The Living is Easy by Dorothy West

Author:Dorothy West [West, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781558617322
Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

THE DUCHESS stood at her bedroom window in the Cambridge house, dressed in white brocade, with her pale hair in a Psyche knot. Her wedding ring had been Simeon’s mother’s. She had left it to him to give to the woman he would choose for a wife. On the day of his choice, in all probability she had revolved in her grave. Above her wedding band the Duchess wore a diamond of singular beauty. The solitaire on her right hand was of the same size and flawlessness. They were only a fractional part of the treasure that Corinne had acquired in those months when she designed her daughter’s destiny.

Outside, the snow was beginning to fall in a blinding swirl, obscuring the sky and the star which had guided the wise men. Between heaven and earth there was now a white shroud. The Duchess could not discern which way wisdom would travel that night.

Behind her, blue flames glowed in hand-painted globes, giving light and heightened shadow to the room. Nothing had been changed since the first Lenore had died on the massive bed, with her namesake and her namesake’s mother far removed from the lofty thoughts her last earthly moments inspired. The Duchess had added to the room only the crucifix on the wall and the Virgin Mother enshrined, she who had conceived without benefit of banns, holding in her arms the child, whom Joseph had not sired, who would have been nameless if God had not named him God the Son.

The Duchess was a bride of less than a month. Simeon had come to propose the day after his father’s funeral. His mood was somber as befitting both occasions. For there were three burials in a row, the least in importance Carter Binney’s, because it was only his mortal remains, and second, Simeon’s single blessedness, because from its dust was formed the man of compromise, and first, because of its frightfulness, the Catholic heart that was buried alive.

Listening to Simeon’s proposal the Duchess poised her soul between good and evil, as she saw them, knowing, from knowing her mother, that there is no interlocking of separated worlds, but inescapably forced to make the choice that would cause the most suffering, that would flog her spirit to its utmost humility, that would burden her with the cross.

But there was nothing in the imperial eyes to indicate this inherited disposition to suffer. Simeon, looking at her without awe, but using the same yardstick of her bearing and ash-blondness by which Cleo measured her aloofness — Simeon thought that she was immune to emotion.

When the brief exchanges were over, the Duchess said, “I hope you will consent to a joint account. I want very much to help The Clarion.”

Simeon rose. He said stiffly: “I am not marrying you for your money. However it may seem to you, I came to discharge a debt, not to add to it.”

She rose, too. The faintest color was in her cheeks. “I had no intention of being presumptuous.

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