With a thin smile distorting her mouth, she marched back to her chair. Will had ducked behind a divan when the book was thrown. Now he reappeared, returned to Gideon’s side and clasped his hand.
“Don’t feel bad, Papa. Maybe you can buy Eleanor a present in Philadelphia if we ever go there. We’re all really sorry we can’t go next month because you have to work so hard writing up those political meetings.”
“Can’t go?” Gideon blinked. He turned and looked at Margaret, who was gazing at her son as if she wanted to wipe him off the earth. “But it’s your mother’s illness that—”
He bit off the sentence. He was beginning to understand. At first it frightened him. Then it made him pale with fury.
“Children—Eleanor—” His voice was barely controlled. “I’m sorry to spoil the party, but I must speak to your mother alone. Please leave us.”
Eleanor and her brother exchanged hesitant looks.
“I said please leave!”
For a second Eleanor seemed ready to protest. But she herded Will out ahead of her and, with her head bowed, closed the parlor doors. Instantly, Gideon stormed toward his wife.
“What have you been saying to those children behind my back? You—and Dr. Melton’s advice—forced the cancellation of the trip.” He grabbed her wrist. “Have you been saying otherwise, Margaret?” He shook the flabby white arm. “Have you?”
She struggled. “Don’t do that. Let me go—”
His voice overlapped hers. “What else have you been telling them? I should have guessed long ago that you were up to something like this. Will’s always looking hurt—Eleanor’s always angry with me—”
Able to contain his rage at last, he released her and stepped away. Something turned in his mind like a key turning in a lock. The drinking hadn’t affected her as much as he’d thought. Her lapses of memory were cold-blooded shams designed to annoy and harass him. She might go to the liquor cabinet too often, but she was more scheming than sick—and far more bloated with the pus of hate than he’d ever suspected.
“I’d like to know,” he said, “just how many lies you’ve put into their heads.”
The pudgy white fingers of her left hand trembled as they rose to her other arm, and massaged it. “You hurt me.”
“And what have you been trying to do to me with your falsehoods, your deceptions? You’ve used my own children—and yours—as the instruments of your animosity. My God, what a wretched creature you’ve become.”
His voice dropped, hoarse with pain. “You’ll find it understandable if I’m no longer able to stay in this house with you.”
He trembled, because he understood the enormous significance of what he’d just said. He had severed all but the last tie binding them together.
Well, so be it. Painful as it was, he’d endure it. Anything was preferable to trying to live in a house ruled by a mind as sick and twisted as hers.
He started for the doors. He heard a faint creak. Someone was outside, leaning against one of the panels and listening. “You hurt me,” Margaret repeated as he rattled the handles to warn the eavesdropper. A moment later he opened the doors.
Although the gas was lit in the foyer, it was trimmed low, and shadows clotted the corners, Eleanor stood two paces from the doorway. Her face showed confusion.
Behind Gideon, Margaret rubbed her arm so her daughter would be sure to see. This time she shrieked, “You hurt me, damn you!”.
“She’s tricked you, Eleanor,” he said. It almost tore him apart to say that about the woman he’d once loved. The sound of his own voice was a roar in his ears, as though winds of unbelievable force were rending the earth. “She’s lied about me. Repeatedly, it seems.”
“Papa, be kind,” Eleanor whispered. “She isn’t herself tonight.”
“She hasn’t been herself for years. She’s beyond help. I can’t stay here any longer, Eleanor. She despises my work and she despises me. She’s been determined to penalize me ever since I made it clear I wouldn’t give in to her every whim.” He extended his hand. “Please try to see my side for a change—”
Eleanor dashed tears away and stepped out of reach. Gideon felt as if his outstretched hand was covered with filth.
“I see a woman who needs support and love,” Eleanor said. “And I see you walking out on her.”
“I can do her no good at all. If anyone can—if it isn’t already too late—it’s a doctor in some sanitarium for—”
“I’m not going anywhere!” Margaret screamed at him. “I’m perfectly fine. I don’t need a doctor, as you so snidely declare all the time!”
Gideon kept his eye on his daughter. She was the one most urgently in need of saving: she and her brother.
“I can’t let you and Will stay here. I’ll consult a lawyer. We’ll find a way to get you both out of—”
“I’m staying, Papa. No matter what else has happened, she needs us.”
He wasn’t strong enough, or, God help him, compassionate enough just then to respond to Eleanor’s plea. A part of his mind acknowledged the rightness of her words. But he was much too angry to let that part have any influence. Too angry, humiliated and worn-out.
It all burst forth in another shout, “She doesn’t need me!”
“She does.”
“No!”
“Well, she must have once—were you here then?”
I was with Julia.
“Goddamn it, she drove me out! She hates me!”
“And can you say you’ve never given her cause, Papa? Can you say that?”
The blazing accusation made him recall how Julia had pointed out his own unconscious withdrawal from the family. He thought of how he’d increasingly come to depend on the Union as a refuge without even being aware of it. His daughter’s scornful eyes were like mirrors showing him all his flaws, and there was no way on God’s earth he could in conscience answer, “No.” He could only say in a shaken voice, “I’m sorry I ruined your birthday.”
He ran up the stairs two at a time. In his room he collected a hat, outercoat and valise, and a few moments later walked out the front door into the darkness of Fifth Avenue.
By then Margaret had undergone a remarkable transformation. She was composed, with no trace of her earlier hysteria showing save some redness around her eyes.
She took Will into the protective curve of her left arm. He stood rigid, afraid to move. Eleanor faced her mother, fighting back tears. None of them did more than start slightly when the front door slammed, and none of them moved to the windows to see which direction Gideon had taken in the rainstorm.
Will turned his head that way, but Margaret pulled him tight against her side and held him there. Eleanor covered her eyes and began to cry. With no one to see, Margaret permitted her mouth to set into a small, satisfied smile.
iii
From the night Gideon moved out, Margaret became the household’s unquestioned ruler. That fact seemed to restore some clarity to her mind. Only forty-eight hours after her husband’s departure, she spoke with the butler behind closed doors.
“I want to make doubly sure you bring me the mail as each post arrives, Samuel. Bring it to my room. If there’s no answer when you knock, slip everything under the door. I want to see it all before anyone else does.”
“Certainly, Mrs. Kent,” the butler murmured.
“And don’t mention this conversation to another person. If you should do so by accident, your job will be forfeit. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Perfectly, madam.” His expression left some doubt that he really did, though. Nevertheless, he added, “There’ll be no slips.”
Margaret smiled. “For the sake of your seven children, I hope you’re right.”
She’d spoken to Samuel none too soon. Next day, the afternoon delivery contained an envelope addressed to Eleanor in Gideon’s handwriting. Margaret tore it open and went into a rage as she read her husband’s blatant attempt to win Eleanor away from her. Gideon wanted his daughter to come down
to the Union as soon as possible, so that he could speak with her and prove that it wasn’t advisable for her or for Will to remain in the house. When the worst of Margaret’s wrath had passed, she tucked the letter into a pigeonhole in the secretary in her bedroom. The pigeonhole was large, roomy enough for many more letters.
For a little while she felt very assured. Very much in control. But she had other moments when she didn’t think she could remain conscious one second longer. During those moments she thought of her children and of how she’d manipulated their emotions in order to turn them against their father. Accompanying the recollections was a terrible guilt. She even had moments of total lucidity in which she was ashamed of what she’d done to Gideon himself. Those moments were rare, though.
As the days went by, her swings between euphoria and depression became more frequent and pronounced. She had a tonic bottle in her possession every waking hour. The damnable guilt began to pervade her mind so completely, sometimes she felt controlled by it.
On June 25 there occurred an event which did not help her mental balance, even though it had nothing to do with her personally. That day, out in the Dakota Territory along a river the Sioux called the Greasy Grass, the famed boy general of the Civil War, George A. Custer, led a Seventh Cavalry column to disaster. He and 265 of his men were massacred.
Two fundamental errors on Custer’s part were responsible for the slaughter. One was his decision to fight when he was under orders to await the main army force moving up to join him. The other was his decision to divide his single column into two. Part of his command survived, but not Custer and those with him. They were surrounded and killed by two thousand or more Sioux under their battle leader, Chief Crazy Horse. The Indians wanted revenge for the invasion of their tribal lands by the white gold hunters. They found that revenge when they found the blue-clad soldiers who had come to legalize the theft by force.
For days, no one in the East spoke of anything but what the press christened the Little Big Horn massacre. All the papers were filled with long dispatches about it. In secret, Will read every account he could get his hands on. So did Margaret. She went over and over the ghastly details in her mind without understanding why.
The news stories produced a strange new anxiety within her. At night, as she fell into the alcoholic stupor which now passed for sleep, the last images in her mind were war-painted faces and shiny scalp knives wet with blood.
Certain passages in her diary began to reflect her disturbed condition. Five days after the Custer massacre was front-page news, she wrote:
—I do not know why I must feel so terrible all the time. HE is the one—
She paused to ink her pen, then raked the nib horizontally beneath the capitalized word.
—who is guilty, HE, HE, HE, HE, HE—
Even as she printed the word over and over, the guilt battered her. It wasn’t true. She knew it wasn’t true. She was the guilty one. She drank more tonic. It didn’t help.
She wanted to cry out, scream. Instead, she wrote faster and faster, as if some exterior force had taken possession of her hand and was operating it like a piece of machinery. She lifted the pen and began to slash more lines beneath the fourteen repetitions of the word HE.
She stumbled to her feet, slashing so hard she tore the paper. Her chair crashed over, then the brown bottle. Loose hair tumbled into her eyes. Her face contorted, sweaty and anguished as she raked the pen back and forth, back and forth.
Like a dagger. Like a sword. Trying to obliterate. Trying to destroy.
Inside her head, a voice said, You are the guilty one.
With a cry she fell backward, fainting.
When she awoke hours later, she was amazed and frightened to discover her dress was spotted with ink. The tonic bottle lay on its side on the carpet, in the center of a soaked place two feet wide. Her diary was open to pages that were now nothing but shreds of paper. Shreds stained with crude, fantastically shaped blots of ink that had flown from the slashing pen.
She had no recollection of how any of that disorder had come about.
iv
A few nights later, about one in the morning, Eleanor heard an outcry from the stairway landing.
She jumped out of bed, hurried along the hall and stopped short at the head of the stairs. Then, uttering a soft “Oh,” she rushed down to the source of the cry.
In her nightdress, Margaret was crouched by the leaded window on the landing. The window overlooked Fifth Avenue and Central Park. From high above the Park, the moon bleached the tops of black trees.
Margaret turned and peered at her daughter. For a moment her eyes showed no recognition. Eleanor almost gagged at the cloying odor of the tonic. Margaret raised a cautioning finger.
“Sssh. They’re watching the house.”
Eleanor felt icy. “Watching?”
“Yes. They’re over in those trees.”
“Who, Mama?
“Men. I don’t know their names. They’ve been put there for an hour. I heard them calling my name and came to look. Keep your eyes open and you’ll see the men dart between the tree trunks.”
“Mama, there’s no one over in Central Park at this hou—”
“The men are there, Eleanor!” She gazed into her daughter’s eyes, entreating her to believe. She acted afraid to speak above a whisper. “They were sent to hurt me.”
Eleanor shivered. Despite all the things she’d said on the night her father left, she found herself wishing he were in the house. If there were a real emergency, she didn’t even know where he was staying. He hadn’t bothered to communicate with her, or with Will. Not so much as a note.
“Who sent them, Mama?”
“I don’t know, but they’ve come to punish me, just the way the Indians punished poor General Custer.”
Eleanor couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Punish you like—? What makes you say such things? Who would come here wanting to punish you? No one.”
“You’re wrong. They’re over there. I swear they are. I’ve seen them. I heard them mocking my name. Daring me to come out, but I won’t. I won’t.”
She turned huge, horrified eyes toward the moon-drenched Park. There in the peaceful silver and shadow of the landing, Eleanor at last realized Gideon had been right about one thing. All the stimulants her mother consumed were hurting her. For the first time, she began to fear for her mother’s sanity.
Chapter XVII
Voyager
i
TOWARD THE END, she always began to swear like a slut from one of the London rookeries. But they were seventy-odd miles from that sort of squalor, sporting in a moon-dappled bed on sheets of satin.
She squeezed him with her plump pink legs like a rider clinging to a horse. Her name was Armina, Duchess of Tichfield. She was seven years older than he, with practiced hands and big, soft breasts—altogether one of the most blithely amoral women he’d ever met. Sometimes that shocked a part of him that had never quite grown out of a Virginia boyhood centered around Sunday church and daily devotions.
He should have enjoyed what they were doing. In terms of pure physical sensation, he did. Yet as he felt the end approaching, a sadness overcame him in that sumptuous bedroom above an English garden drowsing in the summer night. A sadness, and a sense of futility.
The Duchess had yellow curls, and blue eyes, and in certain lights a marked resemblance to Dolly.
“Matt, oh my God, love, go on, go on, damn you!” Then she became completely incoherent except for her cursing.
Her husband the Duke had had a foot blown away while serving with the artillery in the Crimea. She liked to tease Matt by forming a little circle with her thumb and forefinger, slipping it around one of his fingers and rubbing it back and forth while she winked and said the Duke had gone to the Crimea and lost his foot and the iron in his rammer, too. At the moment he was up in town, occupied with his endless speculation in consols, or with some business pertaining to his seat in the House of Lor—
No.
That was wrong, a peripheral part of Matt’s mind warned him suddenly. He stopped the lovemaking, bracing on his elbows with his rump cocked high in the air. The Duchess protested in purple language. For a moment all he could see, through his inner eye, was an image of himself poised above her with his fundament bare in the breeze. It was another splendid lesson on the unintentionally funny attitudes the pretentious human beast fell into. But he had no time to really savor the picture.
He twisted his head toward the foyer of the bedchamber. Was the bolt securely shot? Armina had been so warm to have him tear away her underskirts and corset, she’d said there was no need. But now he heard a fuss and clatter in the hall, and his quickening heartbeat told him there was.
“Matt, damn you, why have you left me in the absolute bloody middle of—?”
“Sssh!” He moved erratically, nearly jabbing his own eye when he jerked a finger to his lips. Perspiration beaded and cooled in his mustache. “Can’t you hear all that?” He meant the servants chattering, trying to warn their mistress, and the frumph-frumph of a man repeatedly clearing his throat.
“God save us, it’s the old bugger himself,” the Duchess whispered. She giggled.
“I’m glad you find it so amusing,” Matt snapped as he disengaged and started to slide off the bed on the side where he thought his pants and smallclothes lay. His bare foot slipped. He landed on his rump. The hall door, unbolted, smashed open. A huge shadow—a beaky head, an arm, a jutting pistol—was flung across the bedroom wall by a multitude of lights in jiggling candle-brackets.
“Show your face, you cuckolding bastard!” the Duke of Tichfield shouted in his phlegmy voice, and things were comical no longer.
Matt didn’t bother with his drawers. He jumped to his feet, jerked on his pants and flung a glance toward the open French windows overlooking the garden perfumed with roses. Some instinct said that if he ran that way, a bullet would find his back.