Ex-wifePart 22
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Part 22
The courthouse was a handsome new clean building. I climbed the wide steps to the entrance slowly, feeling surprised more than anything else. I had not ever planned to get to a divorce court; I did not want to be a divorcée; yet, there I was on my way to meet my lawyer and my maid who was witness for me, outside a room numbered 238.
The entrance hall of the courthouse was a great circular space. The marble floor had brass animals set in it. Probably they were signs of the zodiac. I remembered that the hall of the Boston Public Library had brass animals set in it, too; and that I had liked to walk on the animals when I was a child, because they felt so cool and slippery under my feet.
This courthouse hall was filled with men who wore dark clothes and secretive expressions, and smelt of cigar smoke.
My lawyer, who had been Lucia’s lawyer, had told me to wear black. Mr. Charles Marshall Henry was the sort who would think of things like that. It was my own idea though, to borrow the ensemble; so that I should not have to appear in it again. I had been sure that I would have a miserable time, anywhere I ever went, in the clothes in which I became a divorcée.
I borrowed it from Helena, who had just brought it back from Paris. Helena was going to take over Lucia’s apartment, when Lucia married. Helena painted; did gorgeous fashion drawings, like a realist—and played around in her spare time making masks. She sneered at those of us who got involved with men; made three times as much money as Lucia and I; was always disposed to lend it to friends that were hard-up; and had a passion for reading Greek dramatists in the original. She had a plain face, a supple figure (she played tennis with cool fury) and had an absolutely perfect taste in clothes.
The coat and frock and hat she lent me, made me look like a young widow discreetly inviting a future.
I tried to keep thinking of Helena, and whether Helena were really happy, and what Helena valued most in life, as I climbed the stairs to Room 238, so that I should not think of Room 238.
My maid was waiting outside the court-room door. She was a calm, competent taciturn coloured person. When I asked her to be a witness, after my lawyer said I must choose people who had known both Peter and me during our marriage, she told me, matter-of-factly, that she had started life as personal maid to an actress, and had been a witness in three divorce cases already.
“Good morning, Nora. Do you remember everything that you have to say?”
“Yes, ma’am, I do.”
“Let’s wait for Mr. Henry inside, Nora.”
I felt glad that she was calm, because my other witness had gone to Chile for the Guggenheims, leaving nothing but depositions behind him.
I was quite calm, myself. Lucia had been afraid that I would be disturbed, and had wanted to come with me; but a conference with one of her clients prevented. I thought about Lucia for a while.
“Mis’ Patricia, is this what they call the noncombated court?”
“I don’t think that’s exactly the name for it, Nora. It is the court for non-contested divorce cases.”
“I knew it was something like that. Here’s Mr. Henry, ma’am.”
“Good morning, Mr. Henry. No, I’m not at all nervous, thank you.”
“Court will open immediately. Your case should not take more than twenty minutes.”
Someone, long before had said to me something like “your case should not take more than twenty minutes.” Long ago—in a taxi— Oh, yes, that almost-forgotten doctor of mine.
(What did I have to think of that for? I have stopped being detached. Something begins to ache horribly, in my heart. I had better look around and not think.)
Nora is sitting up very straight, looking pleased and important. The room is full of little groups, each composed of one lawyer, one woman about-to-be-a-divorcée, one or two witnesses. They are just like the little groups arriving in the waiting room of a maternity hospital. One doctor, one about-to-become-a-mother, one anxious husband. But there are no anxious husbands here. That’s a help.
The about-to-become-divorcées have the same tense expression that the about-to-become-mothers had. . . . Well, I lived through that, too.
It is so silly to mind. Just an incident in the career of a Modern Woman. What the hell!
But I never expected it to happen to me. Neither had any of the other females assembled, perhaps. I inspected them. One was all dressed up in purple silk and purple rouge and hennaed hair. The corners of her purple mouth kept twitching. Another looked seventy years old, and wore a beaded bonnet and black silk gloves. I wondered why divorce came to her so late. I thought she might well have put up with matrimony for the little time remaining.
One woman wore a woollen shawl and another wore sables and Le Début perfume.
“The referee is coming in; one stands up,” Mr. Henry said. The referee was a very old man with an altogether gentle face. I thought that he must have forgotten passion and anguish and ecstasy, twenty years before I was born.
Mr. Henry explained that the clerk was reading the calendar, and that mine was the second case.
I thought, “What do I want this for? Why don’t I walk out, here and now? What would Peter say if I walked out and telephoned him that this was a preposterous thing to happen to the nice young people he and I had been? . . . Peter wouldn’t say anything, probably. He’d just hang up the receiver.”
I thought: “Probably all these cases are collusive. I must remember when I am asked that question, to say ‘Yes’ because it reads, ‘Was this adultery committed without your knowledge and consent?’”
I remembered hearing someone say at a party, that the only grounds for divorce in New York state were adultery or perjury—usually perjury. I wished that perjury might have been one of a few things I had missed.
They were hearing the first case. I tried not to listen. I looked about, and remembered that divorce courts were supposed to be funny, so I tried to be amused.
The room was clean and bare and furnished in walnut. Bleak sunlight drifted in . . . but March sunlight was usually bleak, and I had lived long enough to get over being sentimental. At least I should have got over it.
(I loved you so, Peter. Well, I do not love anyone else so.)
The witness testifying said, “and a woman was in bed, and she covered herself up with the blanket.”
(Do not listen to it. Where else should she be? Every co-respondent’s place is in a bed.)
I tried to pull myself together. I watched the sunlight slipping across all the ugly faces. I thought how Cabell would describe that court-room. . . . Something like:
“to this dreariness comes high romance, and that gay challenge that once, when she was twenty, she flung at time and habit and poverty and all the other women who would love his handsome face and cool voice, in the end comes just to this.”
(Ours was to be for ever and ever, on those summer evenings when we sat on a roof and never saw surrounding smokestacks because we were looking at the moon; and did not mind the street noises, because, in an apartment across it, a man was playing Chopin. . . . But that was ages ago. . . . Five years. . . . His fault, my fault, it does not matter now. We were both too young, we were both spoilt. It does not matter now. All there is left of the power we had to stir each other, is a wonderful ability to make each other wince.)
I felt that I never wanted to see Peter again. If I never saw him, perhaps, when I was old, I would only remember things like the Chopin music.
On the witness stand, someone stopped talking.
Mr. Henry said: “Remember to speak slowly, so that it will be easy for the referee to hear.” The skirts of Helena’s black ensemble swished as I walked up to the witness chair.
“Do you solemnly swear . . . the whole truth . . . and nothing but the truth?”
“Yes.” (First lie. My divorce is costing me four hundred dollars and four lies. I am glad that my voice is steady.)
“When were you married to the defendant, Peter—”
“December 27, 1921.”
(We eloped . . . our families thought we were too young, but they sent us wedding presents afterward. We were married on Peter’s pay day so that we had money to celebrate. He made thirty-five dollars a week on the “Telegram.” We went to dinner at Mouquin’s. There is no Mouquin’s any more.)
“Where were you married?”
“At the Municipal Building in this city.”
(The deputy city clerk stood on a red dais between two palms and said, “God bless you both, NEXT” all in one breath. I carried pink roses the cleaning woman in Pete’s apartment gave me. She pressed a white organdie dress that had got mussed in my suitcase on the way from Boston, so that I could wear it to be married. I wonder what happened to that woman. She used to smoke cigarettes while she scrubbed floors.)
“Adultery, on January 12, 1927?”
“Yes.” (Second lie. Not with that poor little unwashed wench. She was probably so glad to get the fifty dollars Pete paid her . . . and she looked so horribly scared.)
“Without your knowledge and consent?”
“Yes.” (Third lie. Peter and I spent two hours arranging it the week before. It would not have taken so long, if we had not quarrelled most of the time.)
“And you have not voluntarily cohabited with the defendant since that date?” (How dirty the formal phrasing sounds . . . Peter came, very drunk, to see me later that same night. He said I had looked so disturbed. Poor darling, he looked disturbed himself. That was the only time in years that we have been friendly. . . . That is as much of a happy ending as we shall ever have.)
“Asking no alimony?” (He does not have to pay for refusing to live with me.)
(Mr. Henry is bowing me off the stand. Now it is Nora’s turn. I do not have to listen. It takes so much longer than getting married. Damn it, I am going to cry. That will probably please Mr. Henry . . . it looks so authentic. I shall weep five minutes for Peter, because I loved him all of five years.)
Nora: “He had on a blue silk dressing gown.”
(I bought it for him just before he left me, when I was trying to prove to him that I could be nicer to him than Hilda. It was a good-looking dressing gown, and undoubtedly it has been much admired. Nora looks as cheerful as can be. This is probably the big day of her year. She will tell all her Harlem friends about it. They all will hear that this “lady” wept. I wonder how her others took it.)
Mr. Henry read Dudley’s deposition. I hoped that Dudley was having a nice time in Chile. I thought that I would probably never see him again. I remembered Peter and Dudley and a girl of Dudley’s and myself, having breakfast-and-bridge parties on rainy Sundays. We played excited bridge for a tenth of a cent a point, and I felt adult because we had cocktails from breakfast time on.
I thought that it had been very nice of Dudley to be a witness for me.
“I am quite all right, thank you, Nora. It was just for a minute.”
Mr. Henry swore to something or other.
Then it was all over.
Mr. Henry said: “I am so sorry that you were distressed. The interlocutory degree will be mailed to you, shortly.”
I wondered if I were supposed to frame it.
He said, “You will get your final decree in ninety days. Then you will be just as if you had never married.”
“Yes, Mr. Henry.” (Enclose with that decree a complete assortment of young illusions, a beatific confidence, an entertaining lack of common sense, and an innocent expression—and I shall be—just as if I had never married.)
I said “Good-bye” to Nora.
I walked down the stairs, and across the round hall and decided I had time to go home and take off Helena’s black ensemble before I went to my office.
“Taxi—drive uptown.”
XIV
I bought a rose chiffon frock and a wide-brimmed transparent hat to wear to Lucia’s wedding, and went home to take her to dinner.
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