Rumors l-2

by Anna Godbersen

  “I’m convinced everything will come out right in the end.” Lina touched her sister’s shoulder, indicating that she should go, and they both stood. It had begun to snow, and tiny white flakes were catching in Lina’s coat. She looked at her sister in the shiny black muff, and said: “You must keep that fur, though. It will be my Christmas present to you.”

  The furrows in Claire’s brow disappeared, and she smiled down at her new possession. Lina’s mind was occupied by this latest, outrageous information, and as they walked — arm in arm this time — to the northern entrance of the park, she found that she no longer minded the loss of the muff at all. The story she had just heard had reminded her that there were far more important things that she should concentrate on acquiring.

  Thirty One

  THE WILLIAM S. SCHOONMAKER FAMILY

  REQUESTS THE PLEASURE OF YOUR COMPANY

  ON THE EVE OF CHRISTMAS, 1899

  AT NINE O’CLOCK

  416 FIFTH AVENUE

  THE VANITY MIRROR IN DIANA HOLLAND’S BEDROOM, with its oval mahogany frame carved at the edges to evoke putti and seraphim, had sat in the same place for the better part of a decade, but it had never held such beauty. There, close to the mirror on the table, amongst combs and pins and powders and face paints, was a simple vase jar filled with purple hyacinths. They had arrived that morning with a reminder that the Hollands were wanted at the Schoonmakers’ Christmas Eve party, even though the families were no longer happily to be joined in marriage, and their fragrance filled the air. They had been a symbol that Diana had read in plain English, and she had claimed them for her room with an offhand comment about hyacinths being her favorite flowers.

  In any event, it was chiefly her own beauty that filled the mirror on that particular Christmas Eve. Her pupils were as wide and black as midnight, and her cheeks had the sweet flush of a summer sundown.

  The face of her lady’s maid, hovering in the background as Diana’s dark curls were pinned upward, was looking a little gaunt by comparison. Her eyes flickered everywhere but did not meet those of her mistress. She was uncharacteristically quiet.

  Diana pursed her round little mouth and let her own gaze rove about the room. All the details were the same as ever: the salmon damask walls, the white bearskin rug, the small mantel, the white chenille bedspread; and yet it was a room forever altered. Diana almost wished she lived in the kind of world where a plaque could be erected — small, subtle, definitely of weathered copper — that would record for posterity the momentous event that had occurred there. What had happened between her and Henry.

  Diana decided that the only way to break the silence was all of a sudden. “I’m glad you saw us.”

  Claire’s blue eyes darted to the mirror and met Diana’s before she went quickly back to her work. “I don’t think I know what you mean.”

  “It’s all right, Claire, I’m not angry.” Diana paused to examine the swath of pale skin at her chest that the white gown, trimmed with dark green, left exposed, and how it caught the low light of her bedroom. The electric light in Henry’s ballroom was sure to be brighter, but she felt confident that that could only be in her favor. “I’m glad.”

  Claire’s sigh filled the room. “Miss Diana, if anyone finds out they’ll—”

  “But you won’t tell anyone. And me, I was bound to tell someone just to be able to talk about it. But now that you know, someone knows, and I won’t have to worry about blabbering on! Except to you, which I’m afraid I may be doing.”

  Claire sighed again, although more softly this time — soft enough that Diana could sense she was ready to relent.

  “Really, Claire, has anything so exciting ever happened in the history of this household? Me and Henry—”

  “You and your sister’s fiancé.”

  Diana brought her lips together. She had forgotten herself. She let her gaze float up and saw that Claire was looking her directly in the eyes now. “Oh, Di, just be careful. Be careful!” And then she allowed herself a little smile. She was weaving holly into Diana’s hair, and as she worked her smile grew. By the time all the holly was gone from the tray in front of them and Diana’s hair was festive with green, the smile had overcome her face, and she and her mistress met each other’s eyes like the giddy romantics they were.

  They didn’t speak again until Diana had stood for Claire to give a final powder on her nose. “So you’ll be able to see him tonight?” she almost whispered.

  “Snowden is escorting me, of course, so I won’t really be able to see him.” Diana’s heart sped at the slightest mention of Henry. She had tried not to think of him too often that day. “But just to be in the same room with him, Claire! I’ll be able to look at him at least. I’m sure I’ll know how he is feeling from a single glance.”

  From that moment forward she thought of nothing but Henry. As she went to her mother’s bedroom to bid her good night and as she walked down the stairs to admire the Christmas tree with Snowden and her aunt. Then they drove, in Snowden’s carriage, to the Schoonmakers’ limestone mansion on Fifth near Thirty-eighth Street, and by the time her father’s old partner had extended a hand to help her up the steep steps to that cheerily lit entryway, her thoughts of Henry were so all-consuming that it was a kind of miracle that she did not stumble on the new-fallen snow and that she did not respond to Snowden’s pleasantries with sentences that were composed of nothing but Henry’s name.

  In through the greeting line she went, down the halls crowded out with potted poinsettias, thinking all the time that her heart was swollen to the point of bursting. The ballroom chandelier illuminated countless male faces bobbing on their standing white collars like soft-boiled eggs, but no matter how quickly her eyes darted, no matter how many smiles she shot to her familial acquaintances, still she could not locate Henry in the crowd. She felt on the verge of betraying herself by bringing up the distressing absence when Snowden saved her the trouble.

  “Which one is young Schoonmaker? The man Elizabeth was to have married…”

  Her aunt had been whisked up by one of the Gansevoort cousins, and a waiter had brought them glasses of warm winter punch. Diana sipped from the little cup to steady her nerves. Why was Henry not there? she wanted to scream. And who is he with? went the echo in her thoughts.

  “I don’t see him,” she said, as indifferently as possible.

  “Well, that’s very odd, that the young man of the house should be absent on an evening that is so important to his family.”

  “Yes, I—”

  Diana broke off. She had noticed how many eyes in the room were on her. The Misses Wetmore, in hues of lavender, were whispering to each other from the rust velvet causeuse at the center of the room, no doubt wondering about the stranger Diana had entered with and what his marital status was. Amos Vreewold and Nicholas Livingston stood in the shadows of the arched entryway to an adjoining gallery, watching her with fervid eyes that made her wonder if they weren’t comparing her appearance to that of the elder sister they had danced with so often. There was Davis Barnard, hiding behind his punch, his brows rising like two flying buttresses at the glimpse of the mystery person she had brought. And entering from the main hall was Penelope, preceded by a fluid skirt of deep red silk, looking Diana over once before she turned her face on the crowd. Penelope was also accompanied by a stranger — at least, he was strange to Diana. Yet the tall man who held Penelope’s arm seemed entirely at ease in the room and nodded to a few people he evidently knew well, before turning in the direction of the younger Holland, where he was far less economical with his gaze than Miss Hayes had been.

  Diana wasn’t sure she had ever seen Penelope not accompanied by that heavyset party-planning fellow, and wondered who the new arrival could be.

  If she had been asked before that moment, she would have said that she was indifferent to being looked at. But she was the youngest of the family, and she had never borne the brunt of society’s proclivity for gawking. There, in the Schoonmakers’ ballroom, on the eve
of Christmas, she experienced a revelation: Being looked at circumscribed one’s movements. It could really hem a girl in, she realized, as Elizabeth must have realized two years ago at least. She desperately wanted to seek out an explanation for Henry’s absence tonight, but her many observers, seen and unseen, made that impossible.

  She couldn’t shake the feeling, either, that she had been so physically changed that her transgressions were plain on her body. She felt so much aware of her own beauty, it seemed inconceivable that everybody else wouldn’t notice the difference, too. And she also couldn’t help feeling that she was marked.

  “He—” she began again. She hoped it wasn’t clear from her tone that, to her, this was the he. “He took Elizabeth’s passing very hard. I’m sure it is difficult for him to think how this would have been their first Christmas as — as man and wife.”

  Snowden nodded faintly at this explanation, and then he went on to ask her milder questions about the other guests, and what part of town they lived in, and what sort of structures they occupied, and Diana obliged as much as she was able. She did not bother trying to keep her thoughts calm, of course. It was far too late for that.

  Living too much in one’s head can be dangerous, her father had liked to tell her. He had always said it lovingly and with some amount of pride, when he had occasion to compare his and his daughter’s personal traits. But Diana remembered it now, in the margins of a ballroom decorated with hundreds of little pictures in big frames and filled by a crowd of faces upturned grotesquely with holiday cheer, with a kind of dread.

  The racket her heart was making in her ears was now drowning out all the rosy thoughts of Henry, and she began instead to fear that she had somehow or other been a fool again. That was the way love was, she guessed — it left you always unsteady on your feet. But something caused her to turn her head, before that feeling of vulnerability grew too strong, and that was when she saw Henry staring at her with such affection and desire that it made her lips quiver open. He was across the room, near the entrance. There was nothing unsteady about his gaze, which she held for several seconds. By the time two large men moved to either side of him, blocking her view and drawing Henry deeper into the ballroom, she knew that she had not been a fool. She knew that the evening would be a success based on that look alone, and the shine came back into her eyes.

  Thirty Two

  H—

  I don’t even know if this will get to

  you, but you must accept my apolo

  gies. I guess I dozed off last night.

  I will be hoping to see you soon, one

  way or another, but in the meantime,

  good luck.

  — T

  HENRY WAS A REMARKABLY WELL-FED BACHELOR, and it had been some years since the absence of a lady had caused him anything like discomfort. Still, on Christmas Eve, with a fresh snow still settling into the panes of the Schoonmaker windows and onto the sloped mansard roof above them, he could not help but feel a little hungry. When he had slipped back into his bedroom late that morning, he’d found his friend Teddy already gone, and then he’d slept until the sounds of party preparation woke him with a start. Then his imagination turned directly to the pink skin and reckless curls of the young Miss Holland. The most important thing he’d accomplished all day, by far, was having the hyacinths sent to her home. It was with these thoughts that he began to feel a pleasant kind of anticipation for an event of his father’s that he would not otherwise have cared about remotely.

  He rang to have his dinner in his room, which he picked at indifferently, and then he dressed in his customary black dinner jacket with tails and white tie without summoning the assistance of a footman. He didn’t want to be pampered. He didn’t want to be spoon-fed by all the liveried manservants his father could afford. He was thinking about the plush neckline of Diana Holland and the bright knowingness in her eyes, and having another man fussing about his waistcoat would only interfere with such thoughts. How brave she was, how fearless in the face of every expectation she was supposed to meet. Being near her made him feel brave too. It made him feel as though he needed, beyond her, very little indeed.

  He took a final sip of the coffee that had been resting on a sideboard and fixed the last strands of his hair into place. Then he looked down from his bay windows unto Fifth Avenue, where all those his father deemed worthy or useful were being helped down to the sidewalk. The snow glistened as bright as any of the diamonds, and it even necessitated the carrying of one or two of the ladies who feared for their gowns. Henry smiled ruefully and thought to himself that Diana would never have done such a thing. She would have inhaled the cold and gone up the steps as indomitably as she did everything. Then he turned and stood, under the great mural of picnicking bons vivants that decorated the ceiling of his rooms, and checked his tie a final time in the full-length mirror with the copper snake ensnaring it.

  He walked toward the door with airy purpose, and it seemed to him that he would have reached the main floor of his family’s house in a few, blithe steps. The reason he did not was entirely to do with the two men standing at his door. They were wearing the black tails and dove gray slacks of butlers, although their faces seemed to have known rougher things than drawing rooms and pantries. Their features, like their hands, were thick and chapped.

  “Excuse me,” Henry said hotly.

  “Oh, no, sir,” replied the first.

  “Excuse us, sir,” seconded the other. “We’ll be escorting you downstairs, then.”

  “Why?” Henry’s voice was indignant. “I hardly need—”

  “Your father’s orders,” answered the first.

  “Seems you broke house arrest — your father found your friend Cutting dozing off in there early this morning, and figured out that you’d given him the slip.”

  “Wasn’t too pleased,” added the other, lowering his eyes at his charge.

  “No, not at all.”

  “Speaking of Mr. Cutting,” said the first man with a gap-toothed smile, “this note came for you earlier.”

  A folded, cream-colored piece of paper was extended toward him. Henry snatched it. He opened it slowly, and as he read he began to see what had happened. He looked at the two men in disbelief, and down the long corridor to where the guests were arriving. The floor had been polished that day, and the light of the entryway was visible down at the end, spilling across the boards like daylight at the end of a cave. He could hear the shrieks of delight as the droves came in, and he took a step in that direction. The two men moved to either side of his shoulders, close enough that Henry smelled the smell of men who did not spend their days looking after hereditary silver. He took another step, and the men followed him exactly. As Henry went forward, the men matching his movements, he realized that he was in another of his father’s traps.

  The three of them went down the grand stairway in absurd lockstep, Henry fighting — not very successfully — his caged feeling. The shiny floors of the hall were almost all crowded out by the arriving guests, who filled the air with silly exclamations and loud prattle. Several of them turned, without much subtlety, to look at Henry as he passed. They went under the wide oak entryway and into the ballroom with all its paintings high on the walls. Henry felt the men fall behind him for just a moment, and that was when he caught a glimpse of her.

  She was a vision in a white gown, her dark hair forming a hazy halo around her rosy, heart-shaped face. Her long lashes fluttered to touch her cheeks, and then her eyes opened fully in his direction. Her small, round mouth flexed in an immediate and knowing smile. That’s the girl I’m going to marry, Henry thought. Then the shoulder of one of his father’s men obstructed his view, and he heard the other one say: “Mr. Schoonmaker wants you going this way.”

  Thirty Three

  Returned from Europe: Grayson Hayes, only son of Mr. and Mrs. Richmond Hayes, via Asia, the Pacific, and the transcontinental railroad. Young Mr. Hayes intends to stay at his family home, 670 Fifth Avenue, for the rest of the s
eason.

  — FROM THE SOCIETY PAGE OF THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF THE WORLD GAZETTE, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1899

  PENELOPE CROSSED THE THRESHOLD OF THE Schoonmaker ballroom with all things necessary for a notable entrance. She wore a new dress from the Parisian couturier Doucet, who kept a dossier on her measurements and fabric preferences. It had arrived just that week, and it was made of a garnet-colored silk faille in rows of tucks and volants that brought it close to her body in the hips and ribs and flowed outward at the knee and was garlanded at the neckline and hem with yards of white point d’esprit. She was glad it was Christmas, if only for the excuse to return to her favorite shade. Her dark hair was done up with simple height, and it was ringed with real pine and pearls. And if her natural stature and glow were not enough to win attention, she had on her arm the returned prodigal, Grayson Hayes, the older brother everyone was always asking about.

  Of course, the entrance proved a useless and petty endeavor. Henry was nowhere to be seen, a fact Penelope grasped in a few unquiet moments.

  They glided into the room, in advance of their less comely parents, slowly, letting the light catch against the architectural planes of their faces. Penelope resented her brother, in a mild sort of way, for his prolonged absence and for taking some attention away from her. But she knew that everybody thought of her as the bright sibling, the sibling who would make a more brilliant marriage, the sibling who would propel the family name to new levels of social exclusivity. It was only that he had made himself scarce that made him so exciting now, and she was inclined to let him have his moment. She clung, sisterly, to his arm as they moved forward along the green velvet wall hangings.

  “Is that little Diana Holland over there?” Grayson asked in a low voice.