The Age of Desire (47 page)

Except that every time he does see her, he tries to persuade her that their intimacy will die if they don’t tend to it. Sometimes he suggests that if she won’t be alone with him at the Crillon, then they should check into a small hotel for just a few hours. He has many small urban inns to recommend, most of them tucked away on back streets, most reasonably priced, all reminding her that Morton has been to each of them with someone else. She can’t do it. Outside of Paris, it was different for her, almost acceptable. But in Paris, the thought of a few hours at a second-class hotel feels like a tawdry way to express their love. She wants long, thoughtful walks in the Tuileries, whispers, talks about poetry. She wants him to value their intellectual connection as much as their physical one. But he vanishes, answers fewer of her notes, doesn’t always show up when he says he will. And when she asks if he has begun the book about Paris for Macmillan—if he only knew she’s paid for it!—he merely laughs.

“Will you never learn to leave me alone about that?”

“But I’ve vouched for you. My name is at stake.”

“Nothing whatever will happen to your precious name. I’ll write it when I can.”

Morton. Like a sunbeam she tried to catch in her hand: when she opens her fist, alas, he was only a trick of the light. Soon Teddy will arrive. And any moments with Morton, even long, thoughtful walks, will have to be stolen.

The new apartment is a blessed distraction, assuages the sting of loss. But to really conquer the task, she needs Anna. No one can turn chaos into harmony faster or with more aplomb. A wizardess at keeping receipts, calling tradesmen, filing everything away with ease. Edith has already picked out Anna’s room. Not in the servants’ quarters at all, but right next to Teddy’s. In case he needs her. In case he calls for her. A lovely room with a view of the garden and plaster sprays of lilies of the valley lacing the edges of the ceiling. It will be Edith’s gift to Anna, who has so loyally watched over Mr. Wharton at his worst.

So she is unsettled when she receives a letter on the same day from Anna and Dr. Kinnicut, reporting that Teddy is acting “in a distinctly exalted state” (Dr. Kinnicut), “the unpredictable, giddy way he did last summer” (Anna). Dr. Kinnicut says his greatest fear is that shipping Teddy off to Paris might “send the pendulum back in the other direction.”

But what is Edith to do? She cannot return to the United States. She
will
not. She’d be trading his happiness for hers. This is the only place where she can breathe. Where she can write. Where she belongs. Teddy will simply have to come to Paris with Anna at the end of July, and then she’ll judge his state for herself. Perhaps, she thinks wishfully, he will choose to return to New York in time. She can live on in Paris. And though still married, without scandal or malice, they can live perfectly cordial existences continents apart. Oh, life seems a fragrant day in spring when she thinks of it!

NINETEEN

LATE SUMMER 1909

G
athering up the wayward Teddy, and having White pack for him, since he can’t seem to concentrate from one minute to the next, Anna gets him as far as New York, where they both check into the Waldorf on Fifth Avenue the day before their ship is to sail. But that night as she meets him for dinner—at last, a dinner with Teddy after weeks of hardly seeing him!—they stop at the desk and discover word has arrived from Teddy’s sister, Nannie, that old Mrs. Wharton is very ill and may not live.

“I have to head back up to Boston,” Teddy declares, looking happier than he should to be attending his mother’s deathbed. “I just wish I had the damn car.”

White asks to travel with him.

“Don’t be silly,” Teddy replies. “Go tend to the Missus in Paris.” And in a blink, he is off to Grand Central Station.

“We’re doing the best we can with him,” White tells Anna with a sigh, and excuses himself to follow through with his plan to visit some New York friends.

Perhaps, Anna worries, as she picks at her filet of sole alone in the echoing Waldorf dining room, ugly rumors about Teddy having a paramour have reached Teddy’s mother, and are what has made her so gravely ill. The rumors certainly make Anna queasy. If she consults Edith, she’s afraid Edith will ask her to spy on Teddy, to check into a hotel in Boston and stick close by. So Anna doesn’t tell Edith a thing. She wants nothing more than to escape Teddy’s mania.

She can deal with his melancholia. Every time his spirits dropped, he reached out for her. But now, having been transformed into a mad, childish version of himself, he has pushed her away. What if Edith blames Anna for it? What if Edith is angry yet again at Anna for not caging him in? She’ll have to risk it. Anna wants, she
needs
, to be in Paris with Edith.

All the way across the ocean she is despondent. No word from Thomas. Teddy gone mad. Edith always picking her out as the perfect scapegoat. Anna tells herself soothingly that if things don’t work out, she’ll become a teacher again. How much more reliable and satisfying children can be than adults! And there’s always Kansas City. Jessie Toibin would allow Anna to work in the library with her two days a week if she asked. She’s sure of it. On Sundays, she’d dine with Aennchen and William, Charles and the boys. These daydreams sweep her across the ocean just as surely as the rumbling ship’s motor, the rudders and waves.

By the time Anna reaches Paris, word has come that old Mrs. Wharton has died, leaving Teddy an estate to clean up. Teddy writes Edith that he will stay on in Boston for a while with Nannie.

“Imagine that, Tonni,” Edith says. “Teddy
agreeing
to spend time in Boston. The man hates the place. Perhaps he is becoming less agitated, after all. I think you and Dr. Kinnicut were crying wolf. He sounds perfectly normal.

Anna shakes her head. “I wish you were right,” she says.

But Edith is not fretting over Teddy. She is absorbed entirely in readying the new apartment. Even though it’s evening when Anna arrives, it’s still light, and Edith insists they take a cab from the Crillon and tour the place.

“No matter how tired you are, it will cheer you to no end,” Edith says.

Anna isn’t just tired. She’s soaked in a soporific relief at being near Edith again. I’m like a dog, she thinks, who has paced by the door all night but can now curl up by the fire because his owner has returned. Anna is not saddened at all by viewing herself as a dog. There is nothing and no one Edith loves more than her dogs. In fact, Edith carries Nicette in her lap to the Rue de Varenne.

“See. Nicette has missed you! Watch how she snuggles against you.”

Anna barely has the energy to reach out and touch the silky golden ears of the little dog.

Unlocking the heavy outer door, Edith reveals the apartment house’s inner courtyard, with its Corinthian columns and glowing mahogany doors, the modern garages neatly arranged along the back of the court. Elegant and simple, the place couldn’t suit Edith better. And while the apartment, endless room upon room, has none of the elegance of the Vanderbilt apartment, it is spacious and light. How Anna will miss the old servants’ rooms at the top of 58, though. Perhaps she will cross the street sometimes to see her old friends.

“It’s lovely,” she says.

“It’s going to need our touch, our vision,” Edith says, generously including her. “And this, dear Tonni, is your room! I think it the best room in the whole apartment. Do tell me you like it.” Anna glances over at Edith, who, having set Nicette down to wander the empty herringboned expanses, stands with her hands together, incandescent with the pleasure of giving. She is a changed Edith. It has been just a few months since they saw one another. So much has passed. And time has worn away at each of them. Does Edith look at her just as critically? Anna wonders. For she can’t help noting that Edith has aged visibly. Her eyes are deeper set. And her hair above her ears is sparked with silvery notes. But also there is a girlish sway to her walk these days. A deeper, inner glow that warms her cheeks and softens her jaw. Has Fullerton given this to her? If so, Anna is grateful to him. Grateful that Edith seems so happy.

Anna walks to the window of her new room and peers out at the garden. In the late day heat, rising in waves from the flower beds, the daylilies and lavender shimmer like jewels. The pear trees that run along the fencing rustle and glint as dark as tourmalines.

“Edith,” is all she manages to say.

“You do like it, don’t you?”

“You want me here? In what would be a guest room?”

“We have a guest suite all its own. I want you here in the front of the apartment. I want you happy, Tonni.”

“Do you?” Anna asks. Is it the exhaustion? The relief? Or the fear that this warm moment will soon fade like late daylight when Teddy’s truths are revealed. She has to wipe a tear from the corner of her eye.

“Don’t you dare cry,” Edith warns. “Or I shall too.”

“When you were a little girl, you once told me that when a room overlooks a garden, its ceiling is painted with watercolors.”

“Did I?”

“Look. It is.” Anna points up at the ornately edged ceiling, awash with shifting clouds of color as the garden’s leaves move and sway in the cooling breezes. Baby pinks, azures. Overlapping, breathing. Anna turns to press a kiss on Edith’s cheek.

“Thank you,” she whispers. “I couldn’t ask for more.”

“There will be endless things to do. We can go shopping together. We have to fill this empty place.”

Anna nods. “We should begin as soon as possible,” she says.

The other shoe—Teddy’s shoe, Anna thinks—does not drop for a wonderfully long while. He holes up in Boston doing whatever it is he is doing, and Anna keeps her worries to herself. It is easy to bury them with all the arrangements that must be made for the new apartment. Edith disappears some afternoons, and Anna suspects she may be off with Fullerton, who scarcely makes an appearance. But what does it matter? Her distaste for Fullerton stemmed from her desire to protect Teddy. Now she wants the opposite. Let Edith have her pleasures!

And then Teddy arrives with Nannie, and they move into the Crillon too, Teddy just as full of himself as ever.

“You will soon be kissing my boots, Puss, when you see what I have done with our finances.”

“I rather doubt it,” Edith says drily, looking down at his feet.

“The fact is, I should have been a full-time businessman. Some men get satisfaction out of working and now I see why.”

“He’s a regular entrepreneur,” Nannie says, patting her brother on the back.

Teddy and Nannie are a pair! They eat at restaurants all over Paris and complain about them.

“Why does no one have plain roast beef here? Everything I eat makes me bilious,” Nannie declares one afternoon, fanning herself. Nannie is hot no matter how cool the hotel.

And then Anna sees that Teddy is sinking again. His mouth is drooping beneath his mustache. His eyes take on that dead look once more. He chooses a favorite chair by the fire in the Crillon suite, and even Nannie can’t budge him out of it. But Anna no longer wishes to be his guardian, though now he has begun to call for her again.

“Come sit with me, my friend,” he says to her one afternoon. “You are the only one who understands me.

“I’m sorry,” Anna says. “Edith and I have an appointment with the drapier at the apartment.”

“I do think you’re avoiding me,” he says wearily, asking her no more questions.

When Edith invites Teddy and Nannie to see the changes they are making in the apartment-to-be, they say they will visit on Wednesday. But they demur at the last moment.

“We can’t count on either of them,” Edith whispers to Anna. “Thank heavens we can count on each other.”

Teddy and Nannie finally plan a trip to the Pyrenees together, with Cook at the wheel. As Edith and Anna watch the car disappear around the Place de la Concorde, Edith doesn’t even attempt to hide her satisfaction.

“We could just stay in Paris and work away this time without the Whartons pulling us down . . . but I’ve been thinking . . . come with me to Germany, Anna. Let’s have ourselves a whirl. You can show me all the things you know. I’ll be your student again. We’ll take the train.”

Anna is dizzy with the thought of a trip for just the two of them.

“Just you and I?” she asks. “Now?”

“And why not? Don’t we deserve it?” Together, they map it all out: Munich and Würzburg, Bruchsal and Karlsruhe. And the trip itself is better than Anna imagines. Armed with guidebooks and Goethe poetry, they track their favorite poet, reading quotes, touching old walls, breathing in the scent of a time long gone, staying at exquisite hotels, sharing a suite like sisters.

And except for thoughts of Thomas (should she call him, go see him?), Anna doesn’t think she’s ever been happier. Finding herself back in Edith’s good graces is a gift. A prize. It soothes the brittle edges of her disappointment over Teddy. They travel as equals. There is so much to share. So much to laugh about. And despite their exquisite accommodations, they aren’t too self-important to drink beer in beer halls.

“Imagine my British friends seeing me here!” Edith laughs as a loud band with a tuba plays music that makes even Anna long to get up and dance.

What a fine time Edith is having, steeping herself in German romanticism. Taking in the intricate beauty of towers and gables and frescoed walls. And all without having to worry about Teddy and Nannie, who annoy her so. Anna is enjoying the trip as well. Edith can see the joy in her eyes. And it is good to share it with her.

But Anna is a mostly silent partner. Nodding in agreement. Happy when Edith is happy. Edith can’t help but long for Morton by her side, in her bed.

Unable to suppress her constant longing for him, she starts a postcard for him from Augsburg and ends up with a full letter. She has never been able to hide her feelings from him. She has never learned to dissemble.

How I’ve wanted you today in this absurdly picturesque place, which we have seen under a balmy blue sky, and the brightest sunshine. At every turn, I thought how we should feel it together, or how, for us, the sensation would be deepened and illuminated by your share in it—as a reflection is often infinitely more beautiful than the object it reflects.