My Aunt Helen said, “Won’t it be so nice and cool, enjoying the ocean breezes at the Oriental Hotel?”
With that, my brother slammed his fist on the table so hard the crystal shuddered. “No. I don’t want to go there. I don’t!”
Lydia said, “Please, Lawrence. It’s for the best.”
“The best for you,” he said, pushing his chair away from the table. “For Mr. Henry Taul.” My brother stomped out of the room, his face twisted in disgust, as I watched every single other person at the table – with the exception of Dr. Mackenzie – peer at me with apprehension.
As well they should.
Now I could begin to make sense of this strange plan to spend the summer at a Brooklyn ocean-side hotel. It wasn’t anything that my own family would ordinarily want to do, I was right about that. But it was something that Colorado-born Henry Taul might fancy, and pleasing him was of utmost importance to not only my sister Lydia, who this year became his fiancée, but my mother and my uncle and all of the Batternbergs.
Henry Taul was heir to his own mining fortune. He was also a man of sudden, unmovable enthusiasms. I knew this quite well, because just over two years before proposing to my sister, he had chosen me as the object of one of his enthusiasms. It was a brief romance, and it ended badly. Henry and myself, Lydia, my mother, and absolutely everyone else united in acting as if it never happened.
I opened my mouth, preparing my accusation, when something caught my eye. It was Lydia. I saw her fingers quiver on the spoon handle resting beside the bowl. Her eyes, brimmed with golden eyelashes, sent me a message of pleading.
I closed my mouth. I’d not say anything, or do anything, until we’d spoken, just the two of us.
If only I could have taken Lydia by the hand to the next room and had our talk at that moment. But instead I had to endure the next three courses, complete with chocolate-raspberry cake, all of it too heavy for summer. I took note that Lydia had barely touched her meal.
After another tedious hour of conversation over cards with my aunt and uncle before, mercifully, they departed, Lydia and I headed up the stairs to her room. She shook her head at me while our personal maid, Alice, launched into the lengthy procedure of taking down my sister’s hair. It seemed this was too sensitive even for Alice, an efficient and understanding woman nearing thirty who we both liked very much.
Finally, finally, Lydia and I were alone.
“So this is Henry Taul’s project for the summer?” I asked. “You go at his insistence?”
She nodded and gnawed on her thumbnail, something that would horrify my mother if she were to see it. “He loves the Oriental Hotel, he made all the arrangements for our suites,” she said. “Henry said the sea air will benefit his mother’s health.”
“But why do I have to be a part of this?” I demanded. “Henry doesn’t care about me. I would think that my presence would be a deterrent, if anything.”
“It’s his mother, Peggy. She knows about you, and I don’t think she approves of a young woman having any kind of job – I suppose that they are not as progressive in Colorado or Connecticut, where she has a new house – and, I’m so, so sorry, but Henry told me that his mother insists that you join us this summer. She wants to become better acquainted with us all.”
“So Henry and his mother will be at the same hotel as us for the entire time?”
“She’s in Brooklyn now. She’s taking the sea water cure for her legs. Something to do with circulation. I’ve met her twice; I believe she weighs close to three hundred pounds.”
I buried my face in my hands. “Lord, I can’t do this, Lydia. A summer in Brooklyn with Mother – and Henry Taul and his mother? It would be so like hell.”
I didn’t look at her. I waited for the sound of weeping. And waited. It didn’t come.
I opened my eyes to peer at my sister. She wasn’t weeping or trembling, but staring into the mirror, at her own reflection. Her chin was thrust forward, in that angry bulldog stance she used to take as a child.
While I watched her watch herself, I thought about the strange reversal that took place between us. I was once the romance-minded young female, lost in a haze of Charlotte Bronte, and she was a vigorous hoyden, pestering our parents for tennis lessons and archery lessons. Everything changed when Father died. I became a different person, as did Lydia. She became, while not exactly demure, a fashionable creature, tremendously popular among friends in a way that I’d never come close to – not that I cared about that. The only time she defied convention was to refuse a coming out party, every debutante’s dream.
We had quarreled over her engagement to Henry Taul. Not out of jealousy on my part, but my lingering dislike of the man. Every time I tried to sway her from her attachment, it went poorly. In our last argument, she’d snapped at me to never criticize her choice of husband again if I wished to come to the wedding, and I’d retorted that missing the wedding would be a treat, not a punishment.
But nothing could ever destroy the bond between us. It wasn’t built on shared interests or cherished memories. It was a sort of camaraderie; we were like fellow soldiers in the same battalion who’d miraculously managed to survive. I understood her in a way no one else could.
“It’s not just my future at stake,” she said. “It’s the rest of us, too. You know Father died in debt? Uncle David said he’d break the news to you.”
This was Mother’s true plan – marrying a daughter to Henry Taul, who upon his father’s death would come into a fortune that rivaled the Batternbergs’.
“Uncle David told me,” I said. “I’m in possession of the facts.”
I felt a spasm of guilt. In the last two years, I’d cared only about myself, endeavoring to separate from my family, holding myself aloof and spending time with school friends or family in Paris or any other pursuit away from Seventy-Second Street. I had abandoned her to the demands of our mother, and I now saw she meant everything to Sarah Batternberg – my sister was both tool and savior.
“Come with us, Peggy,” Lydia pleaded. “It’s just for the summer. Wouldn’t you be taking a holiday anyway from that book shop?”
My younger sister had no idea of what it meant to hold a job, that one didn’t take a school-length summer holiday. But that was not what bothered me most about all of this.
I said, “You can’t mean his marrying you depends on my accompanying you to the Oriental Hotel? That I matter so much in this… equation.”
She tore at her thumbnail again. “Everything matters right now. Everything. He hasn’t set a date. We’ve been engaged for months, but we don’t have a wedding date.”
I didn’t know that. I’d assumed the wedding was arranged for some misty future point; long engagements were the custom.
“Well, what does Henry say about it?”
Lydia seized a brush and worked it through her hair, still tightly coiled because of all the pinning.
“Lydia, what does he say when you ask?” I repeated. The tension of our situation was becoming unbearable.
“I don’t ask. Ever. How can I?” Lydia tore through her hair with the silver-backed brush. It had to be painful, but she kept at it.
She’d shouted at me and threatened me, but I must try again. I could rescue Lydia; this was the moment. I grabbed her arm to put a stop to the brushing. “And you want to marry Henry and spend your life with him – a man who makes you feel this way?”
“Yes, Peggy. Yes, I want nothing but to marry Henry.” Her voice broke into hysteria. “Yes, yes, yes.”
She dropped the brush and stood there, staring at me. Her exquisite features, her perfectly shaped eyes and nose and mouth, were stretched to the breaking point by fear, by lack of sleep or food. Just underneath the beauty hovered something else, something pointed and… feral. I felt a chill of real fear.
“I’ll go with you to the Oriental Hotel, Lydia,” I heard myself say. “I’ll do it.”
My sister collapsed into my arms. “Thank you, thank you.”
It
was only then that the sobbing came, like a dam breaking. I held her, patting her narrow back and sharp little shoulder blades, like a bird’s wings, until she cried herself out and finally became still.
CHAPTER FOUR
The gratitude my family felt at my acquiescence lasted through the next week of packing and shopping and arranging matters. It seemed the season officially began at these Brooklyn hotels the first week of July. All the frantic preparation for our seven-week stay seemed more fitting for a journey to Malta, not another part of New York City.
It must have required considerable effort, but my mother did not criticize her difficult, perpetually disappointing older daughter beyond insisting that I be fitted for new summer clothes, for sporting as well as formal occasions. Everything needed to be patterned, stitched, and sent to Seventy-Second Street as soon as possible. My figure is a bit tricky for clothes, with my short waist and very long legs. I submitted to all the measuring and pulling without expressing my own preferences over color or fit or pattern, with the exception of two dresses for evening. It didn’t much matter to me. I couldn’t shake the feeling that these were uniforms for a prisoner, not holiday clothes.
No matter the efforts everyone made, the veneer of goodwill in my family was thin indeed – so thin that twice it cracked before we left town. Monday morning, I woke up and dressed in my work wardrobe. I would need to make my way to the shop, explain the situation to Mrs. Hamilton-Starke, gather my things from the table, and say goodbye to Sylvie and the others.
To my surprise, my mother and sister stood before the front door, hands clasped before them. They were twenty-five years apart in age, yet it struck me how eerily similar they were at this moment.
“You don’t have to go to Moonrise Bookstore,” said Lydia. “Everything has been explained.”
“Explained?” I repeated. “By whom?”
“Your uncle called the owner, Mrs. Hamilton-Starke,” my mother said.
“Uncle David? How dare he?” I stormed toward the door.
“No, it was Uncle Bernard.”
That made me stop mid-stride. Bernard was the oldest of the brothers, and his actions could never be questioned. That’s how it had worked my entire life. When it came to seniority, we could have been the Plantagenets of the thirteenth century. The oldest brother carried the most weight in the family business and had the most authority over our activities, whether it be tutors or schools chosen, even holiday destinations planned. Bernard’s intervention in this matter shocked me, though. I found it difficult to comprehend that my joining my family on a summer stay at the Oriental Hotel could be this important, that it necessitated a phone call from him.
“But there are my things to fetch at the store,” I said weakly. “It’s not much, but still—”
“A box will be delivered this afternoon with everything packed,” my mother said.
Lydia aimed her pleading gaze at me.
Turning to her, I said directly, “I can’t just disappear to my coworkers, surely you understand.”
“But couldn’t you send a nice note?” Lydia asked. “And you will see them all when we get back at the end of summer.”
A few gracious sentences, written with a quill on my mother’s best cream-colored stationery, sealed and delivered by hand to Moonrise Bookstore? I could only imagine Sylvie’s face when presented with something so ridiculous. Again I realized that to my sister, my leaving the store was the equivalent of a school holiday.
My mother said, “I very much feel it’s best to leave it with your uncle. We are enjoying having you back in the house, Margaret.”
I almost did it: swerve around them to push open the door and make my way to Thirty-Seventh Street. But what would be said when I arrived? Uncle Bernard had made his call. Should there be unpleasantness with the Batternbergs, what would my employer do? Cousin Marshall was an investor in Moonrise. I wasn’t hired on my merits, after all.
Defeated, I turned away from the door and retreated to my room. I changed out of my slim skirt and plain blouse. I didn’t write Sylvie any kind of note, but I put the clothes in a special bag and secreted it away.
As unsettling as that confrontation was, it paled when compared to a tea party two days before we left Manhattan for the Oriental Hotel. My mother loved her tea parties.
I’d slipped out for a walk in Central Park that afternoon. I needed its solace during those tense days of preparation. Everyone complained about the crowds in Central Park, but I found it soothing to join the park-goers in their anonymity. I liked to walk among the young and old, the couples, the families, the aged, all of us united in enjoyment of the rolling meadows, the ponds and woods. I’d taken to plucking wildflowers from a boulder-spotted corner of the park and bringing them home. I disliked the daily bundles that arrived at Seventy-Second Street from the florist, the roses and lilies arranged with stern symmetry in our thick crystal vases. They were like the trickle of water in the fountain: a labored re-creation of the nature that could easily be found just outside the door in its untamed state.
On my return, I immediately knew Henry Taul was here. A blond man, young, wearing a dark blue, gold-trimmed uniform, sat on a bench by the fountain in our home, studying the marble floor. Henry made all his servants wear uniforms. He glanced up, spotted me, and gave me a long look; he had a nose slightly flattened as if from a long-ago fight. Even Henry’s employees were arrogant.
In the downstairs parlor sat my mother, smiling, before her towering silver tea service. Cucumber sandwiches and petit fours were arranged on it, perfectly spaced; the hand-painted china cups brimmed with steaming liquid. Just as exquisite as the high-tea presentation was my sister, perched on a chair to the side of my mother, wearing a blue-and-white dress with a sailor collar, her hair gathered behind by a huge bow. My surly brother Lawrence devoured a cookie, sitting in a chair pushed away from everyone else.
Mother caught sight of me in the doorway and her smile became strained. “Oh, Margaret, how… bedraggled,” she said. Whether she was referring to me or to the wildflowers I held in my hand, I couldn’t tell.
“Hullo, Peggy, how are you?” said Henry.
Around the time when he proposed to my sister, Henry began wearing spectacles. They made his expression a bit harder to read than before, but the careless, friendly tone he adopted with me was intact.
“I am well, thank you,” I said, with a touch more formality, placing the wildflowers carefully on the side table.
Henry stood before my family members, arms outstretched, mid-story. He always liked to stand, rather than sit, when acting out a story. It could make for an overwhelming presence, as Henry was more than six feet tall with broad shoulders and legs like tree trunks. He hadn’t yet lost that smooth face, though, at thirty years of age. When he smiled, as he often did, his face widened to a baby’s roundness.
He was completely comfortable in this room, though its décor was largely feminine. The lingering remnants of my father’s time were the round cognac bottles lined up on a silver tray and the brown carpet made out of a real bear, complete with its staring, sharp-toothed head. Most guests steered clear of the bear carpet. Henry stood right on top of it.
My mother said, “Henry was telling us about the highlights of his trip to Europe.”
Ah, these travels might explain his failing to set a wedding date with Lydia. I sensed no strain between them, no lack of feeling. My sister looked happier in Henry’s presence than at any moment over the last week.
Henry resumed his acting out a story; it seemed that he had spent days at the site in France devoted to Joan of Arc. The Maid of Orleans had made quite an impression, which seemed odd to me, but everyone who encountered Henry Taul found him odd at first. You had to get used to him.
My mind wandered as Henry droned on about Joan of Arc. I summoned up an image of G.T. Samuels and his mysterious smile. My brother Lawrence devoured more cookies as my mother and sister hung on Henry’s every word.
I was jolted back into the co
nversation by Henry who, with a grand flourish, presented Lydia with a small, gift-wrapped box.
“Is it for me?” she breathed.
“Who else?” Henry said, with a chortle.
Who else indeed, I thought, as I watched her delicately pick apart the wrappings, open the box, and, wide-eyed, pull out a gold pendant set with a dazzling crystal.
She thanked him profusely while my mother praised the pendant’s design. Henry insisted that he put it on Lydia now, right away, and the sight of this smug, strapping man bent over my diminutive sister, dressed like a child, sent a peculiar shudder through me.
“Do you know what the crystal symbolizes?” Henry said fervently. “It’s innocence – and purity.”
With the word purity, my hand tightened on the handle of the fragile tea cup. I watched Henry closely, but as he fastened the pendant around Lydia’s neck and then admired the way it hung, absurdly, atop her wide sailor collar, he never looked my way, never betrayed for a second that this could be a statement about me, an accusation, that he was thinking of that night, three years ago, when I was Lydia’s age and he’d pulled away, hissing, “Spoiled, you’re spoiled.”
Frantically, I pushed that memory away.
In a swerve in topic, Henry announced that he expected the two owners of the Triangle shirtwaist factory to be found guilty in the trial going on. That was the position all of New York City took – the owners of this factory, where 185 young women died in a searing fire, were abhorrent human beings, unlike any other business owners. I wondered about that, if they were really so atypical.
“The women shouldn’t have been there,” Henry said, shaking his head.
“They couldn’t help but be there, since the owners always locked the doors on those two floors of the factory, to keep the union organizers away,” I pointed out.
He shook his head more emphatically. “I mean, they should not have been there at all. What kind of family sends their seventeen-year-old daughters to work in a factory fifteen hours a day, six days a week?”
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