Powers of Attorney (27 page)

Mr. Cup proved to be quite right. Chambers was bluffing. In two days' time, having heard nothing from his wife, he sent Judith to her as his unaccredited ambassador.

“I want you to know right off that I think Daddy's behaving outrageously,” she began to her mother in a tone too cool to carry the least conviction. “I've told him so myself. I've said: ‘Daddy, you know perfectly well that you've taken the best years of Mummy's life and that she's been a wonderful wife to you.' He didn't even attempt to deny it. As a matter of fact, that's what convinced me that he's absolutely determined to go through with this thing. He's so cold about it all. If there was any feeling left that I could work on...”

“Never mind about his feeling, Judith. Let's simply consider his duty.”

“But, darling, I'm thinking of
you.”
Lavinia shuddered at the term of endearment. Judith had never used it in addressing her before, and it fairly bristled with the superiority of the happily married for the abandoned woman. “I'm thinking of the position you put yourself in. How can you want to hang on to a man who—let's face it—doesn't want to stay? What does it do to your dignity?”

“Only a very young woman would think of her dignity at a time like this.”

“Well, of course, Mummy, if you don't
want
my advice.”

“I don't, dear,” Lavinia said softly. “I don't.”

She had to do something to fight off the fit of loneliness that struck when Judith departed, and she decided to put her story to paper, as Miss Tilney had suggested. The idea of doing so had never been far from her mind since the day of Ada's tea party. She went to the reference room at her lending library and consulted the little shelf of books on creative writing. They mostly dealt in obvious kinds of generality, but towards the end of her afternoon she happened upon a suggestion that struck her as worth trying. The author counseled the student to write four biographical sketches of himself in the following order: first, to appear in
Who's Who;
second, to appear in the
Encyclopedia Britannica;
third, to be used as an application for a confidential government post and finally, to be a
New Yorker
profile. That night Lavinia started her homework. The
Who's Who
notice was the most depressing; it took only three lines to give the date of her birth, her college graduation, her marriage and the names and birthdays of her children, all items that seemed to point forward—to nothing. For the
Britannica
she listed her activities in Plandome and gave a brief summation of Chambers' legal career. The next day she began to warm to her task and in her government application she tried to present her knowledge of the suburban housewife as an asset to any agent who had to deal with the complexities of Communist propaganda and sabotage. And, finally, for the
New Yorker
profile she began a study of her resentments: how many were unfair and how many were justified and how many were the simple, unavoidable products of the role in life in which she had found herself cast. But this last she never finished. For in the middle of it she suddenly saw her story as she wanted to write it—objectively, coolly, devoid of self-pity—and she started the next morning and worked for two days without interruption. She knew that it was a mood that might never recur.

In the first part she told of Chambers' youth, his poverty and patience, his kindness to his mother and of her own easier circumstances and the terrible entrapment of their high school engagement. She emphasized that it did not occur to either one of them that they were not in love until years later. What they had was love, by their then definition. She went on to describe the extraordinary, immediate fulfillment of her own private dreams: the first little yellow house in Plandome, the healthy children, the women's activities, the damp, rough cheek of her husband to kiss as he descended from a late train on hot summer evenings. And then, in a single paragraph, she attempted to convey her own blurred sense of the quick passage of illusively happy years, culminating in the beautiful weddings of son and daughter and the tears and toasts and champagne. And then death. Quick death, after all that had seemed abundant life.

What she saw now as having happened and what she tried to explain was that overnight all her chief assets had become liabilities. Her love for her children had suddenly become possessiveness and intrusion; her yearning for the deserted house in Plandome, sentimental nostalgia; her unworldliness, a lack of imagination or simple fear. On the other hand all of Chambers' defects had by like token been turned into virtues. His indifference to the children had become a respect for their independence; his habit of buying their affection, a welcome generosity to in-laws, and his unbridled ambition a wonderful vigor in a man of his years. Yes, in a year's time she and Chambers had changed places, and in a world where any demonstrative feeling could properly exist only between newlyweds or parents and small children, Lavinia's love for her family was like a slip that showed. The new world was a world where each member of the family but herself seemed to have a happy and assured place.

The second part of her manuscript dealt with her life in New York and her sorry experiences at parties. It was a bit catty, but some of it was funny, and she enjoyed herself writing it. It had less truth in it, for she was more self-consciously shaping a social satire. When she realized that her story was changing from a memoir to a novel, she stopped abruptly. Rereading the first part she felt that she had produced something valid and good. As Miss Tilney had suggested, it was her brief rendezvous with truth, and she would not be such a fool as to tamper with it. She turned to the last page and added a final paragraph describing Chambers' demand for a divorce. After a few minutes' reflection she decided to quote his memorandum in full. It seemed fitting that her story should be told by two voices and that the last should be his.

It was typed by a public stenographer, and when she called for it, she was startled to hear the stout white-haired woman of the fast fingers and heavy breathing describe it as “riveting.”

“You really liked it?”

“I haven't read anything so good in months. Plenty of people will tell you it's a natural for the
Post,
but if I were you, I'd try the
New Yorker ”

“You mean—I should
publish
it?”

“Well, honey, what else are you having it typed for?”

“Oh, just for my own amusement. And maybe a friend or so.”

“Suit yourself. But I'm glad I read it, anyway. If you'll pardon the expression, Mrs. Todd, what a heel your husband must be. I had one rather like him myself.”

“Really?”

Lavinia hurried away in horror, her cheeks ablaze to have heard her husband so described by a stranger, but by the time she had reached her apartment, the copies of her manuscript tightly clutched beneath her coat to keep them from the old doorman's eye, she was feeling so much better that her state bordered on exhilaration. Alone in her living room, she threw back her head and laughed. A heel? Wasn't it exactly what he was? And “riveting”! The nectar of that praise made up already for her apprehension of Judith's disapproving stare.

She knew nothing about the magazine world, but with the help of the kindly public stenographer she made a list of addresses and mailed the first copy to
Metropolitan.
It came back two weeks later with a nice note asking if she would consider fictionalizing the story and whether or not she would like suggestions for a collaborator. She then sent it to
Country Home
which returned it in ten days with the opinion that too many articles had already appeared on the plight of the middle-aged suburban wife. It was next mailed to
The Women's Review,
and a month later Lavinia received a telephone call from the editor himself. When she heard that he wanted to buy her article for fifteen hundred dollars, she dropped silently to her knees on the carpet and pressed her lips to the mouthpiece.

 

Four months later the article appeared, with two pages of illustrations. On the left-hand side was a large colored drawing of a woman with crisply set, too blond hair and dark circles under her eyes, sitting alone on a sofa and staring at a telephone. On the facing page was another drawing of a dark-haired handsome man in evening clothes talking to a group of three very elegant ladies under a crystal chandelier. The title, in huge print, read:
“Does
Life Begin at Forty?” and was followed by the legend, in smaller type: “A successful attorney's wife wonders.” Lavinia had undergone agonies of apprehension in the months preceding publication. Whenever she had seen a familiar face in the street she had imagined it changing into an expression of oblong disapproval. She had fancied the bitter letters from the old friends in Plandome. She had pictured a lonely old age, deserted by children and grandchildren. But now, holding her advance copy open before her, she felt only a mild disappointment as she thought of the thousands of magazines and millions of words of print that appeared eveny month. Would anyone she knew even
see
the article?

For a while her misgiving seemed justified. Two weeks after the March number of
The Women's Review
was placed on the stands, hardly anything had happened to change the life of Lavinia Todd. She had received two surprisingly sympathetic cards from friends in Plandome, a beautiful letter from Miss Tilney and a horrified, bitter telegram from Judith. She lunched with her editor, drank two cocktails, talked too much and bored him. She was congratulated orally by her hairdresser and by her dentist's nurse. But that seemed to be all, until she heard from the back elevator man that her article was the scheduled subject of a television debate. And, sitting alone that night in her living room before the screen, she felt, with a mixture of awe and pain, that her life was changing at last.

The debate was between Virgilia Peterson and Marya Manners. The first was sympathetic with the plight of the neglected wife and surplus mother, while the latter was inclined to be acid about self-pitying suburbanite women who had failed to prepare themselves for anything but “togetherness.” John Crosby devoted his next day's column to the discussion and contrasted the earlier end of a woman's useful life with her superior longevity, suggesting that this imbalance between the sexes was a serious failure of modern society. This attracted enough attention to bring about a reshowing of the debate on a wider network, and letters began to appear in newspapers, for and against the husband and for and against the wife.
Life
gave three pages to the topic, with pictures of Lavinia and of her old house in Plandome and with quotations from her former neighbors. She was asked to appear on Mike Wallace's program, which she declined in terror, and was taken out to a delightful lunch by Roger Stevens who wanted to explore the potentialities of her article as the basis for a play or musical. When she found two invitations to dinner from Florence Newbold in her swollen morning mail, she wondered dazedly why she had ever been afraid of anything.

But the greatest evidence of her new fame was when Chambers telephoned and asked her out to dinner. They went to a French restaurant where he ordered a bottle of champagne to celebrate her success, and she recognized the moist look in his eyes as the one that he had used in talking to important ladies. He told her about his life during their separation, his business trips and what had happened in the firm. He even discussed the children for several minutes. But never once did he refer to the proposed divorce, and she was the one finally to bring it up.

“Have you talked to Mr. Cup?”

“Cup? Why the hell should I talk to that shyster? Incidentally, Vinnie, I was surprised and hurt that you'd go to a man like that.”

“A woman who's threatened with divorce has to have a lawyer.”

“Who's being threatened with any divorce?”

Lavinia stared coolly at those suddenly moister eyes. “I thought I was.”

He shrugged and grinned in what struck her unpleasantly as an attempt at a lovable, boyish sheepishness. “I was too hasty there, Vinnie. You were the wise one. A man needs to be tided over the dangerous age. But once he's over it, you've got him for life.”

“But, Chambers,” she protested with a sudden desperate, trapped feeling, “what about my article?”

“Your article? Why, everyone loved your article! Even people who ordinarily never read that kind of thing. Shelby Gage, for example, of Gage & Dunne, told me that he thought it ... Now, let's see, how did he put it? Oh, yes, ‘the most honest piece of prose ever written by an American woman.' And Clitus Tilney himself told me it was a minor classic. Oh, they're all for you, Vinnie. Florence Newbold compared you to Harriet Beecher Stowe ...”

“I know,” Lavinia said drily. “She wrote me.”

“Then, why worry about the article?”

“I don't. I thought
you
might.”

“Me? Why should I mind?”

“Because of the things I said about you!”

“Oh, those.” Chambers seemed suddenly embarrassed, but it struck her oddly that his embarrassment was all for her. “Well, of course, I'm not much of a sentimentalist myself, but I understand that when you're writing for women's magazines, you have to go somewhat by their conventions. There may have been a sentence here and there that was a bit slushy for my tastes, but let's face it, Vinnie, no man's going to hold it against his wife that she loves him.”

As Lavinia stared into the complacent eyes of the stranger who was having dinner with her, she wondered how even a person of his passionate egotism could have so misconstrued her. And then a stranger truth was borne in upon her. He hadn't read the article! Or if he had started it, with its romantic beginning, he hadn't finished it. He hadn't even been interested enough to finish! All he cared about was that she should have attracted the notice of Shelby Gage.