“Things have not been easy for you, John. I know that. I’m sorry. Truly,” she added, pleased by her own display of warmth. She quite liked him; she also liked very much her liking him. “You once did me the,” Caroline stared up at the palm tree, half expecting to see if not a monkey a coconut ready to fall, “honor of proposing to marry me.”
“Oh, I do apologize,” John stammered; turned pale. “It was after… after…”
“She had died. I wished that I had known her. She was a…”
“… a saint,” John filled in.
“Exactly the word that I was going to use. I have now thought over your proposal-somewhat slowly, I must admit. It’s been-what? Four years at least. And I accept.” It was done.
Caroline decided that John’s look of astonishment was not the greatest tribute ever paid her. Had she, somehow, imperceptibly, aged? Or was he otherwise engaged? Certainly, she knew nothing of his life. For all she knew, he might have a full-time and exigent mistress, perhaps a Negress, living in Flushing like Clarence King’s secret wife. “But… but, Caroline…”
“You cannot say that this is so sudden, John.” Caroline was beginning, almost, to enjoy herself.
“No. No. Only I never dreamed… I mean… why me?”
“Because you asked me. Remember?”
“But surely others have…”
“Only Del Hay, and he is dead. You and I, we are both-survivors.”
“I can’t think what to say.” John looked as if a coconut had indeed fallen from the trees, and struck him a sharp blow.
“You can say yes, dear John. Or you can say no. I can accept either. But I can’t accept indecision. You must not think it over in your deliberate legalistic way. I want the answer now, one way or the other.”
“Well, yes. Yes. Of course. But…”
“What is the but?”
“I have lost everything. We were-my family, that is-wiped out two years ago, when the Monongahela Combine failed, and then her illness…”
“I have,” said Caroline softly, “enough for two. Or I will have soon enough.”
“But it’s not right that the wife support the husband…”
“Of course it’s right. It is done all the time, even in Newport, Rhode Island,” she added for dramatic emphasis.
“I don’t know what to think.”
She was relieved that there was no sexual aura to John. He was more like a brother to her, a conventional American brother, she felt obliged to note in her deposition to the high tribunal of her conscience which was now sitting in judgment on her. Blaise, though only half a brother, was possessed of the same sort of dynamo that she had responded to in Jim. But John Apgar Sanford was like Adelbert Hay; he was comfortably, undisturbingly present; and no more.
“I shall be able to help you financially,” she said, abandoning any attempt at coquetry, which even if it were her style was irrelevant to the current proceeding.
“That would be mortifying.” John was acutely uncomfortable.
“ ‘A fair exchange is no robbery,’ as the French say.” Caroline gazed at the palm fronds overhead. “So I shall explain exactly what is to be exchanged for what. I know that you are, of all the family here, the most worldly, the most experienced.” Caroline saw fit to lay it on rather heavily, as she was by no means certain what his response was going to be. “You handled Blaise superbly, and I am, of course, grateful.” The fact that John had done nothing at all for her was beside the point, as she methodically set him up for man-of-the-worlddom.
“I did what I could… He’s difficult, yes.” John was at sea.
Caroline threw out her net. “In marrying me, you will not only get the support that you need in your… uh, endeavors but you will be able to provide me with a father for my child.” Caroline gazed at him, with what she hoped were luminous, madonna-like eyes.
John had gone pale. John had misunderstood. “Naturally, in marrying, the thought of a family is all-important to me, to carry on the name…”
“Our name,” Caroline murmured, wondering how to explain herself.
“Our name, yes. We are both Sanfords. So your monogram won’t change, will it?” He laughed without mirth. “I always regretted not having children with my wife, my first wife, but her illness…” The voice again trailed off.
“I think, John, I have not expressed myself with that clarity which you, as a lawyer, so rightly pride yourself in.” Caroline now felt rather like one of Henry James’s older European ladies, ready to launch some terrible bit of information at a dim-witted American ingénue. “I was not speaking of a future hypothetical fatherhood for you, but of an imminent motherhood for me… in October to be precise, which is why I am eager to be married this week, at City Hall, where I have already made inquiries.”
John gasped, but at least he had understood. “You…” But he exhausted all his breath in startled exhalation.
As John inhaled, Caroline said, “Yes, I am pregnant. I cannot tell you who the father is, as he is a married man. But I can tell you that he was my first-and only-lover. I feel like that chaste king of Spain who…” But caution stopped her from repeating Mlle. Souvestre’s favorite story about how the ascetic King Philip had finally gone to bed with a woman and promptly contracted syphilis. John might not be ready for this story.
“He-the father is in Spain?” John was doing his best to grasp the situation.
“No, he is in America. He is an American. He has visited Spain,” she improvised, hoping to erase King Philip from the court-courtship?-record.
“I see.” John stared at his shoes.
“I realize that I am asking for a very great deal, which is why I said at the very beginning that there would be an exchange between us, useful to each.” Caroline wondered what she would do in John’s place. She would, probably, have laughed, and said no. But she was not in John’s place, and she could not measure either his liking for her person or his need for her fortune. These two imponderables would determine the business.
“Will you continue to see him?” John came swiftly to the necessary, for him, point.
“No.” Caroline lied so seldom that she found it quite easy to do. Would she now become addicted to lying, and turn into another Mrs. Bingham?
“What will you do about the newspaper?”
“I shall go on with it. Unless you would like to be the publisher.” This was definitely Mrs. Binghamish: Caroline had no intention of ever losing control of the Tribune.
“No. No. I am a lawyer, after all, not a publisher. I must say, I have never come across a… a case like this.” He looked at her, worriedly; a lawyer mystified by a client.
“I thought that pregnant ladies were always getting married in the nick of time.”
“Yes. But to the man who… who…”
“Made them pregnant. Well, that is not possible for me.”
“You are in love with him.” John was bleak.
“Don’t worry, John. I shall be as good a wife as I can, given my disposition, which is not very wifely, in the American way, that is.”
“I suppose you will want to look at my books…”
“You are a collector?”
“My financial books…”
“I am not an auditor. You have debts. I’ll pay what I can now. When I inherit, I’ll pay the rest. I assume,” Caroline suddenly wondered if she ought not to bring in an auditor; she laughed uneasily, “I assume that your debts are not larger than my income.”
“Oh, much less. Much less. This is embarrassing for both of us.”
“In France our relatives would be holding this discussion, but we’re not in France, and I can’t imagine Blaise handling any of this for me.” When Caroline rose from her chair, John sprang to his feet: yes, he was hers, she decided. So far so good. Now all that needed to be worked out was the marital bed. She had no intention of sleeping with John, and it was plain that he had every intention of claiming his conjugal rights. For the moment she was safe: her family history of difficult, even fatal, pregnancies could be invoked to keep him at a distance. Later, she would, she was certain, think of something.