The “d” off the “Ramon” had somehow excited her more than the note
itself. She was aware, as she sat up that morning in bed and put the
square white envelope back on her breakfast tray, that her legs, which
were stretched between the sheets, were trembling and would have
doubled under her had she attempted to stand. The place at her side,
with the covers folded back by Rarick, as he had risen from his night
there, was still dented with his body. Through the years, there had
been no gesture from either of them to alter these arrangements in any
of their town or country homes, with the exception of the camp in the
Adirondacks, where the women’s quarters of _de luxe_ simplicity were in
one twenty-four-room log building, and the men’s in another of equal
size.
A wave of self-pity, not unmixed with anger, drenched Jenny as she sat
and dipped strawberries-in-November, into a small brown bowl of sour
cream. What a starveling she must be, if just the ordinary homage and
admiration from a boy such as Ramon could bring about all this turmoil
within her.
Why, in the last few years she and Rarick had left off even pecking
each other good-night. She had been aware of it, and, in the spirit
of letting the old cat die, had managed to seem asleep first, if they
retired together, which was rare.
It was well over twenty years since the days when he had placed kisses
against her lips when he came home evenings, or stretched himself
out after dinner on a couch, holding her hand while she sat beside
him and read aloud. Twenty years, or was it ever? There were limits
to the memory of the flesh. The feeling of the print of caresses had
long since died from Jenny’s. Not that Jenny was a type to whom the
end of every road was the arms of the man she loves. Her temperamental
frigidity saw to that. And yet, suddenly sitting there in bed, the
sense of desiring a great deal and being not desired, stabbed through
her consciousness.
Life was passing her by. And for what? For nothing more than a
dumb-animal response to the instinct to abide by her sense of wifely
duty. For what? For Rarick, to whom even her fidelity might be a
matter of indifference? For her children? Bless them, they were no
worse and possibly not much better than the average. Life was going
to be bountiful to them. Jennifer would marry brilliantly. Avery, you
somehow felt about him, even then, in his adolescence, was sure in some
way to be as distinguished as he was rich. She would be crowded out
of their lives. And then what? A specter of an old age with Rarick,
whose eccentricities and cloistered habits were sure to grow upon him,
stalked down a corridor of her imagination--then what?----Thank God,
thank God, it was still left in her to feel that cut of thrill at the
left-off “d.”
Ramon was coming.
She handed the small cascade of ruffles to the maid in the Breton cap
and hurried out as if she dared not glance back at this symbol of the
soiled inner workings of the mind of Jenny Avery Rarick, mother of two
grown children.
Ramon was in the conservatory, poking about among goldfish which darted
about a beautiful wall-fountain of Pulhamite stone that Rarick had
brought over, with its lichen still clinging to it, from a rock-garden
he had admired in Taormina.
He kissed her hand, lifting back some lace first, and then regarded her
in long silence, a slight film of moisture across his eyes making them
deeper.
The quick picture of half a dozen men she knew, including Rarick,
flashed across her mind’s eye. How clumsily they would have paid this
same simple tribute. Mark House, an American who had been fabulously
rich all his life and lived much abroad, always employed this
continental greeting. But how clumsily, creaking where his shirt bent,
and leaving the disagreeable feeling of smear across the knuckles. A
Count Luckow, whom Jenny suspected of casting amorous eyes at Jennifer,
who had only ridicule for him, had this habit gracefully. Rarick,
somehow, would not visualize.
She could imagine that, to a young man like Ramon, whose masculinity
was not mere maleness, there must be something chapped and a little
funny about the unkissed hands of American women.
Twenty and more years of the perfunctory pats of greeting and adieu
from Rarick had been Jenny’s sole share in a world which she was
suddenly aware must be filled with the grand passions between women and
men. Not that anything she had not received from Rarick mattered, but
the slow anger of resentment flared just the same.
Women who had been less meticulous than she about their marriage-vows
were loved women. There were women of Jenny’s acquaintance, of great
wealth and social security, who had not been meticulous, whose wifehood
was far from irreproachable, but who somehow had the gift of demanding
full measure of homage from their husbands.
Precious little Jenny had demanded or received. A stab of self-pity,
the immemorial self-pity of a woman feeling denied, cut Jenny. Rarick
as a husband and lover! It was inconceivable that he could be missing
in his turn any of those things he denied her. The lover had died
back there in the beginning; and for the twenty and more subsequent
years she had been living with a husband. What would even this
Latin-eyed youngster, who was paying her pretty, slightly old-fashioned
compliments, and letting his eye linger far too long on the spot where
the insert of ruffles had been removed, think of her sterile kind
of life if he knew? Really, his eyes, black-velvet ones of deepest
nap, were naughty, roving as they did, from hers down to the tip of
the V-neck which she had calculated before her mirror. A wave of
self-disgust made her redden. With a prim reaction, over which she had
no control, she suddenly felt stripped, and withdrew her hand, to clap
it against her chest.
He regarded her with gentle reproach.
“Why are you like that?”
“Like what?”
“Shy, like a--like one of those beautiful wild pumas that used to live
on the edge of one of my father’s estates in the interior of Peru.”
Puma! She did not know whether to laugh down what she regarded as his
absurdity or incinerate him with the rebuff of which she was so capable.
“You don’t understand the strange wild beauty of these graceful
creatures. You must not think the comparison odious, Mrs. Rarick.”
What were you to do with a boy like that, whose sweetness was
indomitable?
They sat on the coping of the fountain, against a back-rest formed by a
Malaga-grape vine the thickness of an arm. Delicate Asia Minor aconite
crawled along the coping; and even though not one of Rarick’s hundreds
of species of orchids was at the moment in bloom, an overheated air of
exotic humidity prevailed.
“You’re a silly boy for making me indulge your whim for a cocktail in
this ridiculous conservatory of my husband’s, where nothing ever really
blooms, but unpronounceable, unwearable species and expensive botanical
things are always about to happen and somehow don’t. Except by the time
orchids are ridiculously cheap at every corner florist’s.”
The impersonal portion went sailing over his head.
“I know it is only a little glass house, but it cannot ever seem quite
that to me, since it is where you first let me dare know you a little
better.”
“I’m afraid, dear boy, there is nothing to know. If I am still water, I
am not only the kind that doesn’t run deep, but perhaps the kind that
doesn’t run at all.”
“You do not expect me to believe that.”
No, she did not, but she said it again.
“You are a liberal education to me.”
“How liberal?”
“I am tired of all your pretty girls here in this country who have no
faces in particular. You have a face.”
“My dear boy, are you given to profound observations like that?”
“You must not make me ridiculous. I mean you have a face that hangs
like a cameo in the memory.”
She looked at him, and, through the glazed fabric of a skin that did
not easily take the flush, blushed with the surprised sweetness of a
girl.
“You naughty Latin boy. I am old enough to be your mother.”
“I am glad, though, that you are not. Fancy the tragedy of having to be
no more than son to Dusé or Cleopatra or Bernhardt.”
“My boy doesn’t feel that way,” she said, clambering back to what
safety-ledge she could.
“Don’t say that.”
“What?”
“It hurts me.”
“What?”
“‘My boy’--in that tone. I am jealous, Mrs. Rarick--not of him--but of
all the life that has claim on you----”
She had the impulse to rise and rebuke him, and, instead, permitted his
hand to wander again toward the thick fur ruffs at her wrists. Then a
butler served cocktails, and they were silent and at nice distance
while he puttered; but the eyes of young Lopez, above the three
cocktails he tossed off, were over her face with the sweetishness of an
anæsthetic mask.
“I’m going to send you along home now,” she said, and rose. There were
no lights, and a thick hush of November snow was falling against the
glass walls, closing them in.
“I don’t want to go home, Jenny.”
Jenny. The plushy way he had of saying that. The impertinence of his
saying that. The dearness....
“I don’t want to go home, Jenny, without something to tide me over
until next time.” That plushiness in his speech was not from the effect
of the three cocktails, but from an excited lisp, adorable to her, that
seemed to crowd his speech.
“Impertinent,” she said, frightened, in an exultant way beyond anything
that had ever happened to her, and putting out a stiff arm to ward him
off.
He used the arm as a lever to draw her toward him. To the silence of
the big white flakes that were pasting themselves against their glass
inclosure, he dipped the back of her neck against his arm and sank his
lips down on to hers.
Racing home from a charity bazaar, where she had raffled off character
dolls with conspicuous success, to change her clothes for a tea dance
at the St. Regence, a surprise awaited Jenny.
Avery was home.
An envelope addressed in his large free hand was handed her by the maid
in the Breton cap.