Trudging home, along dark pavements which hung like shelves above swarthily glittering rios, through perilous-looking unlighted archways, he was by turns guilty over having talked of Fran, impatient with himself for having too touchy a conscience, raging at the late Cecil Cortright as a scoundrel, and joyous that behind her fastidious reticence Edith Cortright could be blunt.
It was the guiltiness which persisted when he awoke. Edith would be hating him for having blatted about Fran, for having led her to talk. When for half an hour he had been trying to compose a note of apology, a note came from her:
No, you did not say anything you should not have, and I don’t believe I did. I write this because I think I know how remorseful all Americans are after we have said something we really think. Put it down to Santa Lucia who, though I don’t really know my hagiology, is probably the patroness of sentimentalists like you and me. Would you like to come in for tea at five today?
XXXIII
Daily, for a fortnight, he saw Edith Cortright—at tea, at dinner, at lunch on the Lido. She apparently forgot her discomfort at being unchaperoned, and went architecture-coursing with him, went with him to the summer opera, sailed with him to Torcello and Malamocco—sailing gondola with orange lateen sail, from which they looked back to Venice floating on the dove-colored water.
He talked, of Zenith and Emily, of motors and the virtues of the Revelation car, of mechanics and finance. He had never known another woman who was not bored when he tried to make clear his very definite, not unimportant notions on the use of chromium metal. And she, she talked of many things. She was a reader of thick books, with a curiosity regarding life which drifted all round its circumference. She talked of Bertrand Russell and of insulin; of Stefan Zweig, American skyscrapers, and the Catholic Church. But she was neither priggish nor dogmatic. What interested her in facts and diagrams was the impetus they gave to her own imagination. Essentially she was indifferent whether the world was laboring toward Fascism or Bolshevism, toward Methodism or atheism.
He followed her through all her mazed reflections. He was not rebuffed by her ideas as so often he had been by Fran’s pert little learnings. (For Fran wore her knowledge as showily as she wore her furs.)
Of themselves they talked rarely, and they believed that they talked but little of Fran and Cecil Cortright. Yet, lone sentence by sentence, they told their married lives so completely that Sam began to speak of “Cecil” and Edith of “Fran,” as though they four had always been together. When she realized it, Edith laughed.
“We ought to make an agreement that I shall be allowed to speak of Cecil for just as many minutes as you do of Fran. Or we might compose a sort of litany—
‘Oh, Lord, Cecil was irritable before breakfast,
‘And Lord, Thou knowest Fran did not appreciate streamline bodies’!”
And once she got below the surface and told him that subconsciously he had wanted to lose Fran to Kurt, or to any other available suitor.
Yet there was always between them a formality, even when they used each other’s first names as well as those of their eternally problematic mates. They did not discuss their souls. They did not discuss why it was that they seemed to like each other. The nearest they came to intimacy was in planning, almost childishly, their “futures.”
He said abruptly, at coffee after dinner in Edith’s flat, “What shall I do? Shall I go back to America, without Fran? And shall I do the job I’ve been trained to, or play with some experiments? Let me tell you of a couple of silly ideas I have.”
He outlined his plans for caravan building, and for venturing on Sans Souci Gardens villages.
“Why not do both?” suggested Edith. She seemed to take his desired experiments more seriously than had Fran. “I like your idea of trying to make a suburb that would be neither stuffy nor too dreadfully arty—no grocery clerks coaxed to dance on the green. And the caravans would be fun. Cecil and I had one for two months in England.”
“Do you mean to say you did the cooking?”
“Of course I did! I’m an excellent cook! I babble of Freud and Einstein, but I know nothing about psychoanalysis, nothing about mathematics. But I do know garlic and tarragon vinegar! I really love housekeeping. I should have stayed in Michigan and married a small-town lawyer.”
“Could you like a town like Zenith? After Venice?”
“Yes, if I had a place of my own there. Here, everything decays—lovely decay, but I’m tired of being autumnal. I’d like hot summer growing and spring budding for a change—even if the cornstalks were ugly!”
Then, first, did it occur to him that it was not quite ludicrous to think that Edith and he might some day return together to Zenith, to work and to life. He said little to himself, nothing at all to her, of what seemed dimly to be growing as a secure and healing love, yet a day or two after he seized the impulse and showed Edith the letter from Fran.
Fran’s letter revealed more of herself and of her relation to Kurt than anything she had written:
I haven’t heard from you for a week, old man, I admit I haven’t been much on correspondence either but I haven’t been feeling any too merry and bright, I think too much city I really must get out into the country and Kurt and I—you really are an old darling and awfully generous I realize it to let me talk so frankly about him and still be friends with me—we’re going to try to go to the Harz Mountains for a week.
It’s been a funny thing—you always think I have no meekness but honestly I have shown quite biblical humility in trying to
