The Scarlet Letters (17 page)

Paul Farquar was a gruff, dour man of fifty with short curly gray hair and a bulldog countenance, who had never tried to please and rarely succeeded. His abruptness of manner and rudeness of speech would not have been tolerated in a man of less wealth, but the Farquars, thanks in part to the indefatigable party-giving and high pretensions of his late mother and grandmother, enjoyed a unique social prestige in the city and, more importantly, in the press. Nor was Paul himself quite a nobody. He was intelligent, though his brain was largely unexercised, and he relished a proud nature that scorned anyone who made up to him. Jane had found his heavy streak of crude honesty not wholly unattractive.

Besides that, he was smitten by her. Assuming that he had only one thing in mind, she had shrugged off his brash compliments and insinuations, which had only the result of intensifying his interest, and now she decided to be more receptive. In far less time than the unspeakable Tom was willing to accord her she had her cantankerous admirer totally enslaved, and when the time came for the divorce the Farquar lawyers speeded the process to its happily predicted conclusion.

Of her dozen years as Mrs. Farquar Jane found adequate content in the first ten. She was able to perform her sexual role to her greedy spouse's satisfaction, however little to her own, and she learned how to stake out her own independent demesne in what had been his rigidly ordered and isolated life. For he was quite capable of being fair. In return for his paying for, and even his occasional presence at, her grand successful dinner parties, she agreed to their long, lonely visits to his castle on the Hudson or his shooting lodge in South Carolina. And in return for the seats on the opera and museum boards that he had "bought" for her, she winked at the occasional girlfriend who took her willingly abandoned place in his bed. An unimpeachable wife herself, steadied by what she gratefully conceived to be the coldness of her nature, she would have willingly played the role of Madame de Pompadour to Louis XV and established for him a discreet deer park, but he, ultimately sensing that he repelled her physically, preferred to find his own does. And, inevitably, in the end one of these turned out to be a more designing type who resolved to become Mrs. Farquar.

"Of course, I married Paul for his money," she had told her mother, when she informed the latter of the proposed divorce. "No woman in her right mind would have wed him for any other reason. But I was no ordinary gold digger. With me it was a contract. He gave me all the things I wanted, and I in return gave him the nearest thing to happiness he's ever had. He'll find that out when he marries his concubine. And I would have stuck to him, too, if he had allowed me to. But, as it is, I'm delighted to be free and on my own, and I certainly intend to make sure that he pays me damages in full for breaking our agreement. Isn't that only fair?"

"Don't ask me, my dear. I haven't a head for these things. You've always had your own way. I can only pray it's for the best."

U
P IN A BOX
overlooking the dance floor of the Plaza's grand ballroom, Jane and Harry Hammersly, both members of the board of the charity hosting the benefit party, were showing little interest in the spectacle of the whirling couples. Only one of them held their attention. Rod Jessup was dancing with his ex-wife, Vinnie, and his expression made it clear that it was a duty dance.

"You'd better go down and cut in, Harry."

"Those whom God hath joined, let no man put asunder. Besides, I want to talk about Rod. Or rather about him and you."

"I'll tell you frankly that I like your partner, Harry." Jane spoke in her definite tone, which was very definite. "Of course, I perfectly saw that you wanted me to."

"How did you see that?"

"Because you never do anything without a purpose. Don't be offended. I have no objection to purposeful men. But I don't quite make out your motive. Is it to hang on to me as a client? Do you really think that, even if I were married to your handsome partner, I'd hesitate to leave your roster if I thought I wasn't getting the best legal advice available?"

"No, I know you too well. And don't
you
be offended. I have no objection to purposeful women. You could do much worse for a third husband than Rod."

"What do you know about my husbands? Oh, of course, you know about Paul. But did you ever meet Tom Seitz?"

"No. But I know he left you to marry an heiress."

"Just so. He was the one great mistake of my life. And I'm determined not to make another. My marriage to Paul may have broken up, but it was hardly a mistake."

"Hardly. With the princely settlement he's made you."

Jane did not quite like this. "I got much more than my settlement through Paul. But I don't expect you to see that." She looked at Harry now more closely. She and he shared something like a meeting of the minds. She considered herself a nicer person than he but not much nicer. "Do you want to make up to Rod for taking his wife? To buy your atonement with my money? No, that wouldn't really be like you, would it? You don't believe in atonement."

"Hardly," he said again. "I'm not trying to conceal anything from you, Jane. I worry about Rod. His temperament is so uncertain. I think it would help him—and help my firm, of course—if he were to find peace of mind, and settle down with a fine woman like you."

"Why, Harry! I'd no idea you could be so sentimental!"

"Sometimes it's realistic to be sentimental."

Jane was enjoying the subject. She was enjoying it intensely. She didn't care if Harry repeated everything she said, as he well might. "And now tell me what's in it for a fine woman like me."

"A first-class husband. A noble soul."

"Well!" She threw back her head as she laughed. "That from you, my friend, must be a real compliment. But why did this noble soul cheat on his wife?"

"I can only suppose that he suspected that she was cheating on him."

"And was she?"

He hesitated. "Yes."

"I wonder with whom." Again she laughed. "At least, Harry, you know that a mortifying truth is better to make your point with than a detectable lie. So I'll be equally frank with you. I do really like your partner. I may even be a bit in love with him. I find him Byronic. Like a corsair." Here she quoted from memory.

"He knew himself detested, but he knew
The hearts that loathed him crouched and dreaded, too.
Lone, wild and strange he stood alike exempt
From all affection and from all contempt."

B
UT HE HAD A HEART
, didn't he?" Harry demanded.

"Oh, certainly. A Byronic hero has to have
that.
"

"If I'm sentimental, Jane, is it so odd that you should be romantic?"

"But I'm a realistic romantic, Harry. I'm not a dream-crazed female who sees Lancelot in every handsome profile that pays her the least attention. I've reached an age of wisdom and achieved a fortune with which to implement it. I think I know just how to play all the cards in my hand—and in my heart, too—to find the kind of real happiness I want. I shan't be fooled again."

"Rap on wood when you say that."

"Why, Harry, don't you approve?"

"One always has second thoughts when a dearly held project is about to succeed."

"How like you, my friend! You can never really believe in anything, even something you've done your damnedest to bring about!"

"Call it my curse. Believe it or not, my dear, I'm actually thinking of you. Rod can be quite something to handle."

"Leave him to me. I know what he is."

"Are you so sure?"

J
ANE FARQUAR, NOW JANE JESSUP
, had hitherto assumed that she was adequately equipped to handle any crisis that was apt to occur in her adequately protected life. This had certainly been true in her first two marriages. But her third had presented questions for which she seemed to have no easily available response. The bewildering aspect of her situation was that she seemed to have fallen in love—and that for the first time in her life. She had been pretty well convinced that such was a state of mind—or of heart or whatever it was—that would never happen to her, except insofar as her girlish flutters over Tom Seitz could have been called that. Nor had she in the least objected to such apparent immunity to the arrows of Eros. She had always regarded herself as a priestess of the life of reason and was quite content to remain that.

But now she was faintly disgusted to find herself fussing and fretting over the novel business not of being a dutiful wife—she had been that—but of being a loving wife. And it was certainly not that Rod had brought her any of the obvious troubles that a new mate might bring. He had moved without the slightest protest into her duplex apartment, and had been willing to go out to her Long Island villa on the few weekends when he wasn't tied to his office. He had indeed accepted without a murmur her whole regimen of life: the servants, the cars, even the dinner parties (when he wasn't working late). He didn't change the position of a single chair or table or even suggest the rehanging of a picture. She had first supposed that his own possession of a large earned income freed him from any petty jealousy of his wife's greater wealth, but she soon made out that it was rather a complete indifference on his part to money and things. He neither desired nor sought them; they simply didn't exist for him. It was true that he was very careful to receive a lion's share of his firm's income, but this was more to retain his reputation among the law firms than anything else.

As a domestic partner, in contrast to a legal one, he was above reproach. He treated her with a grave and kindly courtesy that she found utterly charming, listened with apparently sincere sympathy to all her enthusiasms and complaints, and rarely showed the least sign of irritation or temper. He was always firmly supportive. Yet he never flirted with her, never gave her the eye, and rarely even touched her except to guide her elbow walking on the street or assist her in donning or doffing a cloak. This might have worried or even alarmed her, had he not in bed made silent and fiercely passionate love to her. He never, however, on the morrow made any reference to these couplings. Did he forget them? Was he even perhaps a bit ashamed of them? She didn't know, and somehow didn't dare to ask. She felt like Psyche, visited only in the dark.

Did he really love her? But if he didn't, why had he married her? Or was it just for those nights? Was he capable of love? Certainly, if his obsession with his office work could be called love, he was. She had learned early that he would grant her any request except one that would interfere with his professional routine, but this routine was so pressing that the field of his favors to her was considerably limited. To have asked him to give up a single night's work for a dinner party would have been like asking a surgeon to desert his operating table, and she had known better than to try.

But at least in their first year Jane, on the whole, was contented with her lot. She had learned to amuse and interest herself with her board memberships in the long and unregretted absences of her second husband, so she never found time on her hands, no matter how tied up Rod was with his litigation. But in time she began to suffer from the greed that is always in store for those who are doomed to wreck their own good fortune, and she started to give in to the temptations of petulance over the fact that she didn't share a greater part of her husband's life.

She had never been one to put much trust in the discretion of woman friends—particularly in the smart set in which she moved—and through the years, oddly enough, she had come to rely as the recipient of her confidences on a mother with whom, as a girl, she had not been very congenial. But a mother, after all, is always a mother.

"I know it's the fate of many American wives to become what are called business widows," she told her parent one noon when Sophia had come to lunch. "But of course I never had to face that with Tom, who found only disaster in business, or Paul, who didn't have any. But Rod is married to that law firm of his."

"Then he's surely a bigamist, for he's certainly married to you, my dear, and happily married, too. Don't rock the boat!" Sophia didn't like to show too much how deeply she savored her enjoyment of these lunches
a deux
in the cool Pompeian dining nook with its elegant service. She had come little enough to her daughter's in the days of Tom, whom she had disliked, or of Paul, who had disliked her—as he had disliked everything pertaining to a bride whom he had wished to receive, so to speak, stripped of all remnants of a non-Farquar past. Rod had struck Sophia as the very welcome but quite undeserved final achievement of her daughter's distressingly worldly life. But all was well that ended well. Or was it?

Jane ignored the maternal warning. "Did you never find Daddy too taken up with his downtown life?"

"Well, I don't suppose many brokers of his day were quite as passionate about their trade as some lawyers are. Your father wouldn't have worked a minute after five
P.M.
if our whole future had depended on it. If I was jealous of anything it was his weekend golf. But it's not wise, my dear, to get between a man and his toys. It's like finding yourself between a hippo and the water. There are a lot of worse things that a man can get into besides his job."

But Jane was not going to be shuffled off by any reference to banal triangles. "Oh, if you mean another woman, I think I'd know how to handle that. It's not playing a secondary role in Rod's life that really worries me. It's wondering if I'm really playing any role at all."

"Oh, Jane dear, how can you even suggest such a thing?" Sophia was at last reluctantly alerted to the fact that there
was
a problem. "Rod's crazy about you! Anyone can see that."

"Anyone but me," Jane muttered, half to herself. "Maybe he's just crazy."

"You know what you should do? You should have a baby. That would settle all these silly morbid doubts. Then you'd have something better to worry about than how much your husband loves you."

"Mother, something that didn't happen with two difficult but far from impotent husbands isn't apt to happen with a third. Nor do I think it would particularly help. Rod has two perfectly good children, and I've never craved motherhood. No, my problem is different." As she went on, she was no longer hoping for any illumination from her friendly, worried and uninteresting parent, but she felt the need of an ear, and did she have any other? "What I think may be really wrong is that I'm going through the gushings and palpitations that I should have gone through at fifteen. And that I actually despise the silly little girl, so long repressed, who's trying to take me over. I was so determined that I was not going to be like you or Daddy or brother Bobby that I didn't see what I was doing to myself."