Splendor l-4

by Anna Godbersen

The unruly noise from the dance floor quieted briefly, and it was possible to hear the ruffle of his wife’s skirt as she fussed in her chair. She was listening, agitated, for his answer. Henry thought of Diana, and how unbearable it was not to know what she was doing after having spent so many continuous hours in her company. The Hollands should have been invited that evening, but he had looked in vain for her and concluded in the end that her mother would not have sanctioned her presence anywhere public. “How can I answer a question like that?” he replied impatiently.

  “No, how could he possibly?” Penelope gasped. She had never been a girl with a surfeit of sweetness, but the sarcasm in her voice now could have severed limbs. “You see how tan he got from all the yachting he did out there, and wouldn’t that be awful for any man to give up.”

  “The — yachting?” The reporter averted his gaze as though even he were embarrassed by the notion, and hoped no one else would be likewise discomfited. It was not the story he’d wanted to hear.

  “Henry is just the slightest bit on edge after his months of service,” the elder Schoonmaker interjected in a calm, commanding tone. “They both are.”

  The reporter nodded deferentially and scurried off.

  The older man, leaning in to his son’s ear, hissed: “Ask your wife to dance.”

  “But she just—” Henry protested.

  “She’s being sullen,” William advised, sotto voce. “That’s what women do. Now ask her to dance — she’ll forget all about whatever it is you are squabbling over soon enough.”

  Henry closed his eyes and regretted ever having left Cuba. They could have run away, he now saw, they had still been free then. It had been an error, a colossal one, to let the colonel send them back. There had been so many missteps, great and small: He should have tried to like the colonel more, he might have been better at persuading him not to send the two lovers home. He shouldn’t have let Diana out of his sight, he shouldn’t have returned to the Schoonmaker mansion, like a cowardly dog, always returning to a stern master when he didn’t know where else to go. Now here he was halfheartedly playing the role in which his father and Penelope had cast him.

  “Go on,” his father continued, in a tone not so much encouraging as insistent.

  Henry tried to remind himself that making Penelope angry, tempting as it was, served no purpose, and that as long as he was by her side and not Diana’s, he should do the thing that would protect his beloved, and make no waves.

  “Penny—” he began, rising to offer her his hand, but she was quick and apparently operating with no small store of vindictiveness. Her foot jutted forward, tripping him, so that he lurched awkwardly. Had he not been able to get hold of the back of her chair, he surely would have fallen flat on his face. Henry grimaced in his father’s direction, as though the old man might suddenly see the pathetic situation for what it was, but the expression his father returned indicated there would be no letting up now.

  Henry drew his hand over his pomaded hair, smoothing his appearance, as though somehow this reference to his dashing exterior might make all the unpleasantness of the scene fade. He tried to recall how successful he had once been in making Penelope chase after him. “Mrs. Schoonmaker,” he began again, though his teeth were gritted, and even he was a little surprised by the animosity remaining in his voice. “Won’t you dance?”

  She drew away from him, propping her chin against her palm, gazing out at the ballroom, pretending not to hear.

  Henry leaned over her and said quietly, but — he hoped — forcefully: “I am your husband. I would like to dance with you.”

  She twisted hatefully in his direction. “You’ve never acted like it once,” she spit.

  “Well,” he replied. The anger was scorching his throat and it was all he could do to keep his words from becoming ragged with it. “It was never a role I coveted.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Perhaps not, but you promised just the same.”

  “You were in such a hurry corralling me to the altar that you barely noticed I didn’t speak half the promises you assume I did.”

  Penelope slapped a hand against the table. “Why did you come back then? Just to humiliate me? Or do you think I am too dim-witted to notice that you returned to New York on the very same day as your little Di—”

  “Stop,” Henry interrupted just in time. Hearing Diana’s name on such a vicious tongue aroused all of his protective instincts, which had become ragingly acute since their reunion in Cuba. The idea of what Penelope might have said infuriated him, and he fixed his teeth together so that she could see them. “Dance with me,” he commanded.

  Penelope lifted her face toward him. An arid smile lingered there. The sounds of the band, the low murmur of deal making amongst the political classes, the silent aggravation of his father, sucked up all the air in the room. A light passed across his wife’s glacial pupils, and then she extended her gloved hand in his direction.

  “Oh…all right” Her tone had grown girly, almost flir tatious, but he knew her well enough to know that it was for the benefit of his father, who was after all the man who signed the bills for her new baubles, and that she was in fact speaking words of war. “But I won’t like it.”

  Then she rose, and allowed him to escort her down past the other guests at the mayoral candidate’s honored table, and onto the dance floor of the Waldorf-Astoria, where they had danced once or twice in simpler times, back when they still liked one another. Henry, in tails, bowed to his wife, and Penelope sank into a deep curtsy, after which they moved together. There were a few gasps from the crowd around them, and then the music swelled, and the crowd began to clap. For a brief moment, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Schoonmaker had created the illusion of a gorgeous young couple in love.

  Sixteen

  Tempting as it may be, you must never allow your daughters to chaperone or discipline one another. Such arrangements have always proved a recipe for mischief.

  — MRS. HAMILTON W. BREEDFELT, COLLECTED COLUMNS ON RAISING YOUNG LADIES OF CHARACTER, 1899

  DINNER HAD BEEN CLEARED AND PORT WAS being served in the front drawing room when the sisters Holland were finally able to separate from the rest of their family for a private moment. Like the well-trained hostess that she was, Elizabeth glanced back over her shoulder to be sure that there was contentment amongst her guests. They were lit by the low bluish glow from the gasolier — for it was not a new house, and though Snowden insisted they would soon update it for electricity, the time in which to do so had not yet presented itself Inwardly, Elizabeth preferred the old way of illuminating a room, for it was subtle, almost ghostly, compared to what an incandescent bulb would provide. Dogwood erupted from tall bronze floor vases, and by the fireplace, Snowden spoke of serious things with Mrs. Holland, no doubt regarding the oil wealth of which his wife had until recently been ignorant. He had been extremely busy all day — dealing with Will’s property was apparently a time-consuming en deavor, and he had only returned home just in time to greet their guests.

  “You look like a pretty Spanish boy,” Elizabeth whispered with affectionate disdain, as she drew her fingers across the dark hair that was almost long enough now to cover her sister’s neck. It had been tamed and made to appear straight by some rather masculine hair product or other, and the new arrangement lent a special mystery to Diana’s deep brown eyes.

  “Well,” the younger Holland sister returned with a devious little smile, “I do now know a lot about pretty Spanish boys.”

  “Oh, Di.” Elizabeth tried to sound disapproving, but her relief at having her sister home was so overwhelming that she suspected her original intention was drowned out. The younger was wearing a pale yellow lace confection that made her skin appear all the browner; Elizabeth stood beside her in baby blue seersucker that enforced a rather severe silhouette despite her newly large bosom and belly.

  “Oh, Liz, not really. I mean, I might have, except that Henry was all I could think about the whole time I was away, and when I found him he so fully eclipse
d my life, I don’t know if I would have noticed pretty Spanish boys if I were standing in a room full of nothing else.”

  Diana’s voice was so loud, so rash — it tried her sister’s nerves. Elizabeth’s blond head swiveled, fearful of being overheard, but her mother and aunt and husband were engaged in conversation across the room, and the servants who waited upon them were too far away, even if they had wanted to listen in.

  “You cannot speak like that,” she whispered.

  “But it’s the truth!” Diana emitted a giddy laugh, and slid her arm around her sister’s engorged middle.

  “But he is a married man, Diana, and you are in a very vulnerable position. We have risked too much as a family already, and we are lucky to still have our good name. Mother wanted me to speak to you about—”

  “Yes, she told me. She wants you to talk some sense into me, and hopes that perhaps a little decency will rub off, if only it’s you doing the admonishing.” Diana’s sigh as she rested her head against her sister’s shoulder was sweetly exhausted, amused. “But she’s a fool for encouraging anything of the kind. Who are you to tell me not to risk everything for the man I love?”

  The brown eyes of the elder Holland girl glazed, and she found herself silenced by this logic. She stared out the front windows. The air was still and damp, and the street lamps illuminated the hot darkness in yellow cones. Mrs. Holland had secured a new driver — that, too, was probably the product of Snowden’s secret dealings — and the young man was leaning against the old coach wearily. He was not as broad as Will had been, and certainly not as alert in his waiting. But the very thought that this boy slept in the same old loft as Will, which she had crept down to on so many evenings, made her heart feel weak. Diana was right; she was in no position to admonish anybody.

  “Do you really love him?” Elizabeth knew Diana loved him, of course — she had known since the brief, strange period when she herself had worn Henry Schoonmaker’s engagement ring. What she meant was, did her sister love Henry as she had loved Will? Did she want the balance of her days to be about nothing but him? Once — just after Will’s death — she had clung to the notion that Diana’s feelings for Henry might be that profound, that such emotion was indeed still possible in this world, after all the horrors. She wanted to believe this now more than ever.

  “Yes,” Diana whispered, and for once her voice was serious. “Oh, yes, sometimes so much, it hurts.”

  “Ah,” Elizabeth replied, her voice growing small with memory. “That’s what it’s like.”

  “I never knew I could love so much!” Diana went on, the giddiness creeping back. “And we will be together. He will find a way to leave Penelope. Only it may take a little while. But I have never in my whole life been so sure of something being so right, and I—”

  “No.” Elizabeth’s eyes were still glazed, and her heart had begun to thud. She spoke like a woman in the thrall of a vision. The well-appointed room behind her, with its blond wood accents and black trim, its polite occupants, its purposeful arrangement, ceased to matter. “You won’t be with him that way, by letting time take care of it, by waiting and believing.”

  Diana turned up her rosy heart-shaped face at her sister. “But—”

  “He loves you, doesn’t he.” It was not a question, and Elizabeth nodded in confirmation of her own statement. “Then you must leave.”

  “Leave — where?”

  “New York.” There was a swelling in Elizabeth’s throat, which she tried not to give in to. All of her floundering had become raw for her again, and for a moment she would have given anything to be back in California, when she could still retract her foolish insistence that they return home. “The one thing I did wrong was come back here. All that fierce propriety — they would never allow a boy like him to love a girl like me, not in this gilded cage of a city.” Elizabeth paused, and met her sister’s eyes. “It won’t be so different for you, Di.”

  A silence hung between the sisters. It was possible that Elizabeth had never spoken so forcefully in her whole life. She did not care who heard her, though it didn’t matter particularly, as Mrs. Holland and Edith and Snowden had gone on talking all the while, anyway.

  “Oh, Liz,” Diana whispered after a moment.

  Elizabeth shook her heard firmly, her fair brows taut, her small, round mouth cinched tight, and stared at the boy out there in the purple midnight. He looked ready to nod off against the worn black leather side of the carriage. “If you love him: leave. They’ll never let you be together here.”

  The profound loneliness of the new house on Madison had not been evident to her until her remaining family members had filled it with their same old voices and poses and affectionate little sayings, and then returned home together to Gramercy Park. They had been gone for many hours, but Elizabeth had indulged emotions she had not intended to, and was having trouble sleeping. In the middle of the night, she found that her eyes were wide open, and that she was hungry, and that she desperately wanted to eat bread slathered in sweet butter. Apparently her attention was easily diverted, however, because by the time she climbed down the stairs, clinging to the banister to steady her unwieldy form, she had forgotten about food. By the time she finally stepped onto the first floor, all she could think of was the card perched on the pink marble-topped cabinet by the door. Snowden must have come in too hurriedly that evening to have even glanced at his mail.

  Her moody fixation with that afternoon’s visitor revived, and in her restless early-morning state she felt an extra, ticking urgency. She paused with her hand in the small of her back, and would have reached out to where the folded piece of paper still stood, like a tent on the marble, except that she noticed something else.

  A blue box of very particular proportions and color sat beside the note, and she knew in an instant that it was a silver baby’s rattle from Tiffany & Co. She knew because she had — in her previous life — ordered this particular gift for the children of several of her older, married cousins. The darkness within ebbed for a moment, and she let her fingers run along its edge, thinking how kind it was of Snowden to have known her well enough to guess how much she would appreciate this particular item. He was kind, of course he was, and she should stop slandering him in her mind. But then she set the box down and picked up the piece of paper anyway.

  Mr. Cairns, Please stop avoiding me.

  I know what you did in the Klondike,

  and if you don’t up my payments I will be

  forced to make your actions public.

  Sincerely, O.L.

  Elizabeth placed the note back on the marble top, just exactly as it had been, so that nobody would know it had been read. The word Klondike had a terrible significance for her; it was where her father had died. He had enjoyed traveling to exotic locations and speculating far and wide, and he had never cared much if the world considered him a smart businessman or not. That was how he had met Snowden in the first place.

  Snowden, her husband, who had known to purchase for her a silver Tiffany baby rattle. She stepped back from the note, ashamed of herself. The stairs and halls surrounding her were dark and empty, and she was relieved that nobody had witnessed her trespass. For the lesson was clear — one did not poke around at night, not unless one wanted to see ghosts.

  Seventeen

  Let’s get out of here

  THE NOTE SLID INTO CAROLINA’S FIELD OF VISION with such subtlety that at first she didn’t comprehend its meaning, but once she had, her broad cheeks flushed pink. Her gloved hand darted the piece of paper, which had been ripped from the bottom of the menu, before Lucy Carr, the divorcée, could see it. Mrs. Carr had been one of her first friends as a society girl, and though the older woman had never been what you would call “nice people,” Longhorn had always found her amusing. There had been several nights when Carolina and Lucy had screamed in laughter about something or other, while Longhorn nodded off over his cognac, and though Carolina had found little use for the twice-wed blonde now that she was truly
rich, still she felt a little bad about dismissing her too quickly.

  “Did I read that you are engaged again?” Carolina asked, hoping that her gauche blush was fading from her cheeks. Across the shiny parquet floor of the Waldorf-Astoria, skirts of organdy and satin twirled and men whose bellies filled out their paisley waistcoats congregated in colonies beside gleaming marble columns. She herself wore tiers of peach chiffon layered with tiny white lace appliqué and silver sequin edging, and her hair rose above her forehead and then lay in sausage curls, bound by ribbon, against her neck. Underneath the Grecian gathering of fabric at either shoulder, her freckled arms were bare.

  “Oh, yes!” Mrs. Carr had once had very fine eyes, although they were ever blinking, and the blinking over years had created a network of lines like dry riverbeds that reached to her temples. “To Mr. Harrison Ulrich!” She giddily extended her left hand to show off the ring.

  “Very fine.” Once upon a time, Carolina would have meant it.

  Mrs. Carr’s lips pinched together in a poor attempt not to smile, and her eyebrows — which were painted on, and slightly too dark a shade — arched. Then her eyes rolled slowly toward Leland, whose note was still hidden under Carolina’s hand, as though to ask, And you?

  But Carolina simply responded with a bland and unaccommodating smile. In a few moments Mrs. Carr had moved on, which allowed her to crumple and drop the note under the table, where one hoped it would continue to go unnoticed.

  “Come with me,” Leland whispered into her ear with sweet, urgent emphasis.

  Carolina put her hand over his and cast nervous glances across the room. She had been in the famous hotel several times in the months since she had become Longhorn’s protégée and then heir, but it still held magical powers for her. The idea of absenting herself from its halls and ballrooms early caused her a slight shudder of scandal. Besides, she was there at Penelope Schoonmaker’s invitation, and though the girls were not as close as they had once been, still Carolina owed no small part of her standing to their association. What would they all say if she left Penelope’s husband’s family’s party so unexpectedly?