Rumors

by Anna Godbersen

  “I had better be on my way…” she heard Amos say.

  Though his presence had receded in her consciousness, she was deeply sorry to hear this. She felt suddenly the importance of Henry, and everybody else, seeing her receive the attentions of bachelors, especially those with old Dutch names and new industrial money. Her whole campaign to seem like a potential bride was forgotten in the wake of Henry’s snub. Now all she wanted was to seem an object of desire. But Amos was standing. He had taken her hand to kiss it good-bye.

  “Thank you for visiting,” she said, fighting to maintain a quiet frailty. “What a relief to have friends like you at times like these.”

  Amos winked at her, which was not the response she had intended to elicit, and then said a few words to Mrs. Hayes before absenting himself from their box. Penelope tried to lean in the opposite direction of her mother, making the most of the advantageous shadows falling across her pale, soft chest. She directed her face to one corner of the stage so that she could sneak a few looks over at the Schoonmakers.

  She wanted badly to seem elegant and aloof, but there was something like a fever of urgency inside of her that she couldn’t bring down. She put one hand over the other in her lap and then reversed them. It would be forever before Buck could make his way back through the corridor and tell her exactly what had happened. But she could see for herself and she knew plenty already. Henry wasn’t understanding her plan; he was indifferent to her artful maneuvers. She rearranged her hands again and then fidgeted with the gold chain of her opera glasses until her mother told her to stop, which she did.

  “It’s official. There are many fine gowns in the audience this evening, but none as fine as those seen in the Hayeses’ box,” Buck said when he eventually retook his seat. Penelope sensed that he had more compliments at the ready, but she signaled their superfluity with her hand. What did it matter anyway that she was so much lovelier than the other girls when Henry was so blind. The wretched tick of her heart was unbearably loud in her ears, but she could not fidget and she could not frown. She was realizing for the first time in her life what agony it was to experience such unquiet beneath an impeccable veneer.

  Ten

  With the opening of the opera tonight, we can again expect to see many of the city’s most lamentable invalids, those suffering from that insidious disease called social aspirations, who will no doubt be trying to elbow their way into making new friends in high places by renting a box, no matter the cost, as have so many strivers before them. We can at least be assured that the crowd they move in is already inoculated.

  —FROM THE SOCIETY PAGE OF THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF THE WORLD GAZETTE, SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1899

  “AND WHO IS THIS?”

  Lina put away the view through her opera glasses—which held Vanderbilts and Livingstons and Vreewolds, not to mention gowns by Worth and Doucet, and diamond tiaras, and gentlemen pouring sweet words into the pink-tipped ears of ladies whose names were always in the columns—and turned to see the new arrivals in Mr. Longhorn’s box. They were hovering over her in their black jackets and white ties, their beards flecked with gray. They were not, she was a little sad to realize, her peers.

  “I present to you Miss Broud, a new addition to our fine city,” Mr. Longhorn said with a little flourish. “She comes to us from out west.”

  Lina lowered her eyelids and hoped that he had not mentioned her geographic origins to account for a dress that was clearly out of date. It used to belong, like all her dresses, to Penelope Hayes; it was of blue chiffon and flounced around her shoulders and neckline in tiers. The color complemented her skin and hair, at least, and now that she’d altered it, the skirt swerved elegantly down past her toes. She had had to borrow one of the laundry girls to help her with the corset, explaining again that she simply could not find a maid whose manners she approved of.

  “This is Lispenard Bradley, the painter,” Mr. Longhorn went on, indicating the taller of the two men, who was also the one in the brighter shirt. “And this is Ethan Hall Smith.”

  Lina smiled a little at the visitors and did her best to appear shy, which was more or less the case. She could not help but feel a little quiet surrounded by people who ordered girls like her around from their first waking moments, though shyness was also a precautionary measure to keep her from saying anything that might betray the truth of her biography. Her older sister, Claire, who still worked for the Hollands, loved to read about such scenes in the newspaper, but Lina knew it would be even better if she got to hear about it firsthand. So she concentrated on silently collecting anecdotes.

  She turned away from the men bashfully—although she was pleasantly aware that they continued to look at her—and rested a bony elbow on the brass rail. Down below her, on the first floor of the opera house, were all those people in rows. Only a few weeks ago—perhaps only a few hours ago—they had been her betters. And now she floated above them, watching and being watched on another tier. She could almost feel the warm embrace of a highborn viewership; all around her they were looking and wondering who she was.

  “Perhaps I may paint your portrait someday?” Mr. Bradley leaned toward her from where he stood, at the entrance to the inner box. He smiled and his mustache spread toward his ears. “You have a most unique look.”

  “Thank you,” Lina answered. The idea of a rendering of her features on canvas was almost too grand to get hold of, though a practical element did enter her thoughts: She would need a new dress for that, too. She remembered quite exactly how Elizabeth always wore a new dress for a sitting. “I’d like it very much.”

  Mr. Bradley nodded as though to say it were confirmed, and from the expression on his face Lina could see that he liked the idea of it. There was a silence that followed in which the four people in Mr. Longhorn’s box looked from one to the other, and though they were all smiles and the general mood never reached a level of awkwardness, Lina began to feel just slightly exposed. After all, the great Elizabeth Holland would certainly not have appeared in a venue like this with three men and no chaperone. Perhaps Mr. Longhorn, who was of an older generation, might be considered a chaperone of a kind; yet her instincts told her that now was the time to rise, make a demure little gesture, and go to the ladies’ lounge for a while.

  Mr. Longhorn and his friends responded with loud encouragements for her to stay, and she promised a quick return. As she walked, at an even, straight-backed gait, she congratulated herself on knowing when to absent herself, when to make herself rare. She was developing the instincts of a lady—that was what Elizabeth had possessed, the thing that had drawn Will to her. But Liz was dead, and Lina was learning more every day, and when she saw Will next, she would have that something, and it would draw him to her instead.

  If she had imagined that she would get to practice her new mien in the ladies’ lounge, however, she was disabused of the notion upon entering it. The women who rested there, on low velvet couches, glanced up at her entrance and cast looks in her direction that were quite the opposite of the appreciative glances she had received from Mr. Longhorn’s friends. Their expressions were blank and their shoulders turned away from her at unwelcoming angles. The color rose in Lina’s cheeks, and she found herself for the first time longing for the invisibility that came with being a lady’s maid. Her mouth opened, but then she realized that she didn’t even begin to know how she should start a conversation with any of these women. She was an outsider again.

  “Excuse me,” Lina heard herself say. There was a heat rising in her chest, under all those layers of dress and underthings.

  A woman in pale red with fluffy blond hair and black lashes pushed herself up on her elbow and said, “Are you lost?”

  Lina’s blush flamed up, and when she heard the twitters this inspired, she decided to leave. She had only just turned her back on the laughter, however, when another girl came rushing through the heavy damask curtains and ran full into her.

  “Oh,” Diana Holland said. She appeared stricken—Lina noticed
that even as her own breath shortened and she began to realize, with no small amount of agitation, how one mistake had piled on another. Diana’s expression had already changed into one of recognition; in a moment, the truth would be out. Then the younger Miss Holland—the only Miss Holland—blinked and looked out at the other ladies, and when she looked back at Lina her expression had changed again. “Oh…I was hoping I would run into you,” she said loudly as she took Lina’s arm and steered her toward a private little settee covered by silk cushions in the corner.

  Lina’s breath came back to her as she sat. She might have felt relief if she hadn’t been so confused. There was a long pause in which Diana closed her eyes and let some private pain pass across her features. She was wearing a dress of pastel green that Lina remembered unpacking from Elizabeth’s trunk upon her return from Paris at the end of the summer, and her brown curls were falling out of place as usual. When Diana’s lids fluttered open again, she didn’t look exactly overjoyed, but there was a certain gladness in her expression.

  “Oh, Lina,” she said quietly. “I’m so happy to see a friendly face right now. But what are you doing here?”

  “I’m a guest.” Lina looked out across the room and saw that several ladies were pretending not to watch them. They were all far away enough, however, that if she kept her voice low she wouldn’t be heard. “Of Mr. Longhorn’s.”

  “Carey Lewis Longhorn?” Diana asked, her eyebrows arcing upward.

  “Yes, and actually”—here Lina’s voice broke a little, though she forced herself to push on—“I like to be called Carolina now, if you don’t mind. It’s my given name, what they call me out west, where I’m from,” she concluded, her voice now becoming almost inaudible. She willed Diana to understand her intent and play along.

  The light danced in Diana’s wide, dark pupils. The women across the room shifted in their seats, rustling their gowns and murmuring to one another. “I like the sound of that better, actually,” Diana said after several moments.

  “You do?” Lina tried to look more serious than surprised, though she had in truth lost all sense of what her face must look like. She had left the Hollands on the worst possible terms, and though she and Diana had never fought, she had also never considered that the younger Holland might have an opinion about Lina that was separate from her sister’s. “Father was in copper smelting, out west,” she heard herself say, “but they’re both dead now. That’s why I came here.”

  “Ah, yes, I remember.” Diana nodded seriously. “You met my sister, Elizabeth, in Paris—she told me your story.”

  “Yes.” Lina hurried to make herself say a phrase she never thought she’d utter: “Dear Elizabeth.”

  “You’re like the heroine of some novel.” Diana paused thoughtfully and took Lina’s hand. “Be careful of the tragic fall at the end, though—anyone who rises too quickly is supposed to get one, and I wouldn’t want that for you.”

  “Thank you, Miss….” As Lina trailed off she noticed that one of the ladies across the room, who was dressed in spangled gold satin, was smiling at her. Diana was being so nice about everything, Lina almost wanted to tell her about the rest of her plan, and meeting Will. But some superstition rose in her, and she decided she might jinx it if she revealed too much. “Thank you, Di.”

  Diana leaned her head of curls back against the cushions, but Lina could not possibly help but look across the room of women who a moment ago had been thinking unkind thoughts about her and now considered her one of them. She was overcome by the frightening exhilaration of having gotten away with something that was near impossible.

  In an instant she was brought back to a luxury store for ladies of years ago where her mother, when she was the Holland girls’ governess, used to run errands. On one occasion Lina had been so taken with a set of hair combs that they had appeared in her dreams, and on the next trip to the store, she had reached out and tried to grasp them from the display table. She had been too furtive, too uncalculating, to grab both, but it hardly mattered. The thrill she’d felt on possessing even one of those gilt filigreed objects could not possibly have been increased by the finding of a practical use for it. She would sneak little looks at the glittering comb from time to time, when she was alone, and the sight of it always inspired that same dangerous sensation inside of her. It was the same with her now, except that the feeling was more tangible and the thing she had gotten away with far more important.

  She carried the feeling with her back to Mr. Longhorn’s box, after she and Diana had parted in the hall, where he continued to introduce her to whatever friends stopped by even as the performers below reached their sad, feverish end. She could see her prettiness reflected in these visitors’ eyes, and knew that she would appear that way to Will when she was with him next. Lina’s confidence grew with her sense of elation, and she felt even more acutely the glimmering golden light of the chandelier as it fell across her forehead and clavicles, the gay fizz of the champagne that Mr. Longhorn served her, the vast grandeur of the auditorium, which already felt like one of her places. She had been a success at the opera—it was almost like an object she could hold, a piece of evidence that suggested she might almost be ready to go west.

  “Thank you, Mr. Longhorn,” she said when she had finally, regretfully reached the door to her room in the Netherland.

  “It is I who should thank you,” he answered, with a gallant tip of the head and a kiss on her gloved hand. He stood back and waited, with the lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth becoming a little extra pronounced and a sharp twinkle in his eye. She smiled back at him—she could hardly have stopped—before slipping past the door.

  The night was still far too vivid for her to have slept, but that wouldn’t have happened anyway. No sooner had the lock turned in its groove did she became aware of a scene that would haunt any potential dreams. The magical transformation of her room had occurred—the bed made up, the floor swept, her breakfast things long gone and fresh flowers appeared in their place—but there was still one troubling detail.

  Her little silk purse with the leather drawstring was lying in the middle of the floor. The purse itself never moved from the drawer in her wardrobe, where it slept under a heap of stockings, but there it was, on the plum-colored rug, perfectly evident under the bright new electric lights. She might have dashed to it, in the hope that everything could be explained by absentmindedness, but she knew already that its contents were gone.

  Eleven

  A great many servants are necessary to run an elegant house these days, and in New York a fleet of twelve is considered rather modest. Those unfortunate ladies who make do with fewer—or, heaven forbid, can only support one or two—must expect that they will take on some of the housework themselves.

  —LADIES’ STYLE MONTHLY, DECEMBER 1899

  DIANA WOKE ON THE MORNING FOLLOWING THE opera with the same feeling of emptiness and a need for a several other things besides. Her mouth was dry and her hair was a fright, and she didn’t feel that it was at all within her power to make the bed. Ordinarily Claire, in her capacity as Diana’s lady’s maid, would have brought her water and hot chocolate in the morning, but that whole routine seemed a little silly once their money started running out and they were forced to let some servants go. Mrs. Holland still viewed Will’s disappearance as a defection based on some knowledge of the family finances, and since then they had had to let go of their laundress and scullery girl; and Mr. and Mrs. Faber, who had been the butler and head housekeeper, respectively, had left only last week when it had become apparent that payment would be from then on an uncertain prospect. With all the extra work this made for Claire, Diana had heroically relieved her of any extraneous cosseting duties.

  But on this Sunday morning, Diana did not feel in the least bit heroic. She didn’t feel like anything. The sensation of being hollow showed no signs of abating, and even so, eating was not among her multitude of wants. She wanted water, she wanted to look pretty, she wanted to be embraced and
petted. Though she did not want to see Henry in the least—the very idea made her stomach feel weak and her eyes burn—she would have liked a better explanation of the rejection he had served her the previous night. She would gladly have had something that sounded like good news to share with her mother. But most of all she longed for her older sister, who had so often been an aloof, judgmental girl when she had still lived in the Holland house, but who now seemed like the only person really qualified to assess Diana’s situation.

  Eventually Diana forced herself up. She found some strength and used it to make herself look presentable. She put on a long black skirt and an ivory shirtwaist with tiny pearl buttons—a uniform that would have made any girl less combustible than Diana look put together. But her character was of the sort not easily dominated by clothes, and so it was in a mildly disheveled state that she went down the main stairs of her family town house and into the shadowy tranquility of the front hall. The Persian carpets that ran down the stairs to the front door remained, though many of the little pictures that had once dotted the walls had been removed, leaving sad little holes in their place. At that very moment there were several frames stacked near the front entrance, a sure sign that the dealer would be by again soon.

  Not long ago, the selling of material objects had seemed to Diana a romantic shedding of things, a return to essentials, but her mind had since changed. It had been easy to be careless about things when she thought she had the love of Henry Schoonmaker; she saw that the disappearance of bric-a-brac was a more painful business now. Such were her thoughts as she drew back the heavy, polished pocket door, which caught a little in its track, and entered her family’s parlor.