1925. Wharton, an American author, is best known for her stories and ironic novels about upper class people. Wharton's central subjects were the conflict between social and individual fulfillment, repressed sexuality, and the manners of old families and the nouveau riche, who had made their fortunes in more recent years. Among her numerous novels, short stories, and travel writings are The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and the Pulitzer prize-winning Age of Innocence. The Mother's Recompense relates the story of a mother and daughter whose infatuation with the same man causes shock waves to ripple through 1920s New York high society. See other titles by this author available from Kessinger Publishing.
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Book Description
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About the Author
Edith Wharton was born in 1862. She won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence in 1920, and was the first woman to receive a Doctorate of Letters from Yale University. In 1930 she became a member of the American Academy of Arts and letters. She died in France at the age of 75.
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Chapter 1
Kate Clephane was wakened, as usual, by the slant of Riviera sun across her bed. It was the thing she liked best about her shabby cramped room in the third-rate Hôtel de Minorque et de l'Univers: that the morning sun came in at her window, and yet that it didn't come too early.
No more sunrises for Kate Clephane. They were associated with too many lost joys -- coming home from balls where one had danced one's self to tatters, or from suppers where one had lingered, counting one's winnings (it was wonderful, in the old days, how often she had won, or friends had won for her, staking a louis just for fun, and cramming her hands with thousand franc bills); associated, too, with the scramble up hill through the whitening gray of the garden, flicked by scented shrubs, caught on perfidious prickles, up to the shuttered villa askew on its heat-soaked rock -- and then, at the door, in the laurustinus-shade that smelt of honey, that unexpected kiss (well honestly, yes, unexpected, since it had long been settled that one was to remain "just friends"); and the pulling away from an insistent arm, and the one more pressure on hers of lips young enough to be fresh after a night of drinking and play and more drinking. And she had never let Chris come in with her at that hour, no, not once, though at the time there was only Julie the cook in the house, and goodness knew...Oh, but she had always had her pride -- people ought to remember that when they said such things about her...
That was what the sunrise reminded Kate Clephane of -- as she supposed it did most women of forty-two or so (or was it really forty-four last week?). For nearly twenty years now she had lived chiefly with women of her own kind, and she no longer very sincerely believed there were any others, that is to say among women properly so called. Her female world was made up of three categories: frumps, hypocrites and the "good sort" -- like herself. After all, the last was the one she preferred to be in.
Not that she could not picture another life -- if only one had met the right man at the right hour. She remembered her one week -- that tiny little week of seven days, just six years ago -- when she and Chris had gone together to a lost place in Normandy where there wasn't a railway within ten miles, and you had to drive in the farmer's cart to the farm-house smothered in apple-blossoms; and Chris and she had gone off every morning for the whole day, while he sketched by willowy river-banks, and under the flank of mossy village churches; and every day for seven days she had watched the farmyard life waking at dawn under their windows, while she dashed herself with cold water and did her hair and touched up her face before he was awake, because the early light is so pitiless after thirty. She remembered it all, and how sure she had been then that she was meant to live on a farm and keep chickens; just as sure as he was that he was meant to be a painter, and would already have made a name if his parents hadn't called him back to Baltimore and shoved him into a broker's office after Harvard -- to have him off their minds, as he said.
Yes, she could still picture that kind of life: every fibre in her kept its glow. But she didn't believe in it; she knew now that "things didn't happen like that" for long, that reality and durability were attributes of the humdrum, the prosaic and the dreary. And it was to escape from reality and durability that one plunged into cards, gossip, flirtation, and all the artificial excitements which society so lavishly provides for people who want to forget.
She and Chris had never repeated that week. He had never suggested doing so, and had let her hints fall unheeded, or turned them off with a laugh, whenever she tried, with shy tentative allusions, to coax him back to the idea; for she had found out early that one could never ask him anything point-blank -- it just put his back up, as he said himself. One had to manoeuvre and wait; but when didn't a woman have to manoeuvre and wait? Ever since she had left her husband, eighteen years ago, what else had she ever done? Sometimes, nowadays, waking Aline and unrefreshed in her dreary hotel room, she shivered at the memory of all the scheming, planning, ignoring, enduring, accepting, which had led her in the end to -- this.
Ah, well --
"Aline!"
After all, there was the sun in her window, there was the triangular glimpse of blue wind-bitten sea between the roofs, and a new day beginning, and hot chocolate coming, and a new hat to try on at the milliner's, and --
"Aline!"
She had come to this cheap hotel just in order to keep her maid. One couldn't afford everything, especially since the war, and she preferred veal for dinner every night to having to do her own mending and dress her hair: the unmanageable abundant hair which had so uncannily survived her youth, and sometimes, in her happier moods, made her feel that perhaps, after all, in the eyes of her friends, other of its attributes survived also. And besides, it looked better for a lone woman who, after having been thirty-nine for a number of years, had suddenly become forty-four, to have a respectable-looking servant in the background; to be able, for instance, when one arrived in new places, to say to supercilious hotel-clerks: "My maid is following with the luggage."
"Aline!"
Aline, ugly, neat and enigmatic, appeared with the breakfast-tray. A delicious scent preceded her.
Mrs. Clephane raised herself on a pink elbow, shook her hair over her shoulders, and exclaimed: "Violets?"
Aline permitted herself her dry smile. "From a gentleman."
Colour flooded her mistress's face. Hadn't she known that something good was going to happen to her that morning -- hadn't she felt it in every touch of the sunshine, as its golden finger-tips pressed her lids open and wound their way through her hair? She supposed she was superstitious. She laughed expectantly.
"A gentleman?"
"The little lame boy with the newspapers that Madame was kind to," the maid continued, arranging the tray with her spare Taylorized gestures.
"Oh, poor child!" Mrs. Clephane's voice had a quaver which she tried to deflect to the lame boy, though she knew how impossible it was to deceive Aline. Of course Aline knew everything -- well, yes, that was the other side of the medal. She often said to her mistress: "Madame is too much Aline -- Madame ought to make some new friends --" and what did that mean, except that Aline knew she had lost the old ones?
But it was characteristic of Kate that, after a moment, the quaver in her voice did instinctively tilt in the direction of the lame boy who sold newspapers; and when the tears reached her eyes it was over his wistful image, and not her own, that they flowed. She had a way of getting desperately fond of people she had been kind to, and exaggeratedly touched by the least sign of their appreciation. It was her weakness -- or her strength: she wondered which?
"Poor, poor little chap. But his mother'll beat him if she finds out. Aline, you must hunt him up this very day and pay back what the flowers must have cost him." She lifted the violets and pressed them to her face. As she did so she caught sight of a telegram beneath them.
A telegram -- for her? It didn't often happen nowadays. But after all there was no reason why it shouldn't happen once again -- at least once. There was no reason why, this very day, this day on which the sunshine had waked her with such a promise, there shouldn't be a message at last, the message for which she had waited for two years, three years; yes, exactly three years and one month -- just a word from him to say: "Take me back."
She snatched up the telegram, and then turned her head toward the wall, seeking, while she read, to hide her face from Aline. The maid, on whom such hints were never lost, immediately transferred her attention to the dressing-table, skilfully deploying the glittering troops on that last battlefield where the daily struggle still renewed itself.
Aline's eyes averted, her mistress tore open the blue fold and read: "Mrs. Clephane dead --"
A shiver ran over her. Mrs. Clephane dead? Not if Mrs. Clephane knew it! Never more alive than today, with the sun crisping her hair, the violet scent enveloping her, and that jolly north-west gale rioting out there on the Mediterranean. What was the meaning of this grim joke?
The first shock over, she read on more calmly and understood. It was the other Mrs. Clephane who was dead: the one who used to be her mother-in-law. Her first thought was: "Well, serve her right" -- since, if it was so desirable to be alive on such a morning it must be correspondingly undesirable to be dead, and she could draw the agreeable conclusion that the other Mrs. Clephane had at last been come up with -- oh, but thoroughly.
She lingered awhile on this pleasing fancy, and then began to reach out to wider inferences. "But if -- but -- if but little Anne --"
At the murmur of the name her eyes filled again. For years now she had barricaded her heart against her daughter's presence; and here it was, suddenly in possession again, crowding out everything else, yes, effacing even Chris as though he were the thinnest of ghosts, and the cable in her hand a cockcrow. "But perhaps now they'll let me see her," the mother thought.
She didn't even know who "they" were, now that their formidable chieftain, her mother-in-law, was dead. Lawyers, judges, trustees, guardians, she supposed -- all the natural enemies of woman. She wrinkled her brows, trying to remember who, at the death of the child's father, had been appointed the child's other guardian -- old Mrs. Clephane's overpowering assumption of the office having so completely effaced her associate that it took a few minutes to fish him up out of the far-off past.
"Why, poor old Fred Landers, of course!" She smiled retrospectively. "I don't believe he'd prevent my seeing the child if he were left to himself. Besides, isn't she nearly grown up? Why, I do believe sh... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Mother's Dilemma,
By
This review is from: The Mother's Recompense (Paperback)
Written in 1925, this less well-known novel by Edith Wharton examines a mother's dilemma. Kate Clephane, the heroine of this novel, deserted her wealthy husband and young daughter twenty years before, when she fled the social constraints of her proper home in New York, at the turn of the century. After the end of that affair she seeks to be reunited with her child, but is denied this by her husband and mother in law. Ostracized by friends and family, Kate leads a life of love affairs and social gatherings amid the frivolous expatriate community on the Riviera. One day she receives a telegram from her now grown daughter. Kate's mother-in-law has died and the girl summons her to return to New York in an attempt to rekindle their relationship. Things go well for a while, until Kate discovers that her daughter is planning on marrying Chris one of Kate's near do well former lovers. Kate is repelled by the thought. She wrestles with what she should do. Should she tell her daughter of her former relationship with Chris, putting her relationship with her daughter in jeopardy? Should she attempt to break up the relationship to save her daughter from marrying a man whose character indicates he was not meant to marry? Or should she keep silent and not break her daughter's heart. The reader struggles with Kate over which is the correct decision, as well as what motivates Kate's behavior. Does she want to end the relationship between her daughter and Chris out of jealousy, or perhaps selfishness? I won't reveal her choice. But in the end she forgoes her own happiness in rejecting the hand of a suitor. Why? This is for the reader to decide. There are similaries in plot and style with Henry James' Washington Square, where a father intrudes into the relationship of his shy daughter with a potentially disastrous suitor.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
NY vs the Riviera,
By
This review is from: Mother's Recompense (Paperback)
After reading "The Age of Innocence", "The House of Mirth", and "Custom the Country" I thought I'd read the best of Wharton. Not So! Wharton is always exemplary in portraying upper class late 19th century New Yorkers and their staid customs. Some things are de rigueur and others just aren't allowed. Unlike her earlier gilded age settings "Recompense" takes place post World War I and there are cars, easier travel within and without the country, telephones provide easier communication. In her early twenties Kate ran from her rules worshiping husband, leaving behind her three year old daughter. Worse still a society playboy helped her escape and then dumped her and everyone who matters knows about it. She exiles herself to Europe and settles in with other rule breakers. They partially redeem themselves with good works during the war. Time moves on. Divorce is invented! More importantly others from her social set misbehave eclipsing her own scandal. When her husband and then her mother-in-law die Kate's daughter invites her back home to live with her. Kate is surprised at how easily she fits back in, how nonchalantly her old cronies welcome her and mostly how much her daughter cares for her. The one love affair she allowed herself during her exile comes back to haunt her threatening her new life however. Despite this Kate sees vistas of possible happiness, but ultimately she has to decide between speaking the truth and hurting her daughter or keeping secrets that are almost impossible to swallow. Sadly her real choice narrows down to deciding whether she wants to feel alone and alienated in NY or on the Continent. At least this is territory she's already familiar with.
6 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Fantastic Voyage Across an Hysterical Sea,
By dixie@bayou.com (Louisiana) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Mother's Recompense (Paperback)
This novel which has gone undiscovered for many years deserves close scrutiny and ultimately a judgement on the heroine. The introduction invites the author to decide whether the mother is merely hysterical or has real cause for concern. Whatever the outcome it is a difficult and delightful decision to make
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Kate Clephane, Fred Landers, New York, Chris Fenno, Horace Maclew, John Clephane, Nollie Tresselton, Fifth Avenue, Enid Drover, Major Fenno, Uncle Fred, Hendrik Drover, Joe Tresselton, Lilla Gates, Hylton Davies, Aunt Kate, Long Island, Lord Charles, Parley Plush, South Carolina, Aunt Enid, Uncle Hendrik, American Face, Aunt Janey Browse Sample Pages:
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Kate Clephane, Fred Landers, New York, Chris Fenno, Horace Maclew, John Clephane, Nollie Tresselton, Fifth Avenue, Enid Drover, Major Fenno, Uncle Fred, Hendrik Drover, Joe Tresselton, Lilla Gates, Hylton Davies, Aunt Kate, Long Island, Lord Charles, Parley Plush, South Carolina, Aunt Enid, Uncle Hendrik, American Face, Aunt Janey Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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