Chapter Seventeen #3
She was not sure what she had expected from this story, except that The Schoolcraft Colony was not it.
That said, she had been picking up dissonant notes in the music of his ideas lately, though for the most part, she had responded by putting her fingers in her ears.
She refused to see anything wrong when their reunion had felt so right.
She reveled in the new vistas that were opening up to her, and of a sense that they were again traveling together on a great adventure.
She could not bear the thought of it coming to an end.
It was a confusing tangle, but there was no time to unravel the threads now. Pelham would arrive in a few days. Julia needed to figure out how to manufacture enthusiasm for a book that genuinely repelled her.
Julia spent every free moment that week poring over Pelham’s manuscript, finding aspects of the narrative she could praise, turns of phrase and metaphors she admired. By the time he arrived on Thursday, she felt prepared.
Pelham had a meeting downtown, so they had agreed to meet at the Willard Hotel. Julia dressed carefully, in a narrow black chiffon evening dress with silver beads, cut low in the back. She pulled her shoulder-length hair back on one side, and kept it in place with a rhinestone comb.
When she looked in the mirror, she chuckled. Perhaps it will occur to Pelham that women in communes are unlikely to wear such frocks.
She arrived to find Pelham waiting in the lobby. He approached, took her hands, and chafed them. “You poor soul, out in this dreadful cold.” It had been a mild winter until earlier this week, when Arctic weather had set in.
“New Englander, recall!” Looking up at his bright eyes and dazzling smile cemented her resolve to set aside her misgivings. “You’re brilliant, Pelham. I’m so proud of you.”
He smiled and pulled her into an embrace, right there in the lobby.
The ma?tre d’ led them to a table by the window, which reflected their faces and the flickering candlelight. A tenor, accompanied by a ten-piece orchestra, was singing “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.”
“I want to hear about you, darling,” he said. “How did your parents take the news of your not attending the funeral?”
“Not terribly well,” she said, rather understating the matter. “But I wrote to Father, and I am certain it will be all right. Please, let us talk about your novel. It is marvelous, so beautifully written and engaging. I know it will be a great success.”
“I hope so,” Pelham replied, uncharacteristically humble.
“Oh, I am certain!” Julia said, and proceeded to spend an hour expounding upon the good points she had so carefully indexed, assiduously avoiding the trickier aspects. She thought she had managed it well, but as they were having coffee, he took her hand in his.
“I must ask what you thought of Patience Turner.”
Julia’s heart sank, but she smiled as brightly as she could. “I recognized her, of course, as Margaret Fuller. I thought she was interesting, a very … textured character.”
“It’s just, well … I wondered if it would be difficult for you to read,” he said, his voice full of tender sympathy.
It isn’t a biography! Julia felt like screaming.
“I suppose it was a somewhat sordid interpretation,” she said, her tone carefully neutral.
Julia knew Pelham believed that he had been faithful in his portrayal of Margaret Fuller’s inner life, and she never felt like she could argue with Pelham, especially on this subject.
“I was afraid you might see it that way. I hoped her happier ending was mitigating.”
“Yes, you freed her,” Julia replied, glad her own comment had not prompted a debate, as she was not sure she could restrain herself. She was relieved when she heard the band play the first strains of Al Jolson’s “It’s You.”
“Can we, Pelham?” She nodded at the dance floor, filling up, as always, for this song.
He rose and took her hand, and Julia did her best to shake off her annoyance. Pelham was always at his most gallant and amusing when they danced, so by the time the orchestra stopped for the night, she felt more favorably disposed toward him.
As was his custom, Pelham was staying in a small hotel in Washington Heights, not far from her apartment. He asked if she would come over for a bit.
They went to the secluded reception room off the lobby, always deserted at this late hour.
He removed her cloak and led her to the love seat near the rear of the room, out of view of the reception desk.
He bent to kiss her, and she felt the familiar stirring thrill, the pull of attraction, of temptation.
He pulled back and looked at her. “Please, Julia, won’t you come up?”
And there it was. One of the dissonant notes.
I am such a fool, she thought.
A few weeks earlier, during Julia’s last visit to New York, she and Pelham met Mina and Gardiner at a basement speakeasy in lower Manhattan.
They resurfaced at the end of the night to find it had begun to snow.
It was like pixie dust, barely visible except in the streetlight, but Julia was enchanted.
“Rather anemic little snow, isn’t it?” Gardiner said, breaking the spell as Pelham’s friends so often did. He grabbed Mina’s hand. “Well, good night, kids!”
As they trotted off hand in hand, on their way to Gardiner’s apartment, Pelham let out a sigh that sounded very much like a huff.
“What?” she said.
“I can’t say I don’t envy them,” he said.
Julia felt sands shift beneath her. The very first time they met, Pelham had told Julia he opposed the institution of marriage, and she knew his crowd put great stock in the idea of “free unions.”
He had been so courtly, though, always taking it for granted that Julia would stay with a friend when she visited New York, and he would stay in a hotel in Washington. She took that to mean that he had abandoned his anti-marriage stance along with some of his other more extreme views.
In the much larger world beyond his very small one, relationships like theirs either ended in marriage or just ended.
Julia felt misled somehow, but unsure if he had misled her or she had misled herself, she had stood mute and motionless under the streetlight.
No longer enchanted by the pixie dust snow, she just felt cold and wet and foolish.
How Pelham took her silence, she could not say, but his slightly defiant look disappeared. He tilted his head and frowned in a rather sweet, reassuring way.
“Come on. Let’s get you back.” He took her hand and led her in the direction of the apartment where she was staying, and then said good night tenderly. A few days later, she received a nice letter, in which he apologized for his “little tantrum” at the end of her weekend.
Not long after, everything was eclipsed by the news of his novel being accepted for publication. He was so proud to send it, and Julia was so thrilled to read it, she had shoved the memory of that evening far in the back of her mind.
Julia felt no great moral impediment to going to bed with Pelham before they were married.
She certainly desired him. But if marriage was off the table, foreclosed as an option, it felt reckless.
More reckless, even, than if she did not love him, if he were just a casual fling of the sort Mina and her friends occasionally indulged in.
Until that night a few weeks ago, Pelham had not pressed her, and given his apology for it, Julia had assumed (rather blithely, she now realized) that some talk of their future would precede his doing so again. Yet here he was, with no preamble, looking down at her with that beseeching expression.
While she did not relish broaching the topic herself, it could be put off no longer.
“Pelham, where do you see this going, you and I?”
“I see us together, of course,” he said, pulling her close.
“Going along as we are?”
“What are you suggesting, Julia?” Pelham pulled in his chin, a baffled expression on his face. “Are you talking about … about marriage?”
His confusion could not possibly be sincere.
Julia might have talked herself into thinking they were of one mind, but only because his chivalrous behavior had suggested it.
What hint had she ever given that she was in accord with his notions?
Irritated, and disinclined to help him along, she raised her eyebrows and waited.
Pelham shook his head, as if to rid it of surprise. “I must say, I had not taken you for an institutionalist, Julia.”
It was fortunate he followed up the charade with such an infuriating comment. A kinder response—I’m so sorry, I fear we have misunderstood each other—might not have overridden her dismay. As it was, his response sharpened her tongue.
“A helpful hint for the future, Pelham: When you meet people outside the tiny circle you have clearly been spending too much time in, you can safely bet they don’t favor ‘free unions.’”
He had the gall to appear stung. “But Julia, given all you have told me about your parents’ passionless marriage, I don’t understand how you couldn’t!” Pelham replied. “Free unions are a more natural arrangement, far superior.”
“You know what else is natural?” Julia snapped. “Snakebites. Snakebites are natural.”
She pushed herself up from the love seat, crossed the room, and stood looking out the window, her back to him. Then she spun around again.
“Suppose I got pregnant?”
“Julia, I love you. I am committed to you, whatever comes! Why would you need some piece of paper to prove that? I think I’ve found an apartment. I want you to come to New York, for us to be together. And if this novel leads to another, just think what might lie ahead. We could go to Paris!”
She turned her back to him again and looked out at the darkness. He came up behind her, brushed her hair aside, and kissed the back of her neck.
“I know you, Julia. I know you yearn for freedom. It’s as clear as the nose on your face. You could be someone’s pretty wife in Back Bay at this very moment, with summers on that fortress erected by Boston’s finest. But you aren’t. Trust your instincts, what do they tell you?”
“That this is a bad idea,” she said, flatly.
“That’s not you talking. It’s the censor.”
Julia almost laughed at his evoking “the censor,” Freud’s term for society’s expectations. “You ask me to tell you what my instincts are, and I do. And what is your response? Oh, no. Not those instincts!”
“Is it society’s opinion you fear? Or perhaps your family, who would have cheerfully sold you to the highest bidder. Why you would ever submit to their codes, I cannot imagine.”
“Then you should try a little harder,” she said, turning to face him again, arms crossed over her chest. “And keep in mind while you do that I’m a woman, who would alone bear all the consequences for living with you without marriage.
I would be utterly cast out, and not just by my family.
Your friends might accept me, but once again, that’s a mighty small world. ”
“But you’re a part of it!” he argued.
No, I’m not, Julia thought, but she did not say it.
Pelham let out a frustrated groan. He turned and wandered aimlessly, rubbing the back of his neck.
“What, Pelham?” she asked wearily.
He glanced at her, hand still at his neck. “I cannot think of anyone who would benefit more from psychoanalysis than you.”
“Oh? Am I so neurotic?”
“I did not say that. But there is freedom in awareness and self-understanding.”
“Yes, and connecting to my inner libertine,” Julia said dryly. Like all good Freudians, Pelham believed that sexual repression was behind all neuroses. Only in the free and open expression of her sexuality would she find true satisfaction.
“Please walk me home, Pelham,” she said.
After a restless night in which her emotions swung back and forth between anger and despair, Julia struggled to drag herself out of bed in the morning to dress for work.
She would have been grateful for the distraction of her students, but they were distracted themselves by the snowstorm that started up in the afternoon.
It was a great deal of work to keep their attention, especially in her low mood.
Only by recalling how she, too, had loved snow as a child was she able to maintain her patience and some semblance of order.
When she emerged from the school, she was surprised to see Pelham waiting for her on the sidewalk. He met her at the bottom of the stairs and took her gloved hands in his.
“I’m so sorry about last night, Julia. You have given me a great deal to think about. I am afraid I behaved like a brute, and a rather presumptuous one.”
Surprised by the apology, Julia was not sure what to say.
“And now I must compound my sins. They say this snow won’t let up, so I have to get back to New York. I can’t get stuck here past the weekend when I sail for Europe next week.”
“Oh … That is a shame, Pelham,” she said, and in that moment, she meant it.
He looked so fine in his dark woolen coat and black fedora, smiling down at her.
He took her chin in his gloved hand, glanced around to ensure there were no eight-year-old witnesses, and kissed her on the forehead. She felt a catch at her heart.
“You’re a darling, Julia. And I am sorry—both about last night, and that I must leave.”
As she started for home, Julia initially felt encouraged, but as she neared her destination, relief began to give way to fatigue.
It was as if she and Pelham had been acting out the same roles, repeating some version of the same scene, over and over.
And hers was such a pathetic role, too, always asking herself the same question—Does he like me enough?
—and alternating between despair and relief, depending upon the answer.
Well, she was off the stage for the time being, at least.
She found a note from Mina waiting for her in the vestibule:
Gardiner and I won’t be able to see you and Pelham tomorrow night. He can’t get down from New York because of this wretched snow, so I’m catching the last train to Charlottesville to see a friend. x, Mina.
Julia felt relieved. She had always tolerated Mina’s personality quirks, but while she could not pinpoint when or why, at some point in recent months, she had begun to find her presence oppressive.
When Julia reached her apartment, her first thought was to call Louisa. She had meant to do so all week, but she had been too consumed with Pelham’s manuscript. When she glanced at the clock, however, she realized Louisa would not be home from work for at least an hour.
Julia grabbed a blanket and went out to her sleeping porch. She did love snow. It was so quiet, so clean.
Like spreading a nice white blanket over all her troubles.