A Well-Behaved Woman

by Therese Anne Fowler

  “W.K.?”

  “His grandfather, Commodore Vanderbilt. I read that his steam yacht is as big as a warship and cost a half million dollars twenty years ago. And W.K.’s father is situated nicely, too. What they need is your untarnished ancestry to offset the gossip about war profiteering and political bribery and all that business about the son.”

  “What? Which son?”

  “His uncle, C. J. Vanderbilt. Papa calls him a dissolute gambler who never pays his debts. Also, he has fits. Convulsions.”

  “You never mentioned this before!”

  “Haven’t I?”

  “If I had known—”

  “You’d have ruled him out? You can’t afford that.”

  Alva turned to look again. “Miss Fair’s dress…” She shook her head.

  “It is a masterpiece of figure—flattery, true. But as I said, her insufferable mother—”

  “Won’t live with them.”

  “Wouldn’t,” Consuelo corrected, pointing at Alva with her spoon. “If. But that if is not a real possibility because Miss Fair is common. Whereas you are a prize.”

  “Only in comparison.”

  Before the war, before New York society closed ranks to most everyone whose money wasn’t local and old, the Smiths had been as good as any of the Knickerbockers—better, Alva’s mother Phoebe Smith had asserted: they were more cultured and much broader of mind, as she had been taking her daughters to Europe from the time each could hold herself up at a ship’s rail. What’s more, their ancestry, deep and impressive in America’s South, was even deeper and more impressive in Europe: they were descended from royalty in France and Scotland both. “My girls are born to wear crowns,” she had told everyone who would listen.

  Consuelo was saying, “It’s always in comparison. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”

  “‘Bad teeth are a bad bargain at any price,’ that’s what Lulu says.”

  “What does an old slave know? Anyway, look at him. He has lovely teeth.”

  “Yes, well, it would be lovely if he would stop displaying them to Miss Fair.”

  Alva fiddled with her neckline. The dress was old and no longer fit as well as it had. It was one of the last she’d ordered in Paris before her father moved them back to New York. She hadn’t understood, then, that his cotton-trade business was dying as quietly but surely as her mother was. With his Old South manners, his enduring belief that a handshake was still sufficient assurance of a man’s intent, he sank under the ceaseless waves of unscrupulous, undercutting cotton dealers, the lot of them climbing atop one another in an attempt to keep their noses above water. Worse, he’d invested badly, betting on the Confederacy and Southern banks. The wealth that had arisen from a grand cotton plantation, money that had lifted her forebears into prominence and come to her father in turn, was now all but gone.

  Consuelo said, “Leave your dress be. And stop frowning.”

  “I’m sorry, but this is demeaning, you must see that.” Alva picked at her thumbnail, resisting the urge to chew it. “I wish we’d gone to London when the empire fell. Jennie Jerome met Lord Churchill there. And Minnie’s going to have a title, too,” she said, referring to another of their friends. “I always thought I would marry a gentleman with a title and lands and people. With history. My mother fed me on that dream.”

  “They all do.”

  “It’s a worthy aim,” Alva said. “She wasn’t wrong about that.”

  “Yes, your mother had a fine aim but a terrible approach. Why did no one ever intervene? That’s what I wonder.”

  Throughout her youth, Alva had thought her mother to be a calculating but charming and effective navigator of society. She was disabused of this belief on an evening in a Tuileries Palace drawing room when, seated behind Empress Eugénie (and thrilled by the proximity), she overheard the empress say, “I believe Mrs. Murray Smith is the most ridiculous figure at court. Always going on about her royal descent—which was centuries back, if it’s true at all. But hearing her tell it, one would think her people still rule.”

  Alva wanted to die on the spot. The empress was speaking of her mother. The empress thought her mother ridiculous. The empress.

  Her companion replied, “A pompous creature, I agree. It’s quite entertaining! Every one of her perfect daughters is fated to be a queen. Or an empress. Beware!” She laughed.

  Empress Eugénie said, “I am not entertained. I feel sorry for her poor girls; no one good will consider them seriously.”

  Alva hadn’t dared draw attention by leaving her seat. There she sat, horrified, burning.

  Her mother was a laughingstock.

  No one good would ever consider them seriously.

  Now her mother was in her grave and Alva was here in West Virginia perspiring through her corset and vying—not very well—for a common gentleman’s attentions.

  Now she was stuck with New York, with its long streets of dingy, uninspired row houses and shopfronts fringing rickety tenements and swampy squalor. There was no grace in Manhattan—few grand homes, no soaring cathedrals or charming garden parks like the ones Louis-Napoléon had carved into the Parisian arrondissements. They had ugly brick and brownstone and boards and soot and one-legged vagrants and dead horses rotting in the streets.

  Now she was a charity case.

  For a time the two young ladies drank their tea in silence. Alva could see her friend’s mind working like Austen’s Emma’s. Consuelo had introduced her to W.K. earlier in the year, when she took Alva to dine at another friend’s home. Consuelo had arranged Alva’s invitation to his sister’s debutante ball. Consuelo sought him out whenever she could, making sure to bring Alva to his mind in some way or other, extolling her qualities, overemphasizing her outstanding ancestry and her father’s Union Club membership, promoting an alliance as a cure to his family’s society frustrations. No Knickerbocker mother would marry her daughter to a Vanderbilt. Alva Smith was the next best thing.

  Consuelo tapped her spoon against her palm. She said, “I don’t see why he … Not that I’m truly worried, you understand. It would be so convenient if there were a terrible rumor about Miss Fair afloat. Something scandalous—like, she’s been seen leaving a stable hand’s quarters.”

  “Except that she hasn’t. Has she?”

  “Who can say for certain?”

  Alva said, “That coal man from Pittsburgh who was seated beside me last night at dinner—”

  “Alva.”

  “He’s sweet, and nice enough to look at. Perhaps it’s not so bad that he’s first-generation—”

  “Alva.”

  “He’s probably worth more than W.K.”

  “Only at the moment. Stop it.”

  Alva lowered her voice. “He has money. I need money. He might be the best I can do.”

  “He is a parvenu. You are a Desha. Your grandfather was a congressman. Your uncle was a governor. You will not let yourself go to some upstart with coal dust under his fingernails.”

  “My mother was a Desha; I am a Smith. Daddy is an invalid who can’t pay his bills, and if I don’t marry into money soon, we’ll be letting rooms and taking in wash.”

  She could see it plainly: her father lying prostrate, too weak to do more than sip broth; odd-smelling strangers stomping in and out of their house at all hours; she and her sisters slaving at the stove and the hearths and the sink, swatting away flies in summer heat, lining their shoes with rags in the winter, their lives every bit as miserable as those she’d seen that day at the tenement, their futures as insecure as the dead girl’s sister’s must be now. No decent man would have any of the Smith girls, and they’d all get some kind of pox or grippe and die ignominiously, four spinsters whose mother had once declared they would be duchesses or marchionesses, or ladies of the peerage at the very least. Probably they would die in winter, in the snow. An Italian immigrant would find them and, in his grief, write an opera about their beautiful, tragic deaths, for which he would become renowned, tour the world, earn a fortune
, and marry a destitute but titled European maiden who would change her name to Armide.

  Alva said, “We’re being hounded by the grocer. We haven’t paid the laundress or Lulu since … I don’t even recall.”

  “Yes, all right, but I know you: money alone isn’t enough.”

  Alva turned for another look at W.K., secondborn son of the firstborn son of the man who was running almost every railway in the east, who had built Grand Central Depot, who often had President Grant’s ear. He and two friends were seated with Theresa Fair, Mrs. Fair, and the two other married women in their party. Mrs. Fair was speaking animatedly, her head bobbing like a hen’s.

  He was pleasing to the eye. Almost beautiful, in fact. He did have good teeth. And he was amiable. Everyone said so. Lively and fun-loving, the nicest fellow, as good-natured as God made. Certainly he had better credentials than the Pittsburgh coal man. Watching him, Alva let herself imagine a life of comfort in which she was never anxious, never cold, never fearful that no one would want her. A life in which she wore every season’s best fashions and headed a polished mahogany dinner table with him at the opposite end, their friends and acquaintances lining the sides, enjoying French wines and stuffed squab and delicate little puff pastries au crème …

  So his grandfather the Commodore was said to be boorish, eccentric, coarse in language and manner. So his uncle was too fond of cards. So W.K. had no title or lands, nothing exalted in his history, no claim to glory—even by extension—in any war in any country at any time. The fact was that Alva had no chance to be Lady Anyone. If she pursued the Pittsburgh man, she might gain security, but socially she’d be Mrs. Nobody. As a Vanderbilt she could at least be a very comfortable Mrs. Someone.

  When Alva turned back to the table, Consuelo was assessing her through narrowed eyes. “Which dress did you bring for tonight’s dance?”

  “The gray faille—I know what you’re thinking, but Lulu altered the bodice. It isn’t current, but it’s closer.”

  “You really should have taken my mother’s offer to dress you this year, instead of capitulating to your father’s pride.”

  “Pride is all he’s got left.”

  Laughter erupted from the Fair table. Look how W.K. grinned at Miss Fair! Look how she blushed! Now it was Miss Fair Alva saw at the polished mahogany table with W.K., Miss Fair in her seat, drinking her wine, eating her squab, licking the cream from her pastries off her delicate little silver-ringed fingers. It was Miss Fair sitting across from the husband Alva might have had, while Alva was up to her elbows in scalding water and lye scrubbing some customer’s—probably the Vanderbilts’—sheets.

  Consuelo reached for Alva’s hand and declared, “You’ll wear my new rose muslin.”

  “And that, of course, will solve everything. No,” Alva said, “thank you, but I look awful in pink.”

  The Fair party rose and sauntered to the French doors, Miss Fair’s hand on W.K.’s sleeve, and then outside they went.

  “That’s the end of it, then,” Alva said. Whatever Consuelo had been led to believe, Mr. Vanderbilt clearly had other plans.

  “You cannot give up so easily. Where is my spirited friend who used to race all the boys and steal backstage at the opera and—”

  “That friend has limits,” Alva said, rising. “I will not chase a man who is supposed to be pursuing me. Let Miss Fair have him. Or you—you rate him so highly, after all.”

  Consuelo didn’t reply, and it was just as well, as that reply would almost certainly be one Alva did not wish to hear: that she, Consuelo, had higher aims for herself than a Vanderbilt, along with the means to hit her mark. That for all the tough talk, Alva had no currency to back her words. That Consuelo was doing her best for Alva and Alva ought to be grateful.

  Gratitude. How perilously close to resentment it could be.

  * * *

  After tea, while the other ladies napped, Alva stood at her room’s window, too uneasy to rest. Consuelo was correct: marrying for money alone was not ideal. Alva hoped for status, too—though not for the reasons her mother had sought it, self-importance and admiration. Status gave a woman more control over her existence, more protection from being battered about by others’ whims or life’s caprices.

  No one gave a whit about the coal man from Pittsburgh (who might not choose her, anyway). The Vanderbilts, though, were already influential in politics and policy. Alva read the papers. The Vanderbilts’ bread was already half buttered. She should temper her pride and pursue W.K.; it would only be to her advantage. And if she somehow did manage to get them into best society, she could have not only butter but raspberry jam, too. Any time she liked. That would be delicious.

  She rang for the bellboy and bade him fetch Lulu. “Tell her we’re going into town.”

  They went to a dry goods shop, where Alva bought four yards of black tarlatan. Then she directed the coachman to a hillside covered in wildflowers. Using sewing scissors and swatting at bees, she and Lulu cut armfuls of goldenrod and brought it back to Alva’s room. Two hours later, the room resembled a sloppy seamstress’s workshop, with fabric scraps, bits of thread, scissors and needles and pins scattered over the table, unspooled ribbon and leftover tarlatan draped over a chair. Discarded leaves and stems littered the floor.

  It was the fashion, then, to tuck little blooms into one’s hair or to tack a few flowers onto a bodice or the cap of a sleeve. Alva had gone further. She and Lulu had draped the tarlatan around the gown’s skirt like bunting, then spread the gown across the bed and painstakingly tacked onto its skirt garland-like lines of tiny goldenrod bouquets.

  “How … striking!” Consuelo said as she swept in wearing the rose muslin. “The flowers—”

  “She had me out there in the hills like some field slave,” Lulu said.

  “For almost no time at all.”

  “I work in the house.”

  “You wouldn’t have let me go by myself!”

  “Mr. Smith, he’d have my hide if I did.”

  “It was a gorgeous hillside, full of fragrant flowers—”

  “Full of bees,” Lulu complained. “And you out there without your hat…”

  Consuelo took Alva by the hands and assessed her from hair to hem. “It’s inspired,” she said. “Do I take it you’re back in the fight?”

  “I don’t want to end up in a tenement.”

  “Do not permit such a thought. Setting one’s mind on positive subjects leads to positive results.” She released Alva, saying, “Now, when W.K. finds you—and he will, if he knows what’s good for him—make the absolute most of it. A man needs to feel he’s won a prize all his friends will envy. Woo him, Alva. Flatter him. Do you understand? Be the prize.”

  * * *

  Alva realized her miscalculation as soon as she reached the ballroom. She had forgotten its walls were painted the deepest rose; the ceilings were paler pink; the very light in the room was rosy. She could not have made a more disharmonious choice.

  Every other girl in the resort seemed to have anticipated the décor. They wore gowns in ivory, cream, buff, silver, pearl, gray, sage, pale blues and greens, every shade of pink. A daring young lady was dressed in deep garnet, the dress and her chestnut hair set off with strings of seed pearls. Perfection! Whereas Alva stood there near the doorway in her black-and-gold … confection.

  She was certainly drawing the attention of the others:

  “Miss Smith! How … unusual.”

  “Well! I haven’t seen that particular style in ages.”

  “I do hope your partners aren’t sensitive to goldenrod.”

  “Rather an autumnal theme, isn’t it?”

  “Mourning summer’s end?”

  Teeth clenched, Alva turned—and ran directly into Theresa Fair’s mother.

  “My dear Miss Smith!” said the saccharine Mrs. Fair, so elegant in dove gray with silver-set diamonds at her ears and neck. And waist. And wrists. And fingers. “Look at you! Those flowers! And … are you wearing hoops?”

  A
lva was not wearing hoops—but she’d added an extra crinoline to support the skirt and was paying for it in streams of perspiration that trailed over her bottom and down her thighs into her stockings.

  Mrs. Fair said, “Why, you’re practically a Southern belle.”

  “Well,” Alva said, “I am from Mobile, Alabama. My father comes from Virginia. My people were in the South a hundred years before the Revolution.”

  Whereas the Fairs were Irish immigrants, now in Alva’s circle only because Mr. Fair had, some years earlier, gone west to prospect and, with two compatriots, stumbled upon one of the biggest silver lodes ever found. Before his strike, Mrs. Fair had run a boardinghouse.

  Mrs. Fair said, “That’s a fine trick to pull here, with so many Southern gentlemen afoot.”

  “Why would I need to play tricks?” Alva said. Then she turned back toward the ballroom and glided inside as if she had every confidence in the world.

  * * *

  Her unusual attire was succeeding, in part: She danced for an hour or more, handed off from one Southern gentleman to another, most of them showing subtle signs of the genteel poverty one could get away with more easily in the South. Their proud bearing seemed to say, Yes, they had to wear cotton gloves instead of kid, and yes, their boots had polished scuffs. They had been devastated by Northern troops, so many men dead, their fields destroyed, their homes burned or ruined by hard use and neglect. Their slaves were gone, their houses in disrepair, their land still unworked nine years after the Confederate defeat. But their impressive family names were intact. Had they known that Alva had nothing beyond her own name to offer, she would have passed that hour standing in discord with the rosy wall while W.K. danced with nearly every other girl present.

  After taking her through a waltz, the Pittsburgh man kept hold of her arm, telling her, “I have meetings with some important men in New York soon. Coal is the future of this country’s power. I mean political power. Not everyone realizes that. There are men working right this minute on coal-fired generating systems that will, when extended as power grids throughout a city—I mean physical power … well, electrical power, which is a kind of physical power—allow for the extension of electricity into both the individual, meaning private, and commercial establishment…”