The Peacock Feast, page 15
Instead, Prudence told herself that after a few years of their being together Carlton would change his mind. He would see the depth of her desire and bend. There was time. It was not as though she wanted children at this very moment. She had her work, her own clients now.
Carlton, though, did not want her to work after they were married. He wanted to remain in his Park Avenue building, across the street from CCB and Louie, but to move into a larger apartment where he could have a library to house his rare books, a music room for the grand piano he intended to purchase, and staff lodgings. Prudence would need to take control of the renovation and decoration for their new home, then organize their domestic routines and social commitments. In addition, he wanted her to accompany him on some of his mountaineering travels. As for her own pursuits, she could take classes at the Art Students League and lease a painting studio.
“Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted?” he asked.
Had she ever said that to Carlton? But she could not admit what she felt: that painting seemed beyond her. Not technically. She could envision learning how to mix oils, copying the great masters’ works, making slight variations of her own. But creating her own paintings? Not imitations but a canvas that expressed her own vision? That seemed impossible. There wasn’t enough inside her.
She thought about what Dorothy had written her about the difference between art and decoration, imagined asking Dorothy where paintings come from. You have to be a whole person, she felt certain Dorothy would reply. Unafraid of who you are, light and dark. As able to see the evil in yourself and in the world as the beauty. Look at Rembrandt’s Portrait of Himself, Dorothy would say. Look at Velázquez’s depiction of the pampered Infanta Margaret Theresa in Las Meninas. At Whistler’s The Gold Scab: Eruption in Frilthy Lucre, with his once patron depicted as a taloned peacock. This, Prudence knew, was precisely what she could not do.
And could she give up her work, as Carlton would insist? Dorothy Burlingham had said in that same letter that a woman must maintain her own work. It was a lesson Prudence had learned early on from her mother, a lesson her mother claimed she’d learned herself from Clara Driscoll, her supervisor at Tiffany’s glass factory in Queens. “Clara always said to us, ‘Girls, you have to be able to put bread on your own table.’ That’s why I was so happy when your father took the position at Laurelton Hall—because I could work there too.” Prudence could still see the look of shame on her mother’s face as she continued, “Then, after everything happened, I just couldn’t work anymore. I know this is horrid of me to say, and I hope the good Lord doesn’t smite me for it, but after your father died, my strength came back. It had to, for your sake. And once it did, the first thing I thought was ‘I’m getting me a job again.’”
But hadn’t her mother also told her when Prudence had wondered if she should do as Mrs. Clarkson at Wanamaker’s suggested and apply for the citywide drawing contest, “When good fortune visits, you don’t spit in his face. You offer him a cup of tea.”
Carlton was a good man. He drank in a gentlemanly manner. He didn’t gamble save for an occasional cribbage game at his club. Never ever would he strike her or anyone else.
Was not Carlton’s marriage proposal good fortune visiting? Would any sane woman of Prudence’s circumstances not marry him?
* * *
With their marriage in the fall of 1937, Carlton and Prudence began to dine weekly with CCB and Louie. Robert was in and out of sanatoriums, taking meals when he was home with his male nurse in his quarters upstairs. On one occasion, Prudence heard something crash, and CCB excused himself from the table. Later, Carlton told her that CCB had instructed the nurse to give Robert an injection of a sedative.
Prudence found Louie, with her blinded eye and cane and the lymphedema rumored to be hidden under her invariable black skirt and overcoat, fearful to look at but fascinating for the intensity of her opinions. Louie’s strongest opinions were about her daughter-in-law, Dorothy. Twelve years had passed since Dorothy had left with the Four for Vienna, but Louie had still not forgiven her for not having told Robert or CCB or Louie in advance, the news delivered by radio telegram after Dorothy and the children were at sea.
Both CCB and Louie railed about the atrocious education the Four had received at the Matchbox School that Dorothy and a friend had started in Vienna. At ten years of age, CCB reported, Mabbie, the second oldest, had written him a letter in which she spelled first as “ferst” and goes as “gose.”
“Do not misinterpret me,” CCB said. “I admire what Dorothy has done with the children, and I can see that their treatment with Miss Freud has been useful to them as well. But it has gone too far. It is too late now for Bob, he is already twenty-two, but it would have been better for both Michael and him to attend a good boarding school where they could have played sports the way boys should. And the girls too. Dorothy should know that. She was in boarding school herself for five years at St. Timothy’s in Maryland.”
CCB paused to carve the roast, which their butler then served.
“The summer before Robert and Dorothy married,” CCB continued, “I had a conversation with her father about precisely this subject. It was Louie and my first visit to his eccentric estate.”
CCB knew that Prudence’s father had been Tiffany’s gardener at the Seventy-second Street mansion, but did he know that he was talking about the place where she was born? That she and her family had been living there then?
“The evening was awkward due to Tiffany having put up roadblocks to Robert courting Dorothy. When he’d first realized that Dorothy was serious about Robert, he forbade her to see him for a year. If after a year they still had feelings for each other, he blithely said he’d reconsider.” CCB glanced over at Louie, who was scowling now. “Louie was very upset about it.”
“It was a monstrous thing to do,” Louie added. “Robert was so dejected, he left to do an internship in Panama. And then, after he and Dorothy did as her father demanded and didn’t see each other for an entire year, Tiffany refused to give his permission when they said they wanted to marry.”
“For what possible reason?” Carlton asked.
“Pure selfishness. If Dorothy got married, he’d be left alone in that mansion on Seventy-second Street with no one to order about or watch him strut.” Louie snorted. “He only relented after Dorothy’s half sister Mary announced that she and her family would take one of the apartments in the building.”
“Louie, dear,” CCB said. “That’s speculation.”
For a moment, Prudence wondered if CCB might have the candor to say what seemed so obvious to her: perhaps Dorothy’s father had sensed Robert’s instability.
“After dinner,” CCB continued, “Tiffany invited me to accompany him to the courtyard so he could have his evening cigar. It looked like something out of an Ottoman palace with a gurgling fountain and a domed ceiling and a pipe organ housed on one of the balconies.” CCB shook his head. “I still remember how careful he was to flick the cigar ashes into the cup of his hand so they wouldn’t fall on the tiles. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t ask a servant for an ashtray or why he didn’t keep an ashtray there. Afterwards, I realized there had been no ashtray because he thought it would mar the effect he’d created in his courtyard.”
CCB motioned for the butler to bring him another piece of the roast. “I’d only met Tiffany on a few occasions before, and in the past he’d talked mostly about his factory and new developments in glass manufacturing. I’d even wondered if he was hoping I’d give him some legal advice about a patent issue to which he’d alluded. That night by the fountain, however, he talked about Dorothy. He told me that she’d been unhappy her first year at St. Timothy’s, but she prevailed and went on to captain the girls’ basketball team. Being away from home, he said, had done her a world of good. He didn’t hesitate to tell me that he’d discouraged her from returning for her last year because by then none of his daughters were living with him and he felt lonely.”
“The same reason that he objected to Dorothy’s marriage,” Louie said triumphantly. “Nothing to do with Robert whatsoever.”
“You have a point, dear,” CCB said. “But Robert told me it was also because Dorothy’s father didn’t want her to receive a diploma since then she would have been able to attend college, which he opposed for all his daughters.”
Prudence felt herself blushing for Dorothy: to have been so controlled, so thwarted.
“Now Miss Freud depends on her in the same way her father did.” A tightness crept into CCB’s voice. “I supported the suffragists. I believe in the equality of women in the eyes of God. But Miss Freud has set herself up to be the father for the Four. That, I find an outrage, not only against my son but against nature.”
Prudence put down her knife and fork. Against nature? Was CCB implying that there were “relations” between Dorothy and Miss Freud?
“Through my intercession, my grandson Bob did come back to attend Harvard, but he was so ill prepared, academically and psychologically, he couldn’t make it through his first year. I insisted that he attend summer school, and that led to his being reinstated, but then he made a visit to Vienna in August and it was all for naught. He decided that resuming his analysis with Miss Freud was more important than returning to Harvard.” CCB shook his head, as though still in disbelief. “Now, he has met a young lady, and I fear this will be the end of Harvard for him. I think his mother would rather he marry at a young age and remain in close proximity to her than that he return to complete his education.”
CCB pushed back his chair. “To make matters worse, now that Dorothy has been diagnosed with tuberculosis, Robert is in support of Bob staying in Vienna. He thinks having Bob nearby will hasten her recovery.”
Prudence wanted to inquire about Dorothy’s tuberculosis, but Carlton interjected before she was able.
“But that is outrageous. She must put their children first, no matter her physical condition.”
* * *
At home, Prudence queried Carlton about Dorothy’s health, but he did not seem to know any details aside from saying that Robert had been obsessively worrying about Dorothy, who he still believed might one day resume their marital life.
For weeks, the Four were a recurrent subject in their nightly dinner conversation. Prudence was moved that Carlton had joined CCB in being so concerned about the fate of Dorothy and Robert’s children. Was it possible that this reflected a softening in Carlton, an opening for them to revisit having children themselves?
It took days for her to gather up her courage to ask. At dinner, she fielded Carlton’s watchful eyes as she picked at Mrs. Meechin’s lamb chops, then waited for Louise to clear the table and for the evening tisanes to be served.
“Hearing how important CCB’s grandchildren are to him, does it ever lead you…” She paused. “Does it ever lead you to question our not having children of our own?”
Carlton cocked his head. He looked at her as though she were pathetically slow, a person who could not follow the developments in the second act of a play or grasp that a moment of quiet signaled a transition between movements in a symphony rather than its end. “To the contrary. Observing CCB’s life, all of his talent, how much more good he could be doing in the world, all I can think is how tragic it is that he has fallen into this great sinkhole of his son’s mental derangement and now the derangement that his son has passed on to his own children. It makes me even more convinced that propagation should require the most serious of consideration—were we not so sentimental, an examination or an interview before an expert panel—rather than being the assumed course as it is for dogs or cows.”
She feared a bead of sweat might dot her forehead. Nothing Carlton had ever said suggested that he thought his own family line or genealogy had a blight. Was he implying that her family had a strain of insufficiency that would make her having children inadvisable?
Perhaps there was. Even if the whisperings that her father had been drinking the day he fell to his death in the Tiffany house were no more than malevolent gossip, she had only to think of Randall’s last evening at home to know that her father had undeniably drunk to excess. And might not a doctor view the weeks when her mother had been unable to dress or leave their apartment and her deathbed utterances—what she’d said about Mr. T, her muttering about the souls she would soon see—as evidence that she’d been mentally unstable?
“I think I’ll go to bed early,” Prudence said.
* * *
Now that Prudence was married to Carlton, her relationship with Ella Jameson changed. With Prudence no longer one of Ella’s noblesse oblige projects, it was as though their differences—Ella, seven years older, with nine- and ten-year-old daughters—dissolved.
As a child, Prudence had been too afraid of finding her mother unwashed in her bed or her father belligerent after a visit to the bar to bring girlfriends home. Then, after her father died and her mother got her job at Wanamaker’s, Prudence had been too busy working there herself after school to have a close girlfriend. Even with Elaine, who came from a home where there’d often been insufficient milk for five children, Prudence had never spoken about Randall or the envelopes from the Tiffany offices. Although she’d been certain that Elaine would not have condemned Prudence’s decision to have an abortion, Prudence would not have been able to tell her how she felt, having done it.
The friendship Ella offered was intoxicating. With a gloved finger, Ella would tip Prudence’s chin skyward so she could better see the hat Ella’s milliner declared would best suit Prudence’s face, would hold Prudence’s hand while they sat side by side to be measured by Ella’s shoemaker for evening slippers. “Your feet”—Ella laughed—“they are no larger than my daughters’!” They took Ella’s girls ice-skating, attended Broadway matinees, walked arm in arm through the Greek and Roman wings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art while Prudence shyly explained what she’d learned about classical design. Ella told Prudence about the boy she’d loved when she was fifteen, and although Prudence could not reciprocate with stories of her own early loves, they amused each other with their accounts of their husbands’ idiosyncrasies: Lawrence’s refusal to touch fish, the way puppies could make him cry; Carlton’s insistence on sleeping with the window open on even the bitterest of nights, his morning tonic of apple cider vinegar and cayenne pepper. On the days when they did not visit, they would each post a note before dinner so on the following morning the cream envelope of Prudence’s stationery would be on Ella’s breakfast tray and the pale pink one of Ella’s on the table next to Prudence’s tea.
Then, in the span of a dinner at Ella and Lawrence’s brownstone, a Thursday evening with Prudence and Carlton the only guests, everything changed. Even now, three-quarters of a century later when nearly all of Prudence’s memories have been reduced to snapshots, the night remains vivid in her mind: the amber of the sherry they had before the meal, the robin’s-egg blue of Ella’s dress, the forest green of the chicken Florentine.
After the men retired to Lawrence’s library for cigars, leaving Ella and her alone in the dining room, Prudence described the lunch she’d had the previous day with Harriet. Harriet had urged Prudence to come back to work, and Prudence had repeated what she’d said a year before when she’d resigned: Carlton objected to his wife working.
“Harriet nearly neighed. ‘You cannot,’ she lectured, ‘allow a husband to have that much control. Even if you don’t want to work, you cannot allow him to believe that it is because of him.’”
Ella smiled. “I can see Harriet throwing back her shoulders as she said that.” Ella sipped her coffee, and Prudence, her thoughts muddled from the second glass of wine Lawrence had pressed upon her, regretted having declined a coffee for herself.
“Harriet then spent the rest of the luncheon complaining about how it was her job to teach taste to rich people.”
Before Prudence had even completed her sentence, she saw Ella’s face cloud and then seal. The terrible heat rose from Prudence’s chest to her neck, bright red she was certain, and she thought about the afternoon she’d been with Randall when they’d rounded a corner to witness a horse collapse on the street. “Why, oh why, did we take that route?” she’d asked Randall that night, unable to rid her mind of the anguish she’d seen in the animal’s eyes.
Ella excused herself so she could check on her daughters. Prudence miserably remained at the table. As soon as Ella returned, Prudence would apologize. Of course, I’ve never felt that way with you. You have the most exquisite taste. If anything, the instruction has gone the other way.
The next person to enter the room, however, was not Ella, but Carlton. Looking exaggeratedly at his watch, he announced that the evening had slipped away and they must—“Prudence,” he said with a sharp note in his voice—must leave immediately.
It was as though a train had arrived and she was being rushed from station to platform. She followed Carlton to the foyer, where Ella stood with her maid, who was holding their coats. Lawrence, his cheeks ruddy from the port he and Carlton had enjoyed after the meal, opened the front door and stepped onto the stoop.
It was lightly snowing.
“And not even Thanksgiving yet!” Lawrence said. “Ella, you’ll have to get the sleds out for the girls.”
Ella did not comment on the snow. Without looking at Prudence, Ella offered the side of her face for a farewell kiss, placed a hand on Lawrence’s back to shepherd him inside, and closed the door of her house.
As always, Carlton insisted they walk the five long blocks and six short ones from the Jamesons’ home to their apartment. The streets were hushed from the hour and what was becoming a blanket of snow. Not wanting Carlton to see her shivering, Prudence buried her nose in her upturned collar and hugged her arms to her body. Standing up to the elements had been a cornerstone of his blue-blooded upbringing: summer mornings diving from the dock of his grandparents’ Maine lake house into frigid waters; winter trips to Montana when they’d slept in hunters’ cabins with the wind wailing like a wounded animal. From the age of six, he’d been forbidden by his father from crying, tears met with a swift paddling. Now, as an adult, he carried the same attitude into his climbing expeditions. The route was meticulously planned to minimize dangers and maximize safety, but whatever discomfort or fear he or his fellow trekkers experienced once under way was to remain unspoken.
