The Wedding Dress

by Danielle Steel

  When the box with the dress in it arrived at the Ritz, it was three times the size of any of their trunks, and had a wooden crate around it that had been made especially to protect it. Now they could go home to Alex, and Eleanor’s father. They had been gone for five weeks by then, and they still had to get to California by train, after they docked in New York. Eleanor could hardly wait until October. It was going to be the happiest day of her life, in the most beautiful dress in the world.

  “Ready to go home?” Louise asked her after two men carried the crate to their suite on the ship. Eleanor smiled as she nodded. Ready indeed, and Alex would be waiting for her, which was the best part of going home.

  Chapter 3

  The trip back to New York on the luxurious SS Paris was uneventful. Every time Eleanor walked into her cabin and saw the huge crate from Lanvin there, it gave her a thrill, knowing what was in it. For the moment, it was the symbol of her future with Alex. She could hardly wait to wear the dress. It made her debut dress by Worth seem plain by comparison. Her wedding dress was going to look absolutely regal, and innocent and feminine at the same time. Jeanne Lanvin was a genius with immense talent, and had been the perfect choice for Eleanor’s wedding dress.

  Eleanor had told Wilson all about it, and she couldn’t wait to see it. She had spent a week with her family in Ireland, and was grateful that Louise had let her go. She had her own cabin in second class on the ship, which was a nicer accommodation than most lady’s maids were given by their employers.

  They only spent two days in New York, and stayed at the Sherry-Netherland as they had on the way to Paris. It was a beautiful new hotel that had opened two years before. It was late May. The weather was warm and balmy, and Eleanor and her mother couldn’t wait to get home. They boarded the train to Chicago in a first-class compartment, with a second one for Wilson, and all their trunks and the crate from Lanvin. They changed trains in Chicago, and Eleanor could hardly sleep on the last leg of the trip. All she could think about was Alex, and the months ahead. She wanted time to speed up now until their wedding. Five months seemed like an eternity to wait for the big day when she would become his wife. It was hard to imagine how much she had come to love him since they met at her debut five months before.

  As the train pulled into the station in San Francisco with Eleanor and Louise looking out the window of their compartment, Eleanor in one of her Schiaparelli sweaters and a new red hat she’d bought from a talented milliner on the rue du Bac on the Left Bank, they saw them waiting on the platform. Alex and his future father-in-law stood side by side, Alex with an armful of red roses, and both of them smiling broadly. Eleanor dropped the window and waved, and the men saw them. Charles beamed happily at the sight of his wife, and Alex looked as though he might explode with joy. The serious, slightly somber young man he had been for nearly a decade had disappeared, and he was wreathed in smiles. Eleanor rushed down the steps as soon as the conductor opened the door of their carriage, and flew into Alex’s arms. He dropped the roses on the platform and held her tight and kissed her, as Louise and Charles hugged a little more circumspectly but were obviously pleased to see each other. There were porters waiting to collect their bags and trunks, and Charles instructed them. The car was waiting for them outside, with two additional cars for their luggage and to give Wilson a ride back to the house. He smiled when he saw the enormous crate from Paris emerge from the train.

  “Is that it?” he asked Louise, and she nodded with a smile.

  “You’ve never seen anything so beautiful.” The dress was perfectly simple in its lines, but laden with embroidery and pearls, which had cost a fortune. Both of Eleanor’s parents had no doubt that what Charles had paid was worth it. Madame Lanvin had outdone herself, and Eleanor would do honor to her design.

  They went home to the house on Nob Hill, and both women were happy to be back. Wilson disappeared quickly to go downstairs before going to Louise’s dressing room to unpack her bags. She told the other servants about her week in Ireland to visit her relatives when she got to the servants’ hall and had a cup of tea and some warm biscuits the cook had just taken out of the oven. She had been seasick on the ship, but they envied her anyway for the trips she was able to take with the family, and she had bought herself a stylish new black hat in Paris too. They all asked if she had seen the wedding dress, and she admitted she hadn’t, but had seen the sketches of it and a sample of the lace and it looked beautiful.

  She went upstairs after that with two of the maids to help her unpack Louise’s trunks and then Eleanor’s. The wedding dress was to be left in its special box and put in a guest room, which would be kept locked. Louise and Eleanor were having lunch in the dining room with Alex and Charles, who looked happy to have their women home. They had been gone for a long time. The engaged couple couldn’t keep their eyes off each other, and held hands at every opportunity. Charles went back to his office after lunch, after kissing his wife, and Alex stayed to walk in the garden with Eleanor. They sat on a bench for a few minutes, talking about their honeymoon. Alex was planning to take her to Italy, and they were excited about it. She had never been there, only to France with her mother for her debut dress and her wedding gown, and this would be her first trip with Alex, as his wife. It sounded like a wonderful adventure to both of them.

  “I missed you terribly,” he admitted, with an arm around her as they sat on the bench. “Are you happy with the dress?”

  “Ecstatic. I hope you like it too.”

  “You could get married in a sack, and I would be happy, as long as you’re my wife at the end of it.” He knew the wedding was going to be an enormous production, and had heard wisps of it from Eleanor and Charles. Charles was content to let his wife plan it, and make all the decisions, and he would pay the bills. Planning a wedding was a mother’s job, and Alex was content to be surprised on the day.

  Eleanor told him a little of what she’d done in Paris with her mother, the museums they’d been to, and the chateaux, and she caught up on his news. They had written to each other daily while she was in France, and had sent countless telegrams. She had saved all of it, and was planning to put them in an album as a souvenir of their love for each other during their engagement, to show their children one day. They hoped to have many of them, and had spoken of it shyly a few times. Eleanor had confessed to her mother that she hoped to get pregnant on their honeymoon. They were so in love that they didn’t want to wait, and wanted to start their family immediately and Louise approved. Alex would make an excellent father and she knew he would take good care of Eleanor. She and Charles both felt confident entrusting their precious daughter to him.

  “Your father says you’re leaving for Lake Tahoe in two weeks,” Alex said with a sigh. He had never seen their estate at the lake, and he was looking forward to it. “He very kindly invited me to come and stay with you. I can take a few weeks off in August, since almost everyone does, and the office is quite slow then, but in July I’ll have to go back and forth a bit.”

  “Papa does too,” she reassured him, “and he spends all of August at the lake with us.” They invited other friends too, and often had big house parties over the weekends. People loved visiting them there, in the healthy mountain air. They took long walks, played badminton and tennis and croquet. The men went fishing, and everyone loved going out in the boats, and swimming although the water was very cold. They visited other families at the lake, and it was a good respite from social life in the city, although at times they were just as busy at the lake.

  The main house was almost as big as their mansion in the city, although life there was slightly less formal. They wore black tie for dinner, rather than white tie and tails, and sometimes had as many as twenty house guests on the weekend. There was an outdoor dining room and an indoor one. Charles had encouraged Alex to invite his two younger brothers up as well, which Alex was loath to do, and admitted to his future father-in-law that they were you
ng and sometimes quite badly behaved. They were planning to visit friends in the East that summer, and he knew that his horse-mad brother Phillip was planning to play polo in Mexico. They were a handful, and he didn’t want to inflict them on his in-laws, and he knew that in a respectable older group, both boys would be bored, and he would end up scolding them all weekend for drinking too much or sleeping with the maids. They were too old for him to control now, and not old enough to want to settle down, so he turned a blind eye to their antics, and got them out of trouble when he had to. It was relatively harmless, though tiresome.

  As head of the family by the time he was twenty-six, Alex had grown up at an early age, which Phillip and Harry hadn’t achieved yet, and had no reason to since they didn’t work. Their inheritances supported them lavishly and allowed them to indulge whatever prank they could dream up, which they did frequently, much to their older brother’s dismay. They knew every speakeasy in San Francisco. He loved them but they tested his patience. Eleanor had met each of them once, briefly, before she left, and they thought she was nice, but too circumspect for them. They couldn’t imagine why Alex wanted to get married and thought he should have some fun first. They thought him very dull, although they were fond of him, but had little in common with him, or his interests, particularly now that he was engaged. They were coming to the wedding of course, but Alex doubted that they’d behave. At least in a crowd of eight hundred guests, no one would notice what mischief they got up to, unless they did something truly outrageous, which they were capable of too. They had never been forced to be responsible and Alex often wondered if they ever would be. So far, his occasionally stern lectures fell on deaf ears.

  Alex and Eleanor sat for a little while longer in the garden, basking in the joy of her return. He had to tear himself away and force himself to go back to the office. When he left, Eleanor went upstairs to look over their unpacking. She had bought a lot of pretty new things in Paris, and some summer evening dresses, and bathing suits by Elsa Schiaparelli to wear at the lake. She loved to swim in the icy cold water and then lie in the sun on the dock, or go out in the boats. She had learned to drive them, with one of the boatmen next to her, and she had learned to water-ski the summer before. Alex said he wanted to learn too. A million happy discoveries lay ahead of them. Eleanor could see her life ahead of her now, with Alex, and their children, spending summers in Lake Tahoe with her parents. Her father wanted to redo one of the houses on the property for them, and to have it ready by the following year. They were excited about that too. Her father was going to have an architect draw up some plans for her to look over with Alex. Eleanor wanted at least four bedrooms for all the children they hoped to have.

  * * *

  —

  The move to Lake Tahoe, two weeks after Eleanor and her mother returned from France, looked like the migration of an entire village. Eleanor and Louise took endless trunks, they kept clothes at the lake house but added to them every year with new fashions they couldn’t live without. Charles was happy to indulge them. “You know how women are,” he had said to Alex more than once. Louise and Eleanor went up on the private train before the men did to get organized and settled. They didn’t have guests coming on the first weekend, but had invited many for the rest of July and August. Their dining room was as large at the lake as it was in the city, and they had more than twenty guest rooms, including the guesthouses near the main house.

  Louise met with the gardeners when she arrived, and told them what flowers she wanted every day from their gardens. She brought the cook from the city, with her assistants, and many of the maids. They hired some local girls to help every summer. The boatmen had the boats ready. They kept horses in the stables for their guests to ride. Louise rode, but wasn’t enthusiastic about it. Eleanor enjoyed riding up into the hills with her father. All the fishing gear was at the ready for Charles and their guests. By the time Charles and Alex arrived on the weekend, everything was in order and waiting for them. Louise ran an extremely efficient home.

  The four of them enjoyed a quiet dinner together the night the men arrived on their private train. They had their own small station not far from the house. They went to bed early and Eleanor and Alex went riding the next morning, before her parents were up.

  “This is a wonderful place,” Alex said, looking enthusiastic. There was so much to do. “My parents had a ranch in Santa Barbara where we used to go in the summer. I sold it when they died. My brothers didn’t like it, and it was too much for me on my own. I thought I’d buy something smaller, but I never have.”

  “Well, you don’t need to now.” She smiled at him, comfortable on the horse she rode every summer, a gentle mare. She had given Alex one of her father’s hunters who was a good ride as well. “We have this,” she said peacefully, looking out at the vast expanse of their land, which included a forest, and part of the mountains behind them, as well as a long stretch of lakefront, where they had their boathouse and the dock, and a narrow beach. “I like coming up here. It’s nice to get away from the city. I hope you’ll love it here.”

  “I’ll love any place where I am with you and it will be wonderful for our children one day,” he said, and she blushed. It embarrassed her to discuss things like that with him, but it was her dream too, and she could envision it easily. The property had been in her family for four generations, and would continue to be in the future.

  “I’m sorry,” he said gently, “that was indelicate of me, but I can’t think of anything more wonderful than having children with you.” She nodded, unable to speak for a minute, and he leaned over and gently touched her cheek. “I want you to be happy, Eleanor, and to give you a perfect life.” Her life was already perfect, but he was the added blessing now. She had never expected to love a man as she did him, and they seemed to love each other more every day.

  They rode for an hour, and then took the horses back to the stable and joined her parents for breakfast in the morning room that looked out at the lake.

  “Have you been out in the boats yet?” Charles asked Alex over a hearty breakfast.

  “Not yet. We thought we’d go down to the boathouse after breakfast.” Charles nodded with a smile, knowing the pleasant surprise in store for him. He joined them and walked to the lake with them after breakfast, while Louise went to confer with the cook. They were going to have crayfish from the lake for lunch, and trout. The boatmen fished for them and the cook did wonders with their catches.

  When they reached the boathouse, Alex was stunned by the beautiful speedboats they kept there. They had a sleek Gar Wood racing boat, a Fellows & Stewart “marine sedan.” They got into Charles’s favorite one, Comet, with a Hall-Scott engine, and then sped across the lake, and took a tour for an hour at full speed, before returning to the dock. Eleanor wanted to change into a swimsuit, and lie in the sun, and they were going to water-ski that afternoon.

  The days at the lake passed easily, and Alex and Charles spent considerable time discussing the recession that had begun that summer and concerned them both. The stock market was continuing to rise and both men were afraid that the bubble would burst. Stock prices had reached a high which could no longer be justified. Alex hated to leave on Sunday night to return to the city to work. Eleanor drove him to the station on their property. She didn’t have a license, but their chauffeur had taught her to drive two years before. Alex took her in his arms and kissed her, while the train waited for him. Charles wasn’t going back to the city until Monday night, but Alex felt he should get back sooner.

  “You’re going to make a lazy man of me.” He smiled at his future wife. “It’s too wonderful being with you. Our life is going to be better than I ever dreamed,” he said in a soft voice, and kissed her again. He felt as though he was going to burst with happiness. He was meeting with an architect the next day to make some changes to his own mansion on upper Broadway, where they would live after their honeymoon in Italy. He wanted to redo hi
s mother’s dressing room and modernize the bathroom as a surprise for Eleanor. She was going to be moving from one very large, stupendously beautiful home to another. The house Alex’s grandfather had built was almost as grand as the Deveraux mansion, though slightly more austere, but they had a spectacular view of the bay, which the Deveraux home didn’t have. Alex thought the garden needed redesigning, and he was going to ask Eleanor to do it once she moved in.

  “I hate to leave you,” he whispered, and then with a sigh, “I’ll be back Friday night with your father. It’s going to be a long week without you. I’m afraid I’m not going to let you out of my sight once we’re married, except possibly to come up here in the summer. My life is just too lonely without you.” He could no longer imagine how he had lived without her for thirty-two years. But the timing had been just right, and providential. She wouldn’t have been able to be with him before her debut anyway, so things had worked out as they were meant to. He had been in hibernation, waiting for her to grow up, and hadn’t known it. Amelia had died when Eleanor was ten years old, and he wouldn’t have wanted any other woman. She smiled at the sweet things he said to her, kissed him again before he boarded their train, and waved as they pulled away until the train rounded a bend and was out of sight.

  The next weekend she knew that her parents were having a dozen house guests so they would all be busy playing tennis and croquet, and whatever entertainments her parents devised for their guests. They often played bridge or other card games at night, and sometimes charades, which was a good icebreaker. They were starting with a smaller group than usual for the first weekend of the summer.

  She and Alex thoroughly enjoyed the time they spent at Lake Tahoe that summer. They both became proficient water-skiers, as her parents watched them from the dock and waved as they went by. Charles developed a strong rapport with his future son-in-law, which for Charles filled the void of having lost his own son so many years earlier. And Alex had lost his father. The two men rode and fished together, talked about banking and the world economy, and shared similar views on many subjects. Whenever possible, Alex stole a few moments alone with Eleanor, savoring the excitement of the pleasures in store for them once they were married. It excited him just looking at her and talking to her, and he could hardly wait until she was truly his.