“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 gu
est 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.
Charlotte was too clever to let Edith suspect her of the truth, which was that she regarded the younger woman as an incubator. Charlotte was as far from being a Roman Catholic as a Christian woman could be, but she devoutly subscribed to the belief that in a choice between letting the mother or the infant survive the accouchement, the mother must die, the child must live. The pregnancy affected Charlotte’s attitude toward Joe in gradual and subtle ways that she did not herself immediately observe, but since Joe seemed not to notice the changes, Charlotte, when she became aware of them, was not frightened of their possible effect on his love for her. If she had been caused to believe that there was a danger of diminished love for her, she would have rejected the baby and restored her son to first concern. But Joe too was behaving as though the child were the first ever to be conceived, and his attentiveness to his wife was a mixture of courtliness and platonic love that all but denied the vigor essential to the creation of Edith’s condition. He came home for every noonday meal, and in the evenings he would read to her (and to Charlotte) until nine o’clock, and then he would stay one step behind her as they mounted the stairs. A second bed was placed in their room and he occupied it during the entire time of Edith’s known pregnancy because neither Joe nor Edith thought to ask the doctor’s advice in the matter. What they both quickly forgot was that neither of them had ordered the second bed; it had appeared in their room without specific comment by Charlotte, and had been accepted by them as evidence of practical delicacy on her part.
Someone in the household was always remembering that a baby was on the way, and the someone was not always Edith. Halfway toward her time the luxurious ease that Charlotte arranged for the young wife became monotonous; Edith was not tempted to forsake the comforts or to complain, for each little attention was welcome for the momentary pleasure it gave, but Edith was a strong young woman who was being overprotected from the simplest routines of living as well as from rainy weather, the slightest exertion, rich foods, tobacco smoke, ordinary household noises, and even the comparatively small number of Gibbsville women who were her friends. Charlotte encouraged Edith to have visitors in pairs, never singly, on the theory that a single visitor would talk and talk without restraint, while a party of three was somewhat less inclined to the intimacy of a party of two and its long-winded long-lasting visit. Such visits, Charlotte said, were all right when they were not exhausting, although she never had asked Edith to define the limit of her exhaustion. A visit that lasted more than fifteen minutes was likely to be terminated by Charlotte’s entrance with the candid remark that “we” must rest. The visitors would put down Edith’s mild protests to conventional politeness—and go. As a consequence Edith saw little of anyone who was not a member of the Chapin family or its servants. The servants were among those who never let Edith forget that she was with child, Chapin child. In point of fact Edith was physically stronger than any of the female servants, but they had been sternly commanded not to allow Edith to lift anything or to ascend the stairs without being followed, a safeguard against a backward fall. Under this regimen Edith took on weight to such a degree that her figure could fairly be described as voluptuous. Watching her come in from the bathroom one evening Joe smiled and said: “Sweetheart, you are a lot of woman.”
“I don’t know that that’s a very pleasing remark,” she said.
“I meant it to be,” said Joe.
“It doesn’t make any difference how you meant it. I don’t want to be fat. I hate being fat.”
“I didn’t say you were fat, dearest.”
“You didn’t have to say it. I know I am. What else have I got to do but notice how fat I’m getting?”
“Dearest, I only meant that—your figure is very desirable.”
She got into her bed and he went over to tuck her in.
“Lie down,” she said.
“Do you think I ought to? I don’t think I’d better,” he said. For a while they limited themselves to gentle caresses, stroking of the hands, kissing of the cheek, but it could not last that way. He got out of the bed but she held his wrist tightly.
“You can’t stop now,” she said.
“But we mustn’t,” he said.
“You fool, you can’t leave me this way.”
She had never been so unrestrained, or so noisy in her demands. When they finished she lay there with her eyes closed and a grin of pleasure on her mouth.
“Edith, darling, I’m ashamed of myself,” he said.
She said nothing, appearing not to have heard him.
“I promise never to do that again,” he said.
She opened her eyes and smiled. “Stay here,” she said.
“I can’t. You know what’s liable to happen.”
“What?”
“It may affect the baby. I might hurt you. Maybe I have.”
“Nothing’s going to happen. I’m all right, and so is the baby.”
“I’ll have to talk to the doctor about it.”
“You’ll do no such thing. Other women make love while they’re pregnant.”
“Because their husbands are inconsiderate.”
“Oh, what if they are? Do you think the miners and people like that don’t have intercourse when the wife is pregnant? And they have hundreds of babies.”
“But we’re not miners and people like that. I’m supposed to be a gentleman. I’m ashamed of myself, and if anything happens it’s my fault.”
“Well, nobody will know it’s your fault.”
“I’ll know,” he said.
“But nobody else will, so stop worrying about it.”
“I’ll never stop till the baby is born and you’re all right,” he said.
“Oh, don’t talk like that. We’re not so different from other people, and I’ve been wanting this for months. And I’ll go on wanting it. Good heavens, nobody ever lets me forget that part of myself. Your mother, the servants, you. I think about myself all the time, and you. Everybody’s trying to make me think pretty and holy things—it’s quite the opposite, I assure you.”
“It’s a very difficult time.”
“You don’t know the first thing about it, so stop saying things you’ve heard other people say.”
“Good night, dearest,” he said. He kissed her forehead.
“Good night,” she said. She heard him getting into bed and rustling the bedclothes, finding a comfortable sleeping position. She had no clock to tell her accurately, but she was sure he was sound asleep in less than 360 seconds. She heard the courthouse clock strike for hours.
It was so for many nights and days until the child was born. She was regulated not by the Gregorian calendar but by one of her own devising based on lunar months and confusing even to herself. The clock meant no more: there was a grandfather’s clock on the second-floor landing, a grandmother’s clock in the sitting room, a banjo clock in Edith’s bedroom, a cuckoo clock in the kitchen, all kept wound and all signaling the time on the hour and the half-hour; but Edith never knew what time it was, and cared not at all. She was drowsy a great deal of the time, at least partly because she had been broken of the habit of doing things. When her time, the infant’s time, was nearing, the months preceding seemed to have flown by, and every hour, then every minute, began to count.