Ten North Frederick (19 page)

The big westward movement paused briefly, but it paused, on October
14
,
1909
, and the temporary halt was caused by the marriage of two of Gibbsville's best young people. The marriage of Edith Stokes and Joe Chapin was important enough because of the bride and groom and the family connections involved; but it was in addition a source of satisfaction to those residents of South Main and North Frederick who were disturbed by the westward trend. Edith Stokes was South Main; Joe Chapin was North Frederick, and what was more, he was taking his bride to live at Number
10
North Frederick. It was just short of a rebuke to the other young people, those who had decided to build or buy on Lantenengo. If North Frederick was good enough for Benjamin Chapin's son Joe, it was good enough for anyone else in Gibbsville—so said the older ones. Joe's decision earned him their gratitude and their confidence; the gratitude and confidence of people who gave neither freely. It was especially gratifying to learn of Joe's decision because as a rich, handsome and young man, and the prince of an old Gibbsville family, he could have lived anywhere he chose and no one would have criticized him. He could have built a California bungalow in the
2100
-block, and some excuses would have been found for him. Joe Chapin, as Joe Chapin, took on a sort of ready-made popularity among the friends of his parents, but when there were added to that the fact of his money, the fact of his good looks, the fact of his choosing to marry a Gibbsville girl, and the fact of his favoring North Frederick Street over Lantenengo, Joe Chapin established himself as a young man who could be relied upon not to confuse change with progress, and a young man who would not reject the good things of the past merely because they were of the past.

There were those who believed, without insisting upon it, that Edith Stokes was entitled to some of the credit for Joe Chapin's good sense. For of the qualities of her elders found in Edith Stokes, none was more frequently cited than her good sense. “Edith is a girl with remarkably good sense,” they would say. Nor was it a remark made exclusively by the men; the women said it too. But among the men and women who were slightly inclined toward Joe as between Joe and Edith (there was, of course, no real controversy), it was always pointed out that Joe had had the good sense to pick a girl who had good sense. “Joe could have had any girl in Gibbsville, not mentioning any names,” they would say. “But he had the good sense to pick Edith.” There was no one in Gibbsville, at least no one who counted, who would have been so discourteous as to suggest that Edith's enormous good sense might make up for the absence of mere facial beauty. It was still the custom of the North to say of a girl that she looked very pretty today, with no intentional implication that the prettiness was not the case yesterday or likely to be tomorrow. Few girls seriously questioned the compliment, but Edith Stokes was one who never let it pass. “Oh, but I'm not pretty and I know it,” she would say, saying it with such conviction and such complete lack of coquettishness that her honesty contributed to the general regard for her good sense. Just as it was somehow known, somehow common knowledge without its being discussed, that for Edith Stokes there never had been anyone but Joe Chapin. Most other girls would at least have gone through the motions of enjoying the society of young ladies and gentlemen, friends her own age. But Edith stayed away from the picnics and the boating parties at The Run, she found excuses to exclude herself from the sleigh rides and chicken-and-waffle suppers. She rode horseback and played tennis, sometimes with young men friends, but the only young man who had ever taken her to an Assembly was the young man whose name she would bear throughout her lifetime. It was never a question of breaking a date to be with Joe Chapin; when Joe Chapin was in town she would not make dates, so that when he would write her a note, or encounter her on North Main Street, he could always know that whenever he wanted to see her, she would be ready and free. “I don't consider it quite fair to pretend that you're keen on a boy when you're not, and besides, I wouldn't know the first thing about flirting,” she would say.

A girl of great good sense, of honesty and simplicity, so much so that the young man whose approval of her virtues was sought finally approved. She waited for him all through the last years of prep school, of college and law school, hoping to
see
him, merely to
look
at him, when he came home for Christmas (that awful Christmas when he went visiting a college friend in New Orleans and never came home at all). She watched the face become more beautiful, the form more perfect, the manner and the manners so polished and easy through his associations and his travels to distant cities that were to her no more than stars on the map. She had no fully developed idea of what she would do with him if she were alone with him and owned him; her information on the possession of one human being by another was incomplete, based largely on hearsay and logical comparisons of her own body and functions with those of animals. But no man or boy had touched her skin under her clothing nor caressed her on the outside of her clothing, and the caresses she shared with a girl in her single year at boarding school were pleasant and even exciting, but had no finality, not, at least, to the degree that she knew would be possible if she could own Joe. She had owned the girl in school, had surprised herself by the ease and rapidity of her possession of her. The girl wrote love letters to her, did favors for her, performed menial tasks, and risked expulsion night after night by visiting her curtained bed in the dormitory, but the experience, aside from the immediate pleasure, only confirmed for Edith what she had always half known: that a girl would respond passionately to certain caresses that a man could give, and the man she wanted them from was Joe Chapin, who could also give more, but whatever more or less he could give, it would be Joe Chapin or nobody. Thus what passed for her shyness was actually restraint. Toward other girls it was restraint and superior knowledge and experience and lack of curiosity. The ease with which she had taken possession of the girl at school convinced her that it would be no more difficult with girls she had known all her life. With young men other than Joe Chapin the curiosity did not become as strong as the desire to own Joe, and in the years just preceding their marriage she became convinced that when she owned Joe she would be owning someone whom no one else had owned. She had acquired a special wisdom about Joe, and one night in her bed, alone with her thoughts, she realized that he had belonged to no one else. He was intact, virginal, uninformed, and innocent. Her own experience, which had taught her much because she was willing to learn, and the new realization of Joe's virginity, gave her an advantage that Joe could not suspect or overcome. After that she was careful, but there was a change in her, and Joe was proud of the change because, he declared, he felt that in a small way he might be responsible for giving her more confidence in herself. Which was, indeed, the truth. Joe, she was sure, would have had a talk with his father sometime before the wedding, and the mechanical techniques she could learn from him and with him, but what he did not yet know was that there were depths to passionate expression and when she owned him she would use him to explore those depths.

Such pleasures were worth waiting for, and the very idea of risking them for the honors and amusements of social intercourse was foolish and absurd. There were friends of Joe's and of hers who had had relations with women, but they had nothing to offer her. She was more than content to have them think of her as the virgin which technically she was, and the unsuspecting girl that she was not. Moreover, she was content to appear to be naive because her naïveté kept them ignorant of her subtle efforts to make them and their bad habits unattractive to Joe. He had gentlemanly standards, but it would have been easy to compromise his standards if he were allowed to believe that affairs with women were an attractive feature of those of his friends who led that kind of life. She encouraged his friendship with Arthur McHenry, which needed no encouragement, but when she was asked to comment on other friends of Joe's—Alec Weeks, for example—she would say: “You mustn't ask me about people like Alec Weeks. He is your friend, and I don't like to say anything in criticism of your friends. Women see things in a man that other men don't . . . Well, if you insist, I can't help feeling that he's sneaky, and I like honorable men.” The effect was as she wanted it to be. Joe did not give up his friendship with the Alec Weeks type of man, but the Alecs were made to seem unattractive and their conduct unworthy of emulation by honorable men like Joe Chapin and Arthur McHenry. She caused Joe to believe that he had chosen his own way of conducting himself, rather than the Alec Weeks way, because his own way was preferable, superior, more fastidious, and, of course, honorable.

They had many discussions about honor, in which she encouraged him to repeat so often the conventional observations on the subject that he came close to sounding like its principal champion, if not the inventor of it. Because of the layman's association of Honor with The Law, which causes an honorable lawyer to appear to be slightly more honorable than anyone else, she was able to speak with genuine conviction when she uttered her admiration for him as a custodian of the principle. She had no knowledge or understanding of the law, and was quick to say so, but in spite of her remoteness from it she theorized that the study and practice of law offered a fortunate young man the opportunity to learn and employ secrets about honor that were not available to the layman. Honor, indeed, became a secondary career in itself. From discussions of honor, in which they were in total agreement, they sometimes proceeded to discussions of religion, and in such discussions they were again in complete accord, even more so, if possible. And since honor could be illustrated with stories of dishonorable behavior, honor was discussed more frequently and at greater length than religion. Four years at New Haven and the years in the somewhat more inquisitive atmosphere of the Penn Law School had made no apparent change in Joe's religious belief, which was Episcopal, and Edith's acceptance of the same faith enabled her to avoid detailed discussion of a topic that is never settled anyway. Their over-all belief, which was not unique at the time, was that friends who professed the other Protestant religions were likely to be overconcerned with matters of theology; that Catholics (Roman) were people who had lost control of the beauties of ritual; and that Jews were strange Biblical characters in modern dress. The church they attended, Trinity, was comfortably Low and not vulnerable to little jokes about the Pope and incense. Attendance at Trinity was good numerically and afforded a by no means unpleasant opportunity for weekly contemplation of the relationship with God, in sanctified but not severe surroundings and in the company of persons of one's choosing. In Trinity you were in another world, where the first rule was silence, but you bowed and smiled to your acquaintances as though in that other world you were seeing friends from home. Religion was a comfort; Trinity was nice.

If they talked oftener than most young couples about religion and honor, it was not altogether an accident. During what might be termed the early days of Joe's courtship Edith was anxious to have him depend upon her for a companionship that she could offer and that would become a habit with him; a companionship that was not based on qualities that other girls had more abundantly than she. There was, first, her good sense, which everybody knew about. But what everybody did not know about was Joe's unsureness of himself, that had nothing to do with his good manners. His manners were exquisite even in a day when good manners were the rule. But she became convinced of his unsureness of himself when she had her instinctive realization of his virginity. With that knowledge she encouraged him to talk to her and to reveal himself without quite exposing himself. On matters pertaining to the law and honor and religion they were on safe ground; in her company he became an authority on everything they discussed, and above all they were not there to argue. They did not argue. More and more he would permit himself to say what he thought, either as simple statement or hopelessly complicated theory. She listened to everything he said and her questions were slight rephrasings of his statements, which proved to him how attentively she listened and how respectfully she heard. For a year they had no physical contact beyond the clasp of hands, but what she provided was habit-forming and exhilarating and intoxicating. When he left her of an evening she could hear him whistling a Yale marching song and she knew that he was already looking forward to their next meeting. She would wash her face with Roger & Gallet soap and brush her hair, and lie in her bed and want to own him. She did not yet know that there were degrees of technical proficiency in love-making between a man and a woman, as well as fumblings and acute dissatisfaction; consequently in her imagination she gave little thought to his pleasure other than to take for granted that since he was a man, his pleasure would come. Her owning him was for her own pleasure; he would be hers. She never thought that
she
would be
his
. It simply never occurred to her to think of herself as his. Whatever he would do with her—caress her, lie on top of her, insert himself in her—was part of her wakeful dream of undefined sensuality, of which he was the essential and enormously desirable instrument. She was convinced that he never had seen a live nude woman close to, and she would lock her door and parade herself about her bed, wearing no clothing, and pretend that he was lying on the bed and looking at her for the first time. She had reason to be proud of her figure. It was a time of the long, tailored line, when ladies' outfits came in three pieces of skirt, blouse and ankle-length coat, following the natural waistline. The design was to make women look tall, with vertical stitching and piping to further the scheme. Edith was an ideal model for the suits and dresses, and even the hats, which were enormous and elaborate (and expensive), were, if not “becoming,” effective in drawing the attention away from the face that was less than beautiful. No man ever had seen her unclothed, and that too was going to be part of the great sensuality when she owned Joe. She was quite aware that men of her class expected the girls of her class to be virgins, and in most cases the expectation was justified. Not knowing exactly what to expect, limited only by her unlimited imagination, she conducted orgies of the mind with herself after an evening with Joe, while at all other times maintaining a calm that was her public character. It was also the character she presented to Joe Chapin; calm, attentive, interested, sympathetic, eager to learn from him the things of the mind, the intellect.