The Wharton Plot, page 2
“They’re the subject of most novels these days, Mrs. Wharton.” The legs unfurled and he turned to face her. “So many happy, silly stories about people tootling around in automobiles from one fussy house to the next, one showy entertainment after another. Dressing, chattering, playing at love. Those books are popular, I’ll grant you that. But that kind of story doesn’t make a bit of difference to the lives of real Americans.”
He was so obtuse, she found it difficult to know: Did he understand that this could be construed as a criticism of her work? Her life and self? (She adored motorcars and could still remember the exhilarating stench of India rubber of her very first, a cream-colored Panhard et Levassor.)
She was pondering her response when Brownell stepped in, saying, “I actually feel Mr. Phillips’s novels have something in common with yours, Mrs. Wharton, in the subject of the contemporary American woman, the, ah, perils of not knowing…”
Edith was about to disagree when Mr. Phillips laughed. “Mrs. Wharton hardly writes about the real American woman.”
She paused. Gathered herself. “I don’t?”
His head reared back in surprise. “A woman of your means? Who spends so much time abroad? What could you possibly know about the American woman of today?”
“But you understand,” she said acidly. “You, Mr. Phillips, understand this singular creature, the American woman of today. The real American woman.”
“I think so, yes.”
“You understand her thoughts and feelings. The world in which she finds herself, the difficulties…”
“Well, I think you and I might define those difficulties differently, Mrs. Wharton. I can accept that in America, most novels are written about women, for women—”
“Magnanimous.”
“—but so many of these novels fail to tell women the truth they so badly need to hear. They perpetuate falsehoods, build up their illusions. No woman on earth has been so ridiculously deceived as to herself and so spoiled as the American woman. The worst of it is, she’s bringing the American man down with her. Did you know that the rate of divorce in America is now two times that of the rest of the Christian world?”
Like a prosecutor, he leaned forward, and for an ugly moment, Edith fancied he had read the gossip about her own marriage.
She said, “Perhaps American women have higher standards.”
“Higher standards, Mrs. Wharton, or appetite?” The legs recrossed. The fingers drummed upon the linen. “There is a certain kind of woman who toils not, neither does she spin. But she consumes, Mrs. Wharton, oh, does she. I tell you, a man is lost forever if he falls into the hands of a luxury-loving woman.”
Folding a piece of candied lemon peel into her mouth, Edith nodded: Go on.
“While her husband labors, she spends. But not on the house that they share, not on the meals she provides him, not even on herself, at least not the part of her that a husband cares about. She grows fat. Slatternly. Rather than have children, she advances herself in society. She cultivates the art of leisure, drifting from one diversion to the next. Fashionable, ornamental, she seeks pleasure in New York, then pleasure in Europe. And lest anyone think her a mere sloth, she dignifies her indolence with nonstop fiddle-faddle about culture and passion. When what she really means is consumption.”
What a joy you must be to live with, she thought. “Tell me, Mr. Phillips, does your wife enjoy your novels?”
She was pleased to see him retreat from the edge of the table. “I am unmarried. I work too much to have time for a wife.”
“Yes,” she said. “That must be the reason.”
But it was a perfunctory sally; his spleen and determination to give offense had made her tired. She gave him her profile, her customary dismissal with bores.
Then she heard him say, “But you know this, Mrs. Wharton. Is not Lily Bart destroyed by her love of luxury? Are we not meant to feel that if she had given herself to Selden, a man of modest means, they might have been happy? I wish…”
Suddenly he seemed to be talking to her, rather than at her. Curious, she said, “Yes?”
“I wish you had given Lily courage. How much more powerful if she had made her choice—yes to love or yes to luxury—rather than drifting into self-destruction.”
There was something wistful in his voice that, despite the criticism, drew her to ask, “And is that the truth, Mr. Phillips? Do you find that people are often courageous? Able to break the rules of their world and come through unscathed?”
For the first time, his eyes were open, free of scorn. “I admit, it’s a rare thing to be able to burn one’s spiritual bridges. But only love gives you the power to say farewell to your old existence and to take flight toward a new one.”
Her first thought was What absolute twaddle. Her second was Why did you not begin with this? I might have liked you better.
Mr. Phillips, she wondered, can it be you are in love?
She felt Brownell was agitated. Well, he had brought this hideous man to her; let him suffer. Irritably, she turned to find the waiter; the table needed clearing. She listened as Brownell insisted they not keep Mr. Phillips any longer. Also that it had been a very great pleasure to see him again.
Then, almost shyly, Brownell said to Phillips, “One hears rumors that your next book is soon upon us. May I know the title?”
“It’s called Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise. Taken me ten years to write, and almost as long to get the cowards at Appleton to publish. The public will not soon forgive me for this one.” He grinned as if the prospect of popular loathing appealed to him.
“Explosive stuff, eh?” guessed Brownell.
“Let’s just say if they’re not scared now—they should be.”
Pushing back the chair as if it were a dog that had gotten too familiar, he nodded curtly to Brownell and then to her, saying, “Mrs. Wharton, a pleasure.”
She returned the pleasantry, matching his tone precisely. She and Brownell waited until Mr. Phillips had passed through the doors of the tearoom, staying silent as they imagined him racing through the vast Belmont lobby, shoving his way through its doors, and hurtling onto Park Avenue. Far below, the subway came and went, causing the table to tremble. Placing one hand gently on the surface, she took up the tongs and gave a sugar cube to Choumai.
“Forgive me,” said Brownell.
“… at some point. Perhaps next year. Around Easter.”
“I didn’t realize his views on women were so emphatic.”
“And so ignorant!” She massaged her temples, then gave it up. What she needed was a cigarette.
She asked, “Are you trying to lure him to Scribner’s?”
“He sells very well,” said Brownell.
Rationally, she knew Brownell’s talk of sales was not intended as an insult; she took it as one anyway. The ranting, successful, oh-so-American Mr. Phillips had left her with the feeling she often had in this country: of being profoundly inadequate and unfairly disdained, both abused and deserving of abuse. Looking at Brownell, she recalled his intense gaze upon her when he first entered the room, the way he examined her as if she were a manuscript. Was she to his liking? Perhaps she was too old-fashioned. Ridiculous, passé. Lacking the dash and energy—the modernity—of a David Graham Phillips.
Hearing shouting and the roar of falling stone, she glanced out the window to Forty-Second Street. It was an unlovely sight. Almost a decade earlier, it had been decided that old Cornelius Vanderbilt’s Grand Central Depot no longer served. With twenty million passengers in a single year, the station was judged to be filthy, overcrowded, even dangerous. So the old depot would be destroyed even as the new terminal was raised in its place. No more steam—all must be electric! Ever since then, they had been tearing up the street, blasting into bedrock, slapping tracks here, there, and everywhere. For years, they had promised a marvel. From what Edith could see, they had achieved only mess.
Hating everything, she reached down for Choumai. But the traitorous creature had sensed her mood and retreated under Brownell’s chair. The table was cleared; there was nothing left with which to find fault. Still, she observed, “I’ve had better food at a French provincial railway station.”
“When do you return to Paris?” Brownell asked.
“We are awaiting my husband’s physician, Dr. Kinnicutt. He arrives from Massachusetts tomorrow. Mr. Wharton is setting off on a world tour; he yearns to see California. But I would like his doctor to see him before he goes. Mr. Wharton has had health difficulties. I think I wrote you in my last letter.”
Brownell murmured sympathetically. “What do the doctors say?”
She attempted a laugh. “Which one? I could write a Molière play on specialists. This one says neurasthenia. That one Riggs’ disease. It’s senile decay. No, it’s gout of the head. Then again, perhaps it’s toothache. But Mr. Wharton’s sister places great faith in Dr. Kinnicutt, and so it is to him I must appeal.” What she did not say was that Nannie Wharton, if asked, would say Teddy’s only difficulty was Edith and her “extravagances.” Nannie would probably enjoy Mr. Phillips’s novels.
The fingers of her right hand ached; she realized that she had been crushing them within the dark cocoon of mink in her lap. She longed to say something banal. Or literary. Something to prove that she was in control of her faculties. But her mind was fogged with misery. That was just one of the awful things about her situation. It made her mute. Not even mute, for she had nothing to say. Her mind was empty. There were days when she opened her eyes in the morning and was not certain she even existed.
Briskly folding up her linen napkin, she revived herself with anger. How dare Brownell compare her to that repugnant man. How dare he say they had subjects in common. His skittish half-reference to the “perils of not knowing.” How coy. How insufferably—
Another memory came, sinuous and unstoppable: the warmth of breath in her coiled hair as he whispered, “That’s something you know nothing about.”
Words spoken by a very different man under very different circumstances. Oddly, David Graham Phillips looked a bit like him. The commanding blue eyes. The flower in his buttonhole. The certainty and vigor as he demanded, “What could you possibly know about the American woman of today?”
To console herself, she seized on the most obviously ridiculous thing about Mr. Phillips: a chrysanthemum. In winter, for heaven’s sake. Did he know its symbolism? A heart left in desolation.
She highly doubted it.
CHAPTER THREE
As he gave Mrs. Wharton time to collect herself, Brownell was reminded of the most astonishing rumor he had heard concerning the Whartons: that Mrs. Wharton had taken a lover.
It seemed unlikely. The woman was nearly half a century old and had never seemed in any way inclined toward that sort of thing, preferring to surround herself with men who for various and discreet reasons had never married. True, she had seemed moved by Phillips’s earnest talk of love and breaking free. But now, looking at her creased, careworn face, Brownell could not credit it. This was a woman drained, not fulfilled.
He felt a soft, rustling presence; the Pekingese was nuzzling his ankle. Withdrawing his feet with as much tact as possible, Brownell said, “This little fellow is a change.”
“I am in the mood for change,” she said quietly.
“Yes, but … das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten.”
He had spoken quickly, and her German was rusty.
“Babies and bathwater,” he explained. “Don’t throw them out together.”
“I am not ending my life in America,” she assured him. “Merely selling a house in New York.”
“But don’t abandon New York as your subject,” he said. “If people want stories of Americans abroad”—or in the wilds of Massachusetts, he thought—“let them read Henry James.”
“I do detest it when people call me the female Henry James.”
“Better surely than when they called you the male Henry James,” he said and was pleased when it raised a faint smile.
The train clattered below them, this time at high speed, causing the lid of the porcelain teapot to rattle. The sugar shifted in its Meissen bowl like sand. The silverware jumped. Moving gingerly in her chair, Edith wondered how anyone lived in this appalling city. How were their nerves not severed and jangling like violin strings pulled to the breaking point? How were their brains not scrambled, their bodies exhausted? The noise alone. In the streets, people, horses, cars, trucks, so many and so crammed, one was left to pick one’s way through fearfully on foot, praying not to be in the way should something suddenly lurch forward without reason.
The city of her childhood had been balanced. So many homes, so many people, room enough that everyone might occupy their own small space in peace. But the number of people in New York had exploded since then from a sedate million or so to five million. All pace and proportion had been destroyed. Instead growth, rampant and indiscriminate. You saw it in the multitude of redbrick buildings, cheaply built and already decaying. The steel, vast brute girders slammed every which way—horizontal, perpendicular—the dripping skeletal supports for elevated trains and the first stark outlines of ever taller, ever uglier buildings. It made one feel as if one were living in a factory, not a city.
And the wires‚ everywhere wires—electric wires, telegraph wires, flung across the city like black spittle. Oh, we must all be connected, insisted the great minds. Leaving her to ask, Truly, must we? Does it bring happiness, being shoved in all together, connection without discernment? Connection without choice?
The busy, busy Mr. Phillips might say this was progress. But was it progress, she wondered, a city so chaotic anything might happen to anyone and no one would take the slightest notice?
“Do New York,” Henry James had commanded. But this had never been a place where she heard her own mind, for all that her mind conjured visions of it that people took for truth. She couldn’t bear to tell the excellent Mr. Brownell that she feared writing about New York because she had lost the feel of it. It had grown beyond her.
She had, in her fragile chair of the Palm Garden, worked herself into a fury. Her anger sluggishly churned in her stomach like a heavy meal, until she felt disgusted with herself. She was old and, worse than old, ridiculous.
“Forgive me, Mr. Brownell. I seem to be impossible these days. You shall have your book, I promise.”
“And shall it be a story of New York?”
His tone was gentle, cajoling, and she smiled, even as she thought, What on earth would that be? It was impossible now to see New York as anything other than something always becoming something else. The train hurtled through once again, its rumble seeming to say, This is the city now, but soon we will be bigger, noisier, more crowded. Love nothing, attach your affections to no street, no building nor park, for we will knock it over in an instant and rebuild. Brutality masked as dynamism. Why, she wanted to ask the most patient Brownell, would you want a story about that?
At her feet, Choumai was restless. Gathering him on to her lap, she said she would try.
Appeased, Brownell inquired as to her plans. Three works of Millet were on view at the American Art Galleries—did that interest her? At Carnegie Hall, the violinist Mischa Elman was giving a recital—that could be charming. Grace Vanderbilt was giving a dinner dance—no doubt she would attend.
“No doubt I shall not attend,” she corrected. “Grace Vanderbilt’s house is a Thermopylae of bad taste.” In a gentler vein, she added, “But I am going to Alice Vanderbilt’s musicale this evening. Caruso and Miss Emmy Destinn are to perform. Tomorrow is my birthday.” She waved off his congratulations. “It is a well-worn tradition, it requires no great celebration.”
“Nonetheless, I wish you many happy returns,” said Brownell.
He was pleased at having rounded off a difficult meeting with emollient pleasantries and was preparing his farewell when Mrs. Wharton said suddenly, “As a matter of fact, I shall be seeing Mr. James during my stay.”
“… Oh?”
“As well as Walter Berry and Morton Fullerton. I wrote you about Mr. Fullerton—he’s a journalist, very good on Paris. I’ve asked them to dine with me here at the Belmont.”
Brownell kept his face composed, even as he remembered that Walter Berry was an old friend of Mrs. Wharton’s—and one of the names whispered by those who accused her of having a lover. “Quite the gathering of minds.”
“The best minds I know. I…” Abstracted, she patted the little dog on her lap. “I have a question I wish to put to them.”
“Matter of life and death, eh?”
He spoke in jest, expecting levity in return. But Mrs. Wharton’s expression remained serious.
“Perhaps.”
* * *
As Mrs. Wharton described her dinner plans, David Graham Phillips was charging down Park Avenue. He had stayed at the hotel longer than he meant to, and now he was late. Not for any particular person or event; he was simply not where he wanted to be and had not done all that he wanted to do that day. Leaving the Belmont, he had considered taking the subway for the sake of speed. But it was only just over a mile to his apartment near Gramercy Park, and whenever possible, he preferred to walk. Once you became dependent on motorized transport, you lost all memory of the body’s capabilities. Then you lost the capabilities themselves. You became an inert … thing to be carted around, pushed whatever way they wanted you to go.
Slowing, he reviewed that last thought. It was limp; why? Thing was wrong. Sloppy. He tried it again.
You became one of the idle …
No, still not right.
Freedom, you lost your freedom. Yes. As this assertion came to him, he envisioned it on a piece of paper, in bold black ink, anticipated the physical release of setting it down.
As he swung onto Thirty-Fourth Street, he imagined throwing off the furred, bejeweled weight of Mrs. Wharton. The conversation had been aggravating. Worse than aggravating—pointless. And yet even now he could not leave it. There were things he should have said, better ways to say what he did. He should have challenged the silly woman more; if he couldn’t change her mind—there wasn’t much to change with that old New York type—he should have at least made her feel her limitations more keenly. Made her see that yes, she could live her life such as it was, but for God’s sake, have the decency to shut up about it. His point about Lily Bart had ended up sounding like praise. Which had not been his intention.
