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.”