Eight
A fragile loveliness can wither if the adoration of a man disappears. A woman’s strength can atrophy if her husband stops believing in her, and in her exhausted resignation she will sigh her way through the most routine days. Beauty of face and figure is designed to be ephemeral and tends by nature to leave slowly over the years, but I knew a woman whom it abandoned overnight, when she realized she was without the love she was promised at the altar. She was my mother’s closest friend, even though she lived in New York. Instead of writing Maureen an encouraging note, Mother sent me two of her friend’s letters and suggested that I read them to Maureen. “Tell her about the extraordinary life and death and life of Judith Benedict,” she said, “and see if she doesn’t find some inspiration in that. If not, throw your hands up over the situation and rob the house on the way out so it won’t seem so much like a bad waste of time.”
Love, my mother believed, was the only specific for true beauty—an abundance of it could make a woman who was as plain as zwieback go into the streets smiling, with her head high and her shoulders back, and a dearth of it could transfigure a good and glowing aspect into one that drove the woman to lock herself away like a vampire. As for my mother, she appears in her wedding photograph to be a handsome woman, with a healthy body and a furnished mind, the type of woman who is assumed to be responsible, efficient, and kind to animals and old people; but it was my father’s adoration and then the memory of it that elevated her to a dear and perfect splendor. And she was never aware that I knew how she made sure she stayed that way.
She took for granted that intelligence was needed. She believed that a woman had to be bright enough to choose correctly and distinguish between abiding trust and transient infatuation. She believed also that a woman’s intelligence, which she called “the ability and desire to spend as much time in the world of serious ideas as in the shoe shop,” should be swirled in with her other attributes. She spoke of intelligence as heightening the impact a woman could make, the way a cook might scare vanilla batter with just enough nutmeg to make the cake memorable.
She explained that the optimal situation involves heart and mind working together, and that only a woman who is swept away could be ignorant of the way the heart was always pressing for advantages behind the mind’s back. “The heart is a metaphor for the soul,” she told me. “The soul wants to feel good all the time. Feeling good all the time is irresponsible. And someone must be hurt in order for that to happen. The heart will inevitably find you the most all-around charming man in the room, but you should never trust it to decide if he should be kept. The heart throws no fish back in the river. It doesn’t realize that there is always another one coming around the bend.”
Before September of 1918, I had met only one woman, my mother’s friend Judith Benedict, whose ordeal in love approached the misery of my aunt’s. Common sense was available to tell me what to do, but it would work only as far as my uncle let it. I was never so glad to see anything as I was those letters from her friend that my mother sent to North Carolina. She had no idea how many times I had already read them.
After my father and brother died, Mother and I made frequent trips to New York to pick up the threads that had been dropped when my father’s illnesses and Daniel’s troubles denied her the continued luxury of visiting old friends. We were always met in the lobby of the Waldorf for afternoon tea by Judith Benedict Stafford, a lady of phenomenal beauty and immaculate manner whom my mother described as highly original and just as appropriate. My impression of her when I was small was that she was human perfection, and even when I saw her after time had passed, I was still in awe.
In my seventeenth year, the last time Mrs. Stafford would meet us at the hotel, an old gentleman approached and stood before our table, locked in a spasm of bewilderment that did not abate until she told him very gently that although the attention was flattering, she should not neglect my mother and me. He asked if he might touch her garment anyway. “Otherwise,” he said, “I will strangle on my own misery.”
Mother asked what it was like to have one’s face and form cause such commotion, and Mrs. Stafford leaned in to us, poked my mother on the knee, and said, “I know I’m not supposed to enjoy it, but I secretly do.” She said that she was fortunate all around. Everything was a blessing.
We were at home no more than a month when Mrs. Stafford sent Mother a letter that was so quickly shoved into a hatbox on a far shelf that I was compelled to retrieve it. This I did while my mother was across the street consulting my grandparents, and I then began a secretive involvement in Mrs. Stafford’s secret life that preoccupied me until I read the letter she would eventually send from Europe. In this one, she said she had found the answers to the important questions of a woman’s life, and she thanked my mother for showing her the way. Although she and I never spoke of it, the route for my mother led through a suite on the top floor of the Jefferson Hotel that she had been keeping since the third anniversary of my father’s death.
I didn’t know whether or where Maureen would find her joy and will. I wasn’t sure that adequate hope could be born with a child. But Mrs. Stafford had found her joy and will, and so had my mother. Mrs. Stafford had to exile herself from this country, and my mother had only to take the trolley to the Jefferson Hotel, but they had both managed their salvation, and they were both thriving.
I waited until Maureen had finished a stack of hand sewing that had been on her mind to explain why my mother had sent Mrs. Stafford’s letters. I told her about the tea at the Waldorf, how blessed the woman felt to have everything in her life exactly where it needed to be. Before I could say anything else, Maureen asked, “And then what happened to her?”
I handed her the first letter, and said, “This.” We sat there and read together what my mother’s friend had told her six years before.
May 3, 1912
My dear, kind Martha,
This was a shock to me, and it will be to you, which I say so that you do not think that I was hiding any truth or being careful in Mary’s company. (Although I would have been, for it is not fit to be told.) I cannot believe that it was five weeks ago that we were together. This morning makes an hour seem like a year. I have been staggered beyond the human capacity for staggering. Perhaps when I tell you what happened, some of the outrage will leave me. It is so bad that I lay down to try to sleep a short while ago, and in the five minutes I managed to stay out, I dreamed there was a life’s worth of nightmares.
Remember when we were girls together?Remember when we were at Barnard? We planned a love match and swore never to settle for less. I had it, and now it is gone. Not to say that my husband has died, though if he jumped off the roof today, I would reach down, get his billfold, and walk on. Sorry to sound this way, but he has already taxed my sympathy enough.
After I returned from a dental appointment this morning, I found him in my bed with a tubercular-looking little tramp. Yesterday, this same creature accosted me twice on the street in front of the house. She gets people coming and going. I told her I’d already bought a box of matches from her the day before, and she set up the most loathsome, taunting tirade behind my back. “The Princess has everything she needs! She does, does she?” And on and on.
She did not look to have the energy to be doing what she was doing to him, but she did, which means that whatever venereal corruption was consuming her had taken a holiday and left her to enjoy some strength, because I will tell you that he looked to be dying more from pure physical exertion than the shock of my opening the door.
He said right off that it was not his fault—but this woman-child did not force entry into my home and neither was she alone underneath those new Frette linens. He said that I brought this upon myself by ceasing to give him the attention I used to. And he let her listen to this. (God only knows what she gave him besides attention.) Martha, this may have been the worst of it, how he let her hear this, how he said it with my name. He said “Judith” in front of her. He may as well have touched her breasts right there with me watching as let her hear the intimacy of my name.
Everything is fouled. My favorite robe, the one you and Mary sent from Paris for my birthday, was hanging off her. I hope you do not mind, but I told the bitch to take it. You know it had to be soaked with their gore, and the thought of putting my hands to it even to throw it away made me sick. I couldn’t.
I told them both they should die. Then I got the fire-place matches off the hearth, the ones I had bought from her, and I struck one and gave them silently to know I would burn them alive before he said another thing about me in front of this mean little urchin.
I said, “You’re both common,” and then he had the gall to use his pet name for me, “Princess.” The last I’d heard it was yesterday, out of her mouth, on the street.
He told me he was always careful of the neighbors when she came over.“It isn’t like I’ve flaunted her in your face, Princess.”
I said, “So you’ve had her in my bed and then let me sleep in it at night. This is the most sordid, the most vulgar thing I’ve ever heard of. Do you think I’m that filthy or that worthless?”
Martha, I will never be able to get over this, not unless somebody helps me by holding him down on the floor and letting me beat him about the head and neck with my hands. I can feel the need in my arms.
He had every attribute of a dog except fidelity. I knew this happened on his trips abroad, but this is my home. This is the place I made for us. Part of me wanted to drag the bed out to the sidewalk and hang a sign on it saying “Desecrated.” Instead, I packed a few things with the two of them lying there watching, and then I left. I went immediately to the bank and withdrew every penny possible, and then I checked into a sunny room at the Waldorf. I had them send up a roasted chicken and some candy and a chocolate milk shake.
I have lain in one spot all day, feeling alternately disoriented and alert, composed. You know I had always wanted children, but if I had that additional pressure right now, I think I would lapse into a durable and absolute state of catatonia. This may be the longest afternoon of my life.
I have read enough to know that I must prove abandonment to have any legal relief, but how do I do that when I am the one leaving? What I may need first is for you to please help me get to my family in Baltimore. Yes, there are people here, but I am not of a mind to involve them.They’ll know more than I do soon enough. Talking is their life.
What did your mother once say of divorce? The public airing of private grievances, and so the better to shoot each other at home and hire out to the attorneys only when the time comes to drag the corpses through the street?
So I close now and think of you,
Fondly, warmly, with love,
Judith
After we finished reading the letter, Maureen asked, “What happened next and then next?”
I told her what happened during the period my family called “Judith’s interlude.” Mother collected her from New York and brought her to Washington to rest with us before she took her on to Baltimore. Mrs. Stafford was destroyed. Had I not read her letter before Mother walked her through the door, I would have wondered whether a madman had just subjected her to some bizarre facial surgery. Her face was clawed by disappointment and nervous hives. Welts that had healed unevenly gave her skin the appearance of having been sloppily basted together in patches, like a poorly made scrap quilt. Her lashes were almost all missing—her eyes looked like they had been broiled inside their sockets, not unlike my grandfather’s after the occasional electromagnetic mishap. A stranger would’ve wondered whether she had been stabbing at her lips with the tips of a fountain pen, so persistently had she been biting them, and there was an angry, infected mass where she had chewed through to her gum. She was ashamed to go to the doctor, so she futilely caked the sore with a vile-smelling patent unguent.
“But,” she told us, “I’ve been able to stop what had been a continual stream of tears, because these little damages turn into caustic horrors when the salt hits them. That’s as much self-improvement as I’ve been able to accomplish.”
It was an astonishing vision of willingness and trust, how my mother diverted Mrs. Stafford’s attention with risqué songs and jokes while she drained the lip with a hot needle, which she said she would do and which she did do each morning, “so that my oldest friend can, at the very least, walk away from this marriage with her mouth.”
The Victoria lace Mrs. Stafford wore pulled down from her hat only heightened the sense of mystery about her and emphasized that she was attempting to hide something gruesome underneath. When she lifted the lace to kiss my grandparents, she rushed to tell them, “I know. People think I’m hiding the plague or some kind of scrofula or that I’ve been beaten about the face. And I know how the rest of my head looks, but this isn’t my hair. I have Chinese hair now. Mine fell out last week in these wadding heaps, and now my teeth are loose, but I suppose I have to tell myself, ‘That’s just the way of the world.’ ”
Grandmother Louise spoke directly to Mrs. Stafford, ignoring everything that was being discussed around her. “Judith, what are you planning to say to your mother? Have you thought about how to talk to her? What does she know? I ask because we had a late supper with her a few months ago, when she and your aunt came into town to see the new play at Ford’s Theatre, and she did not look well. I believe you should give this some thought.”
Mrs. Stafford said that although she was aching to go to her old home, she wasn’t aching to tell her mother the truth. She would have her believe that she had some generalized physical debility, and that my mother had insisted she be evaluated at a hospital in Baltimore.
Grandmother Louise, who had known Mrs. Stafford about as long as my mother had, said, “But Judith, you look like a ghoul. Your mother may tell you to skip the hospital and report to the mortuary.”
Mrs. Stafford was too preoccupied by the deep and serious truth of the news to be insulted. She repeated that she would have to lie to her mother, and then eventually, when the time was right, when her mother would not be as upset, she would tell her the truth.
My grandmother was rattled by this plan. “You intend to wait until she has died to be honest with her? Or do you plan to let her die thinking that you and your husband are just not spending a great deal of time together?”
My mother took up her friend’s part. “I’ll help Judith sort this out when we get to Baltimore.”
“Martha, you aren’t exactly the person to trust on matters of subterfuge,” said Grandmother Louise.
“What do you mean?” Mother wanted to know.
“What have you ever been able to hide from me? What can any daughter hide? Judith, your mother will not need to be told anything but the smallest details. A woman can see damage done to her child. Don’t dishonor a mother with a silly and futile lie.”
No one knew that I knew the details, that I had read the letter. All I was given to know was that her husband had left her and there had been a scene. Anyone looking at the devastation could assume the humiliation had been agonizing, to cut and gouge at her beauty as it did.
Mrs. Stafford decided to tell her mother the truth about what had become of her. She didn’t need the lie festering on her lips, which had come almost back into their natural form in the weeks my mother had kept them drained and nourished with aloe from the kitchen windowsill. She was not going to lie to her mother, and she wasn’t going to wait until she saw her to start speaking the truth. She told anyone who might inquire after her husband back in New York, “Oh, I’m not married anymore. I’m getting divorced. It was just best that I leave.”
Three weeks before she went to Baltimore, my grandparents arranged a demonstration by their favorite palm reader and a performance by a Hindu levitation expert as an evening’s diversion for her. I walked around offering a tray of stale pastries to a large and vivid mix of professors, senators’ and ambassadors’ wives, and amateur spiritualists. At the end of the night, Mrs. Stafford thanked my family and the guests, saying that everyone had made her feel uncommonly embraced. Then she removed her veil and turned her body toward the unmistakably enamored Hindu performer. They had spent much of the evening talking. I overheard her tell Mother, “The levitationist is devastating. Listen to me. That’s certainly not anything I thought I’d ever hear myself say.”
When Maureen had thanked us, he removed one of the scarves from his waist and tenderly wrapped it around her head, stood back, and said, “To consume the lady is all my heart requires to relieve my sorrowful hunger,” and then he stunned us all even more with a pledge of “permanent devotion to the most beautiful mortal mind and flesh alive.”
I recalled what the old man at the Waldorf had said about strangling on his misery. I asked myself, as my mother had asked Mrs. Stafford that day when I was too young to divine the mesmerizing power of such a blunt force of nature as she was, how it would feel to be the object of so much sensual devouring.
Until she left for Baltimore, she would walk on her own for hours, in sun or rain, and then return, carrying in her clothing the inevitable scent of curry. Eventually, she gained a lucrative divorce that was based, in the main, on affidavits she had found the power and will to pursue from several aggrieved, tubercular-looking match girls who had been promised Fifth Avenue and champagne by her husband but instead got a high-class dose of syphilis and sulfa medication.
She began to travel and did not stop. Before she finally concentrated her fascination on the major cities of Europe, she sent Mother letters, postcards, and thoughtful bibelots from exotic and politically nervous places that she confidently described as “far less treacherous than home.” During that early phase of her journeys, she also told Mother that she had at last found the right question, which was necessary to have before she looked for the right answer. “I asked myself, very simply,” she wrote, “if the life I had been living was the one I wanted to live. It wasn’t. I wanted to be loved and I wanted to be free. If that could not be found, I realized that I would have to be happy alone. And I thank God every day for the money. Even the most imperious hobo still sleeps on the ground.”