The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields Page B

were missing something, weren’t we?” she says with a wicked smile, and when she offhandedly touches Edith’s hand, Edith feels electricity pass through her fingertips.

    “Anna de Noailles is like no one I’ve ever met,” Edith tells Anna Bahlmann the next afternoon when her secretary carries in her newly typed pages. “Perhaps I will invite her for dinner. You can meet her.”
    “She would pay no attention to me,” Anna says.
    “Nonsense. You must see her face-to-face to truly understand her poetry. It’s as if she’s neither a woman nor a man, but another sex entirely. She’s got the mind and the desires of a man and the drive to be heard like a man. And yet all the beauty and allure of a woman. The extraordinary thing is it’s all unstudied. She’s a force of nature.”
    “She sounds frightening,” Anna says.
    “I’ll invite her to meet Henry when he’s here.”
    “Well, then, you surely wouldn’t want me at the table.”
    “Of course I would, Tonni. Henry finds you very calming.”
    “Herz, if you wouldn’t mind, may I talk to you about this scene?” Anna asks, selecting a few pages from the batch she’s typed. Edith has nearly worn herself out trying to prepare her new novel,
The Fruit of the Tree
, for serialization in
Scribner’s Magazine
. The new book is bolder and more important, she deems, than any book she’s written before.
The
Fruit of the Tree
is about industrial reform, and even addresses a nurse choosing death over life for a patient and friend who suffers after a crippling accident.
    But Edith’s editor isn’t satisfied with the ending. He wants Edith to make the main character’s feelings clearer. As a nurse, Justine has opted to give her friend a deathblow of morphine she feels her friend is begging for, rather than force her to live in excruciating pain. After Justine ends up marrying the woman’s widower, she never finds the right time to tell him what she’s done. When he discovers the truth, she must make a series of confounding choices. Edith has always resisted overexplaining her characters’ intentions. Let the psychology speak for itself, she thinks. In life, no one explains themselves, and rarely are people insightful enough to question their own motives. But she has decided this one time to give Mr. Burlingame what he’s asked for. He has been annoyingly insistent. Like a fly in her ear. And now she isn’t feeling very good about the changes. How disconcerting to have Tonni call it out.
    “Have I failed at it?” she asks Anna. “It was a fool’s mission.”
    “Failed. No, but . . .”
    Edith feels herself biting her lip, just as she did as a child when Tonni corrected her German grammar or urged her to better support her main theory in an essay on Goethe.
    “I wish Burlingame hadn’t asked it of me. . . . I think he’s wrong.”
    “So why change it?” Anna says.
    “Burlingame thought . . . you agree with me then?”
    “It was clear enough before.”
    “And now it feels like a diatribe.”
    “He isn’t reading carefully enough. It’s all there,” Anna says.
    Edith reaches out and gives Anna a hug, clutches her for a moment as someone might grab a life preserver.
    “I shouldn’t need a backup on these things. . . . I don’t know why I let him talk me into it.”
    “We all need a backup sometimes.” Anna’s eyes are as clear as water. Her lashes almost transparent. She stands there, blinking in the sun. “Shall I retype it as it was, then?” Anna asks in a whisper.
    “Yes,” Edith says. “Please, please do.”

    Henry James arrives at the Whartons’ door with two trunks, four hatboxes and a stained and rather nasty-smelling half-eaten train lunch which he insists be placed immediately on ice. One cannot entirely prepare for a visit from Henry James. He is a jumble of strength, intensity, neediness and vulnerability so tangled, so exquisitely bright, so sharp, so insistent that no matter how well one plans, there is simply