A Prologue to Love

  “I don’t think you will,” said Caroline. (She was terribly frightened, though she sat stolidly in her chair. Her son was looking at her with the eyes of old Fern. He was looking at her with the eyes of the doctor in Switzerland. ) “Go away!” she cried.

  She sat at her desk, her hands pressed hard over her face. Her pain and suffering were too terrible for tears. No one cared for her or understood her, with the possible exception of Elizabeth, who had shyly confided to her earlier that she understood about money and that she carefully read all her mother’s discarded financial journals and the stock-market reports. There was only Elizabeth, Caroline thought distractedly, Elizabeth who knew that money was a trust, Elizabeth who appreciated the paintings of her great-grandfather.

  A knock on the door had to be repeated before she heard it. She said dully, “Who is it?”

  “Ames, Mama.”

  She did not reply at once. Then her incredible hope returned and she said, “Come in.” She dropped her hands to her desk with a feeling of intense prostration. She looked in silence as her son entered the room gracefully, his long body moving in one fluid line. He touched the seat John had sat in and said politely, “May I?”

  “Of course.” What was that terrible sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach, that sense of draining away, of rapidly diminishing vitality? She put the sensation from her and studied Ames, who sat so precisely and neatly, and he reminded her, not of Timothy Winslow, but of Elizabeth. Again her hope stirred, and she could smile a little with a great effort.

  “I wanted to have a talk with you, Mama,” said Ames. “A special talk.”

  Caroline winced. “You want to have your allowance increased. Is that it?”

  He raised his eyebrows and considered her. Her color was practically livid, and her lips had a purplish overcast, and she appeared tired beyond endurance. So John hadn’t got what he wanted. Well, he was a silly brute and had probably riled the old lady with his first words; he had no finesse.

  “It’s considered inelegant to talk about money, except in Boston,” he said.

  “So it is.” Caroline smiled again. “Am I right, then, that you didn’t come here to talk about money?”

  All her children had been shadowy to her, but Ames had been more so than the others. They had been bred for a purpose. Never until today had they actually impinged strongly on her consciousness as human beings with thoughts of their own, desires and ideas of their own, and dreams of their own. She had treated them as her father had treated her; she considered that she had been an excellent mother, instilling respect in them for money, insisting upon frugality, giving them the best education possible, providing for them, saving for them, clothing them. As she had been given, so she gave. It had once bewildered her that they had never extended to her the devotion she had extended to her father. When she saw that they would not, she had lost the last measure of personal interest in them as human beings. They were ungrateful; they did not understand. She did not blame herself for their awful corruption, nor even wonder why they were so different from other children.

  Ames said, “I have the greatest respect and admiration for you, Mama.”

  Caroline was startled from her apathy. She looked with sudden earnestness at her son. “Why,” she said slowly, “thank you, Ames. I’m glad.” She paused. “Why have you?”

  “Because you are a genius,” he said, and as he more than partly believed this, his light voice carried sincerity and conviction. “There are many kinds of genius, though most people don’t understand that. There are the artist, the musician, the composer, the architect, the poet, the philosopher, the scientist, the great statesman or teacher. There is also the genius for making money, and without that genius possessed by a few none of the other arts could exist. Michelangelo, da Vinci, Voltaire, Wagner, to name just a few, had to have patrons. Directly or indirectly, all geniuses benefit from the person who has the genius to make money. To despise the money-making genius is to despise all the others and make it impossible for them to be.”

  This was an aspect of money-making which had never occurred to Caroline before. She considered it, then suddenly reveled in it. Certainly! “You are a brilliant boy, Ames,” she said in a stronger voice, and the starved girl that lived in her rushed into her eyes so that they shone and became warmly beautiful. Seeing this, Ames was startled, himself, at his success.

  “You were never interested in law, as John is,” said Caroline. “But, as I have already told you, it is my intention that all of you, including Elizabeth, must have a thorough education in finance, in world conditions as they affect finance, after your formal education is completed. I do not intend” — and she looked down at her tightly clasped big hands — “that my father’s money, which was a trust to me and my heirs, shall be given into the hands of those who know nothing about it.”

  “That would be ridiculous,” said Ames, inclining his head respectfully.

  Caroline gave him a timid and searching glance, and he was intrigued by its unsophistication.

  “When John has been graduated from Harvard and studied law and business administration, then I intend for him to go abroad. Elizabeth will also go abroad, and eventually you too.”

  “I understand,” said Ames.

  Caroline could not let herself hope again, but again she searched her son’s face. “This is all I have to live for,” she said.

  “Yes, Mama, I understand,” he repeated. Now was the time. “But that’s very sad, isn’t it? I’ve seen the old wreck of the house near Lyme where you spent your summers; I’ve heard rumors of the disgusting house in Lyndon too. Yet you were entitled to some of the graciousness of living, weren’t you? And beauty, and the kind of nice times other girls had. What was wrong with my grandfather that he deprived you like that and made you live like a beggar when he had all that money?”

  Caroline’s face closed darkly; the light went from her eyes. Ames saw this and wondered where he had blundered, and was dismayed. He went on hurriedly, “Money is very, very important, but not as a thing in itself. Is it?”

  Caroline said very quietly, “What would you do with a lot of money, Ames?”

  “I’d spend it on beautiful things,” he said. “I’d have a solid background of it, of course, to protect myself. But I’d buy the handsomest small house possible, either in Boston or New York. Probably in both places. I’d buy a villa on the Côte d’Azure and one in London and another in Rome. I’d search the whole world for their furnishings, so that everything would be perfect and in the best of taste. Not large, gaudy things, or pieces, or pictures. The delicate, the fine. You know, Mama.”

  “Yes,” said Caroline. “I know.” She thought of her Aunt Cynthia. “The ‘boutique’.”

  “I beg your pardon?” said Ames.

  “Never mind. You were saying?”

  “I wouldn’t spare any expense to get treasures I wanted. And I’d surround myself with them.”

  Caroline remembered some of the effete men she had met in her youth who would talk for hours in lyrical voices of a piece of Dresden they had recently acquired, or a small sketch of El Greco’s they had found in Spain, or a rug they had come upon in Afghanistan, or a crusted jeweled cup attributed to at least a pupil of Cellini’s, or a statuette exhumed from the ruins of Pompeii, or a Shakespearean folio, or a first edition of Shelley, or a Grueze figurine, or a Van Gogh bought at an enormous price, or a ‘little necklace’ alleged to have been worn by a princess of the Second Dynasty, or a Chippendale chair, or a Chinese printed silk or scroll. These men apparently lived for useless beauty, for the gathering of scraps and debris. They had a fragile language of their own which had nothing to do with hard reality’s tongue. They often went bankrupt and had to sell their treasures for a tenth or less of what they had paid for them, or their heirs sold them ruthlessly for the money which should never have been spent in the first place, the money so painfully acquired by other men.

  “So that would be what you would do with money,” said Caro
line.

  “Yes, Mama, that is what I would do. You never had beauty in your life, but I want it as you must have wanted it. What else is money for but to decorate life? And to make it pleasant and gracious?”

  Caroline smiled grimly. “I know it is inelegant to talk about money.” A kind of ugly exultation came to her, as if she were confronting Cynthia without fear for the first time and throwing the words of hate and anger in her face, words which had been burning in her since she was a child.

  “We’ll talk about it,” she said abruptly, and struck her desk with the flat of her right hand, and all at once she seemed to enlarge before her son’s eyes, to become formidable. “My father and I didn’t spend our lives getting money to be wasted on trash and worthless objets d’art. I know about your precious collection. I hoped once that you’d get over all that shameful nonsense. Apparently I was wrong.”

  Ames, who now knew that he had lost, came angrily to himself, and his eyes sparkled at his mother. He interrupted: “Wait a minute, Mama. You have a private art gallery of your own upstairs which you hide away from everybody. I’ve heard rumors that you paid plenty for those paintings!”

  Caroline looked at him. “That is another matter entirely,” she said. “There is a reason for my gallery, which you’ll never know. Only one artist’s works are there; I’d never collect another artist’s.

  “No matter. It seems I’m to be defeated everywhere I turn. I’m not going to let my father’s money and what I’ve added to it to be squandered in stupidities and what you like to call the graciousness of living. You are a spendthrift by nature, it seems. And so I have to guard the trust my father gave me. I’ve just told your brother that he’ll get nothing from me but five thousand dollars a year for life when I die, from a perpetual trust. You’ll have to work for a living, as my father worked; you’re no better than he. You’ll have your education, and that is all. You may go now.”

  Ames did not fly into a rage of frustration and hatred as his brother had done. Though he had been dismissed, he sat in his chair and regarded his mother with cold curiosity. “I want to say something too,” he said. “You are a miser, and there’s nothing uglier than a miser. You never knew what it was to live and you want to prevent others from living. Because you never saw, you want others to be blind. Your whole life is a study in ugliness and perversion. Disgusting. Like a mole’s life. What have you ever had — except money? And what has your money done for you? Nothing. Who cares about you? Not even my father. I can’t blame him for what he is doing now. It must have been a terrible life for him here with you. How could he have stood it for all these years?” Ames smiled at his mother. “He didn’t, after all! And I’m glad.”

  He stood up. Caroline’s thoughts were in furious chaos, but she finally fastened on what her son had said about her husband. “What do you mean?” she cried.

  Ames laughed gently. “You don’t know? I don’t intend to tell you. But when you do know — I’m not sixteen yet, but I’m not the only one with eyes in this house, and ears, too. You’re due for a nice fall, dear Mama, and I hope it will be very soon.”

  He bowed like an eighteenth-century gentleman. “All my best wishes for your unhappiness,” he said, and went gracefully from the room.

  When the door closed Caroline jumped from her chair and ran to the windows. The red sun stood over the gray water; the snow and the empty beach below were a picture of desolation. The tide was coming in, black and deathly cold, on the rocks and on the sand.

  A premonition of loss and fear and grief came to Caroline. Where was Tom? She must talk to him! How long had it been since they had talked to each other at all? Months? Years? “Tom!” she cried aloud, and leaned her forehead against the icy window. She heard the rumbling tide come in, and the sun became a dull crimson and sank behind the water.

  She forgot the years in between, and the silence, and the bitterness. She was the girl who had looked from another window, like this, and had seen the young Tom smoking his pipe on the shingle. She was the girl who had seen him move away, and she was the girl who had lifted her heavy skirts and had raced down shaking old stairs and out into the wind and the twilight, calling, crying. Tom had turned to her. He would turn to her now in her extremity, and they would understand each other again. Tomorrow.

  Chapter 9

  Tom Sheldon came home at ten that night, haggard and silent, and thinking. He had come to the end. He had not willed for it to happen this way, but it had happened. He was past forty-six now. He had had a happy and serene life until that accursed day when he had married, not Carrie, but Caroline Ames. That was twenty-one years ago. Twenty-one years in a dark prison, among strangers! He had served his sentence. There was nothing for him here. He had no wife, no real children. He had deluded himself for years, trying to bring kindness and love and understanding to these other prisoners. They had wanted nothing of him and had laughed at what he had wanted to give them.

  John. Elizabeth. Ames. His children! He locked the door behind him and smiled drearily. They were not his children. They were the children of Caroline Ames. “She’s welcome to them,” he said aloud as he took off his coat and hung it up in the cloakroom. It hurt him to say this, but he knew it was true. If he was to have a little of life, the little that was left, he must face facts. He had been refusing to face facts for years. He stood in the cold and unswept hall. Only one meager gaslight burned. Caroline did not like friendly lights burning ‘all over the house, wasting money’. So the house was like a dark cavern, musty and forsaken. He had just left a house full of life and light and warmth and affection. How little it took, even in money, to have a fire and a lamp! It made all the difference to a man’s soul.

  Here it was, the Easter holidays, and the house full of young people! The house was as silent as though completely deserted. He glanced into the drawing room; the little fire had smoldered out; no one had drawn the worn draperies, and so they reflected blackly and meanly the one small gaslight near the mantelpiece. When he had first stood in the completed room Tom had thought of children about that fire, a big fire, and a loving wife and himself watching them and listening to them and laughing with them. He had been stupid not to realize from the very beginning. He thought of John Ames and cursed him simply in his distraught mind.

  Look what you have done to your daughter and her husband and her children, he thought. I hope you are in hell somewhere and that you can see and hear and know everything now. If I thought that by staying here I could still save them and help them, in spite of what I really want, I’d do it. But it’s no use; it never was.

  The house seemed to listen to him. It seemed suddenly filled with alert ghosts pondering what he had thought. He shivered, because he was cold and desperate and lonely, and very, very tired. His father had never been as tired as this, though he had lived to be an old man. It wasn’t work that exhausted a man and broke his spirit. It was loneliness and lovelessness and lack of hope. If there were a way out, a man should take it before it was too late. He had really known it for over two years, but he had hesitated because of his children. Those two years had been wasted.

  He went slowly and heavily up the stairs, hating the worn and grimy carpet, hating the cold and the smell of dust and mice. It had taken only twenty-one years of neglect to reduce a fine house to a hovel, to destroy its beauty and comfort.

  It was late, but he saw the light under Caroline’s study door. The light in John’s room was still burning. He heard the muttering of his sons’ voices. He stood in the hall and listened. The boys seemed to be agitated about something; he heard John utter an oath, and then Ames laughed thinly. There was a feeling that something had happened here, and Tom’s senses became alert. He knocked on John’s door, then opened it.

  A good fire was burning here, as if in defiance. All the gaslights were brightly lit. John was sprawling on his untidy bed, his arms supporting his head, and Ames was sitting near him. Tom did not shrink, as he always did, at the bold and unfriendly glances his sons gave
him. He shut the door behind him and said, “Well? What is it? It must be something or you two wouldn’t be talking about it so late.”

  It was the quiet firmness in his voice, his lack of a smile, his searching and demanding expression, that startled his sons. This was a father they had never seen before. He walked into the room, warmed his hands at the fire while they watched him in silence. He looked about and said, “A filthy mess. You should have more self-respect. Well? What is it?”

  John was so surprised that he sat up, and Ames lost his faintly mocking smile. “We’ve been foxed — someway,” John said curtly.

  “Foxed? By what?”

  “By whom is correct,” said Ames.

  “Are you going to tell me about it?” asked Tom in a hard voice. “Don’t if you don’t want to. But this is your last chance, boys.”

  “What?” asked John, alert.