Melissa by Taylor Caldwell
From the particular, Charles moved on to the general. Marriage at its best was a wearisome thing, enchaining, stultifying, frustrating. It was for those who had no aim but the aim of an animal. The cultivated mind bogged down in the marsh of matrimony, became overlaid with slime and, finally, was choked to death. Matrimony, then, was the final refuge of mediocrity and dullness; it rusted the bright sword of spiritual or objective adventure; it murdered the winged soul; it hung weights of lead on the leaping feet; it substituted for the lustrous pages of poetry the dead ledgers of the commonplace. It was not for the man or woman of sensibility and refinement, and certainly not for those who looked at radiant horizons.
All this was for Melissa’s pre-adolescent stage. Charles had considerable acuteness; he knew that an essential purity lived in the very young and innocent. He knew that the virgin mind quivered like a butterfly in the wind, that is was horrified at grossness, violently repelled by any obscene suggestion, that it shrank from the touch of hot coarse hands. Now, with the utmost delicacy, Charles began to suggest to the girl that marriage in itself was a loathsome and obnoxious thing. How frightful it was, he suggested, that one of sensitiveness should willingly allow herself to be despoiled. He used no words that even Amanda might have objected to, but he was a master of innuendo, of gesture, of expression. Melissa felt herself burning with shame and horror and disgust.
She was appalled that she could bring these visions to her mind, and felt in herself a sickening sense of guilt and aversion. After a while, she could not brush against a young man’s arm in church, could not even look upon a young man, without that flaming sensation of guilt, without that overpowering aversion. When a young man of the neighborhood dared suggest that he call upon her, she would glare at him with such repugnance and with such a fire in her eyes that he would shrink away and carefully avoid her in the future. When Amanda began to refer pointedly to the fact that Melissa was in her twenties, that she was already a confirmed spinster and ought to be considering a husband now if ever, Melissa would flee the room as if in fear of open violation, and, finding her father, would throw herself into his arms with a burst of terrified weeping.
At twenty-five, Melissa still had the innocence of a child, but it was now a cold warped innocence corrupted by lies. It was an innocence which had been seduced into a kind of perversion, an innocence wholly unnatural. To her, all men but her father were polluting monsters, gross and abominable, from which all women should flee in dread and abhorrence. Just how any man could “pollute” her she did not know. She only knew that the experience would be beyond endurance, as her father had so subtly suggested.
In her strange innocence it never occurred to her to question how her father had brought his delicate soul to the point of begetting children. She was immured in her virginity like a nymph in a tree, her spirit daily growing more fibrous, her gestures turning to wood.
Melissa lay in her bed, listening to the wind, listening to the rain lashing her windows. She lay there, cold and rigid as frozen earth, her breath slow and shallow against the beating onslaught of grief, unable to move for fear of again precipitating a violent and shaking chill.
She cried out in herself for her father. She was alone now, forever. Her loneliness, her desolation, were chains that held her stiff and icy upon her bed. She caught herself listening for her father’s step, even while she knew she would never hear it again. She listened for the crackle of his papers in the study next door, the stabbing of the poker against burning wood, the creak of the musty couch, the closing of his shutters against the night. But she heard only the wind and the rain.
“Papa, Papa,” she whispered, and her voice was a dry rustle in the dank silence of the room. The sound increased her anguish. She gripped the edge of her quilts with straining hands.
“What am I to do now, Papa?” she whispered. “Papa, how am I to live without you? You interpreted everything for me. Now I am left without a tongue, blind and deaf. I never had anyone but you.”
The silence thickened about her, became smothering water. She gasped, feeling herself about to choke. Her heart palpitated, faltered, sank to a heavy, dull beat. Suddenly she saw the raw open grave again and the coffin being lowered into it. She cried out feebly, flung her hand over her eyes as if to shut away the vision. Now her bed shook with her trembling. “No, no,” she said aloud, while her mind answered: “Yes, yes.”
If I were only dead, she thought. Dead and sightless and senseless. Anything was preferable to this torture, this knowledge that for her all life had died. How was it possible ever to sleep again, knowing that she would awaken each morning to fresh desolation and pain, knowing that no matter where she walked she would never see her father, no matter how intently she listened she would never hear his voice? The dreadful days lay before her, the dreadful years, of emptiness. For her, there would never be another morning, another sunset, another spring. She would walk in grayness, in perpetual winter, until the day when she would gratefully die. She would never again see beauty, for her father had been her eyes. There would be no music in the wind or in the sky, for he had been her ears. She would move mutely in shadows, her outstretched and searching hands touching nothing. Until the day when she would die.
I cannot go on, she thought. Surely, one did not have to live if one wished to die. There was no law compelling her to endure the sightless and the soundless years.
I have only the past to remember, she said to herself, and in remembering the past my life will be unendurable.
She and Charles had hated the farm. It was to him a prison, he had told her mournfully, a prison which he must endure because his wife had willed it. He hated the long empty road which led to the “horrible, stupid village,” as he called it. He hated the motionless days, he who had been accustomed to the bright and seething life of a great city. He hated the nights, in which nothing ever happened, in which there were no friends to gather about the fire and laugh and talk and sip wine. He hated the way the weeks glided into one another, faceless, eventless. He had been condemned to this, condemned to look at the uninspiring earth, condemned to exile because of the hard resolution of a woman without sensibility. He had not said this in so many words, for Charles was too expert in insinuation to be so tactless and so brutal. But he had conveyed it all to Melissa, who, through him, had hated their life and the farm, had guessed his misery though she had not heard it in so many words. Charles had trusted no one. He was not a man to commit his security to any hands, even the hands of one who loved him. He did not want to wait uneasily for the possible day when Melissa might, in a passion, quote him to Amanda, either in a moment of championing him or while deliberately betraying him in a bitter disillusion. He had a very healthy respect for Amanda, and knew just how far he might go with her.
He had often talked to Melissa of New York, Boston and Philadelphia, conveying to her credulous mind scenes of excitement and sophistication and charm which did not exist, and which he knew did not exist. But it had been agreeable to him to watch her face darken or glow with longing and wistfulness, and he had smiled to himself a little as he understood how she ached, despairingly, to be off this farm and among the scenes he had invented. She did not know that she was being cruelly tantalized; she thought her father was merely trying to enliven her miserable and isolated life. When he described balls, and splendid parlors, and assemblages in which he had shone and had been courted and flattered, the poor girl bridled with pride and joy. Then, though she did not detect it, Charles would look at her inscrutably under his full and heavy lids, and would smile curiously to himself, as in some secret contempt.
“One of these days, my love, when I become truly rich and famous, you and I shall go off together to New York, perhaps to live there for the rest of our lives,” he would say, touching her cheek tenderly with the back of his hand. Melissa would look at him with pale but strong ardor, and catch her breath. Even at twenty-five, she had still believed this might come true. There was no end to her innocence.
It was all her mother’s fault! Why had she clung so obstinately to this appalling and wretched land, to this hideous house so utterly without graciousness, beauty, or even warmth? If it had not been for Amanda, Charles might still be alive. He had died of a broken heart, having been denied what he desired by an unfeeling and arrogant woman.
Melissa turned her head and pressed her shaking mouth into the pillow, while all her body arched and trembled with hatred for her mother. How often had Amanda begged, even insisted, that Charles write the disgusting “popular” articles requested of him by various newspapers and periodicals! Charles had always gently refused, and Amanda had thrown up her hands in despair. She never knew him, she never understood him. Melissa sobbed incoherently into her pillow. She broke his heart with her stupidity; she killed all his ambition; she made a mockery of what was so sacred to him. What could she, Amanda, know of beauty and loveliness?
As clearly as if it were happening again, Melissa suddenly remembered a certain twilight of the last winter. She and Charles, jaded after long hours of work over his latest manuscript, had thrown on cloak and shawl and had gone out into the air. It had been a wild and stormy day of wind and snow, but now a great stillness lay over the white land and seemed caught in the empty branches of the trees. Charles and Melissa moved slowly over the soft and soundless earth, and then had stood quietly, hand in hand, looking out over the marble desolation of meadow, field and distant hill. There was no sound at all, no movement.
Then, very slowly, very subtly, the sky changed. It turned to a dark grayish-lavender, deepening to a smoky purple towards the west. And now a weird, mauve light fell on the snow, darkened to somber heliotrope on the hills. It appeared to become translucent, that mauve light, so that everything took on a dreamlike transparency and unreality. It was not beautiful, though Melissa told herself that it was. There was even something nightmarish about it, something portentous, something that struck on her heart with overwhelming depression.
“It is like my life,” Charles had said, very softly. The curious dead radiance lay on his face, so that there was a suggestion of death in the hollows of his eyes and about his mouth.
Melissa had clutched his hand almost convulsively. She said: “Yes! Yes, I know. How terrible it is.”
She had looked at her father, then, in her depression. And she saw that he was smiling at her tenderly. She remembered that smile very clearly. But now she remembered something else, and her mouth left the pillow and she stared into the darkness. Charles had looked at her, and his eyes were oddly bland and secret, as if he had momentarily peeped from behind a disguise and was laughing at her silently.
Melissa sat up abruptly in her bed, still staring emptily before her. It was at that moment that Amanda put her hand on her daughter’s door and sent her searching despair into the room.
No, no, thought Melissa confusedly, pushing back her hair from a damp forehead. It was that horrible light. I didn’t remember it then. I am imagining it now. It was certainly the light—Or my imagination. Why should Papa have been laughing at me?
She fell back on her pillows. Her heart was beating in the strangest way, as if it were frightened, straining to drag her away, on a long flight, from some great danger. She pressed her hands to her breast to quiet that terrified beating. I am sick, she told herself. I am half out of my mind with grief.
The wind surged against the windows, seemed to force itself into the room and beat down against the girl’s breath. Her eyes grew dim; the lids fell. Her breathing became slower, and she dropped into the sleep of exhaustion. Her last thought was: Phoebe, Andrew. I must get them away from this awful place, for Papa’s sake. And then, in her dreams, uneasy and broken, she imagined she was running away, running into darkness from something that threatened and followed her.
CHAPTER 10
Amanda Upjohn sat in her dim cold parlor and looked at her children sitting in a semicircle before her.
The rain had stopped with the wind, at dawn, and now, at ten o’clock in the morning, a dull brownish light lay over the barren landscape and stood at the tall narrow windows. Again a meager and comfortless little fire burned on the hearth. In contrast with the thundering storm of last night, the silence seemed breathless and pent. Amanda wore her heavy black shawl over her mended black bombazine. Phoebe was wrapped in woolly white depths, Andrew had dressed himself in his stiff Sunday best, as if realizing that this family gathering was very important. But Melissa sat stiffly in her own funeral black, shawlless, her hands folded in her lap.
Amanda’s dry-rimmed eyes moved slowly from one to another of her children. They became mournful as they touched Phoebe, somberly thoughtful as they reached Andrew, and strange and intense when they finally fixed themselves on Melissa, who stared motionless at the floor. Yet still as the girl sat, almost without breathing, wrapped in her own heavy torment, she had about her an enigmatic vigilance, and Amanda knew that she was waiting, inexorable as always. However, Amanda was not infuriated, as she might have been a few days ago. For now she saw that there was something unbearably pathetic about her elder daughter, and she looked away from her with a sick pang.
Then her lips tightened sternly, and she said in a low firm voice: “I have asked you all to come here, Phoebe, Andrew, Melissa, because, as you realize, we find ourselves in a very desperate state. We all know the extent of the fortune your father has left us, or, I should say, the lack of fortune.” She stopped, because she could not speak of Charles now without a hard catch in her throat. She pressed her hands together very hard, reminded herself that this was no time for emotion, however bitter, and went on:
“As I told Geoffrey Dunham yesterday, it seems that we are practically beggars. We must look at our affairs without flinching or self-pity. We know what we have. We must plan what is best to do.”
Melissa stirred, but very slightly, and her pale dry mouth opened a trifle, then closed again. She did not look at her mother, however.
“Had our position been less ominous,” continued Amanda, “we might have allowed ourselves a quiet period of—mourning. But mourning, like almost everything else, is a luxury reserved for the secure and for those who have no pressing problems.
“Yes, desperate as is our plight, and though our debts are tremendous, we are not without hope, and for that we can thank God. Phoebe will be married in April to John Barrett, a most worthy young man, who can give her an excellent home and very adequate security. I regret, Phoebe, that you did not allow him to accompany us home—yesterday—when he desired it.”
Phoebe peeped at her mother from under her bright ringlets, sniffled pathetically, and dropped her head. Her eyes were quite dry. Melissa lifted her own head sharply and fixed her eyes steadily on her mother.
Amanda sighed. “Well, Andrew, we must next come to you. We have this land, this farm, which is in a deplorable condition. But I have long thought that it needs only expert attention and care to provide for us quite comfortably. I am sure you can give this attention and this care, for I have often observed in the past that farming attracted you. You have your opportunity now, my son. You will not return to Harvard, and something tells me that you do not regret this.”
Melissa lifted her right hand with a strong jerky movement. “May I speak?” she asked, and her voice was loud and harsh.
She expected a refusal from her mother, and moved to the edge of her seat as if to stand. She was extremely agitated, and now her breast rose and fell rapidly. But Amanda only looked at her and waited, and Melissa sat, one leg still in a rising attitude.
Melissa spoke again, and her voice broke: “There is something you have not considered, Mama, and that is Papa’s wishes. You know that he has—had—great hopes for Phoebe, and it was settled among us that she was not to marry John Barrett, but to pursue her
She wrung her handkerchief between her hands in the extremity of her passionate determination to win her father’s way.
“As for Andrew, it was completely understood that he was to finish his studies at law and obtain a post in Philadelphia, which was practically offered him by some of Papa’s friends. You cannot, you must not, interfere—” She could not speak again, but could only sit poised on the edge of her chair, her head flung up, her pale face turned with implacable insistence upon her mother.
She expected Amanda’s cold fury to pour over her. But Amanda merely gazed down at her hands as if in deep and heavy reflection. Then Amanda answered her daughter, and there was something sadly gentle in her tone:
“Melissa, there are many things I can tell you. The years are full of them. But this is not the time. Later, you will understand. I understand, and that is why I cannot listen to you or give consideration to any of your demands. You must all trust in my wisdom.”
Melissa turned to her sister with a gesture of despair: “Speak, Phoebe. You know what you wish. You remember our talks with Papa. Tell Mama, now.”
Phoebe bent her head lower. Her little red tongue touched her lips. Stupid, silly old Melissa! Of course I am going to marry Johnnie. It’s time Melly was put in her place, and perhaps Mama, too, both of them deciding what I’d to do with my life! No, I won’t give Mama that satisfaction now. I’ll let old Melly believe that she can probably get her way. It will be all the more amusing when things topple over on her a few months from now.
Phoebe sobbed touchingly, covering her face with her handkerchief. “I don’t know, truly. Papa said that I had such a gift”