ELIZABETH HAD BEEN STAYING with Anne, in her shockingly messy and postage stamp-sized apartment under the el, for only two days when there was a commanding knock at the door. Anne had gone out to hear her idol, Emma Goldman, a fiery, free-thinking speaker, give a speech in the Village. “You should come, too, Elizabeth, you’d be inspired,” she had urged. But Elizabeth, desperately needing to be alone with her thoughts after two days and nights of Anne, declined.
Thinking it was Max at the door, Elizabeth hurried to answer it.
Nola was standing on the other side. Dressed in a chic navy blue suit with a white blouse, and a matching blue hat on her head, she looked thoroughly shaken. Elizabeth understood that when Nola left her house for Anne’s apartment, she couldn’t possibly have known what the neighborhood was really like. If she had, perhaps she would have stayed home.
“Where did you get this address?” Elizabeth asked.
“From Max. It wasn’t easy. He really is terribly stubborn, Elizabeth. I can’t see how you can find that attractive. Still, he did help me understand a few things. He isn’t stupid, I’ll grant that much.”
Max had been after her to call her mother, straighten things out. Elizabeth knew he meant well, but she hadn’t seen any point to that. A waste of time … still, here was her mother now, standing in front of her.
Without waiting for permission, Nola moved past Elizabeth, stopping in shock just inside the door. “Good heavens, Elizabeth, you can’t possibly prefer this to your own home! Why, it’s … it’s…” Apparently unable to find a word in her vocabulary that suited Anne’s shabby, messy apartment, Nola fell silent.
Elizabeth closed the door. “What do you want, Mother? Why are you here?”
Nola turned to face her daughter. “I want you to come home. Now. With me. Joseph is waiting downstairs.”
“But I don’t want to. You lied to me. You frightened me. I don’t trust you anymore. I don’t want to live with you.” Ignoring Nola’s wince, Elizabeth continued, “I’ve already spoken to a lovely woman at Vassar, in Admissions. They will allow me to begin classes in mid-January, and they’ll reinstate my scholarship. I’ll be living on campus, coming back to the city on weekends to see Max and my friends here. That’s what I’m going to do, Mother. Until then, I’m staying here. Anne may be a radical, but she has a generous heart.” She moved over to stand at the window. It was filthy with grime, which she perversely hoped Nola noticed. The windows in the Fair house were always gleaming. “I suppose I should thank you. And Claire. If you hadn’t done what you did, and Claire hadn’t told me about it, I might never have left that house. And you would still be telling me what to do and where to go and how to dress and…”
“I won’t do that anymore,” Nola said in a small voice.
Elizabeth laughed. “Yes, you will. You can’t help it.” More seriously, she added, “What you and Dr. Cooper did was unforgivable.”
Nola sighed heavily. She glanced about the room and, finding no uncluttered place to sit, joined Elizabeth at the window. “I don’t know what Claire told you, but Fenton only does what he does for women who lost husbands … sons … on the Titanic. Women who are so terrified of being further abandoned, they really are sick. Heartsick. Frightened. They know what it’s like to lose someone they loved, and they’re frightened to death that it will happen again. So he gives them just this tiny heart condition. Is that so terrible? To make sure there will always be someone there for them.”
“But it isn’t true. It’s a lie.”
“It is true!” Nola’s sudden passion startled Elizabeth. It was so unlike her mother. “It is not a lie! These are women whose hearts are troubled, all the time, every second, skipping beats every time they remember that night. And they remember it a lot. Skipping beats when they think about being even more alone than they already are because the daughter who survived when the son and husband did not is about to marry and move away, or go away to school, or leave for Europe with friends, or join the suffrage movement or take a job in an office building. Their hearts skip a beat when they think of having to spend a holiday all alone in a big house, with no one there to share it. These are hearts already damaged, if not broken completely in two, by what happened out on the sea. They can’t take any more pain, and that, Elizabeth, is true. Fenton Cooper knows that, and he understands.”
A train rumbled by overhead, making it impossible for Elizabeth to be heard. When it had passed, she said quietly, “I’m sorry, Mother. I guess I didn’t realize … you all seemed fine after a while. All of the women. You all went shopping and to concerts and plays, and I thought you were all doing amazingly well. I’m sorry.”
“That’s just how we do things.” Nola paused, then pleaded, “Elizabeth, if you’ll just come home, I promise you things will change. I’ll be different. You can go to Vassar and you can do as you please. I won’t interfere.”
“Mother…”
“I know you don’t believe me. I don’t blame you. But it’s true.”
Elizabeth decided Nola did mean it. Now. At this moment, in this place, her mother meant every word she was saying. But once back in the Murray Hill house, the old behavior would take over. Nola couldn’t help it. The time would approach for Elizabeth to leave and if her mother didn’t actually have an “episode,” she’d come up with some other reason why Elizabeth should “wait a while” before leaving for Poughkeepsie. Perhaps she’d bring up her daughter’s promise to her father. She would think of something. That was just who she was.
“I’m not coming home, Mother. I’m sorry. But…” Elizabeth saw her father’s face as Max had painted him. Brave. Sad. But trusting as he gazed out upon the departing lifeboats that his wife and daughter would survive, would be all right, would go on with their lives when he could not go on with his. “But I will come to see you. Before I leave for Poughkeepsie. And when I come back to the city on weekends. Perhaps we could even go shopping once in a while. Not every weekend, though.” She smiled. “I don’t have the stamina that you have.”
It was almost impossible for Nola to admit defeat. “But it’s so much nicer at home. This place…” She glanced around again. “It’s not very clean, is it? You could stay at home just until you leave for school.”
“No, it’s not very clean. But Anne doesn’t mind. Nor do I, although,” Elizabeth smiled, “I had thought about straightening up a bit while she’s out.” The finality in her voice was unmistakable.
A light died in Nola’s eyes. Just as quickly, another appeared, proving her resilience. “You really will visit me on a weekend now and again? You’re not just saying that so I’ll leave now, are you?”
“Mother, I wouldn’t lie about something like that. I meant it.”
Nola’s eyes filled with tears. “And you won’t forget?”
“I won’t forget. Why don’t we make a date right now, while you’re here? There’s a calendar somewhere in all this mess.” Elizabeth found the calendar, smeared with dried jelly and coffee stains. “There, the last weekend in January, why not then? That will give me two weeks to get settled on campus. I’ll telephone you and let you know how things are going, and we can make plans.” But,” she warned, “no dinners at the Winslows, can we agree on that?”
Nola said with a straight face, “Oh, but they’re so fond of you. Especially Betsy.”
Elizabeth smiled. “Promise me, Mother.”
Nola nodded. “I promise. All right then, the last weekend in January. I shall look forward to it. And perhaps,” she said, turning toward the door, “next summer when there are no classes, you might think about joining me in Atlantic City. Max could go with Jules and Enid and then we’d all be there together, wouldn’t that be fun, dear?”
Elizabeth smiled. That was Nola, trying to sweeten the pot by tossing in Max, when not so long ago she hadn’t wanted him anywhere in sight. “I may look for a job next summer, Mother. For the experience. But well see. Atlantic City is always fun. We can talk about it later. Now I really should clean up around here a bit before Anne gets back.”
Nola took the hint. Though she was hurt and probably, if the truth were known, angry that she hadn’t accomplished what she’d come there to do, she did give Elizabeth a hug. The hug, Elizabeth knew, was a way for Nola to pretend she’d gained more ground than she actually had. But that was all right. Elizabeth wanted the hug, too.
She stood in the doorway watching her elegantly dressed mother cautiously descend the shabby wooden steps, glancing around her the whole time, as if afraid a thief might at any moment jump out and snatch her purse out of her hands. Nola Farr in a shabby building under the el … now there was a sight Max would never paint. He’d shrug and say, “Who would believe it?”
That night, she related to him, in careful detail, every moment of her mother’s astonishing visit. “You helped,” she said when she had finished. “I don’t know what you said to her, she didn’t tell me. But it made a difference. She didn’t argue half as long as she usually does.”
“I wasn’t rough on her, if you’re worried about that.” They were in his apartment, alone, on his old davenport, Elizabeth in his arms, leaning against his chest. “I guess I would have been, before the unveiling. But that business about the paintings, I guess it showed me how differently everyone has dealt with what happened out there on the ocean. Everyone grieves in a different way, seems to me. Maybe that’s why people have such a hard time talking about it. We’re all thinking differently. No common ground, though you’d think that’s exactly what we have, since we were all there. We all went through it. But we reacted differently.” He looked down at Elizabeth, comfortably nestled in his arms. “Are you worried that you’ve broken your promise to your father?”
“No. Because he was wrong about my mother. He thought she needed taking care of, because that’s how their marriage was. And it worked, for them. But it isn’t true. Whether she marries again or not, she can take care of herself. I believe that. She said as much herself, at Alan’s. And I think as long as I don’t shut her out of my life completely, which I don’t intend to do, she’ll be fine.”
Max sat up straight and fished something out of his jacket pocket. “Speaking of marriage…” He held out a small, navy blue velvet box. “This was my grandmother’s. She left it to me.” He opened the box, revealing a simple but beautiful solitaire diamond set in a gold band. “I want you to marry me, Elizabeth. We can get a better apartment, if you want. I have my grandmother’s money. And you can still go to Vassar, still do all the things you want. A weekend marriage is fine with me, for now. Will you?”
Elizabeth took the box from him. “Oh, Max, it’s beautiful! I love it. But … but marriage? Now?” She loved Max with all her heart. She couldn’t have made it through these past months without him. But it had taken her so long to work up enough courage to leave her mother’s house, to be on her own, to make her own life. She would hardly be on her own if she married Max. She would have a husband. No wife she had ever met could be considered “on her own,” though she supposed there were those who were more independent. The women who marched for the vote, who spoke at rallies … some of them must be married. But not knowing any of them personally, she couldn’t say how their marriages were.
Max looked hurt, and disappointed. “You don’t want to marry me?”
“Yes, of course I do.” She couldn’t bear the thought of hurting him. “It’s just … well, could we be engaged now but wait a while to marry? Would that be all right? I love you so much, Max, but I know I’m not ready to be married. Could I just be a student first? There is so much I need to learn before I can be a wife.”
He looked uncertain. “What if you meet someone else up in Poughkeepsie? Someone you like better?”
“Better than you?” Elizabeth laughed softly. “Oh, Max, don’t be silly! There isn’t anyone I could like better than you … love better than you. There just isn’t.” She took the ring from its box and put it on her left hand. Then she lifted his hand and put it to her cheek. “I promise,” she said solemnly, “that I will marry you. If you will promise to wait until I’m ready.”
With the ring on her finger, Max seemed to relax, just a bit. “I promise, though I can’t say I’m happy about it. How do I know you won’t change your mind? You might become one of those women your mother’s always going on about, the ones who have no use for men. You could decide never to marry anyone.”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Elizabeth said seriously. “I have to marry. I’m sure I will need furniture moved one day.”
Max, who was familiar with all of Anne’s sayings, threw his head back and laughed.
Then, to seal their engagement, he kissed Elizabeth thoroughly.