The Gilded Years

by Karin Tanabe

  Anita had known that Lottie’s family was well-off but could not visualize to what extent. Caroline uttering Lottie’s name in the same breath as John Rockefeller—who had funded the school’s first separate dormitory and was funding a new academic building to break ground that year—was constricting her breathing even further. And then there was Consuelo Vanderbilt. All the Vassar girls followed her doings, but Caroline had said Lottie actually attended her wedding. Anita’s starched traveling dress suddenly felt very tight. She put down her bag and reached up to loosen the stiff lace collar.

  “Anita, are you unwell?” asked Caroline.

  Anita flushed in embarrassment and bent to pick up her things. “I don’t know what came over me. It must be this awful heat. I feel a bit faint.”

  “Come, let’s walk down to senior hall and get settled in,” said Caroline, taking her arm. “Those stairs were dreadful. One of the maids can fetch you something cool to drink. Of course it’s the heat. They need to open some of these windows and circulate the air.” Caroline said as much to one of the young maids, and the two moved away from the other girls still greeting one another as if they’d been off fighting a war, rather than just separated by a summer vacation.

  As they walked to the seniors’ area, Anita thought about her idiocy in agreeing to share rooms with Lottie Taylor. She didn’t want to be housed with anyone prominent, anyone who might attract attention. She needed a nobody from nowhere so she could keep walking quietly through the crowd of Vassar women, well liked, but not too well liked; active in school, but not president of any esteemed club; smart enough, but not first in her class—nothing that would make her shine too brightly or fall too hard. She wanted to be smiled at and then quickly forgotten.

  “I’m here in room eighty-nine,” said Caroline, as they reached it. “Will you be all right to walk to yours?”

  “Me? Oh, yes, I’m feeling much better now. Just a quick spell. I’m in room twenty-one, right in front of the art gallery,” said Anita, pointing down the hall. “I’ll see you at dinner, Caroline.”

  “You’re in twenty-one?” said Caroline, looking down at the hallway’s double marble staircase near Anita’s room. “But that’s the very best senior room, with a perfect view of the Lodge. How did you draw that one? Oh, never mind,” she said, smiling and opening her door. “Lottie Taylor,” she whispered.

  Caroline was in a single, a bedroom without a parlor, and a less desirable view.

  “I’m so happy to be back, aren’t you?” Anita said, watching her friend walk into her bright, sparsely furnished room.

  “I am, too, Anita. There’s no place I love more.”

  The girls bid each other goodbye, and Anita turned the corner toward her room, opening the oak door with her free hand.

  “Just leave it by the desk closest to the window, please,” she heard a voice say at once. Anita saw Lottie, her back to the door, trying to nail a square of ornate silk fabric above their parlor window.

  “I’m sorry,” Anita replied. “You must be waiting for your trunk.” Lottie turned to look at her with a nail in her mouth and nearly dropped the hammer. She took the nail out and gave her an apologetic smile.

  “You’re Anita Hemmings! And you must think me the rudest girl in the world. I’m sorry I didn’t turn around. I thought you were Mervis with my things.”

  “It’s nothing at all,” Anita said, walking into the already heavily decorated room. “I saw Mervis downstairs, but I’m afraid he’s extremely busy. I’m sure our trunks will be brought up soon. Though I think they’ll have to be attended to by someone else. Every senior girl in Main seems to be after him.” As with most of the accommodations in Main, Anita and Lottie had a set of three rooms with two bedrooms and a large shared parlor.

  “Fine, fine. I’m in no particular rush,” said Lottie brightly. “I have all the accessories I need to get our parlor in order right here.” Both girls looked at the floor of their square room, which was covered in fabrics and paintings.

  Lottie paused her chatter as she stepped down from her chair. In her white dress, with her blond hair pinned to her head and the dying evening light creating a shadow behind her, she looked as if she had flown down from somewhere much finer, somewhere celestial.

  “Look at you, you’re even prettier than everybody said,” she pronounced, approaching Anita. “I remembered you, of course, but we didn’t overlap much in classes, did we? You’re very Greek and Latin, I hear. I like Asian history and the sciences.” She extended her hand, then held Anita by the shoulders as a mother might do to a child who had just come in from playing outside.

  “Just look at your hair,” she said excitedly. “Straight and dark like an Indian’s. I’m very jealous. My life’s desire is to be able to tame this top,” she said, tilting her head. “My mother tried, my maids tried, all in vain, I might add. When I was fifteen, my parlor maid burned about half of it off. I wore many hats that year.”

  “I hate hats,” Anita said, laughing.

  “Oh, me too,” Lottie said, smiling with her. “So old-fashioned. If it were up to me, I would spend the entire day lounging in my golf costume. I do love golf. A modern woman’s game. Or I’d be totally nude like the French.”

  She looked at Anita’s surprised face, enjoying her reaction. “You’re going to be an awful lot of fun to shock. That’s apparent already, and it’s scarcely been five minutes. We need to shake a little of that puritanical Boston out of you before the semester’s end or we won’t have any fun at all.” She spun around the room, already comfortable in her roommate’s presence.

  “Did you know a princess lived in this room? A real one. Sutematsu Yamakawa. Or Stematz Yamakawa, as she was known here. She now holds the title of Princess Oyama of Japan. Vassar class of 1882 and the very first Japanese woman to receive a college degree. Ever. You’ve heard the stories about her, have you not?”

  Anita shook her head. She was familiar with the exotic name, but it was clear that Lottie knew the better stories.

  “A woman of legend,” Lottie declared. “President of Philaletheis. President of ’82 her sophomore year. Third in her class. And such penmanship. I’ve seen her letters, barely an inch left without text, and she still keeps in contact with her professors. She married the Japanese minister of war. Isn’t that charming? War is so dramatic, it’s hard not to be taken with it. I curse the world that I wasn’t born before the Civil War. I would have been so good at it. Well, at being supportive. As for Princess Oyama, I hear her husband is afraid that she’ll divulge national secrets, but I’m sure she’ll remain tight-lipped. I plan on meeting her one day quite soon so I’ve been practicing my bow. The royals expect you to bend at a full forty-five-degree angle.”

  Anita had no idea where one heard that a princess might pose a threat to Japanese national security, but she didn’t doubt Lottie.

  “I can’t even recount to you the lies I had to tell to secure us these rooms,” said Lottie, fluttering her eyelashes as if she’d been caught in a rainstorm. “I made up a whole to-do about not being able to sleep unless I could see straight down the dusty drive to the Lodge. Then I added some nonsense about extreme claustrophobia and an incurable passion for the architecture of James Renwick. But it was worth it, I’m sure you’ll agree.”

  Anita looked at her in awe and nodded.

  “I’m simply enamored with Japan. This school is so backward not teaching the Asian languages,” said Lottie, looking wistfully at the room’s décor, most of it picked up during her travels in the Orient.

  “Caroline Hardin will teach you off-color words in Arabic if you bring her molasses candy,” Anita offered.

  “Caroline can eat all the candy she wants. Arabia does not interest me. The art is poor, and there isn’t enough fish to eat.” Lottie sucked in her cheeks and pursed her lips, making little underwater noises. Anita wasn’t sure which world Lottie had sprung from, but she was already convinced it was one she wanted to be a part of.

  “Oh, look, our rocking
chair from Uncle Fred,” Lottie said, running her hand over the curved chair that was paid for and placed in every dormitory room by the prominent trustee. “I used to sit in mine all the time last year when I’d had too much to drink. I’d just collapse like a rag doll and sleep it off.”

  “Do you drink often?” her roommate asked, hoping she didn’t sound prudish.

  “Anita, dearest. One has to live a little, don’t you think?” Lottie looked up with her pale, heart-shaped face, which clearly favored mischief over morals.

  “Of course,” Anita replied hastily, though on campus she was noted for her reserve.

  “With your beauty, you are destined to live a dramatic life,” said Lottie, putting her hand on Anita’s chin and studying her face. “Living, really living, is awfully entertaining. We’ll do a lot of it this year, I promise you.” She peered around the room at the wall hangings she had put up before Anita’s arrival. In between the draped blue silk was an exquisite kimono, hand-painted with a mountain scene and cascading pink cherry blossoms on the back.

  “Let’s tack this cloth to the wall by that kimono,” Lottie said, reaching for a few yards of fabric and picking up a scroll painting of evergreen rice paper with her other hand. “The maids go on about cluttering up the room like this, because dust gathers or some nonsense, and they’re worried we’ll burn the whole place down when it falls into the oil lamps, but I don’t care. I am not living in bland quarters. My mind won’t expand. And for me to keep up here, my mind needs a lot of expanding.”

  “I like what you’ve done with it so far. It’s much more striking than my parlor room last year,” her roommate said. Their room looked like a fourteen-by-fourteen-foot advertisement for luxury travel to the Orient.

  Lottie let the fabric drop and admired her work.

  “Well, as I said, I am besotted with Japan at the moment. I traveled to Tokyo and Kyoto in July and August with father, and it was majestic. I can’t even begin to describe the people. So slight, so diminutive and elegant. They walk on wooden shoes, can you imagine? And they wear long silk kimonos and the food is beautifully presented. Plus the fish! You haven’t eaten a fish until you’ve eaten a raw Japanese fish. I know it sounds dreadful, but it’s just the opposite. And then of course there is the actual art. The paintings and calligraphy, the woodblock prints. My father bought an original Hokusai, whose work is causing a sensation in Paris. His name will make it to America soon. We’re behind, of course. Isn’t that always the case? I tried to bring the print here, but you can guess how that conversation terminated. I’m going to sail to Japan again after graduation. Father promised me I could, as long as I’m chaperoned. I want to go all over the Orient. You should accompany me. We’d have a magnificent time.”

  Anita knew that within days of graduation, she would have a sensible teaching job or a scholarship to another school. And not one across the Pacific Ocean.

  “It sounds splendid,” Anita said noncommittally, diverting the conversation from any future plans.

  “I am so taken with Orientals,” said Lottie. “They have the most marvelous features.” She picked up the hammer and headed to the wall above the ornate lacquer tea table, delivered from overseas just that morning.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked, after she had already put the first hole in the plaster.

  “Not at all,” Anita answered honestly.

  “I told father that I was going to marry the future emperor of Japan, Crown Prince Yoshihito,” she said with her back turned and a nail between her teeth again. “And he said he would shoot me first. He meant it, too. He has several guns and a terrible temper.” She spat out the nail so she could be better heard. “It’s not like I said I was going to run off with a despondent railroad worker with an opium pipe. A sensitive man, my father, but a real modern person despite it all. I forgave him because he’s originally from Pittsburgh, and people from Pittsburgh are natural brutes. It’s a good thing my mother was born in New York or I would be an absolute lost cause and never get invited anywhere of note. Mrs. Astor has a real disdain for people from Pittsburgh.”

  She looked around the room again and jumped onto the small green velvet couch.

  “Come, Anita, let’s tack this all up to the walls and make this room look like a palace.” She grabbed her roommate by the hand and handed her a small nail and the hammer she had been using. “You try this. I’ll wield my Latin dictionary. It will have the most use it’s had in years. Just be mindful of the noise because if Mervis hears us, we’re sure to get fined.”

  “Fined?” Anita asked, crossing to the opposite wall.

  “It’s worth it, don’t you think? I was fined at the start of every semester last year, but we can’t be expected to live in some desolate chamber. How will we learn anything? You should have seen my parlor as a freshman. That was the year I was absolutely taken with the French Revolution. This year’s décor will be decidedly cheaper, as the Japanese really do have a simpler aesthetic. Plus, if my father doesn’t receive fines from the college, he will think I’m in ill health and have lost my spirit. This,” she said, motioning to the room, “is in everybody’s best interest.”

  The roommates finished tacking up the silk just as Mervis came in with their trunks, grunting about the walls. Lottie smiled sweetly and told him to make out the bill to Mr. Clarence Taylor, then she sent for a maid who helped the pair put away their dresses.

  “I’m starving,” Lottie declared after she had placed her silver hairbrush on the table by her bed and her silver inkstand on the writing table. Anita had done the same in her room with her modest belongings.

  “How about we walk over for an ice cream at the Dutchess? Is there still time to get a leave of absence to go to town?” Lottie asked.

  “I believe the Dutchess is closed now. It’s nearly six o’clock,” Anita replied, looking at the gold clock by Lottie’s bed. “The dinner bell will ring soon.”

  “Not those awful bells,” said Lottie, sticking her tongue out like a gargoyle. “Isn’t it horrible that we have to run around listening to the cling clang of old bells? The rising hour bell, the dinner bell, the chapel bell—I feel like the Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

  Anita laughed and said, “You don’t look it.”

  “Really?” Lottie said, puffing up her cheeks. “I feel quite like a French hunchback today. I hate the sleeves on this dress,” she added, trying to pull them up at the shoulder. “I told my seamstress in Paris to make them bigger, but she’s so conservative and her answer to everything is ‘Non, ma chérie.’ Not shockingly, she makes my mother’s day clothes, and I tend to hate my mother’s day clothes. For eveningwear I much prefer the House of Worth, but mother said I wasn’t allowed to train up in my Lyon silk. Anyway, you should go on. I know you were voted class beauty as a freshman. Don’t try to deny it. And I heard all about you and your big, beautiful brown eyes from a few of my Harvard acquaintances, too.”

  Anita’s surprised look caused Lottie to elaborate. “I said acquaintances, Anita. Don’t tell me you believe all of that gossip. One little dalliance during the Harvard-Yale game as a sophomore and I’m a scorned woman. Vassar girls sure can talk. I don’t have a flaxen-haired daughter hidden in a convent in Switzerland, if you happen to be wondering.”

  “I hadn’t heard that one,” Anita replied, thoroughly entertained.

  “Well, I don’t. What I do have is a younger brother in his junior year at Harvard, and he told me that you were quite the talk of the school after our Founder’s Day dance last spring. Many Harvard men in attendance, if you remember. Yes, I launched an inquisition on you, Miss Hemmings.”

  It was unfortunate that Anita hadn’t done the same.

  As Anita contemplated what rooming with Lottie Taylor would mean for her final year at Vassar, she heard a light knock on their parlor door.

  “Come in!” bellowed Lottie in her low, raspy voice. Anita speculated that Lottie’s voice was half the reason so many rumors circulated about her. There was something qui
te intoxicating about it.

  The door opened slowly, and a tall girl bounded in, earning smiles from both roommates. Belle Tiffany, an alto in the choir and the Glee Club, was one of Anita’s closest friends.

  “Belle Tiffany! Look at you,” said Lottie. “See, I’m rooming with your old friend Anita Hemmings. The beautiful girls with the soaring voices. What will I do with myself around both of you? I need to develop a skill. I’m a terrible disappointment.”

  “You’re exceedingly rich,” said Belle, looking at the decorated walls. “And I suppose you’re amusing, too.”

  “That’s true. I am awfully funny,” said Lottie, hopping onto the couch again. “Matthew Ellery, Lucy Ellery’s brother up at Harvard, he was my Phil date last year, and he said I was the most entertaining girl he had ever known. Then he said men aren’t supposed to be fond of girls who favor humor over femininity. But then when I laughed and said I found the whole thing quite amusing, the beast leaned over and kissed me. And I mean kissed. Not just with his mouth, with his entire body, especially the middle. If we hadn’t been clothed, who knows what would have happened?”

  “Lottie, stop trying to shock. We’re seniors now. We’re immune to your alarming ways,” said Belle.

  “Speak for yourself. I’m sure I’ll make Anita Hemmings faint before the semester is over. Besides, do you want me to graduate without so much as kissing a few Harvard seniors?”

  “Most say you’ve done quite a bit more than that,” teased Belle.

  “Belle, don’t start rumors. Even if they are true,” said Lottie, catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror propped on her dressing table. “And Anita, try not to look as if you’re going to wilt. I’ll burn your books if I have to—it’s our last year here, and I won’t spend it stuck in Uncle Fred’s Nose reading Beowulf.”

  “You read Beowulf as a freshman. You aren’t required to read it again,” said Belle. “And have as much fun as you want, Lottie, just remember that you should graduate like the rest of us or your father will write you out of his will.” Belle winked at Anita. “Lottie’s father is a major financial supporter of women’s education. He was asked to be a trustee, but he said not until his daughter had graduated. Did you hear that, Lottie? Critical detail, graduated.”