Whiter Than Snow

by Sandra Dallas

  “I’ll do that,” Grace said, hoping her tone told the old woman not to expect her.

  But why not talk to her? Grace thought now. She could claim she was writing a book, or, if that sounded too pretentious, a magazine article, and who knew, maybe she would write one, because she was good at writing, better at it than at conversation with those people. She liked the idea of being an author. Besides, writing would be something to do, and God knew, talking to the old woman would be more interesting than making needlepoint seats for her eight dining room chairs. That was boring work, drone labor that caused her to dwell on her life too much as she stitched.

  She would ask about mining superstitions, but perhaps she would learn others, something that would explain her own life. And that, she decided, was the reason she was so taken with old wives’ tales. Perhaps there was something that explained what had happened to her, why she felt things. Grace had always blamed herself for making bad decisions, but maybe it was “in her stars,” as people put it. She wondered if the laundress had indeed seen something in the little girl’s hand that foretold an unhappy life.

  Has it been an unhappy life? Grace asked herself, stopping and reconsidering. There were some who thought her the luckiest girl in the world, married to a successful mining executive and the mother of a bright little boy. Perhaps her life had not been all that unhappy. Still, there was little joy in it.

  Of course, Grace’s life had begun well enough, because the family was wealthy beyond most people’s dreams. Her grandfather had started the family lumber business in Saginaw, Michigan, by acquiring vast tracts of timberland just after the Civil War. As the money flowed in, he built an enormous three-story house with turrets and long, narrow windows, a porch that wrapped around three sides, and trim that dripped from the eaves and corners of the house like wooden lace. There were two parlors with huge crystal chandeliers, a music room, a billiards room, study, five bedrooms (not counting the servants’ rooms), and five white-tiled bathrooms, one so large that it was turned into a delivery room, where Grace’s mother gave birth to her only child in 1892.

  Outside were the stable, with the names of horses on brass plates in each stall, and a playhouse that was an exact replica of the big house. It was set in the back in a formal garden with rose beds and a fountain and statues of barely clad women. Grace treasured the little house, because it was hers alone, and she went there when the slights of childhood were too great for her to bear. A governess came in each day, and a groom hitched up Grace’s pony to a dogcart whenever she wanted to drive it. But with all this, Grace grew up a lonely and discontented child, sure that people did not like her. Her father, John Schuyler, preferred animals to children and spent most of his time hunting or watching his own horses race. The family stable was known all over the East. Grace’s mother, Nancy, was engaged in social affairs.

  The parents took frequent trips, leaving Grace in the care of a nurse and, later on, a governess. Nancy paid little attention to Grace as a baby and young girl but was more attentive when Grace reached eighteen and the mother could plan her daughter’s debut. Nancy urged Grace to find a suitable husband before she turned twenty and lost her youth.

  But no one pleased Grace—or perhaps it could be said that Grace pleased no one—and once the coming-out festivities were over, Grace asked her parents to send her to college. College might have been the girl’s salvation, because she was bright and independent and comfortable with her studies, and an education could have brought her out of the shadows that seemed to hover over her. But in 1910, it was unthinkable that a young woman of Grace’s social standing would consider a profession. The idea of college gave Nancy great concern, for she did not believe that a four-year education at the University of Michigan or even at one of the women’s colleges in the East was desirable. It would stamp Grace as even more of an oddity, make her too intellectual to be attractive.

  But Grace begged, and at last the two agreed on a compromise: Grace would attend a two-year finishing school. Even that was not pleasing to Nancy, although it would allow her to explain away Grace’s lack of a fiancé by rolling her eyes and saying, “You know modern young women; they simply are not satisfied to go from mother to husband, but must be out on their own for a time.” In Grace’s case, “out on her own” meant living in nunlike strictness in a dormitory with dozens of other girls who, like her, had settled for finishing school instead of a real education.

  While such a school was not her first choice, Grace found the experience satisfying because she enjoyed literature and art. She did think later on, however, that learning to work a needlepoint canvas, plan parties, and flirt in French and English did her little good in a mining town at the top of the world. The French and Italian she had perfected so well that anyone who heard her speak one of the two languages believed she was talking in her native tongue were useless in a blue-collar town. Better if she had studied Spanish or Polish or one of the Slavic languages that the miners and their families spoke.

  Still, the finishing-school polish did come in handy on occasions such as entertaining Jim’s business associates—visiting engineers, mining consultants, and the company officials who traveled to Swandyke and stayed in the superintendent’s house. Grace was a touch of sophistication in that town of women worn down by overwork and hardship. Tall and willowy, her light brown hair fashionably bobbed instead of knotted at the back of her neck, Grace dressed in smart clothes that were not ordered from the catalog at the general store.

  She was a good hostess, chatting about mining, since she had picked up enough information to sound knowledgeable, and telling amusing stories about the townspeople or occasionally admitting her own foibles, such as drinking a little too much. “I ought to live right, but I wouldn’t have any friends if I did,” she confided.

  Jim was proud of her in those moments, she knew, and that drew the couple together. She had never loved her husband, but she liked him, and he liked her, although she knew he was disappointed that she had never fit into Swandyke. But she hadn’t known how to, and now it was too late.

  She was a whiz at fixing cocktails (although most of the visiting dignitaries and business associates preferred the illegal Tenmile Moon that was manufactured locally), and visitors marveled at the wine-and-cream-sauce dishes with the French names that Grace prepared. She hadn’t learned to cook at school, of course, but had taught herself from necessity, because where could one engage a decent cook at ten thousand feet? She gave her dishes exotic names, especially when the ingredients were second-rate. A can of peas became petit pois and a tough chicken soaked in wine was coq au vin. And there was her pièce de résistance, mousse au chocolat, whose primary ingredient was a five-cent Hershey bar. Jim, who was as easygoing as Grace was high-strung, thought the mousse a great joke.

  Grace could make darling little cocktail sandwiches, too. When she arrived in Swandyke as a bride and discovered that she had to pack her husband’s lunch bucket every day, she put in some of her sandwiches, cucumber or egg salad or cream cheese with pimento, cut into triangles and trimmed of crust. Jim had had to tell her that he preferred roast beef or meat loaf between two full pieces of bread. Grace cringed later on when she recalled how naïve she had been in those early days and how Jim’s associates must have teased him about his lunch bucket.

  It was the Christmas of 1911, during her second year of finishing school, that Grace discovered the Schuyler fortune was gone. She came home to find that the household staff had been cut. That was not unusual, for from time to time, her mother had rows with the servants, let them go, then kept their positions vacant for weeks until she found others who suited her. Still, the cutback in staff was odd, because the family usually had a full contingent for holiday entertaining. The stables were empty, but again, that had happened before. Her father had numerous ideas about racing, and on occasion he sold off all his horses so that he could indulge himself in some new theory.

  What tipped off Grace was Nancy’s ruby-and-emerald necklace, or, ra
ther, the lack of it. The necklace, with its matching earrings, had been a wedding present from Grace’s grandfather, and her mother wore it every Christmas Eve. It was a magnificent piece, with rubies shaped like teardrops suspended from a gold chain that was entwined with emeralds. And it was as much a Christmas tradition as the ten-foot tree in the front parlor or the spectacular party her parents threw each Christmas Eve. To be invited to that fête was to be stamped a member of Saginaw’s elite.

  “Your necklace, Mother. My goodness, you’ve forgotten it,” Grace said as she encountered her mother in the hall, poised to descend the staircase to greet the guests below.

  “Oh, I’m tired of wearing it every year,” her mother replied.

  “But you always wear it. Grandfather would be crushed if you didn’t.”

  “How can he be?” Nancy laughed. “Your grandfather’s been dead for years.”

  Grace frowned at her mother.

  “Well, if you must know, I broke the clasp.”

  The two women gave each other a long look, until Grace asked, “You don’t have it any longer, do you?”

  “Our guests are waiting.”

  “Did you lose it?” When there was no answer, Grace recalled the servant shortage and the empty stable, and then as she stared at her mother, Grace was startled to observe that Nancy was wearing last year’s gown. She always ordered the latest fashion for the Christmas Eve ball. And then Grace knew. “What happened?”

  “It’s best you don’t worry your head about it. Besides, it’s only a little reversal. Your father will acquire more timberland. We aren’t to let it spoil Christmas Eve. We have guests.” And Nancy smiled and began her grand entrance, and Grace knew her mother had already forgotten the setback.

  Grace followed a few steps behind, clutching the railing, because no finishing school could teach her to hold up under such circumstances. She looked out over the upraised faces, which were happy with anticipation, the men in their tails and women clad in shimmering satins, with tiaras and necklaces sparkling in the light of the chandeliers, and she thought that this would all end. John Schuyler had no head for business; he’d never worked in the lumber company. Besides, Grace knew for a fact that most of the vast forests of virgin lumber had already been clear-cut, and there were not many left. Her father would be no more able to acquire new timberlands than she.

  Nancy turned as she reached the bottom of the staircase, smiled brilliantly at Grace, and took her daughter’s hand in an iron grip as she moved about the room, welcoming people. After a few minutes, the girl became aware that nearly every person her mother greeted had an eligible son. Her mother was matchmaking, hoping to find Grace a husband while everyone still believed the girl to be an heiress. The idea would have amused Grace if she had not been appalled. Her mother, who had never paid much attention to her, now seemed driven to find her a suitable husband before the family was disgraced. And what if she didn’t find one? Grace had never worried about a husband, knowing she could live in the family home on her father’s money until she found someone she liked. Now, she realized, she had no choice. She was aware that her father did not know how to cut back his spending, and it would be only a matter of time until every cent was gone, and where would that leave her? And her parents? They were counting on her. She knew as surely as her mother did that she would have to find a husband—a rich one—and soon.

  She wondered which unsuspecting young man she and her mother would settle on. And then Grace was introduced to George Amter, stocky, handsome, with hair like ebony, and Grace’s life was changed forever.

  A year earlier, George might have been considered beneath Grace’s notice. His mother was pedigreed, but his father was new money and had a whiff of scandal about him, something to do with a young widow who had sued him for alienation of affection. It was rumored she dropped the suit and disappeared after being paid a generous sum—someone had seen her on a train, carrying an infant—but no one knew the circumstances, and it was all so sordid that the family would not have been welcomed in Saginaw’s best homes were it not for the goodwill extended to Mrs. Amter. There was the belief that morals, or the lack of them, were inherited, which caused concern that George might be cut from the same cloth as his father. The mothers of Grace’s friends treated the young man with a certain caution, which made him all the more attractive to their daughters. Grace was not the only one who was smitten.

  To the girl’s great delight, George seemed equally attracted to her, and she could not believe her good fortune. He monopolized her that evening, then called on her each day until her Christmas vacation was over and she returned to school. And after that, he wrote her notes and sent her nosegays. Whenever Grace returned home for a holiday, George was invited to the house for cocktails or for dinner. There was a time when Nancy would have discouraged George’s attentions because of his father’s sullied reputation. But now she was thrilled that Grace had attracted such a catch, because it was rumored that the Amters were as rich as the Schuylers were thought to be.

  “We can still afford to give you a proper wedding. We may be able to keep up appearances until the end of the year,” her mother whispered to Grace following the girl’s graduation, which George attended. “But you had better plan the event earlier rather than later.”

  “Mother! He hasn’t asked me.”

  “Then you must get him to, because we can’t hold out forever. Fortunately, it’s summer, and I’ve never worn jewels in summer. If I did, you would notice they are all paste now.”

  School over, Grace returned to Saginaw, where George took her sailing and to summer dances. They rode horseback together and went for long walks in the dusky evenings, all alone, so that they could talk, because George had told her she kept him on his toes with her ideas. He loved a girl with a head on her shoulders, he said. George would lead her down some shaded trail, and when they were alone, he would take her hand. Once, he pinned her against a tree and kissed her and said, “You know I’m nuts about you, don’t you, Gracie?” She’d always despised being called Gracie, but now she liked the intimacy of the name.

  Once or twice, she thought George was going to propose. They often went about with a group of people their age who formed Saginaw’s young smart set, and on occasion, George stole her away from the others so that he could put his arm around her. During one of these times, when they had escaped from a picnic and were sitting on a bench by a lake, looking up at the stars and the wisp of a moon, he put his thumb under her chin and lifted it so that he could look into her eyes. “I can see my reflection. It’s like I’m part of you. I hope I can always be a part of you.” He smiled and leaned in to kiss her. But they heard voices, and he quickly moved away, to Grace’s disappointment, because she was sure he had intended to say more.

  “There you two are. We keep losing you. Honestly, I thought you’d fallen into the lake!” exclaimed Charlotte, who was Grace’s closest friend, and a group of young people burst in on them and swept them back to the picnic.

  Because Grace was sure after that evening that George would propose—it was just a matter of when—she wanted to tell someone, and Charlotte was the only friend with whom she’d ever exchanged confidences. But Charlotte was a dull girl, not much for keeping secrets, and it would be an embarrassment if people thought Grace had set her cap for George. So she kept still. Besides, she admitted to being just slightly superstitious and would not jinx the situation by talking about it. Thinking about that decision later, Grace wondered if things might have turned out differently if she had told Charlotte. Perhaps that was another of her bad decisions.

  And then everything was over. Grace’s aunt died, and the family went east for a month to attend the funeral and participate in the rituals of grief. Grace did not receive any letters or wires from George, which she attributed to the Schuylers’ moving from relative to relative. Any missive sent to her would have been delayed, if not lost altogether. Besides, men were unsure about interfering in family intimacies. She returned home the d
ay after George and Charlotte announced their engagement.

  Nancy, who was rarely sensitive to Grace’s feelings, called George a “cad” and said Grace was lucky she hadn’t married into such a family. He might have money, but he had no breeding, and weren’t they lucky they had discovered it before it was too late?

  Grace, of course, was brokenhearted. For days, she stayed in her room, crying and refusing to see anyone, while her mother gave it out that she had caught a dreadful head cold on the train and remarked how fortunate it was that with all those foreigners riding on the cars these days, Grace hadn’t picked up some terrible contagion.

  Grace couldn’t stay in bed forever, however, and when at last she emerged from her room, she and her mother made the obligatory call on Charlotte to extend their best wishes. As Charlotte basked in the attention, simpering and saying George’s proposal was the surprise of her life, Grace studied her friend and wondered what in the world George saw in her. Charlotte was sweet enough, never saying a harsh word to anyone, but she was as placid as a brick, and thick—thickheaded and thick in body, with a sort of porcine cast to her face. George was as wealthy as Charlotte and had no need for her money. So that didn’t explain Charlotte’s attraction. There were no ties between the families that would have caused the parents to pressure the two into the match. Perhaps George had taken advantage of Charlotte in that way that girls were warned about. He’d have felt honor-bound to marry her then. But Grace thought that unlikely, because George had never approached her with an improper suggestion. And Charlotte was afraid of sex. She’d once told Grace that her greatest fear was her wedding night. Besides, Grace thought uncharitably, Charlotte couldn’t dress or undress herself without her maid’s help.