THE CALVERTS
Chapter Five
After a moment,
Elizabeth looked up, her eyes brimming with unshed tears. When she spoke,
however, her voice was adamant.
"I don’t want
you condemning Miriam because of her parentage. She had no control over who her
father was, and she never knew that James was not her father. She was always
told that he was, and she was never given reason to believe anything else. Neither
was anyone else, and it’s going to stay that way." She looked John in the
eye. "Is this understood?"
John looked back at
her. "I would never condemn Miriam for who her parents were, and I have no
reason to repeat gossip about your family to anyone." He hesitated,
wondering if he should ask the next question. "Who was her father?"
"It’s a long
story. Perhaps I should start at the beginning."
"All
right." John sat back in his chair, pulling Nadia into his lap. Mary
peeked out at them from behind the couch.
"James and I
were married when I was sixteen and he was twenty-five. I had never met him
before our wedding day; it had all been arranged between our families. The
Anders financial empire was growing by leaps and bounds, and the Lovell
industries--Lovell was my maiden name--were also successful. My father and
James’ father wanted an alliance between their interests, and felt that the
best way to form this alliance, and assure its success, was through the
marriage of their children. My mother objected vehemently to the plan--our
family is Jewish, and she wanted a good Jewish husband for me. She never spoke
to me after I married James.
"We were
married on June 16, 1884. James was a handsome young man, and very charming.
Even though I was a young debutante, and marrying a man I had never met before,
I was happy about the wedding. It didn’t distress me that he was outside of my
faith, or that I had been made to convert to Christianity without knowing
anything about it. I floated down the aisle, as happy a bride as could be.
"Things were
good between us at first. There was never really any love between us, but we
got along well enough, and I was certainly well provided for. Every material
thing I could want, I got. We had this beautiful house, lots of servants, and
the respect of New York society. Things changed, though, after a couple of
years. James wanted a son, an heir, but we were never able to have a child, and
he blamed me for this. I kept hoping for a child, but it never happened.
"Ten years
into our marriage, in 1894, James went overseas on business, and while he was
gone, he commissioned a painter he had met in the city to do my portrait. That
was my undoing. James and I hadn’t been happy for a long time, and the painter
he had found, a young man from the mid-west, was only a year older than me, and
very attractive. There was a spark between us from the start, and as he
entertained me with stories of his growing up years, of his travels, and of his
brother and nephew in Wisconsin, I found myself wishing that my life could have
been half so interesting. There I was, twenty-six years old, unhappily married,
and longing for a child that I couldn’t have, and this man came into my life
and told me all these stories about what the rest of the world was like, making
me long for a life I couldn’t have.
"I didn’t have
much of a family life growing up--there was only myself and my older brother,
and I never saw much of him. Father was always away on business, and Mother was
so concerned with her social standing, with her charities and groups of
friends, that I didn’t see much of her, either. These tales of a real family,
and of all the places in the world that I had never seen, brought something out
in me, something that had been buried for a long time. I didn’t think about it
when I began telling him about my own life, and the troubles that I had tried
to hide for so many years. He was friendly, sympathetic, and I found I myself
growing very close to him.
"One thing led
to another, and on the day the portrait was completed, I invited him to my bed.
He was more resistant to the idea than I would have expected--I was a married
woman, and a customer, someone he had never considered carrying on with. He did
come to me, of course, and we enjoyed several happy weeks together before James
returned home. I knew that it had to end sometime, but what I hadn’t expected
was that James would get home early. He caught us together, and was absolutely
livid. He ordered my lover to leave, and when he refused, afraid of what James
might do to me, he had him beaten and dragged away by some of the servants.
"I expected
him to beat me, too, but he just turned his back on me, treating me with a
coldness and contempt that was worse than any physical punishment he could have
dealt out. We didn’t speak for two weeks, and then, one morning, my maid
brought me a note that she had been given while she was in the market. It was
from him, and asked me to meet him at his apartment that night.
"I slipped out
after James was asleep--we were sleeping in separate rooms by then, in opposite
ends of the house, but I didn’t want him to know where I was going. I had our
carriage driver take me into the city, and drop me off a couple of blocks from
my destination. I had never been in that part of the city before, and it was
late at night, but I found my way to his apartment.
"He was
preparing to leave, to avoid tainting my name with scandal, but he wanted me to
come with him. A part of me wanted to go--I had fallen in love with him--but
another part was afraid, afraid of being poor, afraid of not knowing where my
next meal was coming from, afraid of what people would say. My fear of the
unknown overrode my love for him, and I told him that I couldn’t come with him,
that I had to stay with my husband. He was sorry, but he didn’t press me."
She closed her eyes, sighing.
"I wish he
had. He might have changed my mind, but he respected what I thought was best. I
slipped from his apartment and went home, back to my small, unhappy, secure
world. A few weeks later, I found out I was in the family way. It was obvious,
of course, that the baby could not have been James’, but that wasn’t what
really upset him. He was more infuriated by the fact that I could have a child
at all, when for all of those years he had assumed that I was barren, that it
was my fault that we had no children. It was a severe blow to his pride to
learn that the problem was with him, rather than with me.
"Still, he was
willing to claim the baby as his own, to make it his heir, if I never spoke of
who the father had been, and I never did. Not until now. But he was always a
little resentful of Miriam, and she sensed it, and defied him at every turn,
which only made him more bitter. He wasn’t always this unkind to me, but
Miriam’s defiance, her resistance to his every effort to mold her into his
ideal, angered him, and he was happy to send her to Europe for a time, hoping
that she would settle down and find a husband he could approve of, an
impoverished member of the nobility perhaps, as a few other American debutantes
have done."
"And she
disappointed him yet again by marrying me."
"Yes. He did
love Miriam, in his own way, but they were ever in conflict, and he blamed her
defiance on her father. He had hoped that he could make her a proper lady, but
she defied him from the start, and he could always see her father in her. She
had my face, but she inherited her father’s straight blonde hair and blue eyes,
and whenever he looked at her, he saw the man who had led his wife
astray."
"What happened
to Miriam’s father?"
"I never saw
him again, and he never knew about Miriam. He went down to Cuba during the
Spanish-American War, and died there. I can’t help but wonder if things might
have turned out differently if I had gone with him, if I hadn’t been so afraid,
but I guess I’ll never know. It’s over and done with now." Elizabeth rose,
smoothing the creases from her dress, her face composed. "Come with me to
the kitchen. I told you that I was inviting you to dinner, and I am. James
won’t eat with us, but we can eat together in the kitchen without him."
John stood, setting
Nadia down. As Mary crawled out from behind the couch, John looked at
Elizabeth, and asked her one last question.
"What was
Miriam’s father’s name?"
Elizabeth looked at
him, her eyes shadowed. "His name was Peter. Peter Dawson."