Mr. Edwards

Mr. Edwards is a cold, calculating whoremaster who runs a circuit of small-town brothels in New England with ruthless efficiency, but his carefully ordered life unravels when he falls obsessively in love with Cathy Ames, a woman who manipulates, robs, and ultimately drives him to a murderous rage that nearly kills her.

Identity and Business Empire

Mr. Edwards is a large, powerful man in his late forties, running a little to fat but in surprisingly good condition. He maintains a respectable domestic life in Boston with a wife and two well-mannered sons, who are entered on the books at Groton as infants. His wife keeps a dustless house and controls her servants, and Mr. Edwards manages to spend more evenings at home than one might imagine. He runs his business with a public accountant's neatness and accuracy, having invented his own system: a circuit route through small towns, with short stays for each girl, strict discipline, and careful percentages. He never sends his girls into cities, preferring small towns with a mortgaged hotel and no amusements, where his only competition comes from wives and an occasional wayward girl. At this time he has ten units, and before his death at sixty-seven from strangulation on a chicken bone, he will have groups of four girls in each of thirty-three small towns in New England, becoming rich. He recruits and controls his girls without trouble, preferring those who are not too pretty to avoid local young men falling in love. When any of his girls become pregnant, they have the choice of leaving or of being aborted so brutally that a fair proportion die, though the girls usually choose abortion.

The Fall into Love with Cathy

Mr. Edwards has a streak of misfortune when a train wreck kills off two units of four girls each, and another unit is lost to conversion when a small-town preacher ignites the townsfolk. He is interviewing and recruiting numbers of girls to rebuild three units from the ground when Cathy Ames, calling herself Catherine Amesbury, comes into his office. He has not had a good morning, suffering from a halibut chowder that has blown both ways, leaving him weak and crampy. For this reason he does not take in all at once how pretty she is—far too pretty for his business. But something in his body begins to feel her, and his reaction startles him. He realizes he wants this one for his own. Cathy tells him a story about her father being dead and the bank about to take away the farm from her mother, needing money to keep up the interest. A warning buzz sounds in his brain, but it is not loud enough. Mr. Edwards, a big, fat, grown-up whoremaster, leans his stomach against his desk while his cheeks darken with blood and excited chills run up his legs and thighs. He hears himself saying they can figure some way for her to get the interest money, to a girl who has simply asked for a job as a whore.

Manipulation and Decline

Mr. Edwards falls hopelessly, miserably in love with Catherine. He rents a sweet little brick house for her and then gives it to her, buying every imaginable luxury and overdecorating the house. He has never experienced such misery. As a matter of business he has learned so much about women that he does not trust one for a second, and since he deeply loves Catherine and love requires trust, he is torn to quivering fragments. He tries to buy her loyalty with presents and with money. When he is away from her, he tortures himself with the thought of other men slipping into her house. He hates to leave Boston to check up on his units because this would leave Catherine alone, and to a certain extent he begins to neglect his business. Cathy keeps him continually off balance, giving him an impression of restlessness and complaining about the lecherous looks of men. In their sexual relations she convinces him that the result is not quite satisfactory to her. He sees with satisfaction his nerves begin to go, his hands take to quivering, his loss of weight, and the wild glazed look in his eyes. When she delicately senses the near approach of insane, punishing rage, she sits in his lap and soothes him. Cathy begins to steal from him, going through his pockets and taking large bills, padding grocery bills, and mortgaging the house. He cannot bring himself to stop it. She changes the locks on the front door so he always has to ring the bell, and sometimes his ring is not answered at all. Mr. Edwards has her followed.

The Violent Confrontation and Aftermath

Mr. Edwards is essentially a simple man, but even a simple man has complexities which are dark and twisted. Cathy makes only one bad slip: she refuses to drink champagne, and when he insists, she drinks several glasses and her true nature erupts. She calls him a fat slug, tells him she learned her tricks in cribs, and jams the ragged edge of a broken champagne glass against his cheek. He runs from the house. Love to a man like Mr. Edwards is a crippling emotion, ruining his judgment and canceling his knowledge. He wants with all his heart to believe in her goodness, but he is forced not to. He learns the truth, including about the fire at her parents' house from an old newspaper clipping. His chest and stomach turn to molten metal, and a redness glows in his head behind his eyes. Real fear mixes up in his love, and the precipitate from the mixing of these two is cruelty. He moves slowly, checking his suitcase just as he always does when he starts out to inspect his units—clean shirts and underwear, a nightgown and slippers, and the heavy quirt with the lash curving around the end of the suitcase. He goes to the brick house, takes her oak box of money, and tells her they are going for a little trip to a small town in Connecticut where she is going to work. In a private place between a stone wall and a fringe of cedars, he jerks the purse from her hand and throws it over the wall. After two slashes the quirt is not enough; he drops it and uses his fists. His frantic hand finds a stone on the ground, and his cold control is burst through with a red roaring wave. He looks down on her beaten face, listens for her heartbeat and can hear nothing over the thumping of his own. Two complete and separate thoughts run in his mind: one says he must bury her, and the other cries like a child that he cannot bear to touch her. Then the sickness that follows rage overwhelms him, and he runs from the place, leaving his suitcase, the quirt, and the oak box of money. No question is ever asked of him. After a time of sickness to which his wife ministers tenderly, he goes back to his business and never again lets the insanity of love come near him. He says a man who cannot learn from experience is a fool. Always afterward he has a kind of fearful respect for himself, having never known that the impulse to kill was in him.