Ten North Frederick (28 page)

“I know, but I don't need them,” said Edith.

“Well, I do,” he said. “Any of the girls need them?”

“No, of course not, Father,” said Edith.

“Well, give me a kiss, Miss. The last one as a miss.” He kissed her and the march to the altar was begun.

Joe was as pale as his tie, but his responses were audible in the good acoustics of Trinity, and when the now married pair turned their back to the altar and commenced the recessional they walked briskly and smiling. It had gone off well, without the breaking of a bridesmaid's garter, a fainting, a coughing spell, a flatulent report, an apopleptic stroke, a child's vomiting, an upset candelabrum, a bass
gaffe
by the organist, a popping of an usher's shirtfront, a case of hiccoughs, a dropped walking-stick in the aisle, a weeping spell, a Socialist's protest. It was as nice a wedding as anyone could hope for, with none of the disturbances that sometimes occur as a result of nervousness, anger, or jubilance. The reception, on which foolish expense had been spared, was in the best of good taste, dispensing with such ostentatious features as out-of-town caterers, florists, and orchestra, and taking on some of the spirit of a large family party. The secret of the principal couple's destination was well kept and when they departed in a closed carriage there was no vulgar attempt to follow them.

They were driven ten miles down country to the Laubach farm, which had an owner's house separate from the quarters occupied by the hired farmer's family. In the late morning they were to be driven to the railroad station and the train to Philadelphia and White Sulphur Springs; meanwhile the Laubach country house, warm and comfortable, lit by kerosene lamps and candles, was theirs. It was a house with which the bride and groom were familiar and when the Laubach coachman deposited their overnight luggage in the hall Edith and Joe were completely alone.

He kissed her. “My wife, my love,” he said.

“My dearest one,” she said. “My husband.”

“Isn't it nice of the Laubachs?”

“Sweet of them. I don't know what we would have done.”

“It would have been awful to take the sleeper.”

“Oh, I couldn't have stood that,” said Edith.

“Everything went so beautifully, don't you think?” said Joe.

“I expect so, dear.”

“I know, you must have been, as my Aunt Jane used to say, in a tizzy.”

“I hope I remembered everyone's name.”

“You did. You were positively splendid. Much better than I was.”

“Well—it's over, and we'll have the rest of our lives to think about it.”

“The happiest day of
my
life,” said Joe.

“And of mine,” said Edith. “Shall I—go upstairs?”

“Do you feel like it? We can sit and talk awhile, if you like.”

“No, my dear. I want to start our life together.”

“Yes.”

“Shall I call you?”

“Yes.”

“When I turn out the light, will you come in?”

“My dearest,” he said.

“But you—I almost forgot.
Dearest
, what will you do?”

“Let's go upstairs together and see.”

They climbed the stairs and went to the room which they knew to be Mr. and Mrs. Laubach's. The bed was turned down.

“You can change in the next room,” said Edith.

“And then when I see the light go out, I'll come in?”

“Yes. I'll try not to be long.”

She took fifteen minutes while he got into his pajamas and heavy dressing gown. When he saw the light go out he tapped on the door and she said, “Come in.” He walked directly in the dark to the bed and removed his dressing gown and laid it on a chair. She was under the covers and they kissed and embraced. He put his knee between her legs and she made a sound like a moan.

“Do you want me to stop?” he said.

“
No
!” she said.

He felt her breasts and she pulled up her nightgown.

“Do it to me, do it to me,” she said. “Hurry.” She made it difficult for him to find her; she was already in the rhythm of the act and could not stop. “For God's sake,” she said. “For God's sake.”

“I'm trying, dearest.”

“
Do
it then,” she said angrily.

The moment he entered her she had her climax, with a loud cry. His own climax followed and immediately she wanted him again, but when she realized it was impossible she lay calmer, while he stroked the hair of her head and kissed her cheek.

“I've been waiting all my life,” she said.

“Doesn't something happen to you?”

“Not what you think.”

“I thought it did.”

“Not always. Am I the first for you?”

“Yes.”

“I hoped so. I knew it. And you'll never be anyone else's, will you?”

“No.”

“You won't have to be. Unless you think I'm too much this way. Do you think I am? Would you like me better if I were cold? Did you think I was cold because I'm shy?”

“I wouldn't want you to be cold, heavens,” he said.

“Oh, dear . . .” she said.

“What?”

“It has happened. What you thought. Oh, dear. When it didn't hurt, I thought—but it has happened. Now you have to marry me.”

He laughed.

“Am I altogether different than you thought I'd be?”

“I don't know what I thought. Except that I love you.”

“I love you too, Joe,” she said.

“We must love each other for the rest of our lives,” he said. He put his head between her breasts and before she fully realized it he was asleep.

“Are you asleep, Joe?”

He did not answer, his breathing was an answer.

“I own you,” she said. “At last.” But he was asleep, and even in her glowing she wondered and doubted. He had let himself get completely possessed by her, and as different from the man she had always known as he could be, and expressing himself into her and with her as he surely had with no one else in the world. But what she owned now was not enough. It was incomplete and he was asleep and distant from her, and the fire they had lit had gone out. And then she began to understand that he was going to take a lot of owning and that she had been wrong in thinking that owning him was going to be so quick and simple a matter as she had hoped and believed. She might own him as completely as anyone else had owned him, and more and more as the years would pass, but she was beginning to see that what she had wanted was a bigger possessing than she knew could exist. She had been naive in her simple want: the ceremony of matrimony, the consummation of it with their bodies. Now, with his head on her breast, she saw that the desire to own him was not to be so easily satisfied, or possibly ever satisfied. It was not Love; Love might easily have very little to do with it; but it was as strong a desire as Love or Hate and it was going to be her life, the owning of this man. He was going to have to be more than a part of her, more than a child she was carrying or had given birth to, more than a dear friend or an essential of life. It was going to be as though she had covered him with a sac and as though he depended on her for breath and nourishment. And it was going to take forever and it never, never could be achieved because if it ever ended the ending would mean incompleteness, and the kind of owning she wanted was continuing and permanent and infinite.

Now as she lay there, enjoying the experience of her body, she was beginning to see that she could possess him through his body and the sharing of tactile pleasures inside herself and on her skin and on his skin (and there would be many such pleasures). But time itself was going to be as much a part of what she wanted as the kisses and the touches. Now she was pleased that he had gone to sleep so quickly, although at first she had not been pleased. Sleep would renew his strength for the tactile, neural pleasures which she planned to enjoy. But easy sleep also meant to her that he was a simple man who could be as nearly owned as she wanted him to be. Yes, it was impossible to own him as she wanted to own him, but that was because infinity was impossible, and as long as she had life she would be owning him just short of completeness, and there would be no resistance from this simple, now sleeping man. At first this new discovery of the enormity of owning him had alarmed her; but as she put her hand on his cheek and let it slide from his cheek to her breast she enjoyed the future. She would give him anything he wanted and she would even teach him to want more than he knew, because all that he could ever want would be so little in comparison with what she would be taking.

She thought of her friends and of marriages she had known, and the details of marriage: the giving of shelter and warmth and food and clothing, the creation and bearing and raising of children; the problems of money and outside relationships; the compatibility and the incompatibility; the ordering of the meals and the choice of curtains; the separations and quarrels and reuniting; the effect of public opinion; the small business of whom to invite and where to educate the young and the suitability of an Easter bonnet. And she smiled. They were all so easy, such insignificant problems when they were problems, and ambitions and hopes and short-lived desires. Now in herself she felt greatness, not mere superiority but greatness. It took greatness to want to own a human being and to come as close to achieving it as she would with Joe. And it was nothing to tell anyone else; no one else could ever understand. She owned the idea itself, she accepted the inevitability of its incompleteness, and the knowledge of her greatness and that she had a life with a great plan were already starting her on a new and unique serenity. And suddenly she laughed at infidelity: what a foolish admission of inferiority to want to squander time with more than one man when the owning of one man was going to be such a fascinating passion! What did it matter if the owning were inevitably unachievable? She had a life with a plan.

There came a time when at last the Chapin-Stokes wedding was a part of the social history of Gibbsville. The town dearly loved to talk about its weddings and its funerals, its Assemblies, and its rare crimes involving members of the elect. Assemblies occurred twice a year and they provided conversational topics throughout the succeeding months; funerals occurred when necessary, which was oftener than Assemblies; crimes involving the citizens of prominence occurred so infrequently that they were unfamiliar conversational exercises to the uninvolved. There was a pattern to discussion of a Chapin-Stokes wedding; the invitation lists were dwelt upon; the conduct of the guests; the women's clothes and the men's when there was some freakish departure from conventional attire; the wedding presents; the luck of the weather. The details of a wedding continued to be good conversational material until it became known that the happy bride was expecting, and at precisely that point the wedding took its place in the social history. It could always be revived, and would be revived so long as any guest survived to talk about it; but as a conversational topic of the first rank it ceased to entertain when once the bride's delicate condition was whispered to her cousins.

In its way, a first pregnancy was a social event; it provided social conversation. There would be speculation as to the sex of the unborn child; there would be impromptu statistical researches based on the record of the bride's family for producing sons, the groom's family record for producing daughters. It was a by no means generally accepted theory that the sex of the child had been determined early in the pregnancy. As the happy swelling became publicly noticeable there were guesses as to how high the unborn infant lay, a vital point to those experienced mothers and observant virgins who held that the sex of the child could be predicted by its location in the belly of the mother.

When more than two good friends were present there never could be a discussion of the act which caused the pregnancy, but it was the only stage which was not considered fit for conversation, so long as the conversation was conducted in discreetly euphemistic terms. Edith's hip measurements came in for repeated discussion and the previous regularity and painlessness of her menstrual periods, and the size of her bust. The single, almost boisterously unuttered hope was that the child she carried would be a boy, or, if a girl, would look more like the father. A boy's looks didn't matter; but for a girl to look like Edith—it was phenomenal how no one seemed to say it but everybody seemed to think it.

At
10
North Frederick Street the possibility of a girl baby was acknowledged, but only because it was a God-fearing household. If God in His infinite wisdom was seeing fit to make this child a female, He must have some reason, and with the Deity one did not argue, one did not question. But the physical and mental preparations were carried on in a frame of mind that admitted the possibility as no more than a possibility and an extremely unlikely happening. Ben Chapin sounded what he intended to be a humorous warning that girls were, after all, being born every day, but in the sitting room and backstairs his slight hedging was treated as though he had defied an established superstition. The expectant mother and the expectant grandmother were in a state of domestic felicity that was more than anything Edith had dreamed of and which proceeded from the moment Joe was permitted to announce the coming event. All her life Edith had had to make her own bed and tidy up her own room; her mother had seen to it that she learn to sew and cook. Likewise, her father had seen to it that she learn to rub down her own horse and hang the tack on the proper pegs. Now in her waiting months she was so much under the benevolence of Charlotte Chapin that Dr. English had to insist on her taking short walks to relieve her constipation. The fact that she had never ceased to hate the chores she had been compelled to do at home made Edith a willing subject of Charlotte's benevolence. And the arrangement was satisfactory to the two women because they mutually understood that it was impersonal, or at least as impersonal as it could be in view of the circumstance that one of them was actually carrying a child. Edith opposed no suggestion or rule or order that Charlotte set up. The rules were all made with Edith's comfort a factor, which made them easy to honor; and because she knew that her mother-in-law was thinking primarily of the grandchild, Edith did not wish for more warmth and less imperiousness in the stating of the rules.