Rumors

by Anna Godbersen

  Elizabeth’s cheeks had risen in one of those radiant smiles that used to be wasted on brocade, or the gift bags at balls, or salmon mousse. She was surprised to find it was not for this mineral wealth, however—all that still seemed like some far-off fantasy. It was for Will as he would be. There would be successes, whether they began with the oil field or not, and after that he would become one of those men they wrote about in the adventure magazines—about his mythic youth and his great business acumen and all the intelligent choices he had made along the way. He would be shrewd and hard with people who needed it, but he would be fair and looked up to. He would be the head of a family, and he would help those people who were deserving and in need.

  The softness would go out of his face, but the crooked nose would remain the same. They would grow older and see the world change together. They looked at each other for another long moment, and then she moved in, pressing her body against his body, feeling his heart beating in his chest.

  Seven

  I have heard from several sources that Mr. Henry Schoonmaker will make his first social appearance since the death of his fiancée, Miss Elizabeth Holland, at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s winter season tonight. Though the proper mourning time has been observed, some suggest that he may be stepping out a little too soon….

  —FROM THE “GAMESOME GALLANT” COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK IMPERIAL, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1899

  “YOU DON’T JUST THROW A PERSON THROUGH A crack in the ice,” said Mrs. Edward Holland, who was born Louisa Gansevoort and still retained some of the inimitable social presence that the joining of those two surnames implied. She was garbed in black mourning clothes twice over, first for her husband and again for her elder child, and she sat in the corner of Diana’s gaslit bedroom with darting and watchful obsidian eyes. There was something physically reduced about her, however—a shadow had been cast over her former imperiousness. She was ill, Diana knew in certain moments, although in others she told herself it was no more than a mood that would be dispelled just as soon as Diana agreed to be married.

  “Threw is rather an exaggeration,” Diana answered blithely. She was seated at the vanity, her attention fixed on the dark ringlets that edged her heart-shaped face and its wild-rose complexion. Her lady’s maid, Claire, who had been helping her get dressed, stood at her shoulder. Diana was not going to great lengths to seem interested in her mother’s concerns. “I can’t be held responsible for the clumsiness of a Percival Coddington,” she added, turning just slightly to meet the gaze of her aunt Edith, lounging on the bed with its pale pink headboard in an ivory shirtwast and skirt.

  “It’s a miracle it didn’t make the papers,” her mother went on sharply. “Or that he wasn’t too severely injured. But there are plenty of eyes in this city, Diana, and plenty of mouths. They will be saying soon enough that you don’t know how to behave. Once a reputation has been too often confirmed, society cannot forget it.” Her eyes took on a faraway look, and she paused to sink deeper into the wing chair with the worn gold upholstery. It was the chair that Diana curled into when she stayed up reading novels of heroines beset by wickedly handsome men, and it was until recently the place of her most dramatic flights of fancy. But no longer. Recurrent memories of Henry Schoonmaker were the most exciting thing to happen in her conscious mind these days.

  She smiled faintly at her reflection. Then, checking herself, she met Claire’s eyes in the mirror, and gave her a little look in anticipation of Mrs. Holland’s next argument.

  “When I was a girl,” it began, “they used to tell us that a woman’s name should appear in the papers three times: on the occasions of her birth, her marriage, and her death.”

  “Well,” said Edith, pushing her head back into the arm that was folded as a pillow behind her head, “our generation did away with that old adage.”

  Diana’s name had already appeared in the columns several times—more often for something that brought embarrassment to her mother than not—but this did not stop an imaginary photograph of Henry and her descending the church steps from popping into her head under the banner headline YOUNGER HOLLAND SISTER WEDS SCHOONMAKER.

  Claire moved forward and finished Diana’s hair with a honeydew-colored ribbon that matched the honeydew dress she wore. The dress whittled her waist and revealed her clavicles and was decorated at the shoulders with little poofs of honeydew-dyed feathers. It was from Paris, and had been purchased by her sister during the previous summer season, which she had spent abroad. There had been a macabre element to the remaking of the departed sister’s dress, and no one had liked it. But there was no money for a new one, as her mother mechanically reminded her both by implication and outright, and in the end the tailoring had been ordered.

  “If your name should appear in the papers after tonight,” Mrs. Holland returned, ignoring her sister-in-law’s comment, “let it not be because you have managed to half-kill Spencer Newburg.”

  Diana stood at this and turned to her mother, her face imbued with the curious light of two divergent emotions. She would have liked to tell the petite matriarch that if she was not so ham-fistedly trying to marry her daughter off, then she wouldn’t have to worry so for the safety of these gentlemen. This seemed irritatingly obvious enough to Diana. But the mention of Spencer Newburg’s name was like music. Not because of any innate characteristics possessed by Mr. Newburg, who was a widower of twenty-seven, and whose face, always long, had grown ever longer since the loss of young Mrs. Newburg to rheumatic fever. Still, the sound of his name had been sweet to Diana since that morning when she’d read the papers and realized that her evening of listening to opera with him would afford her the first chance to see Henry in weeks. Her heart thrilled at the thought that she might be under the same roof as him that night, that their eyes might meet, that perhaps their hands might even touch. Spencer Newburg’s bit part in all this afforded him a special grace.

  Her mother rose from her chair now too. Stern veins stood out along her neck, and the bones of her face pressed against the skin.

  “Anyway, Mrs. Gore is my host, and I’m not even sure I will meet Mr. Newburg,” Diana said, somewhat disingenuously. For though Mr. Newburg’s elder sister had been the one to officially invite her to sit in their family box, she had made clear on the two occasions she had visited the Hollands that it was for her brother’s sake that Diana should come. Moreover, it was well known that Grover Gore’s wife had made it her mission for the season to find her brother a good match who might mend his broken heart. Mrs. Holland—it was not lost on her younger child—had been allied with the Gores for several decades. “But if I do, I will handle him delicately.”

  The length of Mrs. Holland’s neck seemed to grow and her chin gestured toward the white plaster filigree of the ceiling. Diana watched her, waiting for some sort of rebuke, but the tension in her mother’s face disappeared then, and her whole body seemed to slacken. It was as though she were going to faint. “I think I’ll be going to bed,” she said abruptly. “Be good, Diana.”

  She left a pall in the room even after the door had shut behind her. Diana blinked and then turned to her aunt. “Look, I frighten even my mother.”

  “You look beautiful, Di,” Edith answered from the bed with a sympathetic little wink. The late Mr. Holland’s younger sister shared several facial features with her nieces, and had been known for being rather passionate in her youth. She had made a bad marriage to a titled Spaniard, which had ended in divorce, and she was now known by her maiden name. She had always liked sitting in while Diana played dress-up. “And I don’t think you have to worry about Mr. Newburg being the only one who notices,” she added with a purposeful inflection that made Diana wonder briefly how much her aunt intuited about her desires.

  Diana leaned back into the mirror to check her reflection a final time, and found that she agreed that she wouldn’t have to count on Mr. Newburg alone for attention. Her eyes were hazy and dark, her mouth tiny and plump. The only anxiety she felt was that so
me of the loveliness might fade before she found Henry. She was in a fine mood again, and she maintained it by reminding herself that once her mother understood that Henry loved her and that she loved Henry, then all this anxious nonsense about a swift match would finally cease.

  They arrived late to the Metropolitan Opera at Broadway and Fortieth, as was the prevailing custom of their class. The street was still crowded with carriages when Diana and Mrs. Gore alighted on the pavement and joined the other women in their brocade wraps making their way to the ladies’ entrance on the side. They missed the masked ball scene entirely but took their seats—happily enough for Diana—just as the baritone began “Mab, la Reine des Mensonges.” Her father, who cared deeply about such things in life, had considered Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette not to his taste, but Diana liked any and all varieties of stirring music, particularly when it touched on lovers cruelly divided by circumstance.

  Diana’s gaze swept across the auditorium—the rows of seats below, the tiers of less-coveted boxes above, all filled with rich fabrics and bright jewels and flushed faces partially obscured by fans. She sat down beside Mrs. Gore, who wore a dress of blue velvet, which she filled out in a way that no one could have imagined when she was still lithe Lily Newburg. Her younger brother had said little on the way over, and did not now travel farther than the inner room of his family’s box, where he rested on the couch and smoked moodily.

  His young guest did not pay him any mind. She could barely contain herself from leaning against the polished brass rail to look down on the stage below. The music was surging and lively; she had always liked the sad mystery of those words in Shakespeare, and she loved them now in opera, too. For a moment, with the rise and fall of the orchestra, the prospect of seeing Henry almost slipped from her mind. But only almost.

  “I’d heard that Henry Schoonmaker was going to be out tonight,” her hostess said, lowering her diamond lorgnon from her eyes. “But I don’t see him in the Schoonmaker box.”

  Diana felt the urge to lift her own glasses so she might investigate the view herself, but managed to replace the desire with a demure “Oh?”

  “Pity your sister wasn’t able to marry him. He is a very charming, very marriageable young man,” Mrs. Gore clucked, unaware of the wounding potential of this comment, so consumed was she by the wasted currency of a handsome groom without a bride. Then she brought the lorgnon back up to her nose and began to survey the other boxes, in which sat all the New Yorkers of their kind, spying on one another and looming over the stalls below, where a very different sort of people went to enjoy music.

  “You know,” Mrs. Gore went on with the same tactlessness, “I heard a rumor that your sister hadn’t died at all, that there certainly would have been a body, and that none of the rest of the story adds up, and that she’s perhaps forgotten her identity or been taken up by a band of thieves…. I don’t suppose there’s any truth to it as far as your family knows?”

  Diana shook her head faintly and resolved not to look in the direction of the Schoonmaker box for at least another ten minutes. She was trying to appear a little scandalized, in the hope that this would prevent any future speculations on the part of Mrs. Gore about Elizabeth not being dead. She kept her eyes focused on the stage, where Juliette had now entered with dark curls cascading down her back. The chandelier glittered from the center of the room, illuminating the many diamond tiaras and chokers in the boxes, complementing the sumptuous silks of the dresses and the pale skin of their wearers. Diana felt the glow upon her skin too, and longed to be looked at. And so, after the passing of a lonely minute, she found herself turning to her left to see that, in fact, the Schoonmaker box showcased only Mrs. Schoonmaker—resplendent in petal pink—and the dowdy visage of Henry’s younger sister, Prudence. There was nothing to suggest movement in the crimson penumbra behind them.

  Diana looked away and tried not to feel disappointed. Her eyes were then drawn from the diva onstage, whose ample white bosom rose and fell with a passion that Diana felt sure she alone in the audience could comprehend, to the lithe form of Penelope Hayes a few boxes to their right.

  The lids of her enormous blue eyes were lowered in ennui, and her head was tilted just slightly to the side. She wore a black aigrette in her hair and a dress of black jet that was trimmed with black ribbon at the décolletage. Her long white arms were folded at her lap in a prim way, which must have been part of the saintliness the gossip columns had recently made such point of. Nonetheless, Diana was reminded—as she always was when she saw Penelope—of how Henry had described her on the evening when they’d talked all night. Savage was the word he’d used. Her sister, too, had warned her to watch out for Penelope. But what she felt at that moment was not distrust, but vulnerability.

  For she could not help but think that Penelope, sitting in the Hayes family box in the new black dress made especially for her, and her hair set high and back without a silly curlicue anywhere in sight, had known Henry much more than she had. Not better, perhaps, but for longer, and more physically. Down on the stage Roméo had espied Juliette; the tenor was singing of his instantaneous enchantment. Diana’s eyes drifted to the stage for only a moment, but when they returned to Penelope, an entirely different look had come over her face. The boredom was gone, and there was a confidence and purposefulness in every aspect of her pose. Just then a barely audible murmuring rose amongst the people in the boxes. The collective gaze had shifted to Diana’s left; she looked too, and that was when she saw him.

  Henry was taking the seat directly behind his sister. His father moved, at a heavier and slower gait, to the seat beside him, a lumbering performance that was given little notice by the son.

  “He does still look sad, I’ll give him that,” said Mrs. Gore, who had somehow restrained herself from using her glasses for a more privileged view. “But it does nothing to obscure his handsomeness, I’m sure you’d agree, even if he was nearly your brother.”

  Diana could not find the breath to answer. Nor was she particularly cognizant of the movement in the back of the Newburgs’ box, where Webster Youngham, favored architect of New York’s nouveau riche, had appeared, diverting, for a moment at least, the attentions of Mrs. Gore.

  “May I present Miss Holland,” Diana heard her hostess say. This meant that she must, reluctantly, look away from Henry, whose stiff white collar contrasted against his gold-touched skin. “The younger daughter of Mrs. Edward Holland.”

  “Miss Holland,” Mr. Youngham said, kissing her hand. “My condolences for your sister. What a surprise to see you out and about. But I will have to send my compliments to your mother—you are just as lovely as I have always heard.”

  Diana smiled and lowered her eyes. Back in September she had kissed his assistant in the coatroom during a ball at the new Hayes mansion—a fact she was pretty sure he was unaware of, given his consumption of wine that evening. Of course, that had been before her whole world changed. She peeked in the direction of the Hayeses’ box, and found to her dismay that Penelope was gazing across the opera house with the same imperturbable erectness as before.

  The murmuring in the boxes had either died down or been buried by the music, which was now loud again. Diana turned, nodding to their visitor as she did. “You must excuse me for a moment—the music is a little much for me,” she lied.

  As she moved away from her seat, she looked back once, and saw that Henry’s face was turned in her direction. She went faster now, up into the inner box—where Mr. Newburg’s eyes fluttered open long enough to give her a reproachful look—and then up into the curving corridor. It was dark, illuminated occasionally by dim wall sconces, and she passed only one or two men making their little visits to their friends’ boxes. The corridor brought her around quickly to Box 23, which she knew from the program was the one occupied by the Schoonmakers that season. She paused there to smooth herself over, but already the crimson curtain was being drawn back from the other side.

  The shadows fell across his fine, sculptured f
eatures, and she could scarcely see his eyes or what was in them. Her chest was as loud as a steam train in her ears. In her imaginings she and Henry had been as intimate as two people had ever been, and so she whispered the line that she had practiced for the last two months:

  “I was wondering, Mr. Schoonmaker, when I might again have the pleasure of visiting your greenhouse.” Her voice was as faint and delicate as she had ever heard it; the word greenhouse was lush in her pronunciation. It had been a word with magical connotations for her ever since she had spent the night in his.

  “Di…” Henry began at last. She took a little step forward and smiled just slightly in hope that he might return the gesture, might confirm how fully her memory had obsessed him. But her footing was off. “Miss Diana.” His voice grew quieter with every word. She noticed that his standing collar was so high that he could not comfortably hang his head. “You know that cannot be.”

  Suddenly the floorboards below her, the gallery underneath, the subterranean caves holding props and rats and who knew what else—none of it was steady. A heat had come into Diana’s cheeks, and she thought of the blue-eyed sureness with which Penelope had looked across the house. “I don’t understand,” she whispered.

  “Perhaps you thought we might—” Henry broke off again, and shook his head as though he were shaking away a fly. There was coldness in his voice when he spoke again: “But you can’t think that anymore. No matter what pretty things I said to you, you must know now that they can never come to…fruition.”