The Gilded Cage (7 page)

“What is that? How cruel you've been to me today?” she asked, giving him an impish smile.

He almost grinned, but he didn't. “Nonsense,” he said gruffly. “I try to save your reputation, and you call me cruel. I can't very well fawn over you in public.”

“No. But you could be civil.”

“I was perfectly polite. Stop teasing me, Columbine,” he said when he saw her smile. “I want to discuss this strange young man you have in your back room. Who the devil is he?” He had to concentrate in order for his voice to come out smooth and unruffled. He was severely irked at the presence of Lawrence Birch in this house.

“I told you who he is,” Columbine said, yawning. “He'll find a room soon, Ned. Don't make an issue of it.”

That was too much for him. “Don't you think I'm within my rights to make an issue of it? You are my lover. You have a man living in your house—”

“He has nowhere else to turn. And he was sent by my brother, Ned.”

“What do you know about him? I hardly think Tavish meant for you to take the man to your bosom.”

“Really, Ned—”

“I don't like him, Columbine. I don't trust him. What does he live on, anyway?”

“I have no idea,” Columbine said frostily. “It wouldn't occur to me to ask.”

“Oh, that British chilliness,” Ned said, turning his back to the fire and frowning at her. “You're trying to suggest that I'm a blundering American boor, when I'm merely trying to protect you.”

“I don't need—”

“My protection, I know. But I think you do. What the devil is wrong with that?”

Columbine didn't say anything for a moment. “Please. We're tired. Let's not discuss this now.”

“We have to discuss things of this nature all the time,” Ned exploded. “Because you are too stubborn to consider the alternative to this madness.”

“What madness?” she demanded, sitting up. “Having my own life?”

“Yes!”

“Ned, do not try me tonight.” Columbine relented, and spoke in a softer tone. “Please. I'm afraid when you talk this way. You told me last year that if you ever asked me that question again, it would be for the last time, and I couldn't bear that.”

Ned said nothing. He frowned at his cigar. “You ask too much,” he said finally. “You know if we married things would be less difficult for me.”

“What a romantic proposal,” Columbine said lightly, hoping to tease him out of his seriousness. “Perhaps you should get on one knee when you tell me you wish to make me your devoted bride so that things could be ‘less difficult' for you.”

Ned waited a beat. “I have proposed to you on one knee, as you well know. I have proposed to you on both knees, sitting up, and lying down. And each time you have refused me.”

“You know why,” Columbine murmured. “You know that I will never marry again. I cannot marry in a state where I become the property of my husband, where my rights are trampled—”

“Please,” Ned said, “please, my dear, can we not discuss the politics of marriage this time?”

“But politics
are
part of marriage, and it is men who make it so,” Columbine said stubbornly. “They made the laws, did they not? And I must say, Ned, I find it interesting that you choose this moment for your annual proposal. A moment when you are frustrated in your attempts to control who I see, and who I make a friend of. Could it be that you believe, despite everything you say, that if we married you would then be able to forbid someone like Lawrence Birch your house? For it would be
your
house, then, not mine, in the eyes of the law.”

Ned sighed. “I find it extraordinary how you refuse to see that occasionally I might be right about something. That occasionally you might need protection, or advice.”

“Ned, don't exaggerate. Of course I know you are good and strong, and Lord knows I've never said—oh, do we have to discuss this when my feet hurt so much? Oof, that's better.” Columbine slipped off her boots and waggled her stockinged toes.

Ned closed his eyes in pain. It was having her like this that caused him such sorrow. He loved her casualness as much as her gaiety. He turned and smiled at the sight of her stocking feet, raised on a tufted stool. “You look comfortable in body, at least.”

She smiled. “But not in mind, thanks to you.”

Her smile was so pretty he almost relented. But the brief respite, the light words, had not managed to dispel the frustration in him. He never had enough of her, he was always fighting for more. Suddenly all the unanswered questions of the past months weighed on him. He had to know.

He asked softly, “Do you love me, Columbine?”

Her brown eyes widened. “Of course I—”

He lifted a hand, and she stopped. “Wait. Don't answer out of habit, or affection. You know what I'm asking. Do you love me, Columbine?”

She was silent so long the fear took hold of him. Ned felt his stomach drop. He was falling away. He was a dead man without Columbine's love, and he knew it. She had raised him from a life spent in the margins, looking on at other people, hardly engaged at all. She had made him care.

“Please, Columbine.” He was surprised that his voice was so steady.

“Yes, I love you, Ned,” she said slowly. “But lately I seem to have fallen away from you somehow. I don't know when it happened, or why. … Or maybe something was supposed to happen, and didn't.”

“You're not making any sense,” he said tersely. Then he bit his lip. “No, of course you are. Of course I know what you mean. God help me.”

Columbine heard the pain in his voice and rose so swiftly she took him by surprise. She ran to him and threw her arms around him. “Oh, Ned, don't be unhappy. I
do
love you, so much. You're my best friend. I still want to be with you. I still can't imagine being with anyone else.”

She raised wet eyes to his, and the slender hope that had kept him going died. Her arms around him tortured him, the smell of her tortured him, but he didn't have the strength to pull away. Why wasn't what she offered
enough
anymore?

Columbine saw the pain in his eyes and her heart twisted. “Oh, Ned, Neddie,” she whispered. “What is it? Why is this happening? All of a sudden, we're so serious. This can't happen. Let's just say good night. Ned, you're making me so afraid—”

He had to keep going, had to know everything. “Columbine—”

She put both hands up to stop him. Her eyes were wild. “No, no, don't say it, Ned, don't ask me, please. Not yet, not tonight. Don't ask me …”

He ignored the litany and grasped her hands instead. “I must. I have to. Will you marry me?”

Columbine's eyes filled with tears. “You said if you asked me again it would be for the last time—”

He held her gaze steadily. “And it is.”

Columbine broke away from him and walked to the window. “Don't do this to us, Ned.”

“I have to. Columbine, I've been thinking. I know you can't be only Mrs. Ned Van Cormandt, with all that implies. The house, the family and social obligations are a full-time job, I know that. But what if we lived differently? I've been thinking of making my house into a public museum. The art collection is extensive, and I've received some support for the idea.”

“Oh, Ned. You couldn't. Not the Van Cormandt house.”

“You mean that ostentatious pile of marble, that horrifying copy of a castle where some virgin queen was beheaded, that bad imitation of a medieval dungeon where hundreds of heathen were tortured, that shuddering approximation of a bloody feasting hall of Viking warriors? Yes, go ahead and smile, I remember your words perfectly, my dear. Lord knows, I agree. I can't imagine you living there. Am I right?”

She nodded.

“All right, then. What if we lived in the Greenwich Village house? You love the house, as do I. It's certainly large enough. I would like to live downtown—after all, I was born on Washington Square. And you could keep your name, you could have your own study.”

“Thank you,” she said, but he missed her irony.

“We could have a different kind of marriage, darling. And if you didn't want children, we wouldn't have them.”

“But you want children.”

“I want you more.”

“What about my lecture tours? I've given them up lately, but I plan to return to them.”

Ned struggled for a moment. “Of course. As long as they aren't too long.” He grinned charmingly. “I couldn't bear to be without you.”

Columbine looked out into the night. She pictured the life Ned described, and she saw that it could please her. She could feel happiness tug at her, make a soft bed for her to lie down in, to breathe deeply and slowly. She would never wake up at three o'clock in the morning, gasping in panic at her life. She would sleep the sleep of the contented, next to her husband.

Wearily, Columbine stopped the train of her thought. She'd been married. She knew it could not hold off despair, or uncertainty, or fear. She knew it could imprison. She knew it could bind. Perhaps Ned was right, perhaps they could forge a different kind of marriage. But the thing she most feared about marriage to Ned he could not guard against. Marriage would make her weak. Already, her life with Ned had made her soft. Where had all her anxiety come from during the past months, but the knowledge that she was less than she could be?

“Ned, I've tried to explain this before,” she said. She couldn't look at him, so she stared outside at the blackness. “You think I'm a strong woman. You don't know how weak I am. Just in the past three years of being with you I've changed. I work less. I think less. There isn't an edge to me anymore, Ned. I've grown soft. And it isn't your fault, God knows. It's me. I have a taste for luxury and sloth, for love and lightness, and I succumb.”

“What's wrong with those things?”

“Nothing except that they should be balanced with hard work. And I haven't been working very hard since I met you, Ned.”

“It seems to me you've been working all the time,” he grumbled, and she had to laugh.

Her smile slowly faded as she stared out the window. “Maybe to you, I was. Maybe that's the problem.”

“But I told you I would change my life. Then you, too, would change to meet it. We wouldn't dine out, we would ignore society. I forced you to go to those awful dinners because I felt some kind of ridiculous responsibility to keep up the family name after my father died. I listened to pressure from my family when I shouldn't have. But Columbine, I was wrong. Can't you see that we can change?”

She turned, her back to the sill. “Why can't you change your life first, and then we'll see? Why can't we decide in a year, or six months? If you really mean it, Ned, if you really want your life to be different, then you'll change it, not for me, but for yourself.”

He was already shaking his head. “I can't wait another year.”

“And I can't marry you now!” she cried. She raised her hands pleadingly. “I'm so sorry, Ned, but I can't. Please understand.”

He stared across the room at her, and his eyes filled. She looked so distraught, so beautiful, with her gold hair spilling out of her pins and her dark eyes soft with misery. “I'll never love anyone but you,” he said. “But you're killing me. It's not enough for me anymore, Columbine. I want you at the head of my table. I want you in my bed. I want to go to sleep at night next to you. I can't help that.”

Tears were running down her face now. “I'm sorry.” She couldn't stop saying it.

He walked to where his hat and stick lay on the front windowsill. He picked them up and went back to her. He kissed her forehead while she shook underneath his lips from her sobs.

“I'll always be there for you, Columbine. Come to me if you need me.”

“Ned—”

“Goodbye, my love.” Ned walked out of the parlor, taking his hat and stick, but leaving his heart behind.

C
OLUMBINE SPENT A
sleepless night trying to convince herself that Ned would change his mind. She could not imagine life without Ned. Every time he had said he could not go on, he'd relented the next morning. But he had never spoken those words the way he had said them the night before, and in her heart she knew he meant it. It was proof of the folly of the heart that she was surprised to see no flowers, no note, when she came down the next morning. Instead, she saw the smiling face of Lawrence Birch.

He did not mention her pale face or the dark smudges underneath her eyes, and Columbine was grateful. He merely reminded her of her promise to take him downtown.

“Of course, Mr. Birch, I'd be happy to,” Columbine answered distractedly. “Would you mind making a stop with me first?”

He bowed. “I am at your service, Mrs. Nash.”

After breakfast, they left the house together and walked to the Ninth Avenue El. On the jolting train downtown, Lawrence was caught up in the sights around him, and didn't speak except to ask an occasional question. Columbine turned her mind to the meeting ahead. In preparation, she'd dressed carefully. A plain gray merino dress with her three-quarter length coat of black wool trimmed with gray chenille and silver cord. Perhaps the coat was a bit too smart, but aside from her fur-trimmed cloak it was her warmest coat, and it was blustery today.

When they reached their stop in Greenwich Village, Lawrence looked around him curiously. This far west was primarily an Irish section, with tenements and crowded conditions prevailing. Garbage was piled high on corners, and many of the windows were stuffed with rags or cardboard to keep out the cold. A group of children in tattered coats played a silent and obscure game near a dead horse lying in the street. Between the garbage and the horse, one had to be grateful it was a cold day.

Columbine looked at Lawrence, but he made no comment. She liked the keenness of his gaze, the sense that he was taking everything in, missing nothing.