“Go!” said her mother, worrying her hands.
“I’m wearing a nightgown,” Vida protested. All of her wanted to go, wanted to chase after he who had left her the knife. But she was afraid; she was afraid of what that would mean.
“Well,” said her mother. “Put a fur over it.”
Vida did as she was told. She ran into the hall. “Wait!” she called.
The servant turned at the sound of her voice. “Yes?”
“Who brought this?”
“A young man who works for the Farrar Line.”
“When?”
“Just now, mademoiselle.”
“Take me to him now. It is of the utmost importance.”
The fur coat did mostly obscure the peach frills of her nightgown, and she tried to look dignified as they rushed down the stairs. On the second-floor landing she caught a glimpse of herself—her hair waved, sun-bleached, curling at the chin, the frilly peach skirt of nightgown swishing over the little poufs at the toes of her house slippers, her face tawny as a desert cat. She did consider returning to her dressing room then, summoning Nora, putting on the uniform of smoothed dress and painted face before she did anything rash. But she was moved down the next flight, through the ornate lobby, by a shivery dread that if she did not catch Sal before he left, her whole life would veer in a terrible direction.
“There he is,” the bellboy said.
She thanked him and rushed on through the hotel lobby.
“Sal!” she cried to the tall figure about to disappear through the double doors and onto the street. She hadn’t meant to be so loud and desperate-sounding. The doormen were implacable, but other guests, loiterers, diners dressed for the grand tea room, glanced her way, and Vida wondered for a moment if she had made a mistake, if she wasn’t drawing attention to herself, dressed as she was and rather out of control, if the man about to disappear onto the street wasn’t even the one that she had been looking for. It was entirely possible that at this moment (and in every moment that came before) she was wrong about everything.
But then he turned.
It was him.
His hair was tucked up under his brimmed hat, and the light of the chandelier in the lobby reflected in his dark eyes, and his lips bent upward at the corners when he saw Vida and offered her his hand.
“Why did you give me that?” she asked, trying not to show quite so nakedly how happy it made her to see Sal again.
“Oh.” The lopsided smile disappeared. “Have I offended you?”
She thrust the box forward. She didn’t know what else to do. Emotion gusted through her, pushing her this way and that. And there he stood, infuriatingly, gorgeously placid. He was the same Sal: calm, amused, posing riddles, so that she stood exposed in all her wild feeling. “Did you give me this?” she demanded.
“Of course—didn’t you see my note?”
Her cheeks were flushed. “No,” she admitted.
“I just thought you should have it—you were so brave on the island. We didn’t talk like this then. But it could have been different. Worse. You showed everyone how to adapt to the place—I think that made the difference. I didn’t think you could, but you proved me wrong. You have my—my—” For the first time, Vida saw Sal a little tongue-tied, and it made her heart drop. “You have my admiration,” he concluded, finally, with effort. “I’m sorry I said you weren’t who I thought you are. Now I know who you are, it’s impossible for me to be around you and not allowed to talk to you all the time. That’s what the note said. That—and some other things I thought you should know.”
“Oh.” Vida felt very childish, and drew the box back inside her coat. She itched to open it again, to read the note that Sal had written her. Then she thought of something else. “Are they staring?”
They stood facing each other only a few feet apart. Sal was wearing a navy cloth coat and simple hat, and his eyes were intent upon her. Then they lifted, surveyed all that was behind her in the lobby, and found her eyes again. “Yes.”
“I shouldn’t have been so loud. I’m sorry.”
“That’s all right.”
“We should go.”
“Where? I’d ask you to go for a walk, but your shoes . . .”
Vida put her hand on the elbow of the doorman who had been studiously pretending that he couldn’t hear a word. “Would you get us a cab?”
“That’s the sort of thing people talk about,” Sal said.
“I didn’t think you cared about such niceties,” she answered, and in that meaningless phrase she knew she made her wishes plain.
A minute later they were situated in the back of a hansom jerking its way through traffic in the direction of Central Park.
Vida removed the box from her coat and put it on her lap. “Why did you give me this?”
“I just told you—”
“Now—why did you give it to me now?”
“Because I’m leaving.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, you can’t leave.”
“A few months ago,” Sal said, “you didn’t know I existed.”
Vida swallowed hard. Her mouth was dry. She wanted to tell him how glad she was to know now. But instead her voice was cold, glib. “I didn’t mean you should stay for me, of course. Fitz needs you.”
Sal looked away from her. Outside the business of the world went on—men in suits, women in hats, trucks, deliveries, newspapers, their headlines shouted by children on corners. “He employed me as his assistant when he went on explorations, that’s all,” Sal replied. He sighed, released some bitterness into the winter air. “And there aren’t going to be any more of those.”
“He told you, too?”
Sal nodded and kept his attention fixed on the white drifts and dark buildings outside the little window of the cab.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. It couldn’t have gone on forever.”
“But you’re sad, I can see it.”
Sal shook his head at the passing scene, the droves of people in furs and dark hats, on sleds, on horseback. Then he turned back. Vida felt overwhelmed with gladness to see his curious, off-kilter smile. “Not because of that.”
They had entered the park, and were jostled along its path by a pair of horses dressed in their own flannel coats. “I was thinking of you last night,” she said. “I was remembering how when we came out of the ocean I could still feel the movement of the waves.”
“Yes,” Sal said. “I remember that too.”
They sat in a comfortable silence as the carriage moved through the very manicured nature of the big park at the center of Manhattan. The trees were painted white by an early winter snowfall. Eventually the driver reversed course, and she knew they were heading back to the hotel, and Vida felt a strange grasping within, as though something very precious had disintegrated, become sand, and was slipping through the narrow of an hourglass; that if she didn’t think of something very clever soon she would lose it without ever knowing what it was.
“Here we are,” Sal said.
“You should take the cab back wherever you’re going, and tell them to charge it to our suite.”
“All right.”
“All right then.”
“It was nice knowing you.”
“Yes.” She could think of nothing suitable to the moment that was building inside her and taking on frightening force. “It was.”
Sal was looking at her in his bemused way, and she suddenly felt very foolish.
“I’m sorry, I’m being very stupid. You’re laughing at me. You don’t know why I’m still here.”
“No, I just want to remember you like this. In the morning, with no makeup, and your hair not brushed at all. Like you were there.”
Vida’s mouth formed around a response that she could not summon. She was thinking of that afternoon on the beach, of the moment just before the moment when she saw the little ship in the distance. Sal had said something to her. He had just said something that was really important. It
had been lost in the excitement of what happened next, but she hadn’t forgotten it. It was here now in her thoughts. He’d said that she was strong, and that if she didn’t know what she wanted, then it was because she hadn’t tried to know.
She asked herself—she asked, What do I want?
And then quite unexpectedly her fingers fluttered up, brushed his lips, his jaw, gently pinched his earlobe. The space between them shrank. A sharp winter breath filled her chest and her mouth found his mouth. For a moment he did not respond—yet she knew she had not made a mistake. Then he returned the pressure of her kiss, and she knew what it was to want and be wanted in equal measure.
The carriage was rocking to the gait of the horses and the uneven pavement of the city as they kissed. They kissed again, and his hand found her hair, and his nose brushed her nose. He sighed, his whole body seemed to sigh, and she felt the sigh move through her, too.
Then she heard the driver’s hand on the door handle and she drew back as quickly as she could.
“Mademoiselle,” said the driver.
Panic froze Vida’s features. “When will I see you?” she asked. Already the driver was supporting her, was very nearly lifting her and placing her down on the street.
“Now you understand why I have to leave. I’ve already booked passage, for Friday night.”
“That’s the day after tomorrow.”
“Yes.”
She was trying to think of something sensible to say but her brain was uncooperative. “The night of the party.”
“Yes.”
“But,” she said stupidly, desperately, “you must go to the party.”
“I’ll come, then, to say goodbye.”
She could feel the eyes of the driver on her, and beyond him, the eyes of all the windows of all ten stories of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Her clothes were loose but the rest of her life was constricting, was holding her tight, limiting her movements. “Well, in that case, I will look forward to seeing you there,” she said in as impersonal a voice as she could manage, and curtsied as best she could, before retreating, under the golden awning, where she watched the carriage draw away from the hotel, its wheels finding the darkened grooves in the snow before disappearing into the uptown traffic.
Twenty-Nine
Celebration to be held for the next Mrs. Farrar
by Dame Edna Sackville
This evening, at the house of Winthrop Farrar, the shipping magnate, and his wife, the former Isabella Carlton, a period of mourning for their elder son will end, and a period of celebration will begin. A party shall be held to formally announce the engagement of Fitzhugh, the younger son and now sole heir of the family concern, to Vidalia Hazzard, the daughter of a prominent San Francisco family and one of the survivors of a trial on a desert island which was covered in a thrilling, much celebrated four-part serial by this column. The fast set are all competing with one another to look their best. Not invited? Don’t fret, I am—the bride-to-be is a particular friend of mine, and you can read all the details tomorrow in these pages.
Days of frantic and competing newspaper accounts had whipped up a frenzied public interest in the engagement party being thrown at the Farrar Palazzo on Fifth Avenue, with the unhappy result that deliveries had to be made through a difficult-to-part crowd, and many ill-starred oranges had rolled from crates carried aloft, been ground by sundry boot heels into two-days’-old snow. At dusk, a police detail arrived to clear a path for the guests to be carried over the slush at the gutters and to the mauve carpet that had been laid over the limestone steps to protect the elegant footwear of the members of New York’s oldest and best families—eminent ladies and gentlemen who were also, in their own understated way, manic with curiosity about the event.
Vida drifted toward it, pulled on by the tide. Her mind thought only of Sal, of his breath and the words he had written to her and the way she felt when she was with him. But she could not figure out what do about that. There was no answer. So she allowed herself to be feted, to be dressed, to called upon and talked about.
Although the Farrars had sent one of their own carriages to fetch young Vida from the Waldorf-Astoria, she had observed from the hotel’s second-story drawing room how the curious crowd had noted the intricate F and L design painted on its shiny side. How they mobbed the carriage and would not yield their place! She was shocked, and a little frightened, by how determined these strangers were for a sighting of the young woman from a faraway land who they had been following in the columns, and who had already gone through all the trials necessary to be transformed into an American princess. Vida, a little afraid of them and what they wanted from her, had asked the concierge to take her out the back way and put her in a plain hansom.
Now, waiting in line with the other carriages to arrive at the lowest step of that mauve carpet, Vida peered out. She knew she would not disappoint the crowd. She was wearing a Doucet gown of sky blue chiffon that was embellished all over with tiny specks of coral, and a delicate little white gold tiara nestled in her hair, and an enormous ermine. She had rouged her cheeks and darkened her lashes and brightened her eyes with little drops.
Every minute detail of her appearance met the requirements of fairy tales. She could win their love, she knew; but this masterful social coup, which she would once have delighted in, felt overwhelming now, like a rich dessert after a ten-course supper.
“You’re not yourself,” Nora observed from the seat across.
“No.”
“Well, you look yourself.”
Vida’s eyes darted from the scene outside the carriage to Nora. “Not too suntanned?”
“Just the right amount to remind everyone of your exciting journey to this moment.”
When the door of the cab was pulled back by a Farrar footman and the crowd saw who it was, they roared. The chanting of Vida’s name startled a flock of birds perched on a nearby tree, and their dark silhouettes filled the violet sky. She was lifted by a footman, ferried in his arms over the slush and up the first few steps.
Upright and on her own two feet again, she felt the full brunt of the crowd’s adulation. She saw the beaming faces of children and young women gazing at her, illuminated with the hope that she who had everything would bestow a little good luck on them. To her their energy seemed a slow, gentle wave, and she was sorry for her hesitating. The sweet bath washed over her, and she lifted her hands, wanting to offer something back in return. They were still calling her name, cheering for her, when another footman appeared on the top step. The Farrar machinery kept on, too fast for her to resist, and as though she were another piece of luggage being moved along, she was borne through the grand doorway and into another realm.
The foyer was paneled in dark mahogany and dense with the smell of hundreds of white mums in ormolu vases. After the grand steps of the Farrar mansion, this place had an odd hush, although she could hear the murmurs and music of a party already underway in the next rooms. Her coat was removed from her shoulders. She glanced back for Nora, but Nora was already being led down an unobtrusive little staircase to wherever the servants waited for their masters to be in need of them, and Vida herself was proceeding along a Persian runner, between the liveried sentries who stood stoically waiting for her to pass as she moved onward to the brilliant center of things.
And somewhere, in all of this, was Sal. He had promised her. She would see him, and then she would finally know what she should do.
The Farrar ballroom was speckled with chandelier light and packed with black frock coats and swirling gowns and the flash of eyes wanting to know who else had arrived, and whether or not their appearance was especially eye-catching or just your average, everyday sort of decadence. Vida knew precisely what they were thinking, for she had thought in much the same way for many years of her life. She wanted to survey a room of fine people dressed their absolute best, and feel her place atop the invisible hierarchy of coveted invitations and elegant possessions and incomparable taste. And for a moment her old self felt g
ratified by this confirmation of her ability to win the attention of anyone, anywhere that she pleased. That ripple of triumph to have all eyes on her and know how far she had risen.
The crowd parted for her, and she saw Fitzhugh, the shine of his hair catching the light, and the blue of his eyes a perfect match for her dress. Instinct propelled her. She smiled with a closed mouth and floated toward him. When she arrived at his side, his elbow hooked hers, and they began a slow rotation through the room. The moment with Adele Jones at the Vanderbilts’ really was an aberration—she felt nothing but a warm, envious awe from the crowd now.
“Mother is thrilled that the press will be moving on from the sinking of the Princess,” Fitzhugh said as, arm in arm, they moved from one grouping of old family friends to another.
“How could they not?” Vida replied with winning confidence. At just that moment she saw her future mother-in-law through the crowd, wearing spangled purple. She was in conversation with the Duke of Lemmon, and when she felt Vida’s gaze, she tilted her head and met it with her own. For a moment the two women regarded each other across a sea of tulle. Then the elder lowered her lashes, and returned to Vida the same exact closed-mouth smile that Vida had just been bestowing on all the world.
A sense of clarity settled around Vida’s temples. She knew she had the woman’s respect now; that the grand Mrs. Winthrop Farrar would not turn away from Vida in subtle dismissal again. Unlike Vida’s own parents, Mr. and Mr. Farrar read all the papers, and they surely knew that the discussions of the Farrar Line’s stock price in the wake of the sinking of their newest ship on its maiden voyage were bad for business, and that having the Farrar name on the front page for another reason would be to all of their advantages. This revelation did not wound Vida. In fact it was the sort of coup that she had always delighted in. She wasn’t worried about having Fitzhugh’s true affection—if she didn’t have it now, she would in time, as she always eventually won everybody over. Great hostesses had gotten their entrée into society in worse ways.
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