“No.”
“I’ll never forget his face. Trying to smile to me, but hemmed in, crushed, and unable to move in or out. Mother was there to help me change, but poor Father. I know he wanted to give me one last kiss.”
“Really, Agnes. I’m not planning to drop you into the Hudson River.”
“Poor George. I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
“Would you mind if I went out and smoked a cigarette?”
“Not at all. I wish I had something like a cigarette, but you go ahead and maybe I’ll collapse for a few minutes.”
They had a suite in the hotel, and Agnes immediately declared she was hungry. “You must be, too,” she said. “We haven’t really had anything all day.”
“Shall we have champagne?”
“Do you mind if we don’t? I never want to taste it again. All I want is something like scrambled eggs and some tea.”
“All right. Scrambled eggs for two. Pot of tea. Pot of coffee, and a split of champagne.”
“Very good sir,” said the waiter. “In about twenty minutes, sir?”
Agnes unpacked, hung things in the wardrobe and put other things in the bureau drawers, gazed out the window at the midnight activity in Herald Square, but did not succeed in using up the half hour that passed before the supper arrived. She was wearing a shirtwaist and skirt, part of her going-away outfit. “I wish you’d say something,” she said.
“What would you like me to say?”
“Well, we’re usually so talkative.”
“I know we are, but circumstances are different now.”
“That’s why I wish you’d talk.”
“They affect me, too, Agnes. The circumstances.”
“Oh. I guess I didn’t think of that. I didn’t think of your side of it. Purely selfish on my part. Well, I’m glad you’re nervous, too. Mothers tell their daughters some things, but I never heard of a mother yet that advised her daughter on how to make conversation on the wedding night.”
“There’s all the time in the world for conversation.”
“All the same, I wish I had something to talk about for five minutes now.”
“You’re talking. Keep on.”
“But you’re not helping. Ah, our supper.”
The tactful waiter had brought two champagne glasses, and when he left, George Lockwood raised his glass. “To you, Agnes, I hope you’ll be happy.”
“Of course I’ll be happy, George. We have something together that maybe I don’t altogether understand it, but it’s us.” They touched glasses, sipped the wine, and began their first conjugal meal.
“I wasn’t so hungry after all,” said Agnes. She got up and went to the bedroom, closing the door behind her. Fifteen, twenty minutes later he opened the bedroom door. The room was in darkness and Agnes was in bed.
“Are you awake?” he said.
“Heavens, yes,” she said. “I’ve never been so awake in all my life.”
He undressed and got into bed beside her, immediately discovering that she was completely nude. He had not touched a woman’s body in a year’s time, and in the frenzy of first holding her to him he moved his hand everywhere, and she put her arms around his neck. But after the first minute his hand returned to her hard nipples and found no softness behind them. From the waist up she was almost a boy, and he had so much and for so long wanted a woman. He opened her legs and entered her, and she came back at him like a woman in pleasure and some pain, and that much she knew how to do. She brought him quickly to climax and held on to him while trying to reach it herself, but he slid out of her and she was a long time in realizing that for now she must give up. They had not spoken a word, but now she said, “You’ll teach me, won’t you?”
“Yes,” he said. But he could not teach her to be Lalie Fenstermacher.
On the death of Tom Wynne, a year after her marriage to George Lockwood and five months after her first miscarriage, Agnes Lockwood inherited $100,000 outright and $50,000 in a trust fund for her children, if any, the same to become hers if after ten years she had no living children. It was small money in comparison with George Lockwood’s personal fortune and his prospective inheritance from Abraham Lockwood; but it was hers. The trust fund for the children was being administered by a Wilkes-Barre bank—seventy miles removed from Swedish Haven. The $100,000 was in the form of stocks and bonds of the Wynne Coal Company, which she could not dispose of without first offering to sell back to the Company. “It’s nice to be independent,” said George Lockwood.
“Well, it is,” said Agnes Lockwood. “Now I don’t have to ask you for money all the time.”
“I haven’t noticed that you ask me all the time.”
“Every time I need it.”
“Have I ever refused you? Have I ever even questioned you?”
“No, you’re very generous. But it’s always been your money. Now I have a little of my own, and if I buy you something, you won’t be paying for it. It’s nice to be able to give things, George.”
“Yes. It gets a bit tiresome you’ll find. To be always on the giving end, I mean.”
“Well, hereafter you can be on the receiving end, too.”
“It’ll be a novelty, I assure you.”
“I, on the other hand, have never been able to give as many things as I wanted to.”
“You were never poor, Agnes.”
“Not exactly, but money was always scarce. We paid no rent, we bought things wholesale at the Company store. We got passes on the railroad when we traveled. But Father never had much cash, and Mother’s family had to watch every penny.”
“Well, your father’s well fixed now. What’s he going to do with his hundred thousand?”
“Take Mother on a trip to Egypt, first. Then he wants to write a book.”
“About Egypt?”
“Oh, no. A sort of history of the Wynne family in the United States, but mostly about Cousin Tom Wynne. And he’d like to get in a lot of things about the woods and streams that he loves to roam around. Father was never meant to be cooped up in an office.”
“I just wonder who’d buy a book about Tom Wynne and the woods up that way. I know I’d read a book about my grandfather, but not one about Tom Wynne. Unless of course your father intends to expose some family secret. But knowing him, I don’t expect that.”
“You’re always so sure that Cousin Tom had some guilty secrets to expose.”
“I’m convinced that any man that has over $5000 has some guilty secrets.”
“Does that include the Lockwood family?”
“Good Lord, I could begin with the Lockwood family.”
“But you’re honest, and your father’s honest.”
“Till proven otherwise.”
“George, you always like to pose as semi-rascal. Why?”
“It’s not a pose, Agnes,” he said.
“I think you want to be like your father.”
“You don’t think my father’s a rascal, or a semi-rascal, surely?”
“He’s much closer to it than you are. As old as he is, and even if he is my father-in-law, he can make me feel as if I didn’t have any clothes on, just the way he looks at me sometimes.”
“Don’t I make you feel that way too?”
“It isn’t the same. All you have to do is ask me, or not even ask me. We’re husband and wife, and we have that relation. Those relations. But your father is my father-in-law, and he shouldn’t be thinking those things.”
“You can’t hang a man for his thoughts.”
“No. Not for his thoughts.”
“The way you say that—has there ever been more than thoughts?”
“Not with me.”
“With someone else? My father and someone else? Someone in particular?”