The Second Mrs. Astor

by Shana Abe

  I was feeling, I guess, sunken. A sunken version of myself. A heavier version, one that wanted, very much, just to sit and eat and admire the moon forging pewter shadows along the dunes.

  And, in truth, I could not stop myself from scrutinizing the banks for Kitty. Day or night, I couldn’t stop looking for her. Every mangy tan dog loping along made me sit up a bit. (Egypt, in case you are wondering, has a great many tan dogs.) But it was never she.

  * * *

  Carrie Endres joined us in Aswan. She was a nurse of excellent reputation, and your father had hired her as a surprise to me. I don’t know why that enraged me so much; it’s foolish, in retrospect. Carrie was kind and competent and I am deeply ashamed now, all these months later, that I was so short with her at first. It wasn’t her fault that your father had gone behind my back. I doubt she had the faintest idea he had. But springing the foregone conclusion of her upon me in the middle of our honeymoon made me feel like a child being punished. It made me feel like I could not be trusted with my own body, with my own health. It was the first serious disagreement we ever had—it was the only serious disagreement we ever had—and he won it, because Carrie had voyaged all the way from the States to watch over me, and Jack declared up and down that she wasn’t going back unless I was going along with her, and that was that.

  He never raised his voice. I did.

  Our dog was irretrievable, you see, and we were both still raw from her loss. I’m sure that was some of it.

  My feelings were bruised. I wept a little, hot helpless tears of anger, although I didn’t do it in front of him. That evening as I sulked alone in my chair on the sun deck, Margaret brought me baklava in rose syrup and hibiscus tea and told me that I needed to accept what was done, because it was done, and raging against Jack’s choices for me (however highhanded, she added) would only make matters worse. Why not, she said, reflect upon his consideration instead of his sneakiness? And then she said something I’ll never forget:

  “It’s plain as day Jack adores you. I think he adores you to the point that the thought of being without you terrifies him to the core. And for a man like Jack Astor, that is significant.”

  After that, I stopped my complaints.

  March 1912

  On the Nile

  They turned around at Aswan, Madeleine’s newly appointed nurse neatly stowed in an upper deck cabin. Izz al din informed them all that the journey downriver would go more quickly than the one up. They needed to make up for their lost days in order for Margaret and Helen to catch their steamer back to Italy. But there were still days enough for Kom Ombo, for Edfu. For Karnak, with its famed hypostyle halls and temples, its pillars built to graze heaven and eerie avenue of ram-headed sphinxes, muscular and staring.

  At the feet of the colossal statue of Ramses II, Madeleine and Helen clambered up to stroke the ankle of the much smaller, female figure tucked against his legs: not a wife, as Madeleine had first assumed, but a royal daughter, her features feline and delicate, her lips not quite smiling.

  A girl who had lived and died thousands of years past, still standing at her father’s feet. Like the shepherdess in the painting in William Force’s study halfway around the world, the princess had been captured in a singular moment forever because of a great man. And wasn’t that something?

  It was.

  * * *

  The Habibti left behind the babble of Luxor to make her way downriver again, floating in near silence along the tranquil waters. The weather was turning more summery, still clement, and sitting calm and quiet on her decks became the easiest thing in the world.

  One afternoon, Madeleine reclined in her usual chair on the sun deck beneath the apricot awning, reading a book she’d found in the boat’s little nook of a library. (It was about the customs and traditions of Argentina, left behind, no doubt, by some well-traveled client.) Carrie bustled nearby, preparing a plate of sandwiches for tea; Jack stood at the port railing, gazing out, restless. Margaret and Helen were playing poker near the stairs, but not very seriously. Every now and then, they would stop moving entirely for minutes at a time. Madeleine would catch them both staring dreamily at the passing view, the fans of cards in their hands forgotten.

  Occasionally their boat passed other boats, bulky dahabiyas or smaller, lateen-sailed feluccas, and when this happened, usually at least someone from the crew would shout out a greeting, getting one in return, echoing across the wide river.

  Madeleine could not help glancing up from her book, over and again, at her husband. Against the turquoise sky, he stood tense and tall, his left leg crooked at the knee as if it pained him. He kept his hat clenched in one hand.

  She was looking at him when it happened. He lurched abruptly against the scrolled metal railing, leaning out over it, the brim of his hat crushed.

  “There,” Jack bellowed, louder than she’d ever heard him. He used the hat to point at something below them, something Madeleine couldn’t see. “By God, there she is!”

  “Marhaba!” came an answering shout. “Al’amirkiu! Hada hu kalabik!”

  Madeleine dropped her book. From somewhere out across the river came a familiar, ecstatic bark.

  Everyone rushed to the railing.

  Another wooden dahabiya surged upriver, its sails stained and puffed, the trio of men on its lower deck cheering at the sight of them, jumping up and down and waving their arms. Kitty stood in their midst, dancing, barking, and had not one of the men at the last moment grabbed her by the collar, there was no doubt she would have launched herself into the water, swimming across the Nile to reach them.

  * * *

  It was difficult for Madeleine to frame her sense of relief into words, into thought. She was able to do so in actions, however. She was able to cover Kitty in praise and kisses, to hug her near and close her eyes and breathe in the musky, not-quite-pleasant scent of a dog lost for weeks to the sand and wilds. She ran her hands along Kitty’s ribs and spine and her fingers tangled with Jack’s, also stroking, and together they held eyes and smiled and kept telling their dog what a good girl she was, what a good girl.

  Although Madeleine’s happiness was palatable, Jack’s was even more so. Kitty had been his companion through the sticky months of his divorce and all the notorious, lonely days after, when even the crème de la crème of society, his own kind, had angled away from him. So she was happiest, actually, for him. For her husband, the hard creases lining his brow now lessened, his gray eyes lightened. He had his friend back. It gladdened her heart.

  “Let’s just keep her in the cabin with us at night,” Madeleine suggested, because they’d been letting her roam before this, patrolling the boat in the silky dark, calling back to the jackals that cried in the distance.

  “Yes,” Jack agreed. “We’ll make a bed for her. She shouldn’t put up too much of a fuss.”

  Jack was right. After her escapade offshore, Kitty seemed perfectly content on her bed of folded blankets, as long as she could keep the colonel in sight. Madeleine thought both human and canine slept easier in each other’s company, although she might have preferred a little more private time in the long stretch of night away from a snoring dog in need of a shampoo.

  But this was her honeymoon, this time of sun and water and adventure. In its own unique way, this was how her family would knit together, bone to bone, husband and wife and child and companion. They were all here already. Already a unit.

  In those final few days aboard the Habibti, it seemed to Madeleine that every hour was a raindrop, perfect and enclosed, falling down in a blessing from the sky to the earth.

  At night, she would slide into sleep wrapped in Jack’s arms, each of them with a hand cradled warm over her belly.

  Goodnight, baby, she would think. Goodnight, my daughter or son, my princess or prince.

  * * *

  In Alexandria, the sun flirted from behind a flock of woolly white clouds, and their little group broke amiably apart. Jack and Madeleine accompanied the Browns in a horse-drawn calèche
to the port, waved farewell as Margaret and Helen boarded their steamer to Naples.

  “I’ll see you this summer in Newport,” Margaret said. “You can introduce your new baby to me.”

  “I will,” Madeleine promised, and swallowed the rise of tears in her throat. She still wasn’t accustomed to it, these wild emotional swings that would overtake her. Carrie had assured her it was normal for her condition, and eventually her moods would stabilize, but Madeleine wasn’t there yet. Margaret Brown, her only ally in the social thicket of Rhode Island, was leaving, and would be absent for months. In just a short while, Madeleine was going to have to endure the icy gazes again alone.

  Almost alone. Jack rubbed a slow circle between her shoulder blades with his palm.

  “Bon voyage, fair ladies,” he’d said, and in a froth of lace and netting, Helen had embraced them both, then Margaret, and then they were gone, lost to the bustle of passengers and crew and the gray columns of steam from all the ships, puffing and rolling up into the sky.

  * * *

  They would follow on their own steamer in a few days. They had plenty of time before they had to reach Paris again, and then Cherbourg for the voyage home. Jack had booked their passage to New York on Bruce Ismay’s fine new steamship, her maiden voyage, which to Madeleine sounded like a recipe for enduring all sorts of little things going awry, but which her husband was looking forward to with open enthusiasm.

  They spent the next few days visiting bazaars filled with spices and lamps and jewelry and blown glass; Pompey’s Pillar in the acropolis; the medieval-looking Citadel of Qaitbay, where Moslem princes fallen out of favor had been imprisoned, and the doomed soldiers of the sultan fought off the Ottoman Turks as long as they could. Everywhere she stepped, her feet stirred up the dust of history, hundreds of years old or thousands. She wanted to memorize all of it, so she could carry these days and nights with her back to America. She wanted never to forget the perfect heat, the sand, the stars spread above her in a shifting, infinite river of platinum, stretching from end to end above the earth. The meteors that fell in silence all night, every night, sketching slow blazing lines into the heavy blue.

  * * *

  The rooms they occupied now at the New Khedivial had a very different character than the ones they’d been given during their initial visit.

  Notre suite arabe, the manager had said, opening the double doors wide.

  The rugs were sage and cobalt; the plaster walls baby blue. The ceiling and all the arched doorways were elaborately tiled, mosaics of interlinked circles and stars, diamonds and chevrons and dots, with punched-brass lanterns—orbs and pagodas and more stars—hanging from chains. Wooden screens covering their windows hid their own enclosed garden, with roses and jasmine and a guava tree, growing right in the middle of the grass.

  Kitty began to sniff around its roots with interest.

  On their way in, they had passed a celebration in the grand ballroom (une réception de mariage, the same manager had informed them from over his shoulder), and even though the ballroom was not near their suite, the music still reached them, muted and elegant, and the lanterns cast slow moving shadows with the jasmine breeze.

  In their canopied bed, she lay awake and thought, How splendid the hours are now. I never, ever want this to end.

  Jack murmured, his arm beneath her neck, “Let’s name her Paris.”

  Madeleine smiled. “If I remember my Iliad correctly, Paris is a boy’s name.”

  “Paris,” he said, “because that’s where we first were sure of her, in the City of Light.”

  “All right. And if it’s a boy?”

  “It won’t be,” he said, confident. “We’re having a daughter.”

  She turned to press her cheek against his chest. “Far be it from me to contradict my husband, but just in case you’re wrong, I think we need to consider a boy’s name, too. We’ll keep it in reserve.”

  “For our next child,” he said softly, up to the canopy.

  “Yes,” she agreed, just as soft. “For the next one.”

  But the sound of a waltz crept through the bedroom, and while it whispered by, neither of them spoke again, until finally Madeleine admitted, “I’m going to miss it so much. I’ll miss the place where we were just al’amirkiu, and ma’am. Do you know, I don’t think I’ve seen a single camera since we arrived, except for the tourists at the ruins.”

  “We’ll come back,” he promised. “Next winter, if you like. Or we could go somewhere new entirely, another place they don’t know us at all. How about Japan?”

  She considered it. “Margaret raves about Nagasaki. I believe she mentioned wanting to retire there.”

  “There you have it. It’s settled. A few seasons spent at home, a season or so abroad. You and me and little Paris. Or Arthur. Or Joseph. Or Hubert.”

  “Not Hubert!”

  He laughed. “Not Hubert. We’ll mull it over. There’s time.”

  “John Jacob,” she said.

  “How many of us do there need to be? Let’s give him a name of his own. Something new.”

  “John Jacob the Fifth would be new.”

  “I’m afraid not. That one’s already taken. A distant cousin in England.”

  “The Sixth, then,” she said, stubborn.

  His arm tightened around her, his body warm and close. “Hubert, Grover, Shoeblack. Snarksblood, Muleview, Faradiddle, Muddington—heigh-ho! ‘Muddington Astor’! That has a solid ring to it, don’t you think? No? Well then, how about Pinky, Pokey, Jokey, Mopey—”

  She was laughing too hard to say anything so she pushed up to her elbow instead, leaning over him, stopping his nonsense with a kiss.

  CHAPTER 21

  The press discovered us again in Rome. Jack had telegraphed both Vincent and Dobbyn the details of our itinerary, and I must suppose that is how the newsmen found us. (I had dashed off a letter to your Aunt Katherine with the same, but she would have never spoken to the press about it.) In any case, one way or another, the information got out, and the next thing we knew, it was published in the papers. We spent Easter hiding in our hotel, which was actually enchanting, watching the sunrise pinken the baroque warren of Piazza Navona from our private roof terrace, cappuccinos in hand. But, eventually, we had no choice but to emerge from our nest to move on to Cherbourg, our departure point in France.

  I took comfort in the thought that at least while on the steamship, we would blend in with the rest of the first-class crowd. It seemed exceedingly unlikely there would be a journalist waiting to waylay us on board.

  Cherbourg was, naturally, overcast. I couldn’t help but think it appropriate, given my mood and the immediate future I was sure awaited me. The journey from Paris on the Train Transatlantique had taken no less than six hours. Six hours of smudgy black cinders and chugging motion and nauseatingly uneven scenery flashing by, so weirdly paced I could not gaze out at it for more than a few minutes at a time. Even the train’s compartments were small, I thought. Too small to make room for my uncertain stomach, the headache gathering in a knot behind my eyes. By the time we arrived at the quayside terminus, I was in a state well beyond misery.

  And then, worse and worse, the ship wasn’t even there yet. Our liner had been delayed, we were told, back in Southampton—her first port of call—where she had nearly crashed into another ship ripped loose from her moorings just by the unearthly power of Titanic’s displacement and wake.

  So we waited. A manager from White Star’s Paris office circulated among us inside the station, offering apologies and reassurances, and the unlucky man, I felt sorry for him. I did. He wasn’t to blame for any of it, but you would think he’d arranged the holdup himself, the way some of our fellow passengers abused him.

  The only bright spot was that we ran into Margaret Brown again, also waiting to board. She had received a telegram that her grandson in Denver was gravely ill, and so she had left Helen in Paris to rush back home. Titanic was the first available ship headed for New York, and as there were seve
ral first-class cabins still open, Margaret had had no problem securing a berth.

  It was a relief to see her again, I confess.

  In retrospect, of course, I would not have wished that voyage upon anyone, especially a friend.

  Wednesday, April 10, 1912

  Cherbourg, France

  The waiting room of the train station was plainly too small for the number of people anticipating the arrival of Titanic. Madeleine estimated there was well over a hundred and fifty of them, and that was just the first- and second-class passengers. There were even more people on the crowded platform outside, mostly booked in steerage, she would guess: men in flowing robes that reminded her of the galabeyas of Egypt; women with exotically bright shawls wrapped over their shoulders and around their heads, standing and sitting in clusters, calling out to their children in languages she had never heard before. When the wind blew in past the quay, the many shawls would lift and flutter, and she was reminded of clouds of butterflies, dancing against the gloom.

  Porters pushing oversized trolleys loaded with suitcases and trunks wound through the multitudes, answering question after question and somehow keeping their composure amid all the jabbering confusion.

  Mr. Martin, the White Star man, had already shepherded the Astor group, Margaret, and an older, ermine-clad matron (nervously pale, constantly blinking) through the concourse to a row of benches placed against a wall, somewhat removed from the maelstrom of people.

  “I simply do not know . . .” the matron would mutter, again and again. As she never seemed capable of finishing her sentence, Madeleine had no idea what she did not know. She seemed to be an acquaintance of Margaret’s—who kept absently patting the back of her hand, as if in comfort—but Margaret, in her preoccupation, had failed to introduce them.