It is all we can hope for.” He paused. “No one can save anyone else. We can only save ourselves.”

Ellen Porter was buried on November 13. On that day the Republic of the United States of America was buried also, never to live again. It was the end of an era.

Father Reynolds spoke of both in his prayers: “Requiescat in pace.”

His tears were for the dead woman and his country, and in some way he felt that Ellen had epitomized America, and with both had died innocence, and both had been betrayed by trust.