The Wharton Plot, page 14
“Does she know?” she asked Fullerton afterwards.
“Of course not.”
Do I know? she had wondered, and elected not to ask. She always felt lies were the worst humiliation he could inflict upon her. And yet he could use the truth—toy with it anyway—to unsettle her as well. Always, he … reversed things. If she did not beg for him, he called her cold. When she showered him with adoration, he accused her of suffocating him. She declared him free to do as he wished; he insisted she did not mean it. And now when she wished to discuss a murder, he wished to discuss love between brother and sister. And not because he truly believed it was the motive for the murder, but because he wished to see her off balance. Il ne m’aime pas.
Last year, Katharine Fullerton had married a Chaucer scholar at Princeton. Seeing the club rising above the gates of Gramercy Park, Edith thought to push it all out into the open. Lightly, she would say, Don’t you know someone at Princeton? But it was not a fight she would win.
“The shooter,” asked Fullerton. “Did he come up from behind or shoot him face-to-face?”
“As I understand it, they were face-to-face. The two witnesses were coming out of the building and they only saw the back of the shooter. One remembered a striped scarf.” Had William Walling worn a striped scarf? She tried to recall.
“But Phillips didn’t say anything?”
“Such as ‘My God, so-and-so, why have you shot me, I thought we were friends’? Nothing so useful.”
“But it was a man.”
In his eyes, a focus that demanded he join her in his thoughts. She found it hard to resist. “Yes, of course a man. What are you implying?”
He put his hands in his pockets. “I find it interesting that Phillips’s marital status was the subject of the final argument between the murdered man and Henry Frevert.”
“Your point?”
“I wonder how Mr. Frevert felt, being kicked out of bed for his brother-in-law.”
She had asked for honesty, she reminded herself. Well, here it was. Camarades should be able to negotiate such a conversation. But she felt his hunger for her distress. She would not give it to him.
“David Graham Phillips was complex,” she said finally. “But rather pure-minded in that frank American way. I feel the arrangement you are suggesting would have struck him as decadent. Aristocratic.”
“Hardly the first hypocrite to rail against what he desires.”
“No, he disliked hypocrisy in matters of sex.” She thought of that pompous introduction to Susan Lenox: There are three ways of dealing with the sex relations of men and women—two wrong and one right.
“He wrote about it a great deal in his novels. So much so that his editor believes one of the more deranged Comstockians might have killed him.”
“So, he liked writing about it. Did he ever … engage?”
She thought of what Henry Frevert had told her. That there had been a woman possessed of wits “worthy” of David Graham Phillips. It was worth noting that Carolyn Frevert had not been possessive of her brother. To the contrary, if her husband was to be believed, she was pleased he had found someone.
Wanting the matter of Henry Frevert’s innocence decided, she announced, “You think Frevert shot his brother-in-law out of jealousy and a wish to reconcile with his wife. But it is not as you suggest. For one thing, the landlady’s account is persuasive. If she wanted a nonpaying tenant out of her house, what better way to evict him than to announce he was suspiciously absent the day his brother-in-law was murdered? Not to mention, the Freverts had been separated for some time. Why would Frevert suddenly take against his brother-in-law so violently as to shoot him?”
Fullerton shrugged, as if the loss of his Greek tragedy bothered him not at all. “Then perhaps a different jealous husband?”
“Perhaps,” she said.
“Do you have a theory?”
She did, but not one she wished to share with him. To do so would invite the possibility of introducing him to the person she had in mind. Which—one could call it jealousy; one could call it whim—she had no intention of doing.
Instead, looking through the bars at the slush-sodden grounds, she remarked on the hubris of building such an ungainly fence around such an unprepossessing bit of park. “It doesn’t make it an Eden, keeping the sinners out.”
“Was it sin?” Fullerton looked at her. “As I remember it was a choice. Ignorance and bliss. Or knowledge and exile.”
“Poor Eve, if only there had been somewhere in Eden to quietly dispose of an apple core.”
“Ah, but could she rely on the serpent’s discretion?”
Again, he was teasing—no, insulting. Ne m’aime pas. It was time, she decided, to assert matters important to her.
Turning to face him, she said, “My letters.”
“I cherish them,” he said, his tone deliberately bland.
“You will have to cherish the memory. I want them back.”
Theatrically, he patted his coat to indicate he did not have them at present.
Impatient, she said, “When you return to Paris, send them to me.”
She waited for his of course. It did not come. What could she say that would not be pleading? You returned Henry’s letters. Henry, so reserved in person, allowed his emotions full and free expression on the page, to a degree that would be shocking to those who did not know him and even some who did. His letters often came with the instruction “Commit this to the flame.” Recently, he had made a bonfire of much of his correspondence, some of it from her. She had grieved, but also felt deep relief.
Now she had a disquieting thought. Last year, she and Henry had rescued Fullerton from his own epistolary folly, giving him the money to retrieve letters of a sensitive nature from a vicious little blackmailer named Madame Mirecourt.
Had Fullerton taken an ugly lesson from Madame Mirecourt?
“If it is money,” she said with difficulty.
“Ah, here it is!” he cried, suddenly furious. “Always with you, it is money. It is what gives you power, so again and again, you brandish it over my head like a whip. How can you say this … to me?”
So—she had been wrong to tell him to pay Frevert. She cringed with remorse, even as a small, exasperated part of her thought, Because you are often in need of money. It should not be heresy to say so.
“Does this mean you’ve decided about Teddy?” he asked. “You’re afraid the letters could be used against you in a divorce?”
His interest surprised her. Intrigued her. But she must not be drawn. “It means I would like my letters back.”
“Why?”
“Because they are mine.” And before he could object, she said, “You have no use for them. You’ve made that clear.”
“Then yes, of course,” he said, straightening. “When we return.”
His careless acquiescence hurt, as it was meant to. And she knew: He was lying. When she was in Paris, the letters would be in London. Or Boston. He meant to keep them, she realized. For what purpose she didn’t know. He would keep her letters, keep her raw, exposed self. And there was nothing she could do about it.
Except one thing.
I will write this, she thought. I will write you and understand you and make you a thing that I create. And I will write that other woman too, that young ardent girl, because I am not afraid of her. I can look at her. I can even look at myself in the reflection of her youth and your obsession with her. I can do that. That power, I do have.
Spotting a taxi on the other corner, she suggested that he go and fetch it.
As she watched him go, she thought of writers and lovers. Really, it was almost unfair that writers could take revenge in print on those who had wounded them in life, twisting the story and its characters any way they liked.
But that was not exactly true, not if the writer was good. Which was to say honest. Something authentic about the beloved usually appeared on the page. Something perhaps even … recognizable.
Susan Lenox. Had she been inspired by a real woman? A real love—and loss? Had Phillips written so much about her so he could, in some way, spend time with a woman he cared for but could not have?
Getting into the taxi, she instructed the driver to take her to Appleton. It was several blocks before she realized she had not said a proper goodbye to Morton Fullerton. In fact, she had all but forgotten him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Susan Lenox did not improve with further reading. Sitting in the execrable armchair, Edith read purely for story, following Susan from the horror of her wedding night to her escape on a steamboat with an idealistic journalist named Roderick Spenser. The steamboat wrecked and the journalist got typhus. Arriving in New York, Spenser tried his hand at playwriting, and Susan worked in a house of bondage, “abandoning her body to abominations beyond belief.” Spenser drank. Susan took opium. Then she met a powerful, successful man named Robert Brent. He was also a playwright. Apparently, there was no other profession to which one might aspire in New York.
Searching for clues to Susan’s identity, Edith found many descriptions of her. Her eyes were “starlike,” her lips “crimson,” her features set in “the clear old-ivory pallor of her small face in its frame of glorious dark hair.” She was slender, she was sensuous, she was perfect. Edith tried to match this paragon to the women in David Graham Phillips’s life. In beauty, perhaps Mrs. Walling. In devotion, perhaps Mrs. Frevert. But in truth, like no woman who had ever actually walked the earth.
Restless, she went to the stack of earlier novels and began leafing through them. Here, she found more women. Bold women, craven women, generous women, selfish women. Saints, harlots, harridans, shrews, helpmeets. But they did, she noticed, have a few things in common. Certain sorts of names came up repeatedly. Certain character traits. Yes, she thought, she is here after all.
Turning the pages of The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig, she read, “She has some brains—the woman kind of brains. If I had the time and it were worthwhile, I could develop her into a real woman.” Insufferable. Perhaps Fullerton was right and a woman had murdered David Graham Phillips … Then she heard a knock and called, “Yes?”
The door opened and Mr. Jewett appeared. “My apologies, Mrs. Wharton, they just told me you were here. I am anxious to know: What do you make of our Susan Lenox?”
Weighing tact and candor, she said, “I am uncertain as to whether Susan Lenox genuinely exists on the page. But she certainly existed for Mr. Phillips. Do you have any idea as to who might have inspired her?”
“Graham once told me that when he was fourteen years old, still living in the Midwest, he saw a beautiful young woman in a wagon. He felt she had breeding. Culture. Next to her was an older man, perhaps a farmer. His suit indicated some level of wealth, but no refinement. He put a hand on the girl and she shrank. Graham said he couldn’t forget the look of noble resignation on her face. To be such a person as she was, yoked to a man who would only appreciate…”
Delicately, he concluded, “… one aspect of her being.”
“So he wrote a novel about her.”
Jewett spread his hands: Apparently so.
Edith considered. Fourteen and living in the Midwest strongly suggested Carolyn Frevert. But Susan Lenox was beautiful. Even in youth, Carolyn Frevert would not have been a beauty. Moreover, Susan was physically alluring. Erotic. That too pointed elsewhere.
And the dull, unworthy man who had claimed her? She could not imagine William Walling in a wagon. But perhaps the man had not been William Walling.
What, precisely, had Anna Walling been back in Russia? The image of a girl bundled off in a wagon could be American. But it also had a certain Slavic feel to it.
Jewett broke her thoughts, asking, “May I know the reason for your interest?”
Thinking of Morton Fullerton, she said, “In every novel, there is a touch of vengeance. I’m curious to know who is avenged in Susan Lenox.”
And who, she thought, might wish to take vengeance in return.
* * *
The Belmont lobby was particularly frantic when she returned. She turned toward the front desk when several things happened. A bellboy passed carrying four cases, and two small dogs took noisy exception to each other, which caused a martyred-looking nurse to wheel her ancient charge’s chair around a gold velvet sofa to avoid them, thereby startling a young chatterbox who was announcing her devotion to Maynard’s fudge. Assailed by the barking of the dogs, the squeaking of the wheels, and the calls of “Excuse me, sir, pardon me, madame,” Edith was momentarily flummoxed.
Then she felt a sudden blow to her shoulder as someone shoved past, jostling her sideways. Furious, she searched through the crowd for the precise person to blame, and saw a dark-haired man, his long slim legs scissoring as he made his way to the elevators. He carried his hat in his hand, so she saw his glossy hair, ever so slightly receding from his high pale forehead. The elevator doors opened just as he approached; he got on with the ease of a man accustomed to doing so.
William Walling, it seemed, was a guest at the Belmont Hotel.
The day before, that might have surprised her. Now she only wondered when he had arrived.
Going to the desk, she asked for her messages. The desk clerk handed her an envelope. Opening it immediately, she read:
A man in this world who does just about what he wishes is liable to be a social outcast, a very prominent member of the Four Hundred, or both.
Perhaps it was vanity, but it almost sounded like an imitation of her style. There were two signifiers: “social outcast” and “member of the Four Hundred.” Which are you? she wondered.
Based on what she now knew, she suspected the answer was both. William Walling would have had an excellent education, which would have taught him proper handwriting. And despite his proletarian pretensions, she suspected he used quality writing paper, such as Crane’s.
She had suspected William Walling when she received the warning to women who strayed from their homes, only to reconsider when Carolyn Frevert insisted that Walling supported Phillips’s work. Why, if that were the case, would he warn her off reading Susan Lenox?
Unless that novel revealed truths about his wife he wished to keep secret. The cultured young girl in the wagon who later became a prostitute—had Anna Walling shared stories of her sordid past with Phillips that he then turned into Susan Lenox? A novel her vain, fragile husband felt humiliating to her—and, more importantly, to him? A disgrace compounded by his wife’s affair with the author? She remembered Mrs. Walling entrancing Walter with her bold black eyes while Mr. Walling looked on, her own certainty that Walling had endured that torment before. Had he watched the same scene in that very room of the Phillips apartment, between his wife and the man who lived there?
All was quiet in the suite on the top floor. As she opened the door, Choumai hopped off his pillow and trundled over to greet her. Taking up the telephone, she asked to be connected. When a woman’s voice came on the line, she said, “Mrs. Walling. This is Mrs. Edith Wharton. I would like to invite you to tea here at the Belmont. Shall we say two o’clock tomorrow? Excellent.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Edith Wharton sat alone in the Palm Garden of the Belmont Hotel and considered the question of beauty. Not with regard to the room, which she found deeply unattractive, but in people. What made a face and form beautiful? One knew it when one saw it, but it was not always easy to say why. (Whereas deficiencies were easy to categorize—she had done so often enough with her own slab of a face.) When creating Lily Bart, she had imagined freshness. A purity that was just beginning to show the traces and smudges of being on display for years. Lily Bart suffered from exposure; unclaimed too long, she had grown just that bit stale.
Seeing Anna Strunsky Walling, nervous and defiant at the room’s entrance, Edith decided she was beautiful. And yet she was a woman who had most certainly been in the world, and Edith guessed she had not always been protected. As she came into the tearoom, her movement suggested power and vigor, but she was not coarse. Her face was uncrowded, her features boldly drawn—strong dark brows; eyes rich and brown as the center of a sunflower; ears that stuck out slightly from her lovely round head; a nose that was a genuine nose, although Edith’s mother would have had something to say about its length, and Edith noticed it herself. Her black hair was parted down the middle; her long white neck was ravishing. Her figure was extraordinary. Yet she was not merely beautiful, thought Edith. She was romantic. A woman to dream on.
Which men had dreamed of her? In Russia, who knew? But in this country, Walter had mentioned a long friendship with Jack London. London was also a journalist, politically minded, a good-looking rough-and-ready sort from America’s West Coast. There were similarities, she thought, between him and the deceased Mr. Phillips.
But unlike Lily, Anna had been claimed, although she would probably resent that statement, insisting marriage had been her choice. But her husband’s presence at the Belmont suggested she had cause to regret that choice. What Edith wished to know was: Where had that regret led her? Where had it led William Walling?
As she made her way into the tearoom, Mrs. Walling’s clear and creamy brow was furrowed with confusion at being summoned to such a place and by such a person. But she gave a cry of delight when presented to Choumai, immediately babbling to the dog in Russian, then French in a way that made Edith feel that even if Mrs. Walling was a socialist, she was at least a dog lover.
“I am reading Susan Lenox,” Edith told her.
Mrs. Walling smiled. “And?”
“I am not sure I share your”—this word Edith had planned beforehand—“ardent admiration of his style. But certainly he has things to say.” She sat back in her chair. “You are quite the champion for David Graham Phillips. Have you known him long?”
“I met them in Paris a few years ago.”
