EDITH: Inst. 15

New York City, 1910

New York City, 1910. Public Domain. Source.

Stiffly seated at the white-clothed table, Berry was sapped. From his sickbed in Cairo the month before, he’d laid the groundwork for his successor at the International Court. He was back in the states to finalize his transition to a diplomatic post in Paris. He could not stay on in Cairo on account of his health; that much was clear to anyone who got a good look at him, and Henry James was getting an eyeful.

Henry found it less appetizing to look at Edith, who had dressed in something approximating a sack for dinner at the Belmont. Teddy had run her ragged up to the minute of boarding the ship for his “world tour.” Henry called it the What in the World Happened to Teddy Wharton Tour. If there was an ounce of lucidity left in the man’s head, surely he was asking himself the same question.

Teddy had interrupted Edith’s writing, her very living, with constant complaints about his brain: he was, on some level, aware that he was losing his faculties, though he hadn’t had a full serving from the start. As Edith reported, Teddy lately despaired at not being able to learn French. The man had been born in France, had lived there until contracting typhoid at the age of five, and if he had not learned French then, as Henry saw it, the poor fool never would — decrepitude of the brain or not!

The only person present who looked ready to enjoy the splendor of their surroundings was Fullerton. Full of something, the scoundrel, though Henry could not place what. There was no word for such a poisonous yet pretty package. One became addicted, well aware that one’s addiction was destructive, and yet who could ever truly sever ties with Fullerton? The man was too charming to exhaust his friends entirely; he seemed aware of the possibility, however, and often faded away in pursuit of other gratifications, selfish as he was reliably unreliable.

Henry had not seen the man for nearly two decades before Fullerton had resurfaced in the form of Edith’s lover. Twenty years! In a twilight memory, Henry saw himself flush with his first success as a novelist; he had introduced Fullerton, then a recent graduate of Harvard College, to the Ranee in London – and had suddenly found himself excluded from what he had not realized was a triangle. Geometry was not his forte. He had never gone in for angles, though he loved a good arc.

Was Fullerton preparing another disappearing act after dinner at the Belmont, or would he hang about a week or two? He’ll turn up again, Edith had written, when I can be of use to him, when he needs something.

Fullerton would always need something; Edith would always be accurate; and Walter would always be too thin. The lawyer wasn’t dead – yet. Miss Walter, as Henry had taken to calling Edith’s guard dog, had neither bark nor bite at the Belmont. He seemed hardly disposed to sit at the table. It was this delicacy that drew women to him; Henry had heard tell of Berry’s amorous adventures on more than one continent.

Perhaps this was the reason that Walter appeared to have little idea what Fullerton, seated next to him, had been doing with Edith. To Edith. Then again, Miss Walter’s ill appearance might have been exacerbated by Fullerton’s presence. Edith hardly seemed to know who to turn to; in effect, she had turned to the three of them. And as neither of the other two men seemed willing to address what their party had gathered to discuss, Henry found himself speaking.

He hadn’t known where to begin, exactly, so he began with what had, of late, become an unfortunately frequent refrain: Divorce?

One might have said, in the same tone, Hors d’oevres?

Fullerton shifted in his seat at the word, the first sign of his discomfort. YES! Henry gave an internal shout. Please DO join the party! But Walter took up the refrain, with the welcome addition of a practical plan: Teddy was committed to travel for at least six months. It was time to file paperwork in Paris to secure Edith’s future. Several doctors had strongly suggested – one might say insisted – that she no longer live with her husband, for her own health and safety. It was time to take the next step and make her independence permanent. He himself was relocating to Paris in the new year, following the finish of his business in Cairo; perhaps he could move into Edith’s guest quarters at the Rue de Varenne, at least until the situation was secured and Teddy Wharton had been removed?

Edith looked up through tears at her friend and savior. Two innocent babes dressed in early middle-age! If Fullerton had grown anxious at the prospect of his mistress’s freedom, he relaxed visibly at this look: Walter Berry would not cede his place by Edith’s side. A woman who looked at a man like that wouldn’t hassle Fullerton to marry her.

With the matter resolved for the moment, the party turned to a more pleasant prospect, and ordered dinner.

In the new year, papers were strewn about the long table of the library, the very heart of No. 58 Rue de Varenne, and Edith stood with her sister-in-law and tried to make sense of the life these papers represented.

Though Edith’s husband had never enjoyed what he called the high plane of thought of her Parisian circles, he had once behaved like a well-bred gentleman there. The Teddy Whartons had attended a certain weekly dinner, for a brief spell in the last century, at which a relative newcomer, a rash American, had made his presence known. One evening, as the ladies settled for their after-dinner tea in the drawing room and the gentlemen prepared themselves for the smoking room, Edith had overheard the American offer Teddy a cigar. The man had brought his own box because these folks never have them.

That, had said her husband, is why I never bring them. But the husband of that moment was not the husband who had abandoned his six-month world tour and gone to a sanatorium in Switzerland, confusion in his eyes and false teeth in his mouth, while Edith organized papers in Paris.

They make a mess of it all, Minnie said quietly. The neatness of her person stood witness to her statement. She had never lost the graceful form of her youth, but she had lost her color. She was as faded as her dress, though its simplicity only served to emphasize her smartness. Fred Jones, brother of Edith, had died that month and not left Minnie a cent – as he had not given her since their divorce decades before.

Minnie had supported herself and her daughter with a variety of work: editing manuscripts at Scribner’s, hosting a bachelor cousin’s annual summer hunt in Scotland, and, increasingly, coordinating the business affairs of her sister-in-law, for which Edith paid her well. Minnie Jones had never paused for breath. And when her former husband had breathed his last, neither she nor Edith mourned.

Though Fred Jones had inherited the bulk of his mother’s wealth, Lucretia Rhinelander Jones – never one to miss the opportunity to add insult to injury – had named him executor of the trust she had left to Edith. So Fred controlled the poverty of his former wife and the insultingly small sum left to his sister – as if both mother and son had suspected Edith might help Minnie and wanted to make that impulse as difficult to carry out as possible. They had never anticipated that Edith might not only inherit from Joshua Jones, but also make her own money, out of which she had managed most of her living and sent monthly support to Minnie and Beatrix, independent of the payment for Minnie’s management of Edith’s business affairs.

The most recent addition to the table was a letter that brought ominous news. Teddy did not like his tour any longer; he was coming back to Paris. But there were other papers on the table in the library, documents which Walter had drawn up in the Parisian legal system. If Teddy Wharton knew that papers of divorce awaited his signature in Paris, he might not have been in such a hurry to come back. In the interim, the very sound of a knock at the door made Edith start, as one did now. But it was Berry.

I have been gathering testimony! he announced.

The dossier Walter placed in her hands detailed an encounter her husband had enjoyed with some friends in London at the start of his tour. He’d taken a more circuitous route than planned, and in greeting, Teddy had asked these friends if they wanted to see his gold garters. They had written to Walter Berry in alarm: Teddy Wharton had lifted his pant legs in front of Windsor Palace, where he had displayed what were, indeed, fourteen-carat gold garters holding up his socks. His face had born signs of dissolute behavior, as had the face of the woman with him.

The whole of her, likely, murmured Edith. Where had her husband gotten gold garters?

Berry proposed dangling whatever fruit – golden or otherwise – needed dangling to get Teddy Wharton to sign himself out of Edith’s life. They would send him home to America. Walter would finalize Edith’s divorce in the French courts.

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Thank you so much for reading EDITH! If you’re new to my serialized novel, you can find Parts I & II here, along with a brief account of how the story came to me and links to some of my research.