Savage Beauty (66 page)

If Edna’s letters to Eugen were scant, his to her were voluminous, abundant in their details, pages and pages telling her what he’d done, whom he had seen, how he felt. He kept telling her how beautiful Steepletop was:

 … the hyacinths are in full blossom, large blooms like in Holland … the lawn mowed and trim and neat; the drive nearly raked; the water in the swimming pool, shining in the moonlight like a real body of water. Oh, hell, I cannot describe but I know that never, even at Drafna, did I feel such delight and emotion, at coming home to the most beautiful place in creation.… I lit a fire and sat in the big room, naked looking at the fire, for the first time at Steepletop without you.

Here was a man trying to live by the terms they had agreed upon—an open, free marriage—yet telling her mercilessly of the loveliness that they had created together as he cut his first asparagus, took them to the summerhouse down by the pool, and ate his harvest with “melted fresh Steepletop-butter also a bottle of white wine. I am glad nobody saw me,” he continued. “I felt like a traitor eating them without you. It would have been criminal not to have done it, but I hardly could swallow and I fear I had tears in my eyes. Funny if someone had seen that. Crying over an asparagus.”

Couldn’t she return to Steepletop? They could “go back together, or if you prefer, I’ll stay here.… Let me know what you want to do.…—Let me know. But remember, I was going away for only a month or so, and here I have been away almost a year.”

The next letter was just as long, just as plaintive, and just as filled with domestic details. He had done the income taxes, he would send in the renewal slip for her driver’s license. He begged her at least to give him her telephone number: “
I just must hear your voice again.” Of course, he said, he could hear her voice by thinking of it, “but I do not get it right and it drives me crazy. Am I a nuisance? … I wanted you to know that I can come back at any moment. I am a nuisance, but can I help it that I love you?”

He was not so lonely without her that he did not make plans to see friends: Deems Taylor was going to stay with him, and Margaret Cuthbert was scheduled to come the following week. He’d even driven down to see Norma and Charlie in New City, where Norma had proudly shown him her flower beds and rock garden just beyond their house.

My dear she has nothing in it but the plants you gave her.… Next to the plants are still the little wooden markers with your handwriting on them giving the names and instructions. It was more than I could stand. I had to light a cigarette, and look at any airplane which luckily passed overhead, and tie my bootlace or else she would have noticed.

In these interminable letters Eugen is calling to his wife to return to him, to Steepletop, to the pastoral life they’ve created together, where he is at his fullest as husband. It is spring in the Northeast, the earth is swelling with life, the bees are swarming, the cows are coming to calf, the horses are foaling, Ghost is in heat. Even her mother’s lilacs, which she’d placed near the sunken garden, are white with blossoms. Toward evening he wrote again:

I’ve done the things you told me to do. How long, Edna, how long must I wait? … I will see you soon my dear? Good-night darling Freckles. I am but half alive away from you. Never have I longed for anyone, as I am longing for you. I want you.… I want to see you! and SMELL you! and hear you!

All he received in return was a brief note written on his birthday:

Darling Wham-wham, I had my breakfast this morning with your little picture propped up before me on the tray. I was missing you just awfully. I do a great deal of the time.—I hope Steepletop is beautiful now. It must be, I think. Paris has been clear & very hot the last few days. Today is filthy hot.

She enclosed her license, which she’d just found, and told him to have Norma forge her signature if he could not. “
Please don’t fail me
, Skid-dlepins!” Clearly, she hadn’t received his last letter. How dispassionate and reserved she was, especially in comparison with his outpourings.

As for Eugen, his days were beginning to have a pattern. He got up at seven, made himself a glass of fresh orange juice, worked in the garden, sunbathed and swam, and then drove to Pittsfield to post his letters to her. He had a hunch she’d left the Port-Royal. “
I hate not knowing where you are,” he wrote. “Is it absolutely impossible for the three of us ever to be together?—must one always hide?—Well we’ll have to find out.—We’ll be intelligent and courageous and we’ll find out.—And then others can profit by our mistakes and successes.”

He insisted that he was “pleased with our couple.” But his last sentence read, “I wish I was a couple again,” because there were now two couples. “
Do I write too often?” he asked. Even as he mailed that letter, he wrote another, slipped into an envelope with no salutation and no signature:

What ever happens, what ever you want, what ever changes you may go through: don’t be afraid.—I’ll understand everything.—and I will always love you.—Always love you.—I understand you, I get in your mood, as other people only understand themselves.—no matter what you do, I’ll be as clever understanding and making excuses and justifying, as if I’d done it myself.—so don’t be scared about anything.—

I love you.—
I worship you.—
I know you.—

She had written three letters to his twelve, one of which consisted of two sentences. On May 25, she tried to be more expansive. She told him she’d loved his cables about Steepletop and swimming and described a lavish party she’d gone to the night before, given by Elsa Maxwell:

I wore my new white dress & red jacket & beautiful white slippers with sparkling white buckles & long white gloves & a lovely new glittering handbag: But I was all alone, there wasn’t a person there I’d ever seen before except Elsa herself & the girl she lives with, and I was not at Elsa’s table. And everybody knew everybody else & I felt just like a Freshman the day he arrives at college. It was awful.

People were sweet to her, she told him,

but I had the curse (of course I
would
have—came on just as I was dressing to go) & I felt awful & I felt blue & the music was awful for dancing, Hungarians playing jazz—what you might call “weather sultry”—track slow.… Anyway I was shockingly lonely, and I stayed on & on long after I wanted to go, because I hated so to go alone.

For the first time she mentioned her lover:

George has found a charming apartment, very cheap, two rooms & bath for 800 francs a month. It is on the Boulevard St. Germain just opposite the lovely old church St. Germain des Pres, by the Deux Magots,—but facing on the court, so nice and quiet. He is taking French lessons. I’m going to find an apartment too, and get out of here. It’s really darned expensive here, though it seemed cheap at first. I’ve been, I thought, pretty careful with my money—the only extra dress I’ve bought is one that I got for 2000 francs because it was the model’s dress and just fitted me.

She was going to take an apartment, but not with Dillon, which must have been some consolation to Eugen. Taking an apartment at all, however, suggested that she did not intend to return home soon.

“I love your letters, my darling,” she wrote a few days later, “but I don’t know what to say. For one thing, I don’t see how I’m going to get back into the States at all this summer with all those clothes to pay duty on!” She said it might cost her as much as $1,000 just to get in. Then she gave him a list of people she’d seen:

Allan Macdougall
just called me up, back from Greece & Toulon.

Mary Kennedy
dropped in Thursday & took me to lunch.

Lucie Delarue-Mardrus
took café-au-lait with me Thursday afternoon.

Elsa Maxwell
had me to dinner at her house last night with about twenty charming people.

George Dillon
is coming here to have cocktails with me at 6:30 today, after which we are going out to dine & to the theatre.

Margaret Morris
, of my old Pourville (Dieppe) summer-school days—she was the head of it—called me up yesterday & I am to take tea with her Tuesday.

Pauline Venys
(whom you fished out of the Seine, darling) is at a convalescent home, & doing very well. She’s had a fever, but it’s all gone now. She keeps in touch with me, & I write her. She’s very grateful, & in better spirits.

How disingenuous of her to slip George’s name into her laundry list of encounters!

Eugen was no fool. He said he felt like Sherlock Holmes trying to piece together from the scant clues she threw his way how she truly felt. “
I know you love to be secretive and hate to tell things, but in a couple of months more you will be a total stranger to me and I will have to call you Miss Millay. Silly.” He decided he would not write so often. “
I am ashamed having bombarded you with all my letters and cables.… I will write you once in a while, as I know you will like to hear from me once in a while, but there will be weeks that you will not hear from me.”

“I am not going to be the black shadow between you and George and make you think that you must snatch your happiness whenever the ogre is away,” he told her on June 2. “Settle down quietly, Edna, take a place for a year or come back here with him, do what you like, but do not think of me as the plague of Egypt, or as a husband who with a cold hand any day can be expected to separate two young lovers.”

Tell George, he said, and “tell yourself, that you’re going to be together for ever and ever, or as long as you wish to. As for me, I will not do anything drastic and will live off your money for a year, unless we make some definite decision before that time. But in a year, all three of us ought to know what we want.”

It was the first time any acknowledgment was made that there was a time limit as to how long this could go on. Eugen was telling friends that he’d returned to America for business reasons. “If I stay here the rest of the year, it will not be a secret any more. If you do not mind, I certainly do not. What people think and say is the least of my troubles.” He didn’t want to return to her until he knew she wanted him, “and further I do not want you and George to think that you are snatching, and stealing, happy moments from a cruel world. I am giving you eternity: all your life.”

That afternoon, their caretaker, John Pinnie, stopped in. Eugen got some whiskey, and as they began to talk and smoke, bashful and hesitant, John said;

“How is Miss Millay?” “She is fine.” A minute’s silence. Then: “That’s good,” another silence then: “This is the most beautiful place in miles around.” Then we smoked. “It is strange here without Miss Millay.… it don’t seem natural. I felt sure Miss Millay would be back in her garden for the spring.”

Eugen said it broke his heart the way John kept saying “She’d like some more pines here.” “She’s going to be unhappy about the lambs.”

She, she she all the time.… When he was leaving and I was thinking of putting my arms around him.… Does he sleep in my room with the door of your bedroom open for more air? Has he got to use your bathroom with your little dressing-table with your little Elizabeth Arden bottles on it? Has he got to sit in the big-room of an evening in front of the open fire? Eat in the kitchen, walk in the garden? Weed the perennial garden? Work in the kitchen garden? I love living alone, I like it, but living with a ghost, and such a disturbing and alive ghost: that’s a different story.

“You must understand that I have been absolutely alone here for several days and nights alone with your presence and all your belongings and answering your mail,” he continued.

Forgive me for my little faith, Edna, but I was sure you could not love me, I did not like myself very much … and then I was scared, terribly scared that you loved me sufficiently only to be afraid to hurt me and that I was a stumbling block for you.… and I was miserable. I made certain inquiries and I know now that at any time I can go and live by myself and be economically independent, so that is anyway an obstacle out of the way: you need not bother about that part of it.

In the corner of the last page of his letter he wrote in ink in tiny letters:

“I
do
I
do
love you.”

The balance in their relationship had shifted: Edna, the sick young poet who had married the wealthy, elegant, sophisticated, older European businessman, was now receiving letters from him assuring her and himself that he could support himself without her help.