Ex-wifePart 26
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Part 26
Then, on an evening when we had talked, before his fire, for hours and hours, I said, reluctantly, that I supposed it was five in the morning, or some-such hour, and he had better get my coat. He went to get it instantly. He held it for me to put on. Then suddenly he put both arms around my shoulders, and I turned and put my arms around his neck, and held up my face to be kissed.
I knew in that instant that I was to stay, and I was glad.
Very soon afterward, he was sent to Boston to cover a naval inquiry into a submarine disaster. I felt half-alive while he was gone, but used my leisure to solve the first problem in our relationship: how I was to get any sleep. I worked from nine in the morning until five in the afternoon: and Noel worked from two in the afternoon, until eleven, or thereabouts, most nights, and then we wandered about the city until four or five in the morning.
So I got myself a new job, as advertising manager of a specialty shop—where no one cared if I did not appear before noon, provided I worked until seven or eight at night.
During the week that I remained at my old office, after my resignation, the wide-eyed little girl who had been an ambitious copy-writer, until she decided to marry, came to see me. She was looking shabby, and harassed. It appeared that her husband was not getting any of the salary increases upon which they had counted so confidently, and she had persuaded him to let her go back to work.
She wanted to know if I had heard of any vacancies, anywhere. So she did inherit my job, as I had anticipated long before.
My new one paid less money, but I planned to make that up by doing more free-lance advertising—it left me leisure to breakfast with Noel, which was more important.
Noel wrote me a letter from Boston—the first I had from him.
(I turned to his letters to find that. It was written in pencil, on a series of Western Union Special Blanks for Newspaper Correspondents.)
It began:
“The admiral of the battle fleet sits up very straight in the centre chair on the opposite side of the long table—listening, with a dark, long, weary, brooding face. A rear-admiral is reading one message after another in a huge wad, that represents the mobilization orders of the navy rescue force, after the submarine went down.
“So far, it appears these orders mobilized only ships, equipment, and crews—but not intelligence. I have come to understand that a few men design machines and a great many use them—and all seem very intelligent until an accident happens. Then the user stands helpless at the machine and waits for someone who understands it, like a banker who has dropped his Swiss watch.
“The rear-admiral reads on. . . . And it occurs to me how nice it would be if Patricia managed to turn up in Boston for a week-end.”
Of course I managed it.
Noel did not leave New York again until Springtime—except for his semi-monthly visits to his wife.
He had told me during a long conversation about mutual fidelity—a conversation that I had been stupid enough to begin—that on these visits he stayed with his wife.
He said then: “I don’t know, Patricia, whether she hates me—I could not blame her if she did—or is fond of me, as one might be fond of a keeper when one serves a life sentence. I mean, that I am her only remaining contact with life. She hates to go about, because of that disfigurement, and she sees no one but her sister and the maid month after month. Sometimes she makes scenes if she hears that I have been about with any particular woman. Her sister usually manages to find out.”
I said: “It must be difficult, Noel. I understand though. It was nice of you to tell me.”
I did understand, but that did not comfort me very much. I was older than I had been. I realized that there were women before me, in his life. I could understand even, in some day that I hoped was distant, there might be women after me. But I wished that I might have had him awhile to myself.
Sometimes I thought of his wife—as a somewhat fantastic, altogether tragic figure, hanging on the outskirts of Noel’s life. In moods when I knew that I was looking particularly pretty, and feeling altogether gala, I pitied her; because Ken had said that she was very pretty, once. Less often, in moods when I wanted very badly to marry Noel and have a red-headed baby, and forget everything in my life before I had known him, I resented her.
On nights when I knew that Noel was with her, I walked up and down, telling myself to be civilized, telling myself that he carried responsibilities from his past, into his present—telling myself that it was far better to have whatever of himself a first rate man had to give, than to possess a second rate man wholly. I believed all that, but I could not sleep at all, on the nights when he was with her. Finally, I bought myself a long book, on every Saturday that he went to visit her, and read it until morning. Then I slept, Sundays.
Or, on some of those week-ends, I visited Lucia, who was back from Europe, finding suburban luxury pleasant. (It had turned out to be luxury in Westchester, not Long Island.) Lucia had met Noel again. All she said to me, was: “It’s not sensible of you, darling, but if it makes you happy, why not? You’re looking younger than you’ve looked in years.”
There was a vacant apartment upstairs in the house where Noel lived. Once, when I had to go home, because I could not appear at my office next morning in evening dress, he said that he wished I lived upstairs. I said I would move. From that beginning, we became involved in a long debate on conventionalities. Noel insisted it would still be particularly inconvenient for a woman to be compromised by a man who could not marry her.
I did not care in the least, to what degree I was “compromised.” Of course I wished that I could marry him—I wanted status and stability and a baby. But at least I did have happiness on a day-to-day basis. That was so much more than I had hoped to find, ever again, that I managed to be philosophical (most of the time) about lack of status.
A few days after Noel said that he wished I lived in his house, I had lunch with the girl who had been an eager copy-writer, when I was assistant advertising manager—the girl who now held my old job.
She was looking completely forlorn. “I am going to leave my husband,” she said. “We quarrel every day, because I make more money. He says that proves the materialism of America. Or sometimes he says that I don’t understand his character.” She shed a few inconspicuous tears. “Now he spends five evenings a week with a girl who’s supposed to understand him better. So I thought if I left him, for a while, he might be glad to have me back.”
“He might,” I said. “Where are you going to live?”
“I don’t know. I thought you might know of some girl with whom I could share an apartment. My furniture is in storage—we have been living in hotels since I went back to work.”
So I took the child to meet Helena, who was touched by her helpless-kitten attitude, as I had thought Helena would be. In a week, the child moved into the apartment which Lucia had shared with me, and I with Helena.
Helena said, “Well, Pat, I enjoyed living with you. For heaven’s sake, come to see me often; and if anything goes wrong with your Great Love, come on back. Meanwhile, I’ll teach the blue-eyed infant you wished on me, her way around the city.”
On a Saturday, when Noel was out of town, I moved into his house. When he came back, he scolded me for being so reckless, but he was so pleased that he could not stop grinning while he scolded me.
In the Spring, he went to Albany, to attend the trial of a woman politician accused of mis-use of public funds. He came to New York week-ends, and I began my career as a daily letter-writer.
I took the letters I had written to him at Albany from the box, and looked through them.
“DEAREST—
“I shall be so glad to see you when you do get back that I shan’t be able to talk, shan’t be garrulous at all, for at least five minutes, anyway.
“I see by all the afternoon papers that your lady politician’s case is due to go to the jury tomorrow, but I believe the jury will deliberate ninety-eight hours; then they will disagree, all but one for conviction. The one juror will hold out for acquittal because the defendant looked like HIS MOTHER, who was a good old-fashioned female who couldn’t read or write . . . or manage funds, either. Then the case will be re-tried; that will take until election time; the defendant will be convicted by Christmas. People will point you out as the oldest resident of Albany, by then. The defendant will appeal; there will be long arguments; the case will be re-tried. By then, you will be growing grey haired; and myself, sedate. After fifteen more years the defendant will die, and the feminists will work miracles of check post-dating over her grave. There will be a legend about you, too, who followed her faithfully forty years; I shall be long dead, of waiting for a telegram saying you are coming home. . . .”
After a week-end:
“BELOVEDEST—
“I was so happy, walking down the street this morning after two whole days with you, that when I passed two truck drivers one of them said to the other: ‘Jes’, look at that girl smile.’ And I didn’t have the grace to be embarrassed.
“If you are permanently resurrected from Albany by the week-end, I shall just go completely joyous, and have to be restrained from singing in speakeasies, or otherwise behaving in an undignified manner.
“Noel, am I undignified? Oh darling, please am I not dignified, always or occasionally, or ever? Please, please dearest will you teach me to be dignified? All my life I’ve wanted to be dignified. I never thought of it until five minutes ago, though.”
He was sent to Wisconsin in June, to cover President Coolidge at the Summer White House, and I saw him off at the Pennsylvania station, behaving well enough until he was gone, and then sobbing so hard in a taxi, on my way home, that the driver spoke to me when I was paying the fare. He said: “Listen, kid, I don’t know what it is, but whatever it is, don’t take it that way, kid.”
After three weeks, when we corresponded between New York and Superior, Wisconsin, by telegraph and telephone, we decided it was not to be borne, and I arranged a leave, and went out to spend a month with Noel, living in Duluth, twenty miles away, and wandering about its main streets, contentedly, all day, while he was busy.
It appears that Noel sat down, the night I left Wisconsin for New York, and wrote to his wife, asking her if she would not be just as happy, if she divorced him. His wife did not want a divorce, however, and sent her sister to New York to inquire among mutual acquaintances of hers and Noel’s, as to any new reason he might have for asking for freedom.
The sister found out all the facts there were to find, concerning Noel and me. It was much more my fault than his that the facts were so easily accessible. Noel’s wife did not tell him, at that time, that she knew of my existence. She just wrote him that she could not bear the thought of being a divorcée.
After I came back from Duluth, I wrote to Noel: “Consider that I have put both arms around your neck, and my head happily against your shoulder, and have said that I believe remembrance of the lights of Lake Superior, will glow happily in my heart for all my life.”
And, when I was making an effort to write a gay letter:
“I have thought of a CAREER. Plan to open a speakeasy for tired business women, where they can go alone, and have liquid dinners, without being stared at for drinking alone. . . . Come into partnership with me, my darling.”
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