“For shame, sire; our guests will be arriving any minute. The Taylors are here already.”
“Yes, Taylor went into the salon for a cocktail. Isn’t that a marvelous word for a drink, cock-tail? How far up the pole must someone have been to equate a cock’s tail—or perhaps a cocked tail—with mixed liquors?”
Caleb Taylor, who was in his fifties and was graying at temples and chin, had joined them, drink in hand. He said, “How far up the pole must a rich man be to seek office on a progressive platform?”
“Some would presume I am drunken all the time.”
“And how many friends will you lose simply by having my wife and me as guests here tonight?”
Alva said, “May the burning of those bridges light the way for others!… I’m practicing.”
“And many are already burnt in our paths, to be sure,” said Oliver. He kissed her, for emphasis.
Mary joined them, tin crowns in hand for herself, her husband, and Alva, who said, “Will you look at us? Four people of exceptional quality and intellect, three of whom began life as the property of wealthy white men. Not to say that our situations were equal. I just mean to demonstrate that all sorts of societal wrongs can be improved.” She took glasses of champagne from the sideboard for herself and Mary, adding, “And it all starts afresh with a new century, French grapes, and New York’s Representative-to-be Oliver Belmont, my husband.”
* * *
The ball proceeded much as balls did. The arrival of guests. The exclamations over a lady’s gown or brooch or fur or hairstyle. Julia arrived with her husband, the French count Charles Gaston de Fontenilliat (a dandy, as one might expect), dressed in a pure white polar fox coat. There was champagne. There was music and dancing and conversation on every topic—from what a “lovely little war” they’d just had with Spain, to the gunslinger Pearl Hart (a woman!) robbing a stagecoach out in Arizona, to the hurricane that had wiped out every estate and all the rum production on St. Croix (where several of the guests had interests), to the recent opening of the Bronx Zoo. (Harold and Alva had already visited five times—and he’d only been home from St. Mark’s School for two weeks.) A good many of the white guests (though not all, by any means) engaged in conversation with the Taylors. Mary found Alva at one point in the evening and said, “I’m not certain I’ve ever before seen white people working so hard at being polite.”
Harry Lehr arrived at 11:45, escorting Mamie Fish, and Alva found herself standing there in her ballroom, staring at the pair of them. Harry was not Ward McAllister. Mamie was not Caroline Astor. Yet in the moment, Alva felt as though time had stood still. Were none of them important or unique? Was each of them nothing beyond a fresh player taking over a fixed role in a never-ending production of a single play?
Oliver put his hand on her arm. “Come with me?”
“Where are we going?”
“To the terrace.”
Outside on their roof, the night air was sharp. There was no moon, and the stars were vivid against their black backdrop. Oliver put his arm around Alva’s shoulders.
“It’s awfully cold, I know. But I wanted you all to myself for a minute or two at least.”
Beyond them, Central Park was a dark and barren landscape, its skeleton trees faintly visible, the lake a slick mirror of the sky above.
“It’s so much quieter out here,” Alva said. “I don’t mind the cold.”
“We have an anniversary coming up. Four exceptional years. How should we observe it, do you suppose?”
“Only four! How odd it is—I feel as if we’ve always been together and all those things in my past are imagined, or I read them in a book. And yet not three minutes ago I was watching Harry Lehr and Mamie Fish and feeling as though nothing was different from that old life. Time behaves very strangely.”
“I remember the first time I saw you. Florence Vanderbilt’s debutante ball. I was, what, sixteen years old—a skinny, reluctant boy masquerading as a gentleman. My father made all of us attend, in deference to the old Commodore.”
“You noticed me?”
“You were wearing a green dress, and you seemed uncomfortable—not in the dress; rather, at the ball.”
“I hardly knew anyone there. I was barely out of mourning for my mother.” Consuelo Yznaga had made her go.
Oliver said, “I wished to talk to you, but I couldn’t work up my courage. You wouldn’t have thought twice about me then.”
“Let’s imagine it, though. Say you did speak to me, and I liked you as well as I know I would have, and we’d begun our life together that night with a fast friendship that would become a romance in due time, and marriage.”
“And then all these years later, we would stand out here at the balustrade getting frostbite on the ends of our noses, waiting for the end of the century.”
“And for the beginning of the century.”
Oliver turned to face her. “I didn’t used to believe in love. It’s all very untoward, you know. No dignity in it. Who wants to be a sentimental sap? Well, as it happens, I do. Thank you for changing my life.”
“The sentiment is mutual,” she said.
They kissed, and then Alva said with some reluctance, “I expect we had better go back in. Doesn’t this remind you of that day you came to find me at Marble House? Only, this time you’ve got a rather different sort of speech to give. Are you ready to become Candidate Belmont?”
He stepped away from her, unbuttoned his coat, and hooked his thumbs under his suspenders. After clearing his throat theatrically, he began, “I believe that Man is good. I believe that we stand at the dawn of a century that will be more peaceful and prosperous than any in history…”
“Such an optimist!”
“Unfortunate, isn’t it? Political life chews up my sort and spits us out, all mangled and useless. But … I don’t know how to be any other way.” He pulled Alva against him. “It got me here, didn’t it?”
“Precisely where you ought to be.”
There in Oliver’s embrace, Alva looked beyond his shoulder into the night, at the lights in the buildings bordering the park at Fifty-ninth Street, at Alice’s enormous house, the swelling city behind it. The joy Alva felt tonight would not endure forever. Hardships always waited in the wings. Right now, though, she was a beloved woman on a rooftop terrace under the stars, wrapped in the arms of a man she adored. Right now, she was.
Constellation
Up then, fair phoenix bride, frustrate the sun;
Thyself from thine affection
Takest warmth enough, and from thine eye
All lesser birds will take their jollity.
Up, up, fair bride, and call
Thy stars from out their several boxes, take
Thy rubies, pearls, and diamonds forth, and make
Thyself a constellation of them all;
And by their blazing signify
That a great princess falls, but doth not die.
Be thou a new star, that to us portends
Ends of much wonder; and be thou those ends.
—JOHN DONNE
I
WHEN THEY ASKED her about the Vanderbilts and Belmonts, about their celebrations and depredations, the mansions and balls, the lawsuits, the betrayals, the rifts—Alva said nothing is ever quite the way you think it’s going to be: Once there was a woman who married for money and had some regrets about that. Then she was betrayed, so she cut her losses and went on to marry for love. Now it was 1908. Springtime. She was fifty-five years old, unburdened, expecting to see the fruits of her cultivations ripen further.
* * *
“Do come out to the meeting, won’t you?” Mrs. Kitty Mackay asked Alva, the two having met up by accident one April day at the excellent new Plaza Hotel, where Alva and Armide were having afternoon tea on the finest gilt-edged china Alva had ever seen in a restaurant.
Kitty had been among Consuelo’s school friends, and according to Consuelo’s recent telling, had just founded the Equal Franchise Society. She was d
ividing her time between Manhattan and Long Island, where she had her primary home, a husband, children, and numerous philanthropic endeavors. Consuelo had indicated a possible involvement between Kitty and her husband’s doctor, as well. Whether or not that was so, the young woman was pretty and earnest and had the energy of a terrier, it seemed, because she kept on speaking despite seeing that Alva and Armide were engaged with a delicate tower of cakes and sandwiches.
“It’s at the Colony Club tonight, eight o’clock. We need women such as yourselves to bolster the cause. You do want women to have the vote?”
“I always have,” Alva said.
“Then come! We have a very distinguished panel for the lecture. Mrs. Carrie Catt, Mrs. Ida Tarbell—”
“She’s the one who made all the trouble for John Rockefeller,” Alva told Armide. “I read her book.” To Kitty she said, “All right, count me in. I’m interested to see what sort of muck these ladies are raking up.”
“Marvelous, simply marvelous,” Kitty said. “I told the duchess last time I wrote that I’d find you and rope you in, and here I’ve done it. Excellent. Good day! See you soon!”
Armide stifled a laugh. “How long would she have stood there yapping had you not consented to go?”
“Shhh,” Alva said, bringing a delicate circle of brioche topped with caviar to her mouth. “I want to enjoy this.” She enjoyed another one after that, and then a third for good measure. She did like to measure well.
At the Colony Club that evening, the ballroom was still only half filled when the event began. The ladies in attendance were not all familiar to Alva, but they were almost exclusively of her generation. Kitty was one of only a handful of younger women present.
The first of the speakers, Mrs. Mary Ellen something or other, spoke so softly that Alva found herself leaning forward, trying to make sense of “benefit of having a say … poor, no means of … democratic…” to the point of nearly falling from her chair into the ladies seated in the row ahead.
The next speaker, a Mrs. Aubrey or Audrey, read from her notes in a monotone: “Every person whom God saw fit to bring into this world here in this wonderful country of bounty and plenty when times are good should have a say in his or her own governance, and by this I include all white women but not Indian women who deserve no rights for the crimes of warring with the United States government. Nor do I feel it is best to include the Negress in this otherwise sweeping statement due to the Negress being inferior in her intelligence even compared to the male of her race—”
Alva interjected, “This is not so!”
“Shhh!” said a woman next to her.
“She is in error,” Alva said. “Negro women are no less intelligent than you or I!”
Mrs. Aubrey or Audrey, startled, remained silent for another moment. Then she looked again at her notes, running her finger along the page until she found her place, and resumed her oration, an event lasting seventeen more minutes (Alva timed her), during which some of the ladies who’d been nodding along nodded off.
Another three women spoke, all of them more competent but none of them inspiring, and when the thing was concluded, Alva was no more enlightened than she’d been at the start.
On her way out, she thanked Kitty and said, “That was very nice,” just to be polite. The girl had been so earnest, after all.
“Then you’ll come again?” Kitty said brightly.
“I’m afraid I’m leaving for my house on Long Island, and then I’ll be away most of the summer in England. Good luck to you, though.”
“We’ll be ongoing in the fall. Can I count on you to join us then?”
“My dear, your persistence is admirable. However, unless you and the other ladies in your organization put that energy into the program itself, you’ll only ever get the same already-converted bunch coming to hear you—if that. I didn’t learn a single thing that wasn’t said fifty years ago.”
“Our mission is to educate—”
“Stimulate,” Alva said. “That’s what you need to do. Give ladies your age a reason to miss their bridge games and piano recitals. Get yourself a firebrand speaker—the equivalent of Christabel Pankhurst, that English suffragette who keeps getting herself arrested. Use a meeting to organize a march on the Metropolitan Club in Washington; the congressmen are more likely to be there than in chambers. Make posters. Write letters. Do things.”
Kitty smiled as politely as Alva had done a minute before. “I’m sure we appreciate the advice.”
“You know, for an intelligent woman, you are not very sensible.”
By the time Alva arrived at home again, her mind was already onto other matters. She and Oliver had a date for cards and cocktails in the parlor with their new bespoke Edison phonograph and a stack of ragtime records. The sound quality with this new machine was so good, one could almost believe the band was in the room.
Oliver was mixing the cocktails when Alva came in. He had Vess Ossman on the phonograph and The Bon-Vivant’s Companion at hand for recipes. He said, “How was the meeting?”
“They would do a lot better if they followed this sort of program.”
Oliver handed her a rum cocktail called the Knickerbocker—a little joke of theirs. He raised his own glass and said, “Everyone would do better if they followed this sort of program.”
* * *
“I’ve got a bit of indigestion,” Oliver told her one night in early May after they’d arrived at Brookholt, their Long Island mansion. They’d eaten a dinner of cold chicken, then followed it with a nightcap and were now getting ready for bed. He put on his robe, saying, “I’m going to have a walk around the house.”
Long Island was enjoying a marvelous spring, and they intended to make the most of it before going to England for the summer. Making the most of things was rather their way, now. For example, though William Jennings Bryan had lost to William McKinley, Oliver won his bid for Congress and did what he could to advance his agenda against a conservative majority. When McKinley died in ’01 a week after being gut-shot by an anarchist, Teddy Roosevelt took office, putting the country in progressive hands and leaving Oliver content to return to their habits of fine wines, excellent food, leisurely travel, visits to the Belmont track, and nights that ended with the two of them lying in bed together, Oliver behind her with his hand resting on her hip. If Alva had a single regret, it was that she hadn’t divorced William sooner.
Lately, Oliver and Willie, who had grown into a serious driver of fast motorcars, had been planning an automobile racecourse on Long Island, their progress interrupted only by Willie’s world-record-setting race in Daytona. Harold was now studying law at Harvard, but his real love was, as ever, sailing. Neither boy had much interest in working for the family business, even with William now at its helm—though in truth he was little more than an overseer himself. And Consuelo—well, Consuelo had endured a great deal of change, and Alva was impatient to get back to England and help her daughter continue to sort things out.
Now Oliver put on his slippers and told Alva, “You needn’t wait up for me.”
“No, but I will.”
She was sitting up in bed, sketching plans for a conservatory, when Oliver returned some forty minutes later. Standing inside the doorway, he said, “I must say, I don’t get tired of this.”
“Of indigestion?”
“No, that’s better. Of having you in my bed.”
She laid the sketchbook aside. “Prove it.”
* * *
“All that fresh air does me in,” Oliver told Alva one evening in the middle of May, when they’d been outdoors since not long after breakfast supervising and assisting with alterations to the gardens. Moving topsoil and shrubbery. Pulling up stones from new paths. She was in her bicycle bloomers and a shirtwaist. Oliver wore dungarees. Both of them were smudged and dusty and badly needed to bathe.
He stretched out on one of the drawing room’s divans. “Maybe I’ll rest here before coming upstairs.”
“You smell to high h
eaven.”
“Then I’ll have to smell a while longer.”
His tone was unusually sharp. Alva tilted her head. “What is it you’re not saying?”
“Can’t a man have a lie-down without being interrogated?”
“Have whatever you wish,” Alva said, and left him there.
But it was so unlike them to provoke each other. A little while later she returned to the drawing room to smooth things over. He was still on the divan, curled on his side, asleep.
He woke her the next morning with a freshly cut rose and an apology. “My stomach was hurting a good deal, but I didn’t want to say so. Forgive me?”
“Are you all right now?”
“A bit off my feed, but the pain’s better.”
“I didn’t know pain made you snappish.”
“Neither did I—which I suppose is fortunate. Blessed with good health all my life so far. I’ll have to mind my temper if it happens again.”
“Better to find the cause of the pain, and resolve it before we sail.”
“I’m fine. Probably offended a muscle when I was helping to move those rocks.” He raised his arms, stretched, then flexed his biceps. “Impressive, am I not? Tell me the truth: you’ve never seen a finer man than the one standing here before you.”
“He looks very appealing. His scent, however…” She pinched her nose shut.
“He’s quite astute, too. He knows that if he pushes this button here”—he pressed it to ring for a maid—“hot water will soon appear in his bathtub. He is a problem-solver extraordinaire.”
“I believe I read about his skills in the newspaper.”
“And experienced them firsthand.” He waggled his eyebrows. “He is the lover all ladies long for, but only she could win his heart.”
* * *
In late May, after a meal that involved (as so many of theirs did) several savory courses and a bottle of excellent wine, Oliver, hand on stomach, said, “I believe I overdid it.”
“Are you in pain?”
“Some,” he said, coming around to her side of the table. “I’ll stay in my own room tonight. I would say, ‘I’ll miss you,’” he said, kissing her forehead, “but I fear you won’t be the first thing on my mind.”
A Well-Behaved Woman Page 38
