Free The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields

HJ.”
    Henry stays on at the Rue de Varenne through much of May, and the Bourgets—Paul and Minnie—visit with him often. Paul has grown fond of Henry, has all the patience in the world for his stories and declares him a genius.
    One afternoon, Anna de Noailles comes for tea and to meet the great Monsieur James. She arrives in her silken dress, dewy and flushed as though she has walked all the way from the Right Bank. After Edith’s dream of de Noailles naked in the ocean, she feels shy to be alone with her. And since Henry is still out with the Bourgets, Edith is relieved to recall her promise to invite Anna Bahlmann to meet La Comtesse. Coaxed from her room, Anna sits very still on a distant settee in her dull gray dress and gazes at de Noailles with wide eyes. She speaks only when Anna de Noailles asks, “Aren’t you going to have a taste of these uncanny little cakes, Miss Bahlmann? Honestly, you will be a changed woman.” Anna shrinks back into the pillows and demurs, “Non, merci.”
    “Miss Bahlmann clearly doesn’t wish to be a changed woman,” Edith says, laughing. Just then she catches Anna’s pained eyes and feels a moment’s remorse. But then Tonni leans forward.
    “Comtesse, when I read your poem “Imprint,” I cried. It made me realize how little
I
leave behind.” And then, in flawless French, Anna Bahlmann recites the beginning of the poem.
     
    “So vigorously will I lean on life,
    So strongly will I hold and embrace it,
    That before I lose the sweetness of day
    It will be heated from my touch.”
     
    Anna de Noailles’s soft lips part with surprise.
    “It spoke to me,” Anna Bahlmann goes on to say. “It urged me to make a mark.”
    “Truly, Miss Bahlmann?” The Comtesse raises her extraordinary dark eyebrows. “I too often hope in vain that my poems will do more than amuse people. You are proof that I have made
my
mark on someone,” she says humbly. “I am inexpressibly touched.”
    When the tea is over, she embraces Anna. “Imprint the world,” she whispers into her ear loud enough for Edith to hear. The door closes behind her.
    Edith and Anna Bahlmann are left standing in the hall with the Comtesse’s lingering scent. Edith takes in the figure of the woman who hovers by her every single day: so transparent in her gray gown, like a wisp of smoke threatening to disperse. She wonders if she has ever really
seen
her before.

    Anna Bahlmann lies neck-deep in the servants’ tub, caressing the cool nickel faucet with her toes, whispering aloud the same poem she quoted to the Comtesse. She is pleased that the cool tile plumps her whisper with watery sibilance.
     
    “That before I lose the sweetness of day It will be heated from my touch.”
     
    Anna has spent a lifetime allowing poetry to tie neat bows around her life. How gratifying that this time her habit of finding herself in poetry has managed to please the poet herself.
    How little the world around Anna has ever been heated by her touch! And yet is there anyone she knows who experiences more from the universe than she? Who else sees beauty in the branchings on the underside of a leaf, thrills at the perfect middle C of a streetcar bell, is electrified by the perfume of rain on cobbles? Edith. Edith is the only other person she knows who finds splendor in the mundane. And that is why she loves her, why she has devoted herself to her. From the moment she laid eyes on the earnest ten-year-old with ripples of strawberry hair, she knew she’d met her match. A walk in the woods with Edith was a revelation for both of them. A letter from Miss E. Jones burst with description, with news that no one else would have relished.
    Yes, Edith was intractable sometimes. She wanted the world to be as she expected. Once, as a twelve-year-old, she tore every page out of a Dickens book because it disappointed her. Another time, she wouldn’t write to Anna for a whole month when they were apart, because Anna, called away in an emergency, left