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Soul/Mate
Joyce Carol Oates writing as Rosamond Smith
For Han and Bill Heyen,
“soul mates”
PART ONE
1
Dorothea Deverell knew herself at a disadvantage.
On this drizzly misty evening of November 14, driving in her secondhand Mercedes to the dinner party that would forever alter the course of her life, Dorothea—thirty-nine years old, widowed for fourteen years, and for all of those years childless—felt the sharpness of disadvantage like an early, ominous, shivering presage of the flu: and did not like the feeling. She did not like it because it was too familiar.
She was already twenty minutes late for the Weidmanns’ dinner party (which she did not much want to attend, in any case, since her lover and her lover’s wife were also to be guests), and she had been so delayed in leaving the Institute (where she was assistant to the Director, a charmingly incompetent gentleman who not only publicly claimed he could do nothing without Miss Deverell’s help but saw to it that the extravagant claim was daily, even hourly, substantiated) she had not had time to hurry home, bathe, calm her thoughts, and change into something more formal, and more feminine, than the navy cashmere suit she had worn that day to work—a Chanel ten years out of date, elegantly shabby, with raised slightly knobby shoulders and long sweeping skirt to mid-calf that gave her the look, as her lover, Charles, once remarked, of a sweetly befuddled prioress in a nineteenth-century French novel. Dorothea dreaded being late for any occasion, however innocently, out of a fear that those awaiting her might guess she really did not want to come at all; sociable gatherings, though the very life’s blood of the unmarried and the staple, so to speak, of her administrative work at the Institute—she was in charge of scheduling lectures, chamber music concerts, art exhibits, trustees’ meetings, charity functions, luncheons, receptions, and many another gregarious event at the community-minded Morris T. Brannon Institute—often filled her with a mysterious malaise.
That morning Charles had telephoned her in her office to ask if she was going to the Weidmanns’ tonight, and Dorothea had said in a weakly ebullient voice, “Of course—I wouldn’t miss one of Ginny’s lovely parties for the world, would you?” “God, yes,” Charles said. He spoke with more than usual vehemence; he was no more naturally sociable than Dorothea, though, like Dorothea, he usually managed to acquit himself well at such events; even, upon occasion, to shine. He was a tall lean greyhound sort of man, in his late forties, with sandy-silvery hair, a fair face splashed with pale freckles, a frowning smile, somber pebble-colored eyes beneath rather prominent brows—trained in the law but reserved, even shy. Ah, yes, enormously shy! He and Dorothea Deverell had been romantically involved with each other, to the ambiguous degree that they were romantically involved with each other, for more years than Dorothea cared to recall. “And is Agnes coming too?” Dorothea heard herself ask, rubbing harshly at an eye; and Charles said, “She plans to be, yes,” with a just perceptible sigh, an exhalation of breath Dorothea would not have noted had she not had so many years’ practice. “Well,” she said. “Well,” Charles said. The line went silent, though not yet dead; like two shy, bumbling adolescents they did not want to say goodbye. Finally Dorothea said, in a resolutely neutral voice, “I’d heard from Ginny that Agnes was sick,” and Charles said quickly, “She was, last week, with a migraine headache, and nerves, and—the usual. But she’s better now. And she intends to come to dinner tonight; she wouldn’t miss one of Ginny Weidmann’s parties, she says, for the world.” “How nice,” Dorothea said dryly. Her lips twitched in a fierce little smile, but of course Charles Carpenter, miles away on the far side of town, could not see.
Ginny and Martin Weidmann, whom Dorothea had known from the days of her marriage—her young, doomed husband had been in fact a classmate of Martin’s at Williams College—lived in the most fashionable section of town, in a splendid old “Italianate Victorian” house with a square central tower, tall narrow fretwork-framed windows, steep shingled roof. The very street was antique and otherworldly: cobbled, in chronic need of repair, banked in so severely at the curb that Dorothea invariably scraped the lower edges of the Mercedes’ fenders whenever she parked in front of the house—as she was now doing. “Why am I here?” she cried aloud. She foresaw that it would be one of those evenings when nothing would happen that had not happened countless times before.
Judging by the cars parked on the street and in the Weidmanns’ circular driveway, all the other guests were here. She recognized the Carpenters’ white Cadillac, on the opposite side of the street, poised as if for a quick getaway. Impractical eye-catching white had been Agnes’ choice though she rarely drove the car; Charles did all the driving.
Dorothea rang the doorbell breathlessly and smiled her bright beautiful smile as Ginny embraced her and scoldingly greeted her—“You’re almost half an hour late, Dorothea! It isn’t like you! We were all worried!” Inside, the hum and buzz of conversation filled the downstairs, like a familiar piece of music; there was a delicious odor of roasting lamb; smells of wine, flowers, fruit. The Weidmanns’ black maid, Tula, came to take her coat away, and for a blurred instant Dorothea had a consoling glimpse of herself in Ginny’s antique Venetian mirror—she did not look nearly so haggard as she felt. Her burnished-mahogany hair fell smoothly about her face as if it had been conscientiously brushed, her large intelligent brown eyes shone with expectation. “How lovely you look, Dorothea, all the same!” Ginny said ambiguously. “That suit is so becoming!”—with a fleeting frown that cut Dorothea’s heart. (For it meant, didn’t it, that the suit had become by now too familiar? that it wasn’t at all the sort of thing Dorothea should have worn this evening?) Ginny was perfumy, chatty, Junoesque, her hostess gown as splotched with color as chintz wallpaper. She was a dear friend of Dorothea’s who did not in truth know Dorothea very well; one of those older, dauntingly generous married women who see it as their task to find the perfect mates for their unmarried female friends. Over the years Ginny had introduced Dorothea to so many eligible bachelors, Dorothea swung between a sense of guilt for having failed her and a sense of outrage for being so frequently hauled up on the auction block, against her will and, indeed, often without her knowing what was going on—until it was too late. She had begun to feel like one of those suddenly stubborn mares who at a certain weary age refuse to “stand” for a stallion and have to be impregnated, if at all, by artificial means.
Thus Ginny Weidmann—who meant, of course, only well—was now hurriedly briefing Dorothea on the subject of tonight’s candidate, another in her seemingly inexhaustible store of very nice men, gentlemanly men, business associates of Martin’s. “Why do you look so surprised, Dorothea? Surely you haven’t forgotten? I told you I was inviting Jerome Gallagher tonight, didn’t I?” Ginny asked.
“Yes, I’m sure you did,” Dorothea said quickly.
Wineglass in hand, husky voice lowered, Ginny provided Dorothea with a hurried compendium of facts regarding Mr. Gallagher to which Dorothea made a spirited pretense of listening. Surely this too was familiar? She understood that, remaining unmarried for so long, she was a sort of enigma to her friends and that after a certain period of time there is something disquieting, even disagreeable, about an enigma. She was trained as an art historian at Ya
le; traveled and studied abroad in her early twenties; came home and met, fell in love with, and married a young French architect, newly an American citizen, named Michel Deverell, who died in an automobile accident on a Boston expressway, aged twenty-eight, when Dorothea was herself only twenty-five years old and recovering from a miscarriage suffered in the seventh month of a difficult pregnancy. And how quickly the subsequent years had passed, how swiftly and seemingly without event her life was passing from her! There was Charles Carpenter, whom she had known since her marriage, and whom, for the past eight or nine years, she had loved, but their affair, their friendship, was a strictly private matter, suspected perhaps by some—by Agnes Carpenter? by sharp-eyed Ginny Weidmann herself?—but not known: decidedly not known. It was Dorothea’s custom, when asked discomfortingly personal questions, to say simply, “I was married once, a long time ago; my husband died when I was twenty-five. I’ve worked for the Brannon Institute since 1982.” She did not willingly elaborate; though shy, she was also stubborn, the sort of person, usually female, who so subtly shifts the subject away from herself, and onto others, the finesse of the maneuver goes unremarked. Vaguely it was thought that Dorothea Deverell had been pregnant when her young husband had died and had lost her baby as a consequence, was thus a doubly tragic figure, and this misconception Dorothea could scarcely correct, for it belonged to the genteel mythologizing of her life to which she had no access: like the belief that she was, for all her well-bred delicacy of manner, actually a woman of enormous unexercised passion (like the proverbial virginal prioress) and that she was an heiress of considerable means who did not therefore require serious advancements in position or salary at the Institute—this, the most invidious notion of all, based on the evidence of haphazard items inherited years ago from an elderly great-aunt, including the 1979 Mercedes-Benz 500 SEL, which was always stalling on the expressway, a well-worn natural stone marten coat several sizes too large for her, and various pieces of costume jewelry, furniture, and household goods. If the mythologizing did not represent her, neither did it betray her, and Dorothea took care not to contradict its general outline. She knew that she was locally admired, even, to a warming degree, well liked: she was lovely, she was reliable, she was beautifully mannered, she was good. Yet even to her face people evinced airs of pity, for, having such advantages, why then did Dorothea Deverell appear so disadvantaged? At the last dinner party at the Weidmanns’ she’d attended, not so many months ago, at which, thank God, Charles Carpenter and his wife had not been guests, a well-intentioned older gentleman had inquired of her at the dinner table, in full hearing of the others, why a pretty girl like herself wasn’t married, his very words being, unblushing, in fact quite forceful and accusing: “Why isn’t a pretty girl like you married?” And Dorothea had smiled and had replied, sweetly enough, though inwardly trembling and feeling a rude hot blush rise up into her face, “I was, once—when I was a girl.”
And the entire table went silent, eyes averted. For a space of several awkward seconds.
Now Ginny was saying, “Oh, and another thing. What is this campaign of Roger Krauss’s against you? I hear such—”
They were midway in the Weidmanns’ polished and sparkling foyer, about to join the festive group in the living room, when, to Dorothea’s dismay, Ginny did a characteristic thing—even to laying an exclamatory hand on Dorothea’s arm and squeezing. Having just thought of this new subject, Ginny, who was all spontaneity, emotion, and thoughtlessness, not unlike an overgrown bullying child, could not keep it to herself for a more felicitous moment but had to thrust it immediately at Dorothea, as if, indeed, thrusting it into her appalled face: “I hear such disturbing things, Dorothea, really! We must talk!”
“But now? Must we talk of that terrible man now?” Dorothea cried with a despairing little laugh.
The older woman, regarding her with some concern, relented and merely shook her head, making her diamond earrings flash and her splendidly glowing red-rinsed hair catch the light. Dorothea’s heart panicked in her breast. She had now to compose her face, her very self, as best as she could, entering the living room in which her unacknowledged lover awaited her—her lover, and the others. Ah, how she did not want to appear in their eyes as she so sadly, emphatically, felt: one of those persons of whom the world says with surprise and pity, But how unfair! how unfair, her life!
Dorothea Deverell had fallen in love with Charles Carpenter by degrees; even, it might be said, against her will. She was a woman of principle and she did not believe in provoking others to violate principle—and Charles was of course a married man. However unhappily and pointlessly, a married man. At every step she had warned herself, You’ll regret this! like a brash child venturing out onto thin ice, ever outward onto thin thin ice, wind wailing in her ears and heart pumping: You’ll regret this! You’ll regret this! How very unlike the precipitous headlong plunge into passion, emotion, and eventually grief she had experienced with the young French architect. (Dorothea had known her husband so briefly, if tenderly, it seemed natural for her to think of him in formal terms. And, dead at twenty-eight, he would remain forever young.) Charles Carpenter was a partner in a prestigious Boston law firm for which Michel Deverell’s architectural firm had done some work; thus the two couples came to know one another socially, if not intimately; but it was during Dorothea’s first flush of local renown, when she was establishing herself as a new bright cultural presence in Lathrup Farms (a suburban village, resplendent on Boston’s North Shore) that she became reacquainted with the Carpenters: with Charles in particular.
One Sunday afternoon he had appeared seemingly out of nowhere close beside her to touch her shoulder and murmur, “Dorothea? Might we talk? alone?—for a minute—back along here?” as with a surprisingly forcible grip of her elbow he led her along a rather slippery marble walkway out of sight and earshot of a crowd of others; and Dorothea, frightened, excited, guilty, had known at once what the man intended and how she would respond. The occasion was a large cocktail reception for some charity purpose held in one of the area’s stately old homes, a neo-Georgian mansion overlooking the Bay, one of those from which Mrs. Carpenter had mysteriously absented herself, requiring of her husband that he convey her apologies and offer, never quite convincingly, an explanation of some kind—usually having to do with health. It would be false to say that Dorothea had not been aware of Charles Carpenter for some time, and aware of his interest in her; that she did not bloom in his company, enlivened by his wit and the vigor of his conversation; that she had not in fact often sought him out at such gatherings, as a way of establishing that the gathering, for her, had some human validity. And now Charles was saying in a hurried undertone, staring at Dorothea’s face, “I don’t want to embarrass you, Dorothea, and I certainly don’t want to alarm you, but I seem to have fallen in love with you, and I thought that you should know.”
Dorothea said softly, wonderingly, “Yes.”
So it began, their romance, their mildly adulterous friendship, with Charles talking and Dorothea listening: an attractive couple in young middle age whose rapt interest in each other would have been (perhaps was?) self-evident to any incidental observer. So long a widow in her own and the world’s imagination, Dorothea had felt herself comfortably a virgin again; her womb, emptied of any substance, was again a virgin’s womb, chaste, tight, and inviolate. Hearing Charles Carpenter’s faltering, agitated, but finally quite moving declaration of love and his desire to see her privately, as soon as possible, if only she would allow it, Dorothea remained strangely calm: as (so memory cruelly tossed up to her) she’d been, at first, when news came of Michel’s death, and she had stood in their little rented Beacon Street apartment listening, nodding, head bowed, nothing to say, only a few practical questions to ask. If her eyes had flooded with tears they were not so much tears of emotion as simply a nervous response, as if she had been slapped hard across the face. You’ll regret this! she told herself coolly, but there she was agreeing just the same to see Char
les Carpenter, a married man, the very next evening. And to tell him, as he loomed dangerously near to her, squeezing her hand in his, that she was very fond of him too: she’d long thought of him, she said, as a special friend, to whom she might have turned in time of trouble.
Yet, after the early delirium of intimacy, the fierce whispered declarations, vows, promises, proposals, their feelings for each other quickly acquired a kind of equilibrium, or stasis. Charles telephoned—or did not telephone; they met surreptitiously once, or twice, or three times a week—or did not meet at all. So weeks yielded to months, and months to years. Eight years? Nine? There were periods when Dorothea seemed in retreat, as if gripped by conscience; there were periods when Charles seemed in retreat, as if nettled or hurt by Dorothea’s display of conscience or stricken by his own. As passion waxed in one it was likely to wane in the other, following a melancholy law of human paradox, so that if Charles suggested telling Agnes everything and asking for a divorce, Dorothea was likely to resist, uneasily reminding him that his wife was not a well woman and would be humiliated by such an event; if Dorothea in an outburst of temper suggested that she’d had enough of subterfuge, she would be seen with Charles publicly or not at all, Charles might point out, reasonably enough, that it was she, with her sensitive position at the Institute, who would suffer the more—“Of course I want us to marry, I want it with all my heart, but is this the right time? Have you thought it through seriously? Have you considered the consequences?” Not for nothing was Charles Carpenter trained in the law.
And so—the years. Dorothea had her work (she was generally believed to be next in line for the directorship at the Institute, when the current director, Mr. Howard Morland, retired: Mr. Morland was sixty-six, no longer much engaged in his position, and very fond of Dorothea Deverell); and Dorothea had her friends, her numerous friends, one of whom was Charles Carpenter. She had the vague hazy warmly comforting conviction that, yes, she and Charles would one day be married, and there would be, in town, a new Mr. and Mrs. Charles Carpenter; perhaps they would live in a new house, in her fantasy one of the fine old restored eighteenth-century houses in the Weidmanns’ neighborhood. When the time was “right.” (Or had Charles said “ripe”?—his voice often dropped to a murmur in Dorothea’s presence.)