Her mother hadn’t agreed. When at age twenty-three, after a disastrous romance, Agnes came home to live, Grace Lee further refined what was already an effective glance of disapproval, flashed whenever Agnes said she was going upstairs to read. Grace prodded Agnes to be more social, but once was enough. There had been high hopes for the match and the future, and Agnes was tacitly but clearly blamed for the implosion. Grace’s squared shoulders and her clipped departure from a room spoke for her.
Agnes made a great point of proclaiming she’d dodged a bullet. To whoever would listen, mostly Elspeth and their indulgent father, she railed against marriage as an institution unfavorable to women, not to mention unnatural and antiquated. Even if women were protected by marriage—a main argument in its favor—they were paradoxically infantilized by their own security. The equality of women was a Quaker tenet, but Grace let that slide. Instead she dwelled on visions of brilliant matches, inheritances, great houses, and social standing, all the furniture of the nineteenth-century novel. Lachlan had always jollied Grace, embraced her around the shoulders like a pal, made faces at her until her frozen expression broke and a genuine if self-conscious smile made a brief appearance. He never seemed to take her stiffness to heart. Had he known something about her that her children didn’t? Was she vulnerable or sensual or playful when they were alone? It seemed unlikely but not impossible. Agnes, now, hoped it had been so, for both their sakes.
Assuming a modern sensibility was Agnes’s form of rebellion. She was curious about psychology—Freud was a good writer, Jung too—and unflinching before the hard realities. She could never live the lives her friends did, propping up silly men and caring about propriety and breaches of etiquette. Elspeth, too, had managed to escape Grace Lee’s Victorian hopes for her daughters by acting so much like a nun it wasn’t possible to conceive of her being with a man. So the Lee girls were to be spinsters. Free of men in close quarters.
The idea that Dick had a say in what happened to the Point—that Polly gave him a say—made Agnes nauseous. It was annoying that every conversation with Polly on the subject, and on plenty of others as well, ended with the statement that she’d have to talk it over with Dick. Dick, Dick, Dick. He was really such a small man, so inconsequential, and without the sense to know it. How many people had he discouraged from pursuing philosophy? How often had he poisoned it with pretentiousness? It was a stealth pretension, too, one that masqueraded as an aversion to snobbery, swapping it for a knowingness offered with such a light touch that its elitism was barely detectable. And yet—detectable. She would have seen through him, even as an eighteen-year-old, and she wasn’t special. A lot of students surely had. Why couldn’t Polly, after all these years?
It rankled. Aside from Dick’s general unworthiness of as good a creature as Polly, Agnes had always had to stand aside for him, always had to go along with the convention that he was more important to Polly than she was simply because he was married to her. What sense did that make? Every afternoon at a certain point—it could be right in the middle of a sentence—a look came across Polly’s face, followed by a tip of her head, like a dog hearing a whistle out of reach to humans. Whatever expression she had on her face at that moment shifted to one of some complexity, different features showing different emotions. Her forehead was concerned, her chin weak, her jaw eager, her mouth compliant, her eyes—they annoyed Agnes the most. Her eyes had a look of fanaticism. They shone as if they were being treated to a vision. A vision of… Dick Wister?
Agnes banged her fist on the arm of her chaise. Where were the ducks? They were behaving like tourists, sleeping late. The water had turned from pink to blue gray, and the sky had whitened. Dick no doubt was preening. Rereading his own words or carving a semi-clever sentence into a letter. Lord, she was glad not to be saddled with supporting that! She heaved herself up and began to pace, keeping an eye out. Aware of her footsteps. Aware of being alone.
No matter what she’d claimed to her mother and the world, Agnes had never felt entirely relieved that her engagement had come to grief. She had been interested in John Manning. A bicycle bore down behind her in Fairmount Park. She turned, and there he was. She was twenty-two, recently graduated from Penn, and working in an arm of Lee & Sons as a glorified secretary. He was older, an officer at Girard Bank, and he looked the part—solid, dark-haired, a war veteran. She picked her bike off the grass and they walked side by side. He claimed he had his position because he’d studied economics at Penn, but there was something about him that brought out her mocking response. Do you think if you were Italian or a Negro that an economics degree would have been as persuasive? This flustered him. They parted ways, but the next day, he called the house.
She liked it when he shot his cuff to look at his watch and she saw the light brown hair stop at his wristbone, and when he cut his chicken and chewed it firmly, raising his finger to tell her she had to wait for his response to whatever she was saying until he swallowed. It was exciting to think a grown man might eventually belong to her, and that these gestures would become beloved by her alone. She already had love in her life, with her siblings and her father and Polly. But that kind of love didn’t reveal her to herself in the same way. After they began to kiss, she wanted to see John naked, and told him so. She had no experience and knew next to nothing about what men and women did, sex, but she wanted to touch him and to explore every inch of him with her mouth. She’d never before felt this way, but then, she’d only walked out with boys before.
“Heavens, Agnes,” he said. They were sitting on a bench in Rittenhouse Square. She was invigorated by the change of season, summer to fall, and wanted to be outside as much as possible.
“Is that wrong of me? I don’t think so,” she answered her own question. “It’s an impulse coming up naturally from here.” She touched her abdomen. “Shouldn’t I tell you when I feel something?” She moved her hand to tickle him, but he caught it midair.
“Impulses to kill come up naturally too.” He frowned at her.
“Exactly. Many times people are asking for it. You’re asking to be licked.”
“Whoa! Where did you learn to talk like that? You’re an unusual girl, do you know?”
“I’m not, really. It’s only that most girls don’t act like themselves around boys.”
“I promise my sisters don’t have thoughts like yours.”
“Ask them!”
He turned pink. She wrested her hand free and moved closer to him, laid her head on his shoulder. He glanced around him.
“Sit up. We’re in public.”
She let go and moved playfully all the way to the other end of the bench. Her spirits were too high to understand that they’d reached an impasse. “You’re an old fuddy-duddy already, John Manning. Lucky you met me before it’s too late.”
What went wrong? There was no definitive answer. One day she called him at the bank and asked him to meet her for a walk at lunchtime. It was the first time she’d made an overture. He called her so often she never felt the need, but she didn’t think twice about being the one to initiate a meeting. He was her friend now. He agreed and was perfectly pleasant when they spotted each other by the Liberty Bell in Independence Hall. He held her hand as usual, threw his head back in surprised laughter at her remarks as usual, but she sensed an undertone that confused her, and the next time she saw him she asked him about it. It seemed, she said gently, as though you didn’t want to be there. You could have said no, she offered, but his eyes widened with suspicion, and for a split second, they looked at each other as total strangers. He recovered swiftly and the mask of affability settled back over his face.