Read Online Quiet Dell: A Novel by Jayne Anne Phillips - Free Book Online

the right to betray her, to respond to his heart’s call, to end, he said, the dishonesty that undermined them both. He would say yes to Dora Hulck, née Dora Scholes, a divorcée who had ended her childless ten-year marriage and left the coal merchant whose funds had established her business. The Hallo Shop, a thriving enterprise, produced hand-wrought silver flatware, hollowware, and jewelry, just two blocks from their own barn workshop on Cedar Street, and employed many of the same artisans who designed for the Eicher enterprise. Now Dora would move her shop to Chicago.She wanted Heinrich to manage the expanding business and be her partner in all things, for she had taken him to her bed; they were lovers truly matched and would create Hallo’s Norse Line, a collection of Scandinavian-influenced silver. “Beautiful, Useful, Enduring,” the Hallo motto, would set an industry standard; they would make permanent impress on silver design in America, their adopted country; they would do important work.
    Yes? Work?
    Anna imagined Heinrich leaving her, and his mother with him, taking the children, for Lavinia believed herself as much a mother to them as Anna, and believed in her only son absolutely. Anna would be destitute. She’d no sense of how to run a business, how to plead a case through the courts, no means to hire lawyers, no presence of mind but to beg him not to think of this, to beg Lavinia to counsel him, demand of him . . . but Lavinia prided herself on her disregard for bourgeois convention. She saw her son’s gifts unrealized, his talent wasted. His streetcar commute and his work in the city, actuary for Metropolitan Insurance and Casualty Co., were beneath him; he excelled of course, for his mind was precise and sharp and he inspired confidence, but business was not Art. He was finer than commerce, meant for better things, meant to foreman the major studio they’d all envisioned and could not support. Dora Scholes had offered him the opportunity he deserved. Lavinia refused Asta counsel and retired to her room at the first sound of marital argument.
    Asta begged Heinrich to consider their marriage of more than twelve years, their own struggling but solvent enterprise, his years of seniority at the firm that employed him, and their children, their children! Was his life so unbearable? Had he no feeling at all for her?
    He said, in a tense, quiet voice, “I’m leaving you.”
    “Why?” Asta shouted. “Why Dora? Is it her business, the money?”
    He looked at her, stunned, then advanced upon her, enraged. “Why Dora? Why do you think? Shall I show you why? Throw off your clothes, as she does! Start on your knees! Take me to mine!”
    They were alone, for the children were at school, and Lavinia would not intervene. Asta tried to flee the room.
    But he took hold of her, and dragged her to this bedroom. He forced her against the wall, there, by the mirror, and held her wrists above her head. He stood nearly against her, as though he would kiss or fondle her. She turned her face from him and closed her eyes, but he spoke against her throat, hissing his anger, and she felt each word enter her. “I must work, and work, and work, to even begin with you. I am a man! I am this man! I am not a villain, despoiling you. And I am not your teacher! You do not learn!”
    She opened her eyes and saw that his other hand was fisted, that he shook with restraint, lest he beat her senseless. And then he turned and left the house, taking with him the valise he’d left packed at the front door.
    Lavinia spoke frankly of Heinrich’s infidelity only once, late that night over tea at the kitchen table, when the children were asleep. The room was shadowy in the snowy, windy night.
    Lavinia, appearing regal, kindly, poured the tea. “Asta, hear me out. In this world in which women have so little freedom and enjoy so little regard, it is not always a bad thing to share a man, openly or not, if all are happy, and it is not such