Maureen said, “Look outside, Mary. My father hated it when the day stayed rude like this. We lived in a very black, loamy section of the Delta, and when it was like this, he knew he wouldn’t be able to get into the fields for days. He’d become agitated. He’d pace. And then he’d go out to the shelters and find something to do until things were dry. He could not sit. My mother used to say this weather was good for only two things, sleeping and reading Wuthering Heights, and then she would say, ‘Alas, I must clean the house.’ She loved to read, but managed only about two books a year. There were seven of us, all girls.”
“Yes, I will have to say I did. But I loved him. And I thought I would also pull them all out of it, quickly. But Troop begrudged every penny I sent, even a birthday card with a five-dollar bill in it. He counted it all up and said I had to earn it back.”
“No, but I owed him fifty-seven dollars nonetheless. And then I got my back up and refused to do it. He reminds me every now and then. Mamie and Zollie heard about this and offered to have it taken out of their pay, but he claimed to have no idea what they were talking about. He still sometimes sees something he wants to buy and tells me he could do it were it not for the fact that my family drank up all that money.”
“No. He wants it, but it would shame him to take it. You can’t win like this, not ever. He’ll take you around and around and have you too flustered to think straight, and then he’ll call your confusion to your attention. My mother saw this coming. She knows Troop. I promised I would do whatever was within my power to help my family once we were married. The story is that I tried and failed, and now I don’t hear from her. But I write anyway, two or three times a week. A couple of years ago, when there was nothing in the mail for a week or so, I even started giving Troop the letters to make sure his secretary got them correctly in the mail. I wondered if I was doing something wrong or just stupidly. And then I wondered if he was keeping the mail on both ends, but I’d tell myself that people don’t do that kind of thing.”
“Well, they do,” I told her. “And that’s exactly what has happened here. He did this to you. Think about it, Maureen.”
Her eyes said she had suspected the extent of his duplicity for a long time. Perhaps it had been too awful a prospect to face alone, and the presence of someone willing to raise her and to hold her while she contemplated this awful, new estimate of her husband’s gall and perfidy was all she needed. She was not an ignorant woman. She was not weak. She was intelligent and strong enough to use whatever lies, half-truths, and denials available to construct a world she could survive this long, and I could only imagine the terror she felt when she took my hand and whispered, “He went too far with my mother, didn’t he? A man can’t do that to his wife, can he?”
“I wouldn’t know how to forgive it. If I were you, I wouldn’t know where to begin, like Mrs. Stafford that morning, standing at the foot of her own bed.”
“Me, either,” said Maureen. “I won’t forgive this. I don’t want to face him, but he has to know. Everything here seems so damn needlessly cruel. It’s like he lives hell-bent on revenge, but I don’t know why.”
I told her how I believed that a woman’s heart can find ways to accustom itself to injury so that a fresh blow would have to be incalculably exquisite or ingeniously delivered to do her new, real harm. By the time I reached her, she was shielding herself every few minutes of the day with such rare materials as are seldom used more than once or twice in a lifetime. She always had to be the foolish virgin, spending her honor, hope, pity, courage, and compassion as though these virtues were infinitely funded. Whether she had known and denied the truth hardly mattered, because the moment she was able to see that her husband had tried to isolate her from her mother, those virtues were back. They were all available to her. He may have been ingenious, but he was now working against feminine instincts that were returning to her with such terrific force that she might have said, “Mary, let’s go ahead and have this baby this afternoon.” And I would’ve boiled the water. She was already beginning to think concretely about what was practical for her to attempt at that moment, what could be accomplished without planning, what required contemplation. But she was still fatigued. Her mind was more willing to go and do than her body.
“Just let me hear what happened to Mrs. Stafford,” she told me. “That’s everything I can manage.”
April 24, 1915
My dear Martha,
Prepare to split this letter into installments for later or find an easy place to sit, with good light. Thank goodness I’ve been cadging from hotel stationery all over Europe. I’m sorry for the length, but there is so very much to say. I want to tell you the things I’ve decided about my life, and then I want you to bear with me and listen without hating me for having the audacity to suggest a decision I think you should make about yours.
I told you in the letter I sent from Cuba, when I was on the way to France, that I had decided the life I’d been living wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t know what the life I wanted looked like, but I know now that it is one that is as free as I can manage without fear of being hurt. If I don’t want to be hurt, I can’t put myself in the path where it’s likely to happen to me. You would tell Mary not to linger in dark alleys in downtown Washington for fear of her being attacked, that it’s more likely to happen there than if she were out in broad daylight on a busy thoroughfare. It’s the same thing. I’m likely to be hurt when I’m with people I don’t want to be with and doing things I don’t want to do. This is not selfishness, as in getting my way, but doing what I want to do, granting myself my own choices on the things that matter in a life.
But there are the small things, too, like putting milk in my tea after I’ve avoided it for years because of the way my husband would take the pitcher out of my hand, saying it reminded him of someone he knew in college whose silly English affectations irritated him. I stopped saying that I liked the milk and that what he remembered with displeasure from college didn’t involve me. But since I realized the urgent importance of doing my life my way, I’ve practically been swimming in a river of milk.
Martha, life is a river, and don’t laugh at me for sounding simpleminded and trite. I know how you are. But life is a river, and I am not on it so much as I am in it. Life is all around me all the time, and what I think has gone wrong—memories that plague me, I don’t want to destroy them. Now I know, you see, that everything is in the river with me, even the hate and the blame, and it all makes me who I am, and it has taken me off the banks of the river and pulled me down into the water, where we belong.
Now I understand what your dear father Toby meant when he said he tells the ghosts, “Nothing stops.” It keeps flowing, and we ultimately become what we truly are, some sooner than others. So, please pass along to him that I’m finally having my cake and eating it, too, for once I realized that I want to love and be loved as strongly as I want to be free, I was able to figure out how to do it. Please tell him that I am now living what I wanted to be.
Practical hearts like yours need to know about processes and procedures, and it is, for now, as simple as this. I’ve gotten to know some men, Martha. All various shapes and sizes of men. The one rule is that I don’t remain with them if anything makes me sad or afraid. I can love, and I can get up and leave. If I wake up and don’t look forward to the day ahead of me, I can create a different one. I’m not trapped and dragged through days and the years with a husband, like mine was, with his whores and his insults.
We stay together, these men and I, and I’ve yet to be cast out of a hotel or looked at as though I’m plying a trade. It’s different in Europe, particularly in France. Puritanism doesn’t exist here. The ones with that bent have long since left for New England. There’s nothing dirty or Bohemian about it. The man sleeping six feet from me right now is a London professor, in Paris for the year. It isn’t one of those cases where the American woman poses for a painter and things go from there.
I don’t “pick them up,” but neither can I tell you exactly how it happens. All I know is that once I realized the possibility of having love with the freedom, I saw that it may be unwise and is certainly spiritually unsafe for human beings to persist in mating for life, particularly if there is any difference of opinion about what makes a joyful existence, if that’s ever discussed at all. It wasn’t in my case, though I know it was in yours. I’m not sure the way we’ve persisted with this sensible mating is natural. Maybe more like a habit and a nice illusion of security. But the truth is that with so much invested, there’s more to lose.
My mother writes weekly to ask what is so terrible at home that I choose not to return to where everything is “so nice and peaceful.” Maybe I’m too mad at my own country for not immediately intervening. Maybe I’m worried about being too near the old places, where there was so much damage done, although this is sometimes a frightening landscape—frankly, almost always. Despite the danger, despite the horrid sights and sounds beyond these windows, I never thought I would say that everything is a blessing, but it is. It would mean a great deal to me if you would write my mother and help her understand that I am here for the duration, bombs notwithstanding.
I fell asleep last night with my head on a man’s chest, rising up and sinking down, evenly, rhythmically, but the sound explodes in each beat and moves out through my body in waves, and let me tell you I think I may have found my meaning of life in the sound of his heart, his breath, the rising up and sinking down. Other people can find theirs anywhere they please, but mine is here. We eat, drink, talk, make love, sleep, and when I believe I should leave, I do. Sometimes with tears. Sometimes not. But always glad and forever better for having known him, them.
Some know about the past in New York, as much as I felt comfortable telling, and others don’t, and so we stay entirely in the present. I’ve learned that there’s enough in the moment to talk about forever or until dawn, and it always amazes me. It isn’t a game, and neither is it as flippant as moving from one to another lover. Part of losing one’s mind after something so large as a marriage is destroyed comes of losing one’s way in the world, but I have managed to find it instead. It started chiefly because of your family’s insistence on truth, and then that mad affair I had at the Jefferson Hotel with the Hindu gentleman. And I thank you again for the key to your suite. I forgot to tell you, but you had done it up nicely. I loved the pleated linen bed skirt. The white brought it all together. Everything was bright and airy. Very needed. There was finally enough light to see into the days and the nights I might live and love through, not just breathe and take sustenance through.
He was the first man I may have ever loved the way it is intended, without the possession and the constant stress to please, to be perfect and pleasing, to be in a top mood all the time, even the once monthly when it’s a struggle few of us can win. Forever yanking on the ropes and pulleys behind the scenes of my married life fairly exhausted me, but my husband enjoyed a wonderful show. Hard to believe any man would be so stupid as to wrench such a charmed life down on himself.
When you took me to Baltimore, the Hindu gentleman didn’t maneuver to go with me, and he didn’t try to make me stay. He encouraged me to leave. When this has happened, I find myself returning out of sheer desire, not guilt or obligation. You were right when you told me that want is more sensual than need. Men will say we cry and hang on, looking desperate, and it’s the last thing that makes them want to stay, the first thing that drives them to someone else. Funny, but I don’t remember ever doing that with my husband, not ever. He was the one who was overheard moaning about not knowing how he would live without his “gem.” Then, during the divorce, he told me that, unlike me, these whores would do anything to him that he wanted. I thanked him for that image and said what turned out to be the last words I ever spoke to him.
I told him, “Well, when you want those thick toenails clipped, your ear hair trimmed, balm rubbed into that scaly back, your Newport society friends placated, and so forth, see how fast your whores get off their knees to do it. And fine jewelry may look splendid on them naked in bed, but you can’t cover dirt in diamonds and take it to the opera. If you’re shameless enough to ever go there again, and it’ll be alone, you’re going to realize what you lost the minute you look toward those wide steps and don’t see me walking down them. And then if you go home and do away with yourself, see if any whore will clean up the mess. I’m through with it.”
That was then. Now I have these days and nights of strong, luxurious love, and it feels and smells and tastes like raw perfection. Martha, I did not know I had a body. Neither did I know what it was willing to receive and willing also to do. It isn’t the same as what he said about the women who’d do anything. I think he was referring to the elasticity of their limbs, not the bounty of their spirits.
When I was with a man who undressed me, picked me up and laid me down about two days later, I realized that my husband had done me a favor by underestimating how long I would be at the dentist’s. When I found him with that girl, what they were doing was a sick and trifling approximation of what would’ve accomplished the same trick and been far less expensive to him had he simply taken care of it by himself. Now I can see that I walked in and caught a man in the act of dying. His mother has not stopped writing to me, wanting to know what I did to provoke him into infidelity. Let me tell you that I’ve decided that what men do to their mothers while calling out their wives’ names is much more of an assault against ethics and morality than anything I’ve done in Paris.
Not too long ago, the brightest and most beautiful man I have ever known looked up at me and said he appreciated my weight on him when he was going off to sleep. Just the weight, Martha. The light heaviness of muscle and bone. I had a sense of a body. This good thing that I have and am was being loved hard. All my adult life, I’ve heard my “figure” praised. It was as though I was accepting the compliments on some other body’s behalf, but now I’m wholly inside it, on my own ground, real, wet, dry, hot, cold, vibrating, and still.
I allowed you to assume that those days at the Jefferson were the first and last episodes of a cathartic fling. The truth of my silence is that I wanted to go a little longer and make sure that I hadn’t made a horrible mistake before I disclosed it all to you. I couldn’t announce a plan for my life and let you witness failure.
You wait with wisdom and act with assurance. I kept thinking of the way you trusted that you were making the best decision by not telling Mary about being in love again and having taken the suite at the Jefferson to be with him when he was in Washington. You said you would honor your child and keep that part of yourself to yourself, and then you went home and put that into action and did not back away or weaken. You told me, “I have a child who loves and misses her father. She does not deserve a mother whose heart is disjointed, waiting to see anyone else but her. She deserves both my eyes and my ears open. She did not ask for a pining, lovesick girlie for a mother.”
You wanted love again because you’d been blessed with Grammar’s, and it wasn’t a trifling thing to have to learn to do without. But I wanted what I’d dreamed of and heard about from you since the day you saw him cutting up that old man’s food when he was doing that work for St. Bart’s, above the Beautiful Dreamer salon. Remember? What impressed me more than anything is that Grammar never told you how you were supposed to be. But I chose someone who thought that I required constant direction. Remember when I couldn’t tell you if I liked dark turkey meat? I don’t know whether I had forgotten or was simply afraid to say.
When I booked the first ocean passage alone, I took what accommodation they wanted to give me, and paid an exorbitant fee, all because I’d become so bound up by the agent’s questions. Which deck did I prefer? Did I want to engage the services of a porter? Did I want to pre-order a menu? I gave the agent the dates, told him to handle everything else, and got out of there as quickly as I could. He thought I was the type of person who couldn’t be bothered by details, but the truth was that it was shaming to be indecisive because I had spent so many years giving over everything and myself. But I did sail the ocean like a queen.
I had to develop authority over myself. I had to see whether I could be in charge, from the largest notions of how I wanted to be to the smallest considerations of a day. All of which is to say I have done it, and am doing it, and I will be irritated if you become anxious for me in retrospect, about me drowning. There wasn’t ever any danger.
Which brings me to what I wanted to say about a decision I think you should possibly consider making. Mary is such a kind and intelligent girl.Don’t you think she’s now grown-up enough to hear the news that her beautiful and responsible adult mother has a lover?
It is not as though you’ve kept him hidden because he’s a drifter or a confidence man or someone who is seeking any kind of advantage, and it is not as though he is married. He’s a brilliant, successful, well-regarded man who is devoted to you, and I’m sure she would love knowing him and would find so many things to admire. I’ve often wondered how you can sit beside her at a moving picture he made and not tell her anything. I would be up on the seat, shouting out loud that the man who created this picture loves me.
I agree that she should never know that you have turned down his proposals because you want her to feel a whole-ness in your attentions. Of course, I don’t have a child, but I think you’re right to feel that she doesn’t deserve the guilt. If she asks about why you haven’t married him, you could lay the reason to his extensive travels, or you could simply say you don’t want to, which is an entirely plausible thing to say, as you have never had that much difficulty with acting on your own counsel before.
But it is inarguable—you have given Mary a good life. She will want you to have yours without slipping out to do it. You know that the family across the street would agree. They have, after all, helped you keep this secret, taking her on trips with them, keeping her when he blew through Washington in a hurry. You’ve surrounded yourself with people who wish you only well, and she will continue to. It’s in her nature, Martha. She is your child.
You need to remember this—that if you feel what you’ve done is immoral, then it was only because the impetus was to protect her, and in that universe of your family’s, things like that have a way of canceling each other. Also, it is because you denied yourself and spent the time with her that she is now the type of young lady who would want only the best for you. You’ve raised her to have an open mind and a good heart, and if anyone should now reap some of the benefits of your efforts, it is you. She and I will both thank you for forever showing us the joy at the confluence of love and freedom.
My most dear portion,
Judith