The Goddess Abides: A Novel (6 page)

“Tell me—”

He drew a deep breath, he closed his eyes, he began, her hand still clasped in both his hands upon his breast.

“I want to tell you how I love you. I want to tell you now, while I am still fully alive, while my brain is clear, while my heart beats, while I have words upon my tongue.
I love you.
I have always loved you. I loved you before I ever knew you, before we ever met. I loved you because I knew the sort of woman I would always love, must always love, and when I saw you, I knew you were she. Of course I love your body because it is yours and because it pleases me. But I love your body because your spirit dwells there, because your incomparable brain is housed in your beautiful skull, because your soul is enshrined in your heart. I cannot imagine your body apart from the essential you, But I cannot imagine the essential you otherwise housed. You are entire in your whole being. I love the least part of you—your long free hair, your hands and feet, your adorable breasts, your waist, your thighs, the way you walk and carry your head. I love your voice, the look in your eyes—have you an idea how your soul speaks through your eyes? No, don't answer! I have more to say. If you had not let me love you—did you observe that I never ask you to love me?—I would have been afraid to descend solitary to the grave. As it is, my love for you sustains me. I fear nothing. I march to the unknown with steady step, for I bear in my heart my love for you. Love is the torch that lights my way. ‘O Death, where is thy sting? O Grave, where is thy victory?’”

His voice rang out into the night. He put her hand to his lips and held it there. But she drew it gently away, she lifted herself and took his head between her palms and kissed his lips.

“I am honored,” she said. “As long as I live, I am honored. I shall never forget—never, never!”

…She was at home again. They had parted, she and Edwin, with a new ease. Whatever they had was somehow eternal. All impatience was gone. A profound unity existed between them, maintained by the flow of his letters.

“I shall write to you whenever I like,” he had said at the last moment, “but don’t feel you must reply. It does me good to put down my thoughts, crystallize them, actually, in my letters to you. I feel they are permanent, once I give them to you. If anything happens to me, if some morning I don’t waken, you have the essential man with you always. You may do as you like with me.”

With these words, he began a series of letters, which arrived almost daily. Without attempting to reply to these letters she received them, absorbed them, and when she felt the need of communication, she wrote at any hour, day or night, of what at the moment engaged her thoughts, relevant to his or not. He wrote:

“I am astonished that the more I contemplate death the more I am upheld by a new confidence in the persistence of life beyond. This may simply be wishfulness, and yet I think not. Or it may be that, infused by love as I am—thanks to you, my darling—I believe final death is irrational, therefore morally wrong, therefore impossible. I assert the impossibility by a new faith in immortality. It is not for myself that I make the assertion. It is because of you, whom I love as perfection, that I insist it is morally wrong that the creation of perfection end in mere dust. Somehow the entire being cannot be thus dependent on a temporary manifestation, namely, the human frame, composite of water and a handful of chemicals. The ability to love must surely have a significance, must surely contain a promise. Without love, it is easy to believe that death is final, but with it—impossible! The very will to believe suggests persistence.”

To this she replied:

“Spring is here. The old maple trees, which seemed to me as a child already as old as eternity, are clothed in tender green. My house is rich with early roses. The gardener specializes in a certain few flowers, and roses are one of the few. In the midst of all this color and glory, your letter is like music, or perhaps, better, a voice, putting into words the promise of immortal spring. Though winter intervenes, life begins again in spring. As for me, I am idle, simply enjoying, not thinking very much, too lazy even to visit friends. They visit me. I tolerate them affectionately but without enthusiasm. I am happy in myself.”

This was not entirely true, she realized, even as she sealed the letter and sent it off. In the midst of the ordered daily life, she was aware of a secret restlessness, a query she did not pursue. The air was still cool. No wind, no storm, disturbed the golden air. Never had the house seemed so comfortable, the grounds so encompassing, the smooth lawns clipped of early growth, the shrubbery controlled, the trees in bud and leaf. Yet in the midst of all this to which she was accustomed she was waiting for something more and, moreover, was aware of waiting.

She had received one short note from Jared Barnow, thanking her for letting him stay in her Vermont house. She had not answered it. Why should she, indeed? A casual hospitality, a casual note of thanks, an invitation casually given, a half promise of acceptance—all in all, but there was no more here than gossamer. She must understand herself. Loneliness was inevitable and not to be assuaged by one who merely passed by. She must busy herself, first with the house. It was now hers alone. It could be changed, improved, made new. After all, a house should change with changing generations, become the setting for a new personality.

A new personality? Herself—no other! She could be a different person now, someone she had not known, less shy, less retiring, more concerned with her looks, with her mind—in short, with growth. Arnold in his own way had been a retreat. In the shelter of his superior age, his success as a famous lawyer, she had felt no stimulus except to be what he wished her to be, his wife, the mother of intelligent and reasonably obedient children, a charming hostess, a figure conventionally correct in the conventional and correct society of an old conservative city. She had felt no great desire to be any other than this, for Arnold had not restrained her. She had not been aware of ambition unfulfilled and on the whole she had enjoyed her state of being. She knew that Arnold in his own fashion had loved her more than she loved him, but she had loved him, nevertheless, without regret, and she supposed their relationship was one common to persons in their life circumstances.

Now, however, it occurred to her that she might be quite a different person and a creeping curiosity beset her. Suppose, indeed, that she became someone entirely new? Suppose she began by doing what she wanted to do, saying what she wanted to say, going where she wanted to go? She could not define as yet such yearnings, but then she was accustomed to being as she was. Suppose, she told herself, suppose she studied her own desires as they might appear, once they were allowed? It occurred to her that she was in fact repressed, although unaware of repression. The house, for example. If she could not think of what she wanted, she could begin by rejecting what she did not want.

Walking thoughtfully about the vast rooms, looking at one object and another, it slowly came to her that she did not want any of it. It was not at all her idea of a house for herself. Grandparents and parents had built it, had filled it with the furniture of their own age, valuable, heavy, immovable. She would sell it—no, she would give it away, fill it with orphans or old men and women, homeless people whom it could shelter as it had sheltered her.

How did one rid one’s self of a shelter? And where would one build again? And what should she build, what could she build, when she did not know what she was? Or wanted to be! To Edwin she was a woman he loved and by so loving prolonged his life. To Jared Barnow she was nothing, perhaps scarcely an acquaintance. Suddenly she remembered her decision. She would do whatever she wanted to do—that was what she had decided. But she must do it quickly before decision faded into old sheltering ways. Now she must do it. She crossed three rooms swiftly and in the dim old library she sat down at her grandfather’s mahogany desk and wrote a brief letter.

Dear Jared Barnow:

I don’t like my house any more. I am tired of it. I want to build a new one. But what? Here is a chance for invention, is it not?

She searched for and found his note with his address. She would mail the letter when she went to luncheon with Amelia Darwent, next door. But at the mailbox, holding the letter in her hand, she changed her mind. What would he think? She put the letter in her purse and snapped it shut.

“But why build another house?” Amelia inquired.

They were at luncheon, the two of them in the oval dining room. Amelia, an only child, continued to live in the great old house on a large corner lot on the Main Line, in the midst of twenty acres of land, which was what remained of three thousand acres, presented to her ancestors in the days of William Penn as a reward for favors now forgotten. She sat, slim and erect, her hair becomingly silvery, in her usual place at the rounded end of the table. Rose, the Irish maid, a desiccated, elderly Rose, served them.

“Because I want to rid myself of old encumbrances,” Edith said.

“You can’t rid yourself of an inheritance,” Amelia persisted. She tasted her clear soup and looked at Rose reproachfully. “It’s not hot!”

“On account, madame, you didn’t come when called,” Rose said truculently.

“Oh, well—”

Amelia lifted her bouillon cup and drank the soup as though it were coffee.

“What’s next?” she inquired.

“Broiled squab, like you said, madame,” Rose replied.

“Put it on the table,” Amelia ordered. “Serve the salad, and leave us.”

“Yes, madame.”

Alone with Amelia, she unfolded her plan of a house, a place not yet clear in her own mind.

“I met a young man—”

“Aha,” Amelia said triumphantly. “I thought so! You look ten years younger. There’s nothing so absolutely cosmetic for a woman as a young man, or so I am told.”

“Amelia, you are repulsive,” she said severely.

“My dear, when were we not honest with each other?” Amelia demanded. “You are looking unnaturally beautiful—and have—ever since you returned from Vermont.”

“Amelia, will you stop?”

“Don’t pretend then, Edie!”

The two women looked at one another over the low silver bowl filled with small pink hothouse roses. Amelia’s black eyes were laughing and Edith turned her own blue eyes away.

“I don’t know why I tolerate you, Amelia Darwent.”

“Because you know I never tell anyone what you tell me, Edith Chardman!”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Edith said. She put out her hand and touched a rose. “I can’t see why your roses are always better than mine.”

“Bone meal,” Amelia said. “So what has the young man to do with the house?”

“Nothing,” Edith said. She helped herself to a squab.

“Nothing,” Amelia repeated.

“Except I’ll ask him for suggestions,” she amended. “But that’s nothing.”

“Then let’s not talk about him,” Amelia retorted. “Let’s talk about you. You’re someone to talk about! My dear, how shall you amuse yourself?”

“By building the house, of course.”

“But where?”

“Somewhere—by the sea.”

She was improvising as she went. She had not thought of a house by the sea, but the moment she spoke the words, she knew that of course it was what she had wanted for years. She had even spoken of it to Arnold once, long ago, but he had refused the idea.

“That surf, pounding all night! We’d not be able to sleep.”

“You’d not be able to sleep,” she had retorted. “I’d be lulled.”

“You can sleep anywhere,” he said with one of his wry smiles, never unkind and yet edged. He was always the superior mate, an attitude that she attributed to the combination of English and German elements in the ancestry, dating from the marriage of an early English great-grandfather with a German
Mädchen.
Environment had encouraged these ancestral traits. He had not even been overly impressed by her Phi Beta Kappa key, won in her senior year at Radcliffe. It would take time for her to recover from the atmospheric pressure of her marriage.

As if she had divined these thoughts, Amelia now spoke.

“Do you know, I am quite curious about you, Edith.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Arnold kept such a strict hand.” Amelia was vigorously salting and peppering her salad. “I shall be watching you, lovingly, of course, for I am very fond of you, to see just how you will blossom. For I don’t doubt you’ll blossom, my dear, with the charming looks you have. There are young men who actually prefer women over forty. Oh, yes, there are—don’t look so surprised!”

“Do I look surprised?” she inquired.

“Shocked, perhaps,” Amelia said. For an instant she pondered whether to confide in Amelia, that old friend, the astounding news of her unexpected new relationship with Edwin. Immediately she decided against it. She had never been given to confidences and, moreover, she was certain that Amelia would not be able to comprehend the quality of the relationship. Amelia would laugh, or Amelia would make ribald comments about lecherous old men, comments that would indeed apply, doubtless, to most old men, but not to a man as intelligent, as learned, as wise, as Edwin Steadley. To Amelia love was sex, whatever others might call it. Instead of confidence she replied with mild evasion.

“I am not aware of any great changes about to take place in me.”

A monstrous lie she realized as soon as she had spoken, for it remained incredible that she had accepted Edwin, had actually allowed him in her bed, thereby in that simple act asserting independence of the past years during which she had known intimately no man except her husband. And it was not to be explained to anyone, even to herself, why the intimacy with Edwin, at once fulfilled and unfulfilled, was no infidelity to Arnold, living or dead.

“Each experience of love,” Edwin had said one night in the darkness, “is a life in itself. Each has nothing to do with what has taken place before or will take place again. Love is born, it pursues its separate way, world without end, transmuted into life energy.”

“I doubt I shall ever love anyone else,” she had replied in the darkness. At that moment she had deeply loved the beautiful old man. Never had she known such a mind as his, crystalline in purity. That was the amazing quality. Even when he held her against him, the quality was not changed. She had loved Arnold, too, but he was divided, the one man intelligent, though not creatively so, a decisive, calculating self-confident man whom she admired and trusted, and the other a silent, possessively passionate man, who appeared regularly and without preliminaries in her bedroom to fulfill his primary need. She could not imagine talking in the night with Arnold about life and death and what communication might be possible between them. Arnold took it for granted that death was total end.