––FROM THE “GAMESOME GALLANT” COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK IMPERIAL, SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1899
SUNDAY WAS ELIZABETH HOLLAND’S SORT OF DAY, which was one of the reasons that Diana had first come to despise it. She hated Sundays because they usually started with church and ended with informal visiting hours, although informal was a completely erroneous way of describing these visits, as everything was done appropriately and triple-chaperoned by their mother, their divorced aunt Edith, and a small army of help. At any rate, there had been no church this morning, because—as their mother had explained on the stair as they approached the parlor—they were going to have to have a very serious talk.
They were now situated in that prison of a room—that was how it seemed to Diana, anyway, when she was forced to sit there for hours and act ladylike—amidst an embarrassment of riches. The floors were crowded with Persian carpets and the walls with gold-framed oil canvases of all sizes, depicting, among other things, the stern faces of their ancient relatives. Above the wainscoting, the walls were covered with embossed olive-colored leather, which ended only at the carved mahogany of the ceiling. The moldings were filigreed with gold, and the fireplace, with its marble mantel, was large enough to crawl into, as Diana and Elizabeth had often done when they were children, and which the younger Miss Holland sometimes still imagined doing during particularly boring visiting hours. Everywhere she looked, there was something delicate or silky or rare that Diana was at constant risk of staining or scuffing.
There were plenty of places to sit, settees and chaises in a jumble of styles were arranged across the floor, but the room had never been comfortable since her father died. He had always said that there was humor in everything, and had tempered Mrs. Holland’s formal hostessing style with sotto voce sarcasms. Diana wasn’t sure if Sunday afternoons had ever been fun, but they had been at least bearable then. Since her coming out, Elizabeth had assumed her role with extreme seriousness, while Diana developed the habit of retreating to the Turkish corner, where dozens of striped and tasseled pillows were heaped on the floor. She was there now, curled up with the Hollands’ oversize Persian cats, Lillie Langtry and Desdemona. Diana had always known it was her father she took after, temperamentally. They were the romantics, while her mother and Elizabeth remained aloof and practical.
“What is it, Mother?” Elizabeth asked, arranging herself on her usual settee, underneath the great portrait of their father wearing his top hat and finest black suit, a little wild about the eyebrows and looking miffed as usual by the world’s stupidity. Diana wished he were still there in person to watch over them. Then he would give Elizabeth one of his looks, and she would feel foolish for reigning over Sunday visits with such insufferable imperiousness. “What did you want to talk to us about?” Elizabeth went on, folding her hands in her lap just so.
Diana thought she saw a streak of fear pass through her older sister’s face, but then she was composed again. Their mother stood and moved to the fireplace, her slight frame looking especially severe in her heavy black high-collared dress. Her hair was pulled back tightly under her widow’s cap. She stood looking into the fireplace, where a few unlit logs lay in wait. Aunt Edith waved Claire, who had been serving tea, out of the room.
“First, I want to tell you how pleased I was to see your glowing reviews in the press. They were absolutely full of your beauty, Elizabeth, and that will be very…” Mrs. Holland paused ominously until Claire disappeared behind the parlor’s pocket doors. “…useful to us in a difficult time.”
“What do you mean?” Elizabeth asked, her smile turning brittle.
Mrs. Holland turned to look at them, her gaze piercing even from across the parlor. “It is imperative that what I am about to tell you does not become known.”
“Oh, everything gets known eventually,” Diana put in sagaciously. She found her mother’s theatrics vaguely ridiculous, though she couldn’t deny her growing curiosity. What did she have to be so terribly grave about?
“Not things about families like ours,” Aunt Edith offered from her seat at the little malachite-topped card table. Diana had spent all summer in Saratoga with her, during which time her aunt had often commented on how alike they were in looks and desires. Aunt Edith’s marriage had been short and difficult, and it was true that the extent of Duke Guillermo de Garza’s debauchery had never really gotten out. But it seemed to Diana that her aunt had bought this discretion by living a decade or more in boredom.
“Mother, what is it?” Elizabeth went on, ignoring her sister. “When father died, that was a difficult time.”
Diana moved her eyes away from her sister, who was using the soft voice that implied sadness, and sighed. She missed her father every day, but it was a tragedy he would have wanted them to feel and then move on from. Edward Holland would not have wanted them to wallow for the rest of their lives in sanctimonious grief.
“But now Diana and I are back,” Elizabeth continued in her normal, brighter voice, “and determined to enjoy the season. We are ready to get on with things.”
“That’s just it.” Mrs. Holland moved to a fan-backed chair near Elizabeth and rested her arm on its ormolu edges.
“Not all of the consequences of your father’s death were immediately obvious. It seems getting on will be much more difficult than you think. We shall have to keep a minimal staff, and I’m afraid there will be no more tutor. Elizabeth, you will oversee your sister’s studies. You see, girls…” She paused and touched the center of her forehead lightly.
Diana was now fully at attention. She sensed that something thrillingly dramatic was about to be announced, and she pushed herself up from the pillows so that she could really hear it. Elizabeth’s hands were still in the same position, and she kept her face low, so that no one could see her features.
“I barely understand it myself,” their mother went on, her voice growing almost impatient, “though Brennan has explained it to me so many times. It seems that when your father died, he left a tangle of debt and a paucity of…of money. We are still Hollands, of course, of the Holland line—that means something.” She rolled her eyes up to the ceiling and made a curious noise from her throat as though she might cry. “But we are not well off,” she added finally. “Not anymore.”
Elizabeth brought her hand to her mouth. And though Diana could see her mother’s great distress, and was well aware that her sister was having the entirely appropriate reaction to this news, she could not help but clasp her hands together. “We’re poor,” she breathed excitedly as three sets of horrified eyes fixed on her.
“Diana, please,” her mother hissed. She turned to her younger daughter with a look of horror.
“Oh, I know, I know,” Diana said cheerfully. She couldn’t believe such a romantic thing was happening to her. She felt like she was at the edge of a great precipice and that no matter what she did next, her life would be like floating through air. She felt positively free. “No more jewels, no more shipments from the Paris milliner…But I am going to wear it like a badge of honor. It will be so much fun! We’ll be like tarnished princesses in a Balzac novel, like—”
“Diana!” Mrs. Holland interrupted her.
“But we could really be anything now! Hoboes or train robbers, and we could go to Cuba or France or…” Diana finally stopped speaking when she noticed that her sister’s mouth was moving without producing words.
Mrs. Holland looked at Diana grimly and then turned to her older daughter. “Now, Elizabeth, you can see why everything, absolutely everything depends on you. On you and what you are able to accomplish by the end of the season. I was hoping—”
Mrs. Holland was interrupted by Claire, who was sliding open the parlor’s heavy pocket doors. She stood with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes on the floor. “Pardon me, Mrs. Holland,” Claire enunciated carefully. “You have a visitor. Mr. Teddy Cutting has left his card in the foyer and would like to know if you are at home.”
Mrs. Holland took a deep breath, fo
rced an almost frightening smile, and told her to send him in. A flurry of activity followed, as the Holland women attempted the appearance of normalcy, and then they welcomed their first Sunday visitor with a touch of extra hostessing zeal.
Diana was not the sort of girl who wore powders or rouge. She liked her emotions to play themselves out on her skin, and she could not now hide, even in her remote corner of the room, how ridiculous she thought this all was. She had been dying for something to do with her afternoon—nay, her life—and now that she was blessed with the saintly shroud of poverty, maybe she would be able to find it. The rest of her family was blockheadedly acting as though everything were the same, as though they were still as rich as anybody who might stop by, but Diana’s mind was already busy with the possibilities.
“Miss Holland, I can barely begin to tell you how pleased I am that you are back in town. I have never seen anything so lovely as you as a shepherdess at the Richmond Hayes ball,” Teddy Cutting, now situated at the other side of the room on the peacock-colored settee next to Elizabeth, was saying. She smiled demurely and lifted one of her hands to bat the compliment away before neatly reclasping them in her lap. “Ivory is an excellent color on you, though so is sky blue.” Elizabeth was, in fact, wearing a high-collared dress of white-and-blue seersucker, but to the male eye it probably looked sky blue enough. Diana thought her sister looked like a cinched doll.
“Teddy, you must tell me, are you going yachting this week?” Elizabeth asked, making the very appropriate move of deflecting the conversation back to her visitor. She was putting on a good show, but the strain of the abbreviated family discussion was evident in her voice. Diana glanced up from her exile in the corner and noted the absurdity of this back-and-forth.
“Oh, Teddy,” Diana mimicked, throwing up her hands in faux ecstasy. “You must tell me if you’re going yachting this week.” She shook her head mirthlessly and added a loud ha for effect. They could pretend all they wanted, Diana thought. The rules of decorum by which the wealthy lived and died no longer applied to her. Of course she knew she didn’t fully comprehend her mother’s announcement as of yet, but she couldn’t help but feel like her life—her real life—was going to begin any moment now.
Teddy and Liz turned to Diana as though they had just remembered that she existed. “Mother?” Elizabeth asked pointedly. “Doesn’t Diana have somewhere else to be?”
Mrs. Holland let her gin rummy hand fall flat on the little card table where she and Aunt Edith had been playing. “Diana, you have been acting strange all afternoon. Perhaps you are feeling out of sorts and should go upstairs.”
“I never get sick, as everybody knows.” Diana turned a page of her book, making a sharp sound as she did. “And really, talking about yachting was boring enough before. Is there really any point when we can no longer afford it?”
There was a moment of shocked silence, and Diana thought she saw Teddy begin to fidget uncomfortably. Elizabeth hung her head, and Mrs. Holland’s mouth puckered with rage. “Diana,” she said. “You mustn’t talk so. Our guest might misunderstand you.” Louisa turned in Teddy’s direction. “What she meant, of course, is that we can no longer afford to talk of yachting emotionally. Mr. Holland loved the sport so.”
Diana rolled her eyes at this newest lie. She sank back into the cushions even as her mother and sister and aunt assumed stricken facial expressions. Her father had never given a damn about yachts.
“Of course. Well, I am going yachting,” Teddy said, good-naturedly moving on from the awkward moment. “We go whenever we can, Henry and I—”
“How is Henry?” Mrs. Holland interjected. She had picked up her rummy hand again, and kept her eyes fixed on it as she spoke.
“Oh, Henry is Henry, which is why everyone wants to talk to him and nobody ever can.” Teddy laughed, and that put an end to the subject. He stayed for another fifteen minutes—bringing his visit to the socially acceptable time of precisely one half hour—and then he gave his compliments to Mrs. Holland for having such lovely daughters and for serving such refreshing iced tea, and he went on with his rounds.
Diana was not sorry to see him go. This was the nuisance of all things appropriate, that the gentlemen visited the ladies, requiring the ladies to stay put. This meant that a lady, or whatever Diana should be calling herself now, had no control over who visited who when. And while Teddy Cutting was perfectly pleasant, he had always seemed to Diana—ever since they were children—nothing more than nice.
“Diana! How could you?” Diana looked up from her reverie to see her mother, standing with fists clenched and face hung with anger. “How could you expose your family that way?” she yelled. “Do you understand what could happen? Do you?”
“Really, what’s the point?” Diana replied heatedly. “Everyone will know soon enough when you stop paying the dressmaker and the florist and the bills begin piling—”
“Silence!” her mother screeched. Diana looked around her, but found no sympathy. Her aunt laid a hand over her mouth. Claire, who had been standing at the door, would not meet Diana’s eye. “You are an outrageous, despicable girl, Diana, and you will go to your room this instant. You will read your Bible. You will remember that you were born to obey your parents.” She paused and looked down, and Diana thought she saw a tear glisten in her mother’s eye. “Your parent.”
Diana couldn’t believe the stubbornness of her mother’s denial and felt her stomach souring. “I mean, if you’re going to punish me for telling the truth about our situation—”
This time Mrs. Holland stopped her with a look more exacting and stern than even her harshest words.
Claire came forward from the wall to escort Diana away. Her titian eyebrows were knit together and pleading. Diana sighed loudly, threw her book on the mahogany floor, and stormed toward the hallway with Claire close behind her.
“Elizabeth, thank God I can depend on you,” Mrs. Holland was saying, exasperated, behind her. “The salvation of this family lies with you and you alone.”
Diana heard these words as she reached the doorway, and for the first time realized what it was her mother was asking of Elizabeth. Do not marry for money, Mrs. Holland had often said in happier times, just marry where money is. She’d said it lightly before, but Diana knew that her mother’s intentions were different now.
She could not help a glance back, as she passed into the hall, to see her sister sitting silent and frozen, as though she were part of a still-life painting. Diana’s throat choked in rage at the sight of Elizabeth, so passive and seemingly made of stone. It was difficult to imagine that they were sisters at all.
Nine
For my Lizzie, who always manages to be such a good girl, on the occasion of her debut.
—EH, 1897
ELIZABETH TRIED TO STOP HERSELF FROM PLAYING with the engraved white-gold bracelet her father had given her as a coming-out present. It dawned on her that she was going to have to snap out of it and start acting more…Elizabeth-like. She was fidgety and vacant and her thoughts roamed from her father to her mother to Will and then back again. Nothing seemed real to her at this hour. She did not even feel real. Particularly unreal was the figure of Henry Schoonmaker preparing to enter the Holland parlor, which she vaguely recognized upon raising her eyes to the open pocket doors.
“Mrs. Holland, Miss Holland.” He nodded in the direction of the card table.
“Mr. Schoonmaker,” they replied. Mrs. Holland beamed. Elizabeth realized, looking at him, that though he was so very talked about, and though their families were linked by history and class, she had not actually spoken with Henry in years. He was a catch—everyone said so—but that was just an abstraction. She hadn’t thought of him as an actual person until he entered the door.
“Miss Elizabeth,” he said. She managed to stand and smile at her mother and then at Henry Schoonmaker, who was holding his bowler very properly. She wouldn’t have thought a person like him would hold his hat that way, which was perhaps why she kept staring a
t it vacantly even when he began to twist it nervously back and forth. She had just discerned that Henry was the sort of person to have his initials, HWS, embroidered in gold on the pale blue ribbon that lined the inside brim of his hat, when Claire took it from his hands and announced that she would be putting it in the cloakroom for safekeeping.
His eyes ranged about the room and then fell on her. Elizabeth felt embarrassment at his very look and tried to convince herself that the famous Henry Schoonmaker, whom Agnes lusted for, whom Penelope had danced with, whose father owned some sizable percentage of Manhattan, did not know her secret. Her secrets: that her family was poor, that she was in love with a servant, and that she was a selfish girl likely to ruin her family even more than they were already ruined. “That is a very becoming dress,” he said in Elizabeth’s direction.
“Thank you, Mr. Schoonmaker,” she replied, meeting his eyes and then looking quickly away. Here was the bachelor all the debutantes of New York desired, and she supposed she should have been thrilled he had come to visit with her. He was indeed handsome and crisply dressed, which was everything she was supposed to want. She was surprised at herself for being so little drawn to it now. All she could think was that, if she and her family were sent to debtors’ prison, he would probably laugh—he seemed like the kind to find comedy in others’ misfortune.
“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Schoonmaker?” Edith said with an amused expression on her face.
Henry sat on the edge of the chair that his friend Teddy had recently been sitting on. Light fell through the tall parlor windows into the lush, quiet room, which Elizabeth felt suddenly, surprisingly, proud of. It felt like the signature of her family—these neat pieces arranged so perfectly and thoughtfully for company. The embossed leather panels over the mahogany wainscoting, which her father had chosen himself when he inherited the house from his parents. The exuberant curves of the old-fashioned gasoliers. The wall crammed with picture frames. Everything so soft and perfectly aged and rich. She looked over at the card table and noticed her aunt Edith tipping her head to her mother.
The Luxe Page 7
