* * *
As summer faded, making way for the crisp, golden cool of autumn, I hoped for quieter days and more time at home with Eddie. With golf and tennis mostly done for the season, perhaps he’d settle in a bit more at The Boulders. Perhaps we’d have casual dinners as a pair and retire to bed together as we’d done in Hot Springs and Battle Creek. Wake up beside each other and enjoy breakfast trays together under the covers. We may have been experiencing lifestyle differences, but the love between us was strong enough to bridge any such rift. That was what I believed, and with the right attitude, I was sure I could show Eddie it was so.
How wrong I was. It didn’t seem like Eddie wanted me to even try to join his lifestyle. That fall, with the country clubs turning quieter after the high summer season, Ed started visiting Columbia friends and Manhattan colleagues for house party weekends in Newport, the Hudson Valley, and on Long Island. “It’s for business,” he’d say, kissing me on the top of the head before motoring off in my chauffeured auto for those weekends away. “All legal talk with the gents and cocktails into the night. You’d be miserable, my dear.”
I asked him, after his return from a late-September weekend trip to Long Island’s Gold Coast, if I might accompany him the next time he went out. “I’ve told you, Marjorie dear, you’d think it was all bunk. You wouldn’t enjoy yourself.”
“I know you say that, Ed. But…but I want to spend time with you.”
He frowned at that but he didn’t reply, and so eventually, after a moment and an intake of fortifying breath, I gathered the resolve to voice what I had so far been too afraid to ask: “Are you embarrassed by me?”
He turned, holding me in his unsmiling gray gaze. After a long pause, his voice quiet, he replied, “No, sweetie. It’s that you’re embarrassed by me.”
* * *
It was a rainy Friday afternoon in October, and Eddie was home from the office for the day. I’d had one of the footmen build a fire in our drawing room, and I sat before it, reading the latest issue of Collier’s as Eddie fidgeted in the armchair across from me. His only entertainment since we’d finished lunch an hour earlier had been his scotch, it seemed. I forced back the bitterness my tongue was tempted toward, instead summoning a jovial tone as I lowered my magazine and turned toward him. “Everything all right, dear?”
“Dandy.” His fingers tapped his glass. “Just bored, is all.”
I rose from my chair and crossed the room toward him. “This is absurd.”
“What is?” he asked.
I raised my arms. “Look around. We have the most beautiful home two people could ask for. We’ve got a beautiful life. We’ve got our health.” He looked at me with a pale eyebrow lifted, unsure of my point. I went on, “We are not going to spend another afternoon quarreling. We love each other.” With that, I threw myself into his arms and brought my lips boldly to his, assailing him with a kiss. I felt his body tense, and then soften. He might have been inclined to call my actions undignified, but he was loose from the liquor, and I was offering him something that very few men can turn down, no matter how refined their breeding.
He laughed, an exhale that smelled of liquor, as he settled me into his lap on the oversized chair. “That’s the Marjorie I like to see.”
In truth, I didn’t know what he liked to see in me, but I wasn’t going to press the point or risk an argument. Not right then. Not when he was, for once, eager to be with me; I would use that for the good of our marriage. We held each other and traded affectionate caresses right there in the plush armchair, not worrying about whether an unwitting maid might walk in. And then, after that had turned into delicious torture, we retired together to bed for the first time in weeks and made love.
And the next month, as I prepared the household for Thanksgiving, I had my own cause to be thankful because I had found the key, at last, to saving my marriage. I found out I was expecting our first child.
Chapter 13
Greenwich, Connecticut
Summer 1908
Motherhood surprised me. Namely, I was surprised by the fact that motherhood came so much easier to me than my marriage to Ed had. I think that was, in part, because I was not expected to figure out my new child entirely on my own—as had been expected with my new husband—but instead had many around to love the baby alongside me. And she certainly was a lovable thing, my pink little Adelaide Close. She arrived in the heat of late July. Papa came out for the birth and the early days of my daughter’s life, mercifully unaccompanied by Leila. Mother also came, and the two kept to opposite wings of the house, splitting their time with Adelaide and switching off visits to the nursery with cool, cordial nods.