The Luxe l-1 Read online

  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 discovered. 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, congratulation
s, 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 mother. 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.

  There was a difference between them even then, of course, but they were all children and as such equally banned from the Hollands’ grown-up world of dinner parties and card games. During the day they were all under the care of Lina’s mother, Marie Broud, who had been the Holland girls’ nurse, and she never made any distinction among her charges. She had often scolded Will and Elizabeth equally for their many schemes. Claire was too timid to join in these pranks, and Diana too young. But Lina had always hurried along with them, desperate to play a part. At night they would crawl about the darkened house, giggling at those great portraits of Elizabeth’s forefathers, sneaking sugar from the kitchen and silver buttons from the morning room. They stole old Mr. Holland’s playing cards with the pictures of ladies in undergarments on the backs and wrinkled their noses at them. They really were friends back then, before Elizabeth’s sense of self-importance swelled and she stopped having time for her old playmates.

  Lina wasn’t sure when things changed. Maybe around the time that her mother died and Elizabeth began her lessons with Mrs. Bertrand, the finishing governess. Lina had been almost eleven then, awkward of body and eager to find fault in everything. She didn’t often like to think back on those years. Elizabeth, a little less than a year older than she, had become suddenly absorbed in her lessons in civility, in how to hold a teacup and when the proper time to return a call from a married female acquaintance was. Her every gesture seemed intended to convey to Lina that they were not of the same cloth, that they were no longer friends. And now Elizabeth was the sort of girl Claire read about in her magazines.

  For years Lina had existed quietly, and practically alone, despite attending to Elizabeth all day and night and sharing sleeping quarters with her sister and the other young women on the Holland staff. She’d been too shy to maintain her childhood friendship with Will without the buffer of Elizabeth. So she had watched him grow taller and finer looking from afar. There had been dark years for him, too she had heard stories of his drinking and fighting from the housekeeper, Mrs. Faber, and had wondered what dissatisf
action lived in his heart. It was only that summer when, with Elizabeth gone, she was temporarily and gloriously freed from her regular duties that she and Will had become friends again. They shared cigarettes after his long days were done and jokes at the expense of Mrs. Faber. They imagined aloud what their lives would be like if they were free to do as they wished. Before, she always wondered where he used to disappear to. Now she knew that he wasn’t dangerous at all, that he spent nearly every moment he wasn’t working with a book. Books about the excesses of the leisure class, and the theory of democracy, about politics and literature, but most of all about the West and how anybody with drive could make his way there. Now the summer was almost over, and she still hadn’t found a way to tell him that she wanted to go out West, too. With him. That she was in love with him.

  Lina was brought back from her thoughts of Will by the actual sight of him. One of the Hollands’ broughams came to a stop in front of the house, and Will leaped down from his perch to hush the horses and open the door for the ladies. She looked at his back, wide at the shoulders and long at the torso, with the poignant X of black suspenders across it. Elizabeth came first, holding up her arm for Diana, who, for all her big talk, was looking rather fatigued. And then Will put his arm up for Mrs. Holland, whose small black figure came quickly to the ground. Then the women walked one after the other through the still night and up to the door. Lina could hear Claire welcoming them as Will walked the horses around to the carriage house.