A Passionate Girl (50 page)

So we began our reckless love, a compound of our needs and fears, his strength and my wildness, of blind wishes and blinder hopes. He came to us every weekend aboard the train, with its stubby shrieking steam engine, symbol of America's energy and determination. I did not see, I could not see, the confusion into which I was leading us. If he saw it, he thought he had an answer to it. What sustained us, beyond the passionate pleasure we found in our midnights, was the change in Rawdon. Steadily, perceptibly, his antagonism to his father ebbed. We did not completely understand it. We thought it was a spiritual thing, an overflow of our own joy.

There were other reasons. There was a deep vein of poetry in Rawdon's nature, which ill suited the science and mathematics that his father was determined to make part of his mind. With me as his only tutor, he escaped science and plunged deep into poetry—not only the English poetry we read as part of his lessons, but Irish poetry. So much of our verse is speech between lovers—or haters—it was easy to play poetic games with him. One we played over and over again was Lad of the Curly Locks. As I tucked him into bed, I would rumple his dark hair and say:

Eyes aglow with the game, Rawdon would reply:

Then would come two or sometimes three good-night kisses, and he would close his eyes.

Some of this was no doubt an overflowing of the love I felt for his father, but I loved the lad, too, with a mother's delight in his good looks and his ready laugh and his passionate honesty. It was always the truth that he sought, in his endless perusal of the newspapers, in his pondering over the battles of the war, in his searching through books. I could see it derived from the literal, practical directness of his father's mind, but Rawdon wanted more than facts. Young as he was, he sought truths of the heart, of the spirit, insofar as his young understanding could grasp them.

“Do you think people should always tell the truth, Miss Stark?” he asked me one day.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“Father says everybody, even the president, senators, businessmen, lies all the time. I saw it in a letter he wrote to my mother about when the war was going to end.”

“It's a shame, but it's probably true.”

“Do you ever lie?”

“Sometimes. When you get older, it's hard to tell the whole truth all the time.”

“What do you lie about?”

“Nothing important. Come now and read this book that your father brought down,
Moby-Dick
.”

“I don't like it. Who cares about hunting a whale?”

“'Tis not the whale that Ahab seeks to destroy but the spirit of evil in the world. He sees it concentrated in this terrible creature. Your father says it's a great book.”

Rawdon shook his head. “Stupid.”

I found the book hard going myself, but I was not able to blame it completely on the writer. Rawdon's questions had awakened the secret fear that crept within my love for his father and grew stronger with every passing week. What would happen if my deception were discovered, if he found Elizabeth Stark was Bess Fitzmaurice, the Fenian girl? At first I consoled myself with the thought that it would simply be the end of the affair; though we would part with regret, it would be swift and clean, like the stroke of a sword. But as Jonathan's spirit healed, as his nerves grew firm and strong, as his confidence in his manhood deepened, the part that pity and sympathy had played in my love began to diminish, and admiration, delight in his touch, his smile, his conversation, increased to the point where the thought of losing him became pure anguish. In my innermost heart I had opened myself to him, but I still wore deception on my face. I did not know what to do about it.

Doubling the agony was the way he talked frankly to me about his mother, his wife, the family and its complex concerns. He saw his mother clearly enough. He resented the domineering part she had played in selecting his wife for him, though he never said so directly. He was freer in criticizing her pro-Southern politics, which he refused to share. But his mother had a grip on him in other ways, not the least of which was the large amount of stock she owned in the family railroad. Control of this immensely valuable property was now becoming a furious issue within the family. Many wanted to sell it to one or another of the tycoons who had emerged on Wall Street with hundreds of millions of capital at their disposal. The danger in not selling lay in their power to build a competing system, by corrupting the New Jersey legislature into giving them a right of way.

Prudence was probably on the side of selling, but Jonathan Stapleton disliked the idea. “I don't want to become a mere money man, no matter how much we're paid. The railroad was our source of power, not because of what it was worth but because of the men who worked for it. We had spokesmen living in cities and towns around the whole state. Money can't buy that.”

“Would you not still have the cotton mills?” I asked.

“Even if we expanded them, they'd still only be a single business in a single city.”

I saw the forward thrust of his spirit, the readiness to mount the barricades, and rejoiced in it. The man who came down here in November did not, could not, think this way. He had been exhausted in body and soul. Now, in bleak February, he was ignoring gray skies and ice floes on the bay; he was pulsing with life, vigor, command.

We were on the beach, striding along at his usual pace.

Rawdon was with us but scampering far ahead to investigate pieces of driftwood and dead fish and other flotsam of the winter sea.

“I'm boring you with this business claptrap,” Jonathan said.

“On the contrary,” I said. “I'm flattered that you take me into your confidence.”

“I want a wife who shares not only her love with me but her mind.”

“A wife?” I said, my voice dying away with disbelief.

“Do you think I could let you go when we go back to Bowood? Do you think I could turn my back on happiness that way?”

“I—I couldn't preside at Bowood. I'd be an embarrassment to you. There would be scandalous rumors.”

“We've had them before and survived. According to my great-grandmother Rawdon, Kemble Stapleton had a love affair with an Irish girl who turned out to be a British spy.”

“How would young Rawdon react?”

“I think he may love you more than I do,” he said.

We walked in silence between mounds of snow and driftwood, my mind soaring above the wintry wreckage, then plummeting to earth like a stricken bird at the thought of my deception. Would now be the time to tell him? I suddenly remembered William Seward in his secret pleasure house in Washington, fixing me with his cold worldly eyes and saying,
Who are you? A somewhat notorious Irish adventuress
. My courage failed me.

Jonathan broke our silence to reveal he had been practicing a kind of deception on me—not a malicious or intentional one. He had spoken what was in the forefront of his heart first. Now he began telling me why he had to qualify his bold declarations and delay fulfillment of his promise.

“I hope, having told you this, you'll let me choose the moment. It can't be now, or even this spring. There are two reasons. One is my mother. She wouldn't approve. You aren't on the social level she considers so important for someone who becomes a Stapleton. Her health is failing rapidly. I flinch from bringing further unhappiness into her life—having brought so much.”

I wanted to cry out against his thinking that way. I thought he had stopped it. But my protest would have had an ugly note of self-interest in it.

There was also the problem of the family and the railroad. It was very important for him to hold their coalition of shareholders together for the next six or eight months while he showed them that he could withstand the titans of Wall Street. A marriage that some might disapprove could shake their confidence in him when he needed it most.

“Do you understand?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

There was a falling note in my voice, caused not by his realism but by the impossibility of ending my deception now. Put in the context of what he had just been saying, the truth would have been catastrophic. At least, so it seemed to me then, as I thought of how it might part us and how unbearable that had become.

He thought my sadness was caused by his realism. He stopped dead in the sand and seized my hands. “My God,” he said. “I sound like I consider you a block of preferred stock. I'm a monster without a soul. I'll get the local parson down here and marry you tonight.”

“No,” I said, terrified at the idea of marrying him without removing the deception and even more terrified of telling him on such short notice. “I won't let you do it. Your promise is enough for me, if it takes two years to fulfill.”

He started to brush aside my objections. “For your mother's sake,” I said. “She received me in the house with courtesy and trust. I understand—I truly understand—her prejudices.”

We had lost all track of Rawdon. He came rushing up to us at this moment, a piece of driftwood shaped precisely like the body of a woman in his hand. “Look at this,” he cried, then stopped, open mouthed, when he saw that beneath our cloaks we were holding hands. Instantly he began reciting to his wooden woman.

“Where did you learn that?” his father said.

“From Miss Stark.”

“It's part of the game of poetry we play when he goes to bed nights,” I said. “It's Irish, from the sixteenth century.”

“He's too young for that kind of poetry,” Jonathan said. “Give me that thing.”

He took Rawdon's driftwood woman away from him and flung it far out into the freezing water.

“That's mine,” Rawdon said. “You have no right to do that. I wanted it.”

“Now, now.” I said. “You'll find another piece just as interesting.”

He shot me a look of genuine dislike, the first such expression I had seen in months, and ran off toward the house.

“I hope you're teaching him some English poetry, too,” Jonathan said as we walked back toward the house.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “That's part of his daily lessons.

We've done two plays of Shakespeare in the past week. On Monday we'll read some of Dryden. The Irish poetry is just by the by, recited for the fun of it.”

“I don't like much poetry,” he said, “especially those little tinkling meters that Poe and Longfellow use. Or Shelley, for that matter. But I liked that fellow Walt Whitman. Have you read any of
Leaves of Grass
?”

I had to confess I had not heard of him.

“His poems
march,
” Jonathan said. “He marshals words like an infantry general.”

“Tell me your favorite,” I said.

He considered for a moment and looked past me at the limitless sea.

“How lovely,” I said, the words striking me as almost a paradigm of my own life.

“He wrote that to a failed revolutionary,” Jonathan said. “But it's equally true for others, I think.”

“My God,” I murmured, almost overwhelmed.

I trembled on the brink of telling him everything. By this time we were approaching the house, and Rawdon stood on the steps, glowering. I realized he was jealous. He frankly expressed it a few days later, when his father had returned home for his week of business. We played our usual game of good-night poetry, but after his third kiss he clung to me and asked, “Do you love me?”

“Of course I do,” I said.

He released me and fell back on his pillow, glaring. “You really love Father. I can tell.”

“I love you both. Each in a different way. I love you as if you were my own son. I love him as—a friend. He's been so good to me. He's given me a home, a welcome in your country. Think of what that means to me, who has no mother or father, nor great fortune.”

“I want you to love
me
, not him.” he said. “If you love him, he'll hurt you, he'll kill you, like he did my mother.”

“He will do no such thing. Your father is done with killing. He wants nothing but peace and happiness for us all, above all for you. Isn't it proof of his love, the way he comes down here to see you each weekend?”

“Not if he comes to see you,” he replied.

“He comes to see us both. Does he shun you or show any dislike of you?”

He was silenced but not satisfied. I should have realized his hostility once aroused was liable to awaken his old habits of stealthy observance. I should have warned Jonathan and myself that we were under surveillance. But the flurry of direct protest seemed to subside and be virtually forgotten in the excitement of the next weekend, when his father arrived with a thrilling new toy, which was considerably more than a toy—the Myriopticon. It consisted of a series of brilliantly colored pictures that unrolled off a drum onto a screen, behind which a glowing lamp was positioned. The first series told the history of the Civil War. With each picture was a text, designed to be read by a master of ceremonies.