Savage Beauty (43 page)

To Norma she joked:

Whadda you think about my bringing the little old Irish devil over here? … I’m going to drag her up to the top of the Eiffel Tower the moment she gets to Paris & let her crow one good long crow, & then I’m going to waltz her up to the
Rotonde
& get her drunk, & if she wants to crow all the way home, well, I’m going to let her.

But the real news in all those fugitive letters that at last began to arrive in Rome was that Norma had married Charles Ellis.

Now I have two bruvvers! And two such nice bruvvers. I couldn’t have picked me nicer ones. Charlie knows I love him, unless he has lost his memory, but tell him anyway that I love him very much, and that I think he is a great actor and has a very handsome nose, and that I am proud and happy to have him in my immediate family.

She couldn’t help noting that she, the eldest, remained unmarried: “Well, both my little sisters are young married women, and me, I am just about three months from being an old maid. My Englishman, honey, is, as you might have guessed, a married man, this time with three children. Oh, well. (Who the devil told you about him, anyhow?)” Then she sent them both her love, “and I do hope you’ll go ahead and have a baby. If you can’t support it, I will.
^*

As ever, the companion of your middle age, the friend of your declining years, the old woman who’ll sit before the fire with you fifty years from now and knit the left stocking while you knit the right.

In her own life there was still nobody she cared for as she had Slocombe, to whom she had written while she was in Albania. His letter awaited her
in Rome. “
I had thought you lost,” he wrote on November 19, “having no other news of you than a message from Griffin saying you were gone off into the Albanian wilds.” Then he played the remembering game that lovers play when they’ve lost each other for good. It was like licking a sore tooth to see if it still hurt. He had asked her if she remembered telling him about her mother’s cupboard filled with the healing herbs of her childhood. “Darling … I remember you too vividly & personally for me ever to forget,” he wrote. “Anyhow I am working hard afternoons & evenings in my office. The Rotonde sees me once a week on an average. My wife sees me most of the other nights. And for the rest, I have your photograph in my table drawer, & dreams of you two or three times a week, and daydreams almost all the time.” He sounded just like Jim Lawyer or Arthur Ficke: full of yearning but married and utterly unavailable.

It was to Arthur that she admitted that first winter in Paris how lonesome she was: “
Oh, if only you were there now,—just around the corner from me!—Shall I never see you again, my dear?”

Arthur wrote back on Valentine’s Day, telling her to pick up a Japanese print he’d left with his French dealer, as well as a few thousand francs the man was holding for him. The money was his gift to her, and she was to spend it on the same kind of riotous living they would have spent it on if they had been together. Instead, she bought a Poiret gown of silk the color of her eyes. When he asked if she minded that in his next book he’d publish a group of sonnets dedicated to her, she wrote that she couldn’t care less what the world thought. At the close of her letter she asked offhandedly about Witter Bynner, “
Dear, does Hal know how much you care for me?—I have wondered, idly wondered.”

The mention of Hal galvanized Arthur’s pen. Their letters began to answer each other, with the intimacy of a conversation held in secret thousands of miles apart. For of course Arthur was not going to come to her in Europe. “Yes, Hal knows that I am perfectly mad about you,” he replied, “whether he knows
how
mad, I don’t know.” That was in August. By late fall, their letters had turned urgent.

Edna wrote to only three people from Albania: her mother, George Slocombe, and Arthur. “
I must write you,” she told Arthur. “But when I start to write you all I can think to say to you is—why aren’t you here? Oh, why
aren’t
you here? … Dear, when I come back to the States, won’t you come east to see me?— … you could come to New York, because you often do, to see Hal … and don’t you love me most as much as you love Hal?”

It was striking how often their thoughts turned to Hal. But Edna was drawing Arthur to her.

I think we might have a few days together that would be entirely lovely. We are not children, or fools, we are mad. And we of all people should be able to do the mad thing well. If each of us is afraid to see the other, that is only one more sympathy we have. If each of us is anguished lest we lose one another through some folly, then we are more deeply bound than any folly can undo.

Doubtless all this reasoning resolves itself into one pitiful female cry,—what ever happens, I want to see you again!—But oh, my dear, I know what my heart wants of you,—it is not the things that other men can give.

Do you remember that poem in
Second April
which says, “Life is a quest & love a quarrel, Here is a place for me to lie!”?—That is what I want of you—out of the sight & sound of other people, to lie close to you & let the world rush by.… Arthur, it is wicked and useless,—all these months and months apart from you, all these years with only a glimpse of you in the face of everybody.—I tell you I must see you again.—

Edna

On November 22, Arthur, who had not yet received this last letter, wrote to her from Iowa, where Hal, who was visiting, had given him the astonishing news that he “has gently and politely asked you to marry him.” Arthur’s own advice to her was that since he couldn’t, they should and then adopt him. “Do you know, I’ll bet I am more interested in this damn marriage than either of you two are!” Hal added:

What about that?

I am beginning to think there is no such go-between as the Atlantic Ocean.

Why have you never answered? Is there no answer?

Hal

Hal, not Arthur, had asked her to marry him. Except that Vincent had not yet received his letter. She wrote to him just before Christmas:

Dearest Hal,—

I never received your letter of which Arthur speaks.—So that his crazy card-index note, and your post-script, are all I have to tell me what is in your mind.—Do you really want me to marry you?—Because if you really want me to, I will.

As if that were not a remarkable enough acceptance, she amplified it for him:

I have thought for a long time that someday I should marry you.

Of course I can’t write to you about it, you must see that, my dear, not knowing what was in your letter. Whatever I say would be perhaps the wrong thing to say.

 … You have known me since I was a little girl. It is curious to think of that. As little as we have seen of one another, yet you are bound in the memories of my childhood.

If, she told him, it was just a dream he’d had a month ago and now regretted or had forgotten, then she was sorry.

I wish you could come here. It is not so very far, and I feel I must see you, and I can’t come there. But I suppose you have duties now from which you cannot be released—even for me. (It is amusing and pleasant to say to you: even for me.) In any case, I wish you could come, and wanted to.

You will let me hear from you at once, Hal, won’t you? Oh, if you knew the comical state my mind is in! What a
ridiculous
person you are!

Edna

Then suddenly, still having heard nothing, on December 30 she cabled him: YES HAL. One week later, precisely, she cabled him again. This time the single word YES.

On the first of January, he wrote to her at last in response to her first cable—a letter she could not have received by the time she sent her second. It was an eleven-line note with which he enclosed six poems:

Beloved Edna:

Your cable with its breath of you, stirs through my days.—Instead of going to China in the spring, I shall come to Europe, and we’ll talk deep. Perhaps for either of us marriage would be jolly. Perhaps not.—Uncannily I feel the beckon to be rather for Arthur than for

Hal

Again their letters crossed. When Vincent read Hal’s next letter, there was no mistaking his uncertainty:

Dearest Edna:

 … I didn’t know what to say.… First of all I wrote, half merry, half sad, half hoping, half doubting,—that we ought to see each other some time and talk over this possibility of our marrying. To be frank, I thought you would hoot, albeit in friendly fashion. But you said nothing. So I put far away from me the flicker of a thought and returned to my content. Presently I told Arthur, lightly. And he urged it. And he wrote you; and I, still lightly, added the postscript. You know the rest of the events.

As to what is going on inside me, it wobbles and wobbles. I have very important things to say to you, even before I can let myself be serious.…

Arthur, with no word from me except the bare news of your cable (forgive me), rapidly changes his mind, gives in, reasons, comes to N.Y. and sweetly expostulates, for your sake, for mine and, I think, for his. All I know is that for the first time in my life I am a coward. But, darling Edna, you’ll understand it all and laugh with me. We’re alike a little.… You frighten me. But you inspirit me. You also awe me—which is necessary!—was there ever such a fool as

Your friend from childhood
Hal

On January 24, 1922, in Vienna with Griffin Barry, with whom she had traveled for convenience, she received two of Arthur’s letters, forwarded from Rome. Outside the window of her hotel there was only a gray wall; she kept the lights on all day just to have the sense of light somewhere in her world. “
I smoke too many cigarettes, and the German food nearly kills me,” she wrote, “hot bread and cabbage and grease, when what I want is a bowl of plain rice and an apple.” But far worse was living with Griffin Barry. She explained for the first time to Arthur the circumstances of their being together:

I am living, chastely and harshly, with a man with whom I once had a love affair, a man whom I breathlessly and ruthlessly abandoned for somebody else, and whose consciousness of the wrong I did him is always boiling in his mind. We do not want to be together; … we have almost no tastes or opinions in common; but except for each other we are entirely alone in a strange city, so that we are constantly forced back into each other’s society; he is irascible and sarcastic; I am hard and pugnacious; we spend all the day and half the night in quarreling, or in abstaining from quarreling with an effort which whitens his face and makes my back ache; then we separate, either with a make-shift amiability or with the sublime insult of the encounter, and go to bed; I lie awake until four o’clock in the morning, at times desperately getting up and turning on the light, smoking a cigarette, trying to read, then lying down and making another try of it; finally I fall from entire exhaustion into a succession of little dozes, from each of which I am slowly, chokingly awakened by a glimmering and malevolent nightmare.

She was not writing. “I might as well try to work on a ship-wrecked raft.… I think I am going to marry Hal,” she wrote. She told him that Hal was going to come over to Europe in the spring. Clearly, she had not received Hal’s last letter.

Of course we may do nothing about it. But I rather feel that we shall. Would you be sorry or glad if I did? Tell me seriously, dear, what you feel about it. Of course, there is every geometrical reason why I should. We should make such a beautiful design, don’t you see,—Hal and you and I. Three variable and incommensurate souls automatically resolved into two right angles, and no nonsense about it.