So then I hadn’t imagined it. “Joe, May told me. About your wife. Emlen is her name, isn’t that right?”
“Yes.” I heard Joe’s exhale, his breath crackling on the line. “Emlen.”
I swallowed, and then forced myself to go on. “I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me.”
“I know, Marjorie. I…I should have. I didn’t know how. You see, she’s not…It’s not really as though we are married.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She’s in London. We rarely speak. We rarely see each other. We have nothing between us anymore.”
“Three daughters?” I asked.
“Yes, yes. I love my daughters more than anything. But, you see, they’re all adults now. And out of the house, living their lives. And it’s time that I…Well, Marjorie, meeting you was the kick I needed, and now I know.”
I didn’t say anything. After a pause, Joe said: “I’m going to London, and I’ll tell Emlen it’s over. It just has to be. So that…well, so that this, this between us, can begin. The right way.”
“Joe, this is madness.”
“That’s exactly what it is. I’m mad for you, Marjorie. Was I the only one…the only one who felt it?”
The pair of you look like you’ve been pierced by arrows. That’s what May had said. What was the point of lying? “You weren’t, Joe. I felt it, too. But I just about wept right there in May’s powder room when she told me you were married.”
I heard another exhale. And then his voice again, more urgent. “Can I come up to New York City to see you?”
“No,” I said. Silence on the line. “Not until your marriage is well and done.”
“Please, just let me visit. Only to talk. We can meet in public somewhere. I just—”
“I won’t do to your wife what another woman has done to me.”
And I didn’t want to see Joe as capable of that, either. That was no way to start a courtship. I didn’t want something illicit with him. I wanted, I realized, a proper relationship. And then I wondered—was it a blessing or a curse, my heart’s ability to contemplate love once more?
* * *
Apparently Joe was thinking about love again as well, because from that point forward, I began to receive massive flower arrangements daily. The servants would blanch as they carried in the heaping bowers of rose and lily and peony and begonia. “Another one, ma’am, from a Mr. Davies of Washington.”
He’d ring my home several times a week, though I always had my servants offer some excuse as to why I could not answer. He spent a fortune on telegrams that carried no news but snippets of Browning or Shakespeare: “Haply I think on thee, and then my state Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate.”
He wrote letters in his beautiful looping cursive as well, but even to these I didn’t respond. And yet, of course I read and kept the letters, just as I relished the flowers and delighted in giddy silence at the telegrams and telephone calls. I stowed his handwritten notes in my bedside table and returned to them in the evenings before bed, inevitably shutting my eyes with a pang in my heart. “Dearest Blue Eyes—Do you believe me, dear one, when I tell you how you hold my heart and my soul? There are so many places in my heart that cry out for you. The purest gift in this life would be to look into your beautiful eyes daily.”
Though outwardly I remained resolute that we would not converse, that we would not meet, that we would not court in any way while he was a married man, inwardly I was hopeful as I had not been in years, perhaps ever. Joe Davies was a romantic, to be sure, but he was also a serious man. A mature man, an idealist who was about to do great things. To think what life could be like beside him, as his partner. This was not a man who would squander his—or my—energy and time at raucous parties. Who would throw my money away at billiards or gambling. After the disillusionment with Ed and then the heartbreak with Ned, to find a man, a devoted man, a self-made man, one who had risen from nothing to the height of power and brilliance and with such a passion for serving others, and to know that he cared for me—why, the thought of Joe’s love was that much sweeter because of the bitterness that had preceded it.
Finally, that summer, I received the telegram for which I had been longing: “In London. Just met with Emlen. Marriage is over. My heart is yours.”
The next day I received a follow-up: “Sail day after tomorrow. Straight to New York. To my beloved blue eyes.”