His emotions were too chaotic to sort out. He turned his back on her, to avoid saying something hurtful, or humbling himself, or making things worse.
“I’ve ruined it, haven’t I?” she said when he didn’t answer and she could speak again. “Now we can’t even be friends.”
“I don’t know what we can be.”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “If you could believe that I want…exactly what you want….” She despaired. “But it’s not possible.”
“Why not?” He was looking for an opening, a weakness; he already knew why not.
“You know,” she answered, reading his mind, smiling with great tenderness.
“I’d make you happy, Sara.”
“I know that. It’s beside the point.”
“I can’t stand the life you lead.”
“Thank you. But you can’t help me.” He reached for her, touched her cheek, but she slipped away again. “Go away, Alex. Leave me, please, you must.”
“And then what?” He felt thwarted and angry. “What do we do then, Sara, pretend nothing’s happened? See each other whenever you’ll allow it—only in public, of course—and pretend there’s not a damn thing between us?”
“Yes. Exactly that.”
“Well, I can’t.”
She smiled again, hugging herself. “Alex,” she whispered, “don’t make it harder. It’s already—” She made another futile gesture. “Please go.”
He walked away, found himself standing in front of the sink. He slid his hands restlessly along the gleaming metal spigots, the sleek line of the spout. Each second that passed widened the gulf between what he wanted and what he could have. When he faced her again, she was standing in the same posture, but it was as if she had faded, diminished. Burned down. “All right, Sara. Since I don’t have a choice, I’ll do what you want. But will you at least let me know if you need me? Ever, for anything. If I can do anything for Michael. Or if you just—”
“I will.” She nodded vigorously. But she was reaching the edge of her endurance.
“I never meant to do this to you. Don’t tell me again that this was your fault, because we both know that’s a lie.” It hurt to look at her any longer. “Good-bye, Sara.”
She listened to his footsteps fade, heard the front door open and quietly close. Silence flowed back, heavy as snow, smothering her. She swallowed a mouthful of cold tea and nearly gagged. The cup clattered in the sink, startling her. She went into Michael’s room. Looking at him brought her comfort of a sort; she didn’t cry again. Every few minutes she touched him—light fingers on his cheek, a soft kiss on his grubby hand. Hours later, she fell asleep in her chair.
Michael lay flat on his back for five days. Sara ordered a cot moved into the room so that she could stay with him at night. Keeping him entertained and quiet exhausted her and challenged all her maternal resources; by the fifth day she was as glad as he was when Dr. Buell said he might get up. Alex never visited, but each day the post brought an amusing note with the gift of a book or a game or a puzzle. His thoughtfulness moved her, even while it deepened her despondency.
Ben didn’t come either—his business affairs were too pressing right now; besides, the boy was fine, wasn’t he?
Ten days after the accident, Sara decided to go home. She didn’t ask Ben’s permission; she sent a note to his club announcing her decision and the time of her arrival. She let the servants go, but kept the lease on the house for the rest of the summer—Ben might make her return, after all. For now, though, whether he liked it or not, she was taking Michael home.
She could have written to Alex to tell him they were leaving, or called him, even gone to see him at the site. She delayed doing any of those things until the morning of the last day, with less than an hour before the Fall River steamboat left for New York. Then she picked up the telephone and called him.
From the sound of his voice, she knew she’d awakened him—and for the first time she realized that it was Sunday and not quite seven o’clock in the morning. She spent the first minute apologizing, giving away the full extent of her nervousness. Then she explained why she was calling. Michael was improving, but he was such a handful these days, she really needed help. And he missed his friends quite a lot; it would be good for him, especially now, to see them again. They might come back later in the summer, who knew, but right now it seemed best to return home, where they could both rest and recuperate from the accident.
It didn’t sound very logical in her own ears, and she kept rattling on in hopes of achieving credibility by sheer volume of words. But finally she ran down and thanked him for his kindness—and told him good-bye.
There was a lengthy pause. She imagined him raking his disheveled hair with his fingers and rubbing the whiskers on his cheeks. Did he sleep in pajamas? she wondered irrelevantly. A nightshirt? Naked? “Sara,” he said in a husky voice. “This isn’t necessary.” She started talking again, repeating herself, pretending not to know what he meant. His heavy sigh cut her off. In the new silence he asked, “How are you?” and at once all of her defenses crumbled.
“I’m all right. No—I’m tired. Oh, Alex. How are you?”
“I miss you.”
She squeezed her eyes shut.
“I’m sitting here trying to figure out if it’ll be better or worse if you leave. Worse, I guess.”
“Please,” she whispered. This was exactly the conversation she had wanted to avoid. He was quiet for a minute; she could hear his slow breathing. And she sensed his frustration, because from the beginning she had forbidden frankness between them, and anything approaching intimacy. She’d had no choice.
“Don’t forget what I said, Sara. If you need me for anything, call me. I’ll always be here.”
“But I don’t want you to be. Don’t make promises to me, I don’t want them.”
“It’s not a promise, it’s a fact.” His voice lost its edge and turned gentle again. “You don’t have to worry. About me. I won’t do anything to hurt you or to put you at risk. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to be your friend.”
Her friend. She almost laughed, but she managed to say, “Thank you. I’d better go now. Michael sends you his love.”
“Give him mine.”
“I will.”
The next pause was interminable.
“Sara.”
“Yes?”
“Take care of yourself.”
“Yes, and you too.” She hung up abruptly.
It was good that she was leaving, she saw that clearly now. In trying to reassure her, Alex had actually clarified the danger. She ought to feel grateful to him. But what she wanted to do most was cry.
But she couldn’t afford the luxury. And through the window she saw Daisy toiling across the yard in her paisley dressing gown, hair swaying from side to side in a graying plait down her back. Sara got up to
Twelve
“…HIS NAME IS CLAUDE Reynauld, his father and mother are both painters, and he’s an artist to the bottom of his soul. We met in my life class. The first thing he said to me was, ‘Mademoiselle ’Ubbaird, you have a very mandarin sense of style.’ Naturally I fell in love! No, but truly, Sara, I think I love him. We’re together all the time, and it’s hell for me when we’re apart. For him too, I believe. No one has ever made me feel this way; I can hardly describe it. He’s so good and noble and kindhearted—and funny too. We’re always laughing. He wants very much to have a complete relationship, and of course it’s what I want too, but I hang back. He says I’m bourgeois, that I’m still a child listening to my parents, that convention is the death of passion and art and personal growth. Oh, Sara, I’m so tempted! Tell me what to do! We’re nearly the same age, but I’ve always felt years younger than you, and decades more foolish. In my head I agree with Claude, and I long to be everything to him. But I’m afraid, I can’t even say of what. Is it women’s curse always to be the cautious ones? What are we protecting? Is t
here some evolutionary motive that keeps us chaste, something beyond ‘morality’ or the simple need to run away from what’s new and unknown? Oh, my friend, I’m so confused….”
Sara almost knew Lauren’s letter by heart. She refolded it and put it back in her desk drawer. Each time she read it, she had a different response. This time she was struck by the quotation marks Lauren had put around “morality.” Like tongs, they held the word at a distance, demeaned it and made it sound fatuous. Was that Lauren’s conviction now—or merely the influence of noble, kindhearted Claude?
Poor Lauren. If she expected sage advice from her best friend on this subject, she was going to be disappointed. Sara had no idea what to tell her. Her own upbringing had been fairly conventional, if not strictly “moral” in any religious sense; her first reaction was to urge Lauren to marry this man if she truly loved him. Why not marry him? If Lauren knew how lucky she was to be in a position to make that free, joyous choice, she might not be so quick to decry it as “bourgeois.”
But perhaps kindhearted Claude didn’t want to marry her; perhaps he was afraid such a commitment would put an end to his “personal growth.” Then what would she advise Lauren? Spit in his eye—that’s what. But envy lurked at the root of that reaction, and well she knew it. Besides, she was thinking of M. Reynauld in the abstract. If she personalized him, if she imagined him to be, for example, someone like Alex McKie—then everything changed. Black and white turned gray, and her rules flew out the window. For the truth was, if not for Michael, she might have become Alex’s lover.
She thought of him constantly. He’d been right—it was worse, infinitely worse, not being allowed to see him at all. But her memories were acute. She remembered things he’d told her weeks ago, fragments of conversations about his work, his friends, his likes and dislikes. And she caught herself in the midst of shockingly erotic daydreams, fantasies that began with kissing him in the kitchen and ended with desperate lovemaking somewhere in her imagination. This was new to her, this incessant physical longing for a man. She fought it, because it served no purpose except to intensify her unhappiness. She’d given him up, told him “no” without coyness or equivocation, so it was stupid now to wallow in regrets and useless wishing for what might have been. She felt like a goose. And yet, try as she might, she couldn’t let go of her dreams. Thoughts of Alex—calm or sexually charged, lyrical, philosophical, contemplative or salacious—were like flashes of lightning in a pitch-black sky, the brightest moments in a round of days full of manufactured gaity, duty, and dreary responsibilities.
A knock sounded at the closed door to her study. “Come in,” she called.
“Excuse me for disturbing you, but I thought you’d like to know.”
She heaved an inward sigh. “Come in, Mrs. Drum.” Michael’s nanny always prefaced her reports of harmless childish misbehavior in this portentious way. When Sara didn’t respond with sufficient outrage, Mrs. Drum had a way of communicating her disappointment behind a guilt-inducing wall of icy, silent reproach.
But Michael’s transgressions weren’t on her mind today. “I’ve come to speak to you about Miss Eminescu. There’ve been complaints.”
“Complaints about Tasha? From whom?”
“The servants.”
“Why?”
Mrs. Drum drew herself up to her full height, which was not considerable, and pushed out her narrow shelf of a chest. “She orders them about as if she lived here, like she’s the mistress here instead of a guest in the house.”
Sara was flabbergasted. “I beg your pardon, but she does not.”
“I beg your pardon, but she does.”
“Mrs. Drum—”
“You’re not here when she does it, so you don’t know. She waits till you’re gone to your settlement house or wherever it might be, and then she starts ordering people around.”
Sara tapped her fingers on the desk and eyed the nanny with veiled dislike. “Perhaps the servants have misinterpreted things. Tasha’s foreign, and her ways aren’t the same as ours. And of course she’s not used to the presence of servants at all; it’s possible she takes a certain tone to them that’s not quite appropriate and has been misconstrued.”
“No, ma’am, nothing’s been misconstrued. I know because she’s done it to me. She’s tried to send me on errands for her—‘tell the maid to do this, tell the cook to fix that.’ But I’m not having any.”
Now they were getting to it. Wounded pride, that’s what this was about; Tasha had used the wrong tone of voice, and Mrs. Drum had taken umbrage. “I see. Well, I’ll speak—”
“The servants don’t know where she stands, so they don’t know how to act. Some of them do what she says and some don’t. Is she a guest or not? That’s what they want to know.”
“Thank you for telling me this. I’ll certainly.”
“There’s something else.”
Sara sighed again. “Yes?”
“Yesterday morning while you were out, Mrs. Kimmel paid a call.”
“Oh, did she? She didn’t leave a card.”
“No, ma’am, she didn’t. That’s because Miss Eminescu entertained her in your absence.”
She smiled. “ ‘Entertained’ her?”
“That’s right—sat her down in the drawing room, ordered tea, and talked to her like she was you for thirty minutes. The parlor maid said so, and the housemaid verified it.”
“I see. Well, I’m sure there’s an explanation for that, Mrs. Drum. I’ll look into it. Is that everything?”
“Yes, except Charlie O’Shea’s mother called just now to say that they’ll meet you and the boy in the park at four. I said I’d convey that to you.”
Sara’s eyes narrowed in irritation. There was nothing she disliked more about Michael’s nanny than her persistent habit of referring to him as “the boy.” “Thank you,” she said shortly.
“It’s not for me to say, of course, but in my opinion the boy isn’t ready yet for rough-housing in the park with his little friends. He could hurt himself all over again.”
“I appreciate your concern. It’s been more than six weeks since the accident, however, and Dr. Patterson says Michael’s ready to resume his normal activities. Now, Mrs. Drum, have we finished?”
The nanny sniffed, said, “Yes, ma’am,” and took her leave.
“Tasha? May I come in?”
“Yes, of course, come.” Tasha sat up—she’d been lying across the bed, reading the newspaper—and sent Sara a welcoming smile. The remains of tea lay on a tray at the foot of the bed.
“You’re not ill, are you?” Sara asked.
“No—why? Oh, because I’m not dressed! Yes, I was feeling odd this morning, not ill but not myself, do you know? So I didn’t put on my clothes yet. Forgive me—it offends you?”
“No, of course not.”
“Ah, good. I am just reading something of interest here, perhaps you have seen it already. This tells the story of Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s great housewarming in Newport last week. ‘The Breakers,’ they have named their new house. It’s quaint, is it not?”
Sara laughed, but she wasn’t amused; the subject of “The Breakers” had been a source of friction between her and Ben for weeks. “I doubt you would choose the word ‘quaint’ if you could see the house.”
“Yes, I’m sure you’re right. The article describes it here—‘a stately dining room two stories high, most opulent and breathtaking of all the formal dining rooms in Newport. The grand salon is also resplendent, constructed in France, disassembled and packed, shipped to America, then reassembled.’ There is a sixteenth century fireplace in the library, it says, purchased from Chateau d’Arnay-le-Duc in the Loire Valley. How exquisite it all sounds! You’ve seen it, then?”
“Yes, certainly. No one could avoid it.” The seventy-room “cottage” dominated Cliff Walk, dwarfing its neighbors.
“But you did not go to this ‘housewarming’?”
“You know we didn’t. We were here.”
“B
ut—why, I wonder? So many people went.” She went back to her newspaper. “Where is the place …ah, here. ‘The doors of this grand American palace were thrown open in a combined housewarming and coming-out ball for the Vanderbilts’ beautiful daughter Gertrude. Dinner at 8:30 was reserved for a small gathering of thirty of Gertrude’s friends, while the grand assemblage of over three hundred began arriving at 11:00 for the formal cotillion. A special stage was erected in the great hall for a private theatrical event for the entertainment of another two hundred and fifty guests—’ ”
“Yes, I read it,” Sara cut in brusquely. “The reason we didn’t go is because we were not invited.”
Tasha’s luminous black eyes widened in astonishment. “But—” She halted, apparently realizing that to ask “why” again might be tactless. “Oh, I see. What a shame. This makes you sad, does it not?”
“Not particularly.” Sara folded her arms and regarded Tasha with interest, trying to discover if the new look on her face was pity. And she’d noticed something else while the girl read the newspaper story to her: her speech was different nowadays. She still spoke with a heavy Slavic inflection, but she pronounced her words with a decidedly British, not American, accent. Odd, since the tutor Sara had hired for her was a native New Yorker. Was Tasha unconsciously imitating her? The speculation made her uneasy.
“I should feel sad to be excluded from my own …what’s the word? My own peers,” Tasha said positively.
“Would you?”
“Yes. I would wonder what was wrong with me.”
“How interesting. Speaking of that, Mrs. Drum has mentioned to me—”
“Sara?”
She blinked in surprise; she had repeatedly asked Tasha to call her by her Christian name, but until this moment she never had. How strange the word sounded on her lips now. Almost like a presumption.
“If I may say this to you, you don’t look well these days. You seem tired, and not so happy as usual. Perhaps you are working too hard?”