The Age of Desire (4 page)

“How could you?” she said, her voice as marring as a nail on glass. “Don’t
ever
do that to me again!”

He muttered something in a crushed, angry voice, which took her ears a moment to interpret. “It wasn’t even worth it,” is what he said, and he began to cry. Truly cry. She didn’t know if he was lachrymose from the liquor, or hurt, or angry. But she was horrified. She would have apologized to him if she hadn’t been so miserable, still throbbing with pain, still in shock. Teddy got up from her bed. And in all these twenty-two years, he has rarely returned. When he has, her head has been turned, her eyes squeezed shut. It’s been miserable for both of them. It’s become their silent truce to leave each other alone, to sleep apart. It’s the marriage they’ve made together. She doesn’t know whether he sees other women. She imagines he must have at one time. As long as it is done very quietly, she hasn’t wanted to hear about it. She is only too happy to give him a wide berth.

For years, Edith has wondered how other women seemed to
long
for this shattering intimacy that feels more like injury than love. Why should the Comtesse de Noailles find blissful pleasure where she finds pain? Maybe Teddy did it wrong. More likely, she is a woman not made for love. This, in the end, is what she’s come to believe. That she is mis-made. A woman unlike other women. A freak of nature.

For the first years of her marriage she was miserable, nauseated at least once a day, sometimes even unable to get out of bed. Her great friend through everything has been her old beau, Walter Berry. He writes her often, visits when he can. Having suffered childhood malaria, he’s been ill much of his life. He understands her almost as well as Anna does. Once, a few years into the marriage, when Edith was particularly ill and Teddy his jolly joking self, Walter walked her to her room to lie down.

Tucking her tenderly into bed, he said, “Dear Edith, I have to ask . . .”

“What? Ask me. I don’t keep secrets from you.”

“Okay. I’ll brave it. What, exactly, is it you
see
in Teddy?”

She was very quiet.

“I’ve offended you,” he said.

She still did not speak. She would never be able to explain it even if she chose to.

“I’ll never ask that again,” he said. He looked utterly ashamed. She did not disabuse him of the notion that what she felt for Teddy was deep and abiding love. There was simply no point. She chose Teddy. They are anchored together. She made a vow and she sees no choice but to keep it. And there were years when she did enjoy the best things about Teddy—their love of animals, his happy-go-lucky nature, the way he could tell a story and charm their friends. But it is difficult to recall them now, even when she tells herself to.

In recent years, Walter Berry has become an international lawyer. It’s an impressive and important role in the world, and Edith is proud of him. As much as she has grown to love him, she is still glad she didn’t marry him. Walter would have had no patience with her, would not have allowed her to spurn her marital duties as Teddy has. Yet his presence in her life as intellectual sparring partner and loyal friend is infinitely more precious. She is grateful Teddy doesn’t mind. The way Teddy sees it, he won the contest, and Walter is simply first runner-up. Allowing him to come around just confirms Teddy’s superiority. That the “prize” is somewhat shabby and disappointing seems to have no bearing on Teddy’s sense of triumph.

Edith lies in bed now, and when she closes her eyes, she sees again the resplendent and daunting Anna de Noailles shaking her hand good-bye: such a warm, ironic smile, the dusky stain of her cheeks, the tumble of her dark, infinite hair, the green feathers at her shoulders shuddering with every breath. Mythic.

Tonight, the salon was not as Edith had expected and yet it was more thrilling than all the other evenings at Rosa’s. Can she learn from de Noailles? What if Edith’s own smile could be so seductive? What if she had the power to make Mr. Fullerton’s cheeks color, to make his hands shake?

And Fullerton, with a face she might find in a John Singer Sargent painting. Those icy eyes. Those sweeping black lashes. Why did he watch her all through dinner? When she thinks of it, she experiences a sweet drawing beneath her ribs. What was he thinking as he stared? And what was he about to tell her when Comtesse de Noailles interrupted by entering the party?

In the next room, Teddy finally comes to bed. She hears the familiar groan as he removes his slippers, the scuff of the sheets, the sigh as he settles onto his soft mattress. She soon detects that distinctive snore that rises only from a heavy blanket of brandy. She doesn’t know why tonight—a night so full of new people and ideas and pleasures—the widening distance between them should bathe her in such despair.

Anna Bahlmann slowly climbs the stairs to her room at the top of the
hôtel.
It lies along a hallway she shares not just with Catherine Gross and Cook and Marthe, the Whartons’ servants, but with all the servants in the building. The narrow gaslit passage is made to feel wider with walls the color of clotted cream and pretty prints of odd-shaped houses from Japan. Her room is spacious for a servant’s room, and in the late mornings, when she comes back for a respite after typing up Edith’s pages, sunlight spills from an east-facing window and she likes to lie in its warm embrace. The bed is especially comfortable, with a cherry satin eiderdown and a fat bolster. More than at The Mount, and almost as much as in her beloved rooms at 882 Park Avenue in New York, Anna feels at home here. Now, at the end of her very long day, she finds comfort under the eaves.

Once, many years ago, after years of boarding, she bravely took a flat of her own on the top floor of a house on Ninety-fifth Street. It was airy and clean, and she furnished it with family things her brother sent her from Missouri and a beautiful chest her cousin shipped her from Virginia. She adopted two kittens, and after a long day they would greet her with a symphony of demands. How rich she felt in that little flat! Free. But how lonely! After years graced with the music of other people brushing teeth in the hall bath, arguing, sneezing and singing to themselves, the long silences of her evenings were too accusatory, and ultimately painful, even with feline company.

And then one day Edith came to her and said, “I know you love your little space uptown, Tonni, but won’t you come down and live in Number 882? You’ll have two rooms of your own, a sitting room and a bedroom. You can bring all your pretty things. The kitties can come, of course. It would be absolutely free, and Gross would love your company. Besides, I need you closer to me. The streetcar has disappointed us one too many times.” A month later the narrow house right next to Edith’s became her primary home.

But the top floor of this building in Paris houses a special treat: the common room where an ever-changing cast of servants gathers in the evenings. Sometimes Anna sits by the fire with a book. But more often than not, after a page or two, she turns the book upside down in her lap and chats with the servants from other households. She is keen to know what other families are like, where and how they travel, and how they treat their staffs. Tonight she takes her darning egg and a pair of worn stockings and walks down the hall to see who is in the common room. Though it is very late, she finds Louise, one of the friendliest ladies’ maids, seated in the most comfortable chair by the fire. By her is one of the footmen, and across the room, a seamstress who has come for just a week to sew a new wardrobe for the very wealthy but very fat lady who lives one floor above the Whartons.

Anna has never forgotten what Louise told her when she first arrived: “My mistress only wears her dresses once or twice and often gives them to me. She gives me her jewelry too. She gets tired of everything.”

“But whenever do you wear such grand things?” Anna asked.

“The best ones I have remade for me. The rest I just enjoy having. This was hers.” Anna recalls how Louise plucked a golden chain from her bodice. Dangling from it was a heavy gold seal. Edith has drawers of jewelry similar to this, but Anna can’t imagine Edith giving away a single piece. Could someone be so rich that things of such value hold no meaning? And at that moment, Anna thought of her own great prize, the secret locket she wears against her heart always.
His
locket. Nothing could make her part with it.

“My mistress smokes opium,” Josette, a little French maid with a strawberry mark on her cheek, whispered last week. “Her skin is turning a terrible shade of yellow. Soon her husband will leave her. I see how he looks at her with disgust. I keep dreaming she’s died. I fear I’ll come to wake her one morning and she’ll be cold as ice.”

Anna carries these stories with wonder and sadness, thinking about them for days afterward. If one were lucky enough to have such a life of privilege, how could it be tossed aside so casually? She considers telling Edith about the lady who smokes opium, but stops herself. The story was told in confidence. Doctors do not share information outside the sanctity of their offices. As a governess, as a secretary, Anna has spent a lifetime straddling a life of service and Edith’s world. And despite her middle-class roots, she is more comfortable as a servant after all these years. In the servants’ hall, she’s admired. Edith, lately, sees her faults and points them out too often. Sometimes, Anna feels like a mother whose child has grown beyond her, a child who no longer remembers the tenderness they once shared.

Tonight, unsettled by Teddy Wharton’s growing melancholy, an issue Edith doesn’t seem to acknowledge, Anna chooses the settee near the footman where a glowing oil lamp brightens the corner enough that she can do her darning. She slides the china egg into the toe of one of the stockings and threads up the needle. She is surprised when the young footman launches into conversation.

“I hear your employer is famous,” he says.

She looks up, puzzled.

“Mr. Wharton? He’s not famous.”

“No. It’s the missus who’s famous. That’s what I hear. She’s a famous writer?”

This amazes Anna—that even a footman would have heard of Edith. Is her fame now so widespread? True, Anna has helped Edith with nearly everything she has ever written from the time she was in braids. She answers her mail. Reads notes from the publisher out loud when Edith’s eyes are burning with allergy. She corrects her spelling. She picks up the pile of pages outside her bedroom door every morning to type and tells her when characters don’t seem believable or things don’t make sense to her. She offhandedly mentioned to Edith when she first read
The House of Mirth
that it struck her as ironic that Selden seemed to spend a great deal of his time with just the sort of people he disdained, and the next time Anna typed the pages, Lily Bart was telling Selden exactly that. But Edith famous?

“I wish my mistress was famous,” Louise says. “Anyone can have money. Talent is something few have.”

“That’s so,” the seamstress says.

“You’re Mrs. Wharton’s secretary, are you not?” Louise says, sitting forward in her chair, her eyes suddenly bright.

“Yes.”

“Well, you must read everything, then. You must know every word of her famous books, maybe even put a word or two of your own in there?”