The Luxe

by Anna Godbersen

  Instinct made Penelope smile even through her misery, and she tipped her head. “Of course,” she answered. Then she watched, alone, from the middle of that epic room, as her future husband disappeared amongst all those ordinary bodies. Penelope knew, despite the still-dancing masses, that for her the party was over.

  Four

  THIS IS TO CERTIFY THAT I, WILLIAM SACKHOUSE SCHOONMAKER, DO LEAVE ALL MY WORLDLY POSSESSIONS, AS ITEMIZED BELOW, INCLUDING ALL HOLDINGS RELATING TO BUSINESS, REAL ESTATE, AND PERSONAL PROPERTY,

  TO _______________.

  HENRY SCHOONMAKER PRETENDED TO STUDY THE piece of paper for another moment, and then he did what he always did when he found something too serious or too boring to bother trying to comprehend. He spread his long thin lips back from his perfectly white teeth and laughed.

  “Awful morbid, Dad,” he said. “We left a party for this?”

  His father stared back at him, large and unsmiling in his black suit and thick, dark muttonchops. William Schoonmaker had small eyes skilled in intimidation and dyed his hair an inky black out of vanity. Because of his frequent turns to rage, his skin was a patchy red, and his mustache curled down around his pink chin. But one could see, under all that, the fine, aristocratic features that he had bequeathed to his son.

  “Everything is a party to you,” his father finally said in reply. Henry saw the father he knew best emerge now—the full, unpleasant personality Mr. Schoonmaker reserved for when he was in his own home or office. Henry had been raised by his governesses, and so his father had always seemed a distant and awesome figure, charging about the house while a fleet of underlings made awkward, obsequious gestures in the vain attempt to please him.

  Henry pushed the sheet of paper back across the polished walnut pedestal table toward his father and stepmother, Isabelle, and hoped he wouldn’t be bothered about it again for the rest of the evening. Isabelle smiled apologetically at him and gave a surreptitious little roll of her eyes. She was twenty-five—only five years older than Henry himself, and they had often been dance partners before her marriage last year to the richest and most powerful of the Schoonmaker men. It was almost strange to see her in his own house; she still looked like Isabelle De Ford, who was always good for a flirt and a laugh. It might have been all about money, but Henry still felt secret respect toward the old man for winning her.

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on Henry,” she said in a high, girlish voice and brushed a golden curl away from her face.

  “Shut up,” his father replied in his deep rasp, without so much as turning to look at her. Isabelle made a frowning face and continued playing with her hair. “Get those silly looks off your faces, both of you. Henry, pour yourself a drink.”

  Henry did not like to appear overly obedient to his father, and they avoided each other enough that indeed he rarely had the opportunity. But there was about his father the rangy, discriminating air of all extraordinarily powerful men, and there was a part of Henry that craved his attention, that longed for the man to notice his actions and approve. At this particular moment, however, he chose to listen to his father because what he most wanted in all the world was a drink. He crossed the room and poured himself a Scotch from one of the cut-glass decanters on the side table.

  The room was dark and heavy with the cigar smoke that attended all his father’s dealings. The walls and ceilings were of ornate carved wood—the virtuoso Italian craftsmanship so familiar to Henry that he barely noticed it anymore. So this was the sort of place where business got done, Henry mused with a touch of wonder. His life was so absolutely crammed with play that the serious mood of this room felt like a foreign territory. Earlier, he had dined at Delmonico’s on Forty-fourth Street, and then there had been an interlude at one of those downtown saloons where one could hear rags and dance with working girls, and then off to Penelope’s grand fete. He got a little perverse thrill from being slightly tipsy in the midst of his father’s serious decor.

  The elder Schoonmaker shifted in his seat. His young bride yawned. “So tell me about you and Miss Hayes,” Henry’s father said abruptly.

  Henry sniffed his drink and studied himself in the mirror over the bar. He had the smooth chin and slender features of a man of leisure, and his dark hair was pomaded to the right. “Penelope?” he repeated thoughtfully. Though he had little or no desire to discuss his romantic entanglements with his father, it was a subject mildly preferable to family wills.

  “Yes,” his father urged him on.

  “Everyone thinks she is one of the great beauties of her generation.” Henry thought of Penelope, with her gigantic eyes and dramatic red dress, which seemed calculated to frighten people as much as to seduce them. He knew from personal experience that Penelope was not frightening—but then, he knew how to enjoy her. He wished he were back at the party, moving her exquisite body across the dance floor.

  “And you?” his father went on. “What do you think?”

  “I very much enjoy her company.” Henry took a sip of Scotch and savored the burning tingle against his lips.

  “So you want to…marry her?” his father asked, leadingly.

  Henry couldn’t help a little snort at that. He caught Isabelle staring at him, and he knew that she was now thinking not like a stepmother, but like all the other girls of New York, obsessing over how and when Henry Schoonmaker would marry. He lit a cigarette and shook his head. “I haven’t met a girl I could think about so seriously, sir. As you have often pointed out, I am not serious about much.”

  “Then Penelope is not someone you could see as your wife,” his father confirmed, leveling his fierce eyes at Henry.

  Henry shrugged, remembering last April when Penelope had been staying in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Her family had left their old house on Washington Square, and the new one wasn’t yet completed. Even though he hardly knew her, she’d invited him up to the suite she’d had all to herself and welcomed him in nothing more than stockings and a shirtwaist. “No, Dad. I don’t think so.”

  “But the way you were dancing…” He paused. “Never mind. If you don’t want to marry her, that’s good. Very good.” He clapped, stood, and came around the table to tower over Henry. “Now, who do you think would make a good wife?”

  “For me?” Henry asked, managing to keep his face straight.

  “Yes, you good-for-nothing boulevardier,” his father spat out, his momentary good humor quickly evaporating. The famous Schoonmaker rage was one parental touch that Henry had not been deprived of in his childhood, and it had arisen at everything from broken toys to bad manners. William Schoonmaker sat down noisily in the baby-soft leather club chair next to Henry. “You don’t think I’m just idly curious about your paramours, do you?”

  “No, sir,” Henry replied, blinking his dark lashes at his father. “I do not.”

  “Then you’re smarter than I give you credit for.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Henry said, meaning it. He wished his voice wouldn’t get so small at times like these.

  “Henry, I find your louche lifestyle personally offensive.” His father stood again, pushing the club chair backward across the parquet floor, and began circling the table. “And I am not the only one.”

  “I’m sorry for that, Dad, but it’s my lifestyle, not yours,” Henry replied. He had regained his voice and was forcing himself to keep his gaze steady in his father’s direction. “Or anybody else’s.”

  “Possible, but doubtful,” his father went on, “since it is my money—inherited, yes, but multiplied many times over by my hard work—that has allowed your lifestyle.”

  “Are you threatening me with poverty?” Henry asked, glancing at the will as he lit a new cigarette with the old one. He tried to look careless as he exhaled, but even saying the word poverty gave him an unpleasant feeling in his stomach. The word had a sick lilt to it, he had always thought. His first semester at Harvard he had shared a suite with a scholarship boy named Timothy Marfield—his father’s idea of character-building, Henry later di
scovered. Timothy’s father clerked twelve-hour days at a Boston bank to pay his son’s tuition, and Henry liked Tim, who knew all the best watering holes in Cambridge. But it was the first time Henry had ever really thought about someone doing that soul-crushing thing called working, and the realization still haunted him.

  “Not exactly. Poverty does not become a Schoonmaker,” his father finally answered. “I am here to suggest an alternative course. One I think you will find far more palatable than an empty bank account,” he went on, lowering his head and staring into his son’s eyes. “Marriage.”

  “You want me to marry?” Henry asked, fighting back a laugh. There was no one less marriageable in all of New York, and even those sycophantic, underpaid society columnists knew that. He tried to picture a girl with whom he would actually want to trip across the lawns of Newport or the decks of European luxury liners forever—but his powers of imagination failed him. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I certainly am.” His father glowered at him.

  “Oh.” Henry shook his head slowly, hoping to appear to be considering his father’s proposal. “There would have to be a long search, of course, to find a girl worthy of becoming a Mrs. Schoonmaker…” he offered.

  “Shut up, Henry.” His father wheeled back around the room and put his large hands on his young wife’s shoulders. She smiled uncomfortably. “You see, I already have someone in mind.”

  “What?” Henry said, his cool beginning to evaporate.

  “Someone with class and sophistication and good family breeding. Someone whom the press likes and will embrace as your bride. As a Mrs. Schoonmaker, Henry. Someone who will come across as a conduit of civility and culture. I am thinking of—”

  “Why do you care?” Henry interrupted. He was fully mad now and standing. Isabelle made a little gasping noise when she saw the two Schoonmaker men facing each other down.

  “Why do I care?” his father roared, pacing around the table.

  “Why do I care? Because I have ambitions, Henry, unlike you. You don’t seem to understand that every move you make is reported in the society pages. And the people I care about read those pages—however silly they are—and they talk. You make us all look ridiculous, Henry. With your dropping out of college and running around town…Every time you open your mouth, you tarnish the family name.”

  “Doesn’t answer my question,” Henry shot back. His father, with his explosive temper and famous love of money, would seem to have satisfied quite a few ambitions already. He had built a railroad company from scratch and made it hugely profitable, had treated the tenements built on his family’s ancestral lands like his own personal mint, and had married two society beauties and buried one. “I really don’t get it, Dad,” Henry said. “What do you want?”

  Isabelle’s small, pointed elbows came excitedly to the table. “William wants to run for office!” she blurted.

  “What?” Henry’s face puckered. He was unable to disguise his incredulity. “What office?”

  His father looked almost embarrassed by the revelation, and it quieted the tension in the room. “I’ve been talking to my friend from Albany, and he wagered me that…” Mr. Schoonmaker trailed off and then shrugged his shoulders. Henry knew that his father was a longtime friend and rival of Governor Roosevelt’s, and he nodded at him to continue. “I admire the man’s call to public service,” William enunciated, his voice growing warm and stately. “Who says the noble class should not be involved in politics? It is our noblesse oblige. Man is nothing if he cannot rule his world in his time and leave it better off when he departs for—”

  “You don’t have to give me the speech,” Henry interrupted, rolling his eyes. He was infuriated by this stroke of bad luck. “What office do you want, anyway?”

  “Mayor first, and then—” his father started.

  “And then who knows!” Isabelle broke in. “If he becomes president, I will be the first lady.”

  “Well, congratulations, sir.” Henry sat back down dejectedly.

  “So there will be no embarrassing me anymore. No more tales of your wildness in the papers. No more bad publicity,” the elder Schoonmaker pronounced. “Now you see why you must marry a lady. Not a Penelope. A girl with morals, whom the voters like. A girl who will make you look respectable. A girl…” Henry watched as his father leaned a hip against the table and pretended to have an idea. He raised his eyebrows at Isabelle. “A girl like Elizabeth Holland, say.”

  “What?” Henry snapped. He knew the older Holland girl, of course, although he hadn’t had a conversation with her since before he went to Harvard, and she had been very young and gangly then. She was impeccably beautiful, it was true, with her ash blond hair and small, rounded mouth, but she was so obviously one of them. She was a rule-follower, a tea-sipper, a sender of embossed thank-you cards. “Elizabeth Holland is all manners.”

  “Exactly.” His father pounded his fist on the table, which caused the golden liquid in Henry’s snifter to slosh back and forth.

  Henry couldn’t speak, but he knew his face was twisted with outrage and disbelief. His father could not have suggested a poorer match. What he had prescribed for his son was nothing short of a prison sentence. He could feel the life of quiet gentility already rolling out before him, like the endless manicured lawns on which so many narcoleptic garden parties had been held by the matrons of his class, in Tuxedo Park and Newport, Rhode Island, and all those other places.

  “Henry,” his father said warningly. He snatched up the piece of paper and waved it in the air. “I know what you’re thinking, and you should stop it. Now. I want you married and respectable. You will have to do away with Penelope. I am giving you an opportunity here, Henry.” He paused. “But God help me, if you cross me, I’ll see that every damn picture frame goes to Isabelle. I will throw you out and it will be very swift, and very, very public.”

  The thought of a brown future of threadbare clothing and rotting teeth made Henry feel suddenly, horribly sober, and his eyes drifted to the bottles crowded together on the sideboard. For a moment, he wished he could go back to Harvard—all the readings and lectures had seemed so pointless when he was there, but he saw now how college might have been a way for him to carve his own path, to guard against these threats of pennilessness. It was too late for that now.

  His bad behavior and pathetic marks ensured that, without his father’s intervention, he would never have a place there again. Henry stared into the silent amber bottles and knew that the only route to independence left to him was through the quiet, deathlike boredom of a life with Elizabeth Holland.

  Five

  The ideal ladies’ maid will be awake before her mistress, with warm water for washing the face, and will not go to sleep until she has undressed her mistress for bed. She may require a nap during the day, when her mistress does not need her.

  ––VAN KAMP’S GUIDE TO HOUSEKEEPING FOR LADIES OF HIGH SOCIETY, 1899 EDITION

  LINA BROUD REARRANGED HER ELBOWS ON THE SILL and stared out into the tranquil darkness surrounding Gramercy Park. She had been sitting this way for many hours, in the bedroom where she had dressed the elder of the Misses Holland in layers of chemise, poplin, whalebone, and steel earlier that evening. Miss Holland—no longer Lizzie, as she had been called in childhood, or Liz, as she let her sister call her, but Miss Holland, the junior lady of the house. Lina was not looking forward to her return. Elizabeth had been away for so many months that her personal maid had almost forgotten what it felt like to serve. But from the very moment that morning when Elizabeth had reentered the house, she had gone about reminding Lina precisely what was expected of her.

  She scrunched up her shoulders and sighed as she dropped them. She was not like her older sister, Claire, an altogether softer person, content to read the latest Cité Chatter in the narrow attic bedroom that they shared, gazing at drawings of the Worth gowns she herself would never wear. Claire was twenty-one, only four years older than her sister, but acted as though she were Lina’s mot
her. Since their real mother had been dead for years, in many ways she was. But Claire was also childlike in her gratitude for every little trinket the Hollands bestowed upon her. Lina could not bring herself to feel the same way.

  She shifted in her simple black linen dress, with its boat neck and low, dowdy waist, taking in the luxury of Elizabeth’s bedroom: the robin’s-egg-blue wallpaper, the wide mahogany sleigh bed, the shiny silver bathtub with heated water piped through the walls, the perfume of peonies erupting from porcelain pitchers. Since Elizabeth had come out, she had begun to fancy herself an expert on the decoration of interiors, and if asked, she likely would have said that the Holland rooms were really rather modest. Well, compared with the ridiculous mansions of Fifth Avenue millionaires, perhaps they were. It seemed to Lina, sitting under the small Dutch painting of the quaint domestic scene in the big gold frame, that Elizabeth had become blind to her own extraordinary privilege.

  But Lina did not hate Elizabeth. Could not hate her, no matter how much she distanced herself with elaborate clothing and fine manners. Elizabeth had always been Lina’s model for how to act and be, a glimmer of hope that she would not always live a life so simple and plain. And it was Elizabeth who had convinced her, one night ten years ago, that they must go downstairs—all the way to the carriage house—to find out who was wailing in the middle of the night. Lina had been scared, but Elizabeth had insisted. That was when Lina had first come to love Will Keller, who was beautiful even then.

  Will had been orphaned at the age of eight by one of those fires that blew through the tenements like they were kindling, trapping men and babies in dark closets. Will, who had been taken in by his father’s former employers with the understanding that he would serve, even at that tender age, had wailed when he dreamed of fires. Though it didn’t matter very long after that, because he stopped dreaming of those things when Lina and Elizabeth became his friends.