Rumors l-2 Page 4

  Henry kept on, through the band, with all its ear-shattering horns, through the clutch of ladies that followed, in their white gloves and weighty hats. He heard the ladies saying his name and knew that they had turned to look at the spectacle of the young man moving downtown, against the traffic of his own father’s event. He would hear about it later, of course. His father was fond of threatening to disown him if he did not behave as a future mayor’s son should, although these threats had mostly abated since his father had realized that he might plausibly base his campaign on the current mayor’s mishandling of a debutante’s death and the spectacle of his own son’s grief.

  “Schoonmaker!”

  Henry’s eyes moved across the faces of the people massed on the sidewalk and the paraders all around him until his gaze settled, happily, on the face of his old friend Teddy Cutting. Next to Teddy was his younger sister, Alice, who was fair like her brother, with the same gray eyes, which were now focused shyly on the ground. Henry had once kissed her in the garden of the Cuttings’ Newport cottage, and she hadn’t been able to look at him straight since. She was the youngest of Teddy’s sisters, Henry believed, although he could never be sure, as Teddy was the only son among several siblings. To Henry this had always been telling: Teddy was the kind of man who had too many sisters.

  “Miss Cutting,” Henry said, taking her gloved hand and kissing it. “It is always a pleasure to see you.”

  Teddy gave him a warning look. “You look like you’ve had about enough.”

  Henry smiled with his characteristic charm at both siblings, and said, “I’m full to the gills.”

  “Let’s go, then.” Teddy reached out and put a hand on Henry’s shoulder. He had been one of Henry’s chief sympathizers since the unfortunate events of October. “I know of a lunchroom near here.”

  They said good-bye to Alice, who joined a group of young women, and then they moved into the crowd of common people with their faces lowered. The shininess of Henry’s black top hat and the superb cut of his wool coat would have given them away as members of the city’s elite, as would the rich brown check of Teddy’s vicuna jacket, or the stamp of the Union Square milliner on his brown bowler. Still, they made no eye contact with the people in the crowd, and when they emerged onto a side street they hailed the first hackney they saw.

  Teddy’s lunchroom was clean and bright, with a floor of small white octagonal tiles and convex mirrors lining the walls. They sat at a small round table made of sturdy dark wood, and they ordered the German beers that arrived in tall glasses with wedges of lemon. Henry felt quiet after several very public hours, and he was grateful that his friend waited to speak until after they had each sipped.

  “How are you bearing it?” Teddy asked, placing his glass back on the table. He had taken off his hat, and his blond hair was brushed neatly to the side. At Henry’s wary smile he went on. “I can barely listen to your father’s speeches, and I’m not even related to him. I mean, he hardly knew Elizabeth and then to use her death that way, for political purposes—” Teddy broke off, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Let’s not talk about that.” Henry took a long pull of his beer and then found that he didn’t feel quite so dark anymore. “It’s all hypocrisy and misery if we go that route, and who wants that?”

  “Fair enough,” Teddy said, returning his smile. “We’ll just be happy we’re free of ridiculous parades then, and be done with it.”

  They clinked their glasses and drank, and in the brief silence that followed, Henry found himself wondering how to open a topic that that they had discussed only briefly more than two months before.

  “You are really going to have to find a way to put Alice at ease,” Teddy offered before Henry could speak. He was trying to give Henry a disapproving look, but he couldn’t help a waver of a smile that his friend’s old effect was still at work even in gloomy times. “She gets quiet every time she sees you.”

  “Your sister’s too good for me,” Henry replied with a laugh. “She’ll see that soon enough, and the problem will be solved.”

  “She won’t want to hear it,” Teddy answered heartily, “but I can’t say I disagree with you.”

  Henry paused to drink, and when he placed his beer back on the table he met Teddy’s gray eyes. “You know, my official mourning period is almost over.”

  “I know. Thank God.” Teddy drank, and shook his head. “It’s been dull out in the world without you.”

  “We have fun.”

  “Yes.” Teddy’s eyes shifted and a memory passed in them. “We’ll have a dinner at Sherry’s, or maybe a hunting party up in Tuxedo.”

  Henry twirled his top hat in his lap. “I think I’m going to go to the season’s opening at the opera. Even my father likes the idea — the better to drive home his point about Van Wyck’s poor handling of Elizabeth’s death, when there are sure to be newspaper people around. It’s Roméo et Juliette, you know.”

  “Well, we’ll have to plan something for afterward, then.”

  “Yes.” Henry looked at his hat and began to twirl it the other way. He brought his eyes back up to Teddy’s and returned to the subject he’d so wanted to raise. “There’s something else.”

  Teddy had a fair and distinguished brow, and it rose now, ever so subtly.

  “At some point, my father will want me to start thinking about another engagement….” Henry paused to clear his throat. “And the girl I find myself thinking about is Diana Holland.”

  Their glasses were empty, and one of the waiters in long white aprons appeared to remove them. Teddy asked the man to bring more, and then turned a pained but stern expression on his friend. Henry rarely thought of Teddy as older than himself, but he was reminded of the two years that separated them now.

  “That cannot be.” Teddy kept his voice low and looked around to see that nobody had heard.

  “But why?” Henry could not hide the exasperation in his voice. “You know Elizabeth was even less interested in me than I was in her. All those rumors about their money, about it being gone — that must have been the reason she accepted my proposal. She couldn’t even bring herself to smile at me. And Diana will be in just the same position as her sister, and, unlike her sister, she has a chance of being happy with me. I would be happy with her.”

  “You know society will not allow it.”

  Henry shook his head and cast his eyes about the busy lunchroom. “They will forget.”

  “I don’t want to know what has happened between you and the younger Miss Holland.” Teddy paused as their drinks were delivered, and took a quick sip before continuing. “But if you really care for her, and you seem to, then you must stop being so stupid. Her sister was your fiancée, and she has died under circumstances that none of us begin to understand. Circumstances that you yourself suggested might have something to do with her impending nuptials. Diana may be infatuated with you now, but when she grows up, when she understands more about death and family, when she understands how much she has betrayed Elizabeth by taking up with her former fiancé, it will destroy her. And you know perfectly well how often people will remind her. Society does not forget.”

  Henry was taking long sips of his beer and trying not to be angry with his friend for speaking negatively of an imagined future that he had promised himself indulgently during the worst moments of the last few months. He had sat across from Diana in her family’s parlor during those first weeks of mourning and imagined the time when she would meet his eyes again, and that eventually all the misery would pass and they could really be together. Diana was the only girl he’d ever met who inspired him to imagine himself as a married man.

  “She will come to hate herself, and you too.” Teddy shook his head.

  For some reason this brought Elizabeth’s pitiable visage on the morning of her death back into Henry’s mind’s eye, and he began to think of the part his skirt-chasing — however ardent — had played in what she had done next. His fiancée had then seen him with her little sister; per
haps that had been the single event in ending a bright girl’s will to live.

  “Let’s go,” Teddy said gently.

  Henry finished his beer, and he placed a bill on the table. He had brought the topic up to Teddy once before and subsequently longed to have said nothing. There wasn’t a thing left to say now.

  In the past Henry had always ignored his friend’s advice at his own peril, but still he could not give up the picture of Diana he kept in his mind. Even as he put a resigned sort of smile on his face and placed his hat on his head, he could not help but think of her loose curls and fresh skin, of a gorgeous recklessness that perfectly matched his own.

  Five

  Women often stop me on the street and demand to know how they can transform their daughters into society ladies, and I always say: If they are not born with position, and if they are not uncommonly beautiful — for few girls today transcend mere prettiness — they will have to marry in where they can. To this mission, clothes are essential. A good place to start, I tell these eager parents, is at a department store in a good part of town, where one can find a salesman one can trust….

  — MRS. HAMILTON W. BREEDFELT, COLLECTED COLUMNS ON RAISING YOUNG LADIES OF CHARACTER, 1899

  LINA BROUD TURNED HERSELF ROUND AND ROUND, overcome with a kind of desire that was still new to her. Everywhere she looked there were objects edged in gold, finished with elaborate hand stitching, or festooned with feathers. They lay in neat piles on tables of mahogany that stretched as far as the eye could see, or at least far enough to reach one of the hundreds of etched mirrors that reflected the opulent scene within the Lord & Taylor department store over and again.

  “Tristan,” she said in a high, clear tone. She had been working on her elocution, and had lately concluded that the acoustics within the grand department stores of Ladies’ Mile were ideal for such an endeavor. In her previous life she had only rarely caught glimpses within such stores, which lined Fifth Avenue and Broadway above Union Square, and attracted the kind of women Lina used to serve. This in spite of the fact that the row of grand retailers and little specialty shops was mere blocks from Gramercy Park, where the women Lina used to serve still lived. Most of them, anyway. “I adore these gloves.”

  Tristan Wrigley, who was a salesman at Lord & Taylor and the first friend she had made in her new life, came to her side — perhaps an inch closer than men were supposed to in public with women who were not their relations — and said, “Of course, Mademoiselle Carolina. If I may.”

  Although Lina was not shy of being seen in public with naked fingers — she had lived most of her life with bare, working hands — she did feel a tinge of embarrassment as Tristan pulled off her gloves and began to draw the new pair on. She immediately noticed how superior in quality the hand-stitched, dove-colored pair were to her own. They fit to her fingers with an almost preternatural closeness, and the smooth softness of the silk against her skin gave her an instantaneous sensation of being very, very rich.

  “Does mademoiselle approve?” Like all the Lord & Taylor salesmen, Tristan had been hired for his all-American good looks — the better to lure female shoppers — and he always spoke with an elaborate politesse. He seemed as good a person as any to practice her new persona on, which was why she occasionally let him take her for walks in the park or tea at the hotel. Only occasionally, though — she was merely practicing, and didn’t want him to get too close. Her affections lay elsewhere.

  “Oh, yes.”

  Tristan had a long face with an architectural nose and cheekbones that seemed to set him even above his peers. He wore a fitted brown waistcoat and an ivory shirt buttoned at the wrists. His hazel eyes were such a hypnotic color that Lina sometimes found it difficult to look into them for more than two seconds at a time. Looking away from him did not distress her, however. Regularly averting her eyes was in fact useful to the illusion she was trying to maintain: that she was a copper-smelting heiress from out west (Utah, if pressed, though she had not been) and recently orphaned.

  At first she had been surprised at how easily Tristan bought her story. The day she had met Tristan had been in the most nascent stage of her new life, and it had included a terrific blunder. That had also been the first day she’d drunk beer or been in a saloon, and it had not ended prettily. The episode might surely have proven what a thousand little missteps suggested: that she was not a lady and that her origins were very humble indeed.

  But she had since witnessed — both in her new home, the New Netherland Hotel, and on her visits to Lord & Taylor with Tristan — real western millionaires, and had seen that they were even coarser and more prone to gaffes than she. For Lina Broud — Carolina, as she was trying to refer to herself in her own mind — did know some things about comportment, manners, and dress. She had learned them as the lady’s maid of the late Elizabeth Holland. Chief among her observations was how effective an aloof demeanor was in declaring one’s personal importance.

  It was in fact Elizabeth, whose wealth and reputation for loveliness gave her advantages with which Lina could not compete, who had won the heart of Will Keller — he had been the Hollands’ coachman, and Lina had loved him in secret for a long time. This wound was one of the reasons that she had sold her mistress’s secret, the one that involved Elizabeth and Will spending nights together in the carriage house, to Elizabeth’s sometime friend Penelope Hayes. That information had garnered Lina five hundred dollars, what had then seemed a fortune but had since been reduced by more than half by the dinners and hotel rooms and dresses and trinkets that she hoped would differentiate her from the plain girl she used to be.

  It had been a sore disappointment that such an extraordinary-sounding sum didn’t go very far in the lifestyle of a girl like Elizabeth. And Lina was not proud, either, that her life as a lady, or something like it, had been made possible by such a sordid transaction. But she had done what she had to do. Her object had not really been to make herself into a society girl — she just wanted to make herself enough Elizabeth-like that, when she was ready, she could go out west, and then Will would see that it was Lina he’d wanted all along. Or at least, when he heard of Elizabeth’s death, that the new, shiny Lina could fill that hole in his heart.

  Lina had never been above taking Elizabeth’s seconds, even if it was her mistress’s death that now allowed the passing down. She wanted to find Will as much as ever. She believed that that time was near — it had to be, or her money would run out first.

  Tristan was placing the gloves she had chosen, the little lace shawl, the Persian lamb muff, the new pair of onyx hose that sold for two dollars and twenty-five cents — Tristan had introduced them to her, and now she could not live without them — each in its own box, with the same magical, crinkling tissue. Lina watched with dizzy joy and a vague sense of dread as these objects were folded and placed, wrapped, and then boxed. Once they were boxed, that meant they were hers and that she would have to pay for them.

  “Shall I have these sent to your hotel?”

  “No…” Lina paused and looked away. The late afternoon light was coming in through the high, Romanesque windows that faced the street. Already the day was getting away from her, and she couldn’t truly be said to be grander than when it began. When she stepped outside the weather would have dropped, and all the workaday people she so wanted to distinguish herself from would be massed at the store’s plate glass windows to gawk at the Christmas display. At moments like these she couldn’t help but feel a little sad and recall how devastating it had been when, after years of secret longing, she had one night confessed her feelings to Will and then been sent away. She wanted to be sure that such a rejection wasn’t repeated, and reminded herself that she must perfect her transformation before she saw him again. “I’ll be taking a hansom, of course — I can carry them myself. But please do send the bill to the hotel.”

  Lina had recently stopped carrying her new wealth on her person — which had been a kind of nervous obsession when she first went out on her own
— and had cautiously begun to embrace the luxury of paying later. She kept her Penelope money in a small silk purse with a leather drawstring buried deep in her drawer of lacy underclothes. In her own experience as a maid, this drawer had possessed a taboo aura; she assumed the maids at the hotel would feel the same way and not go through it too carefully.

  “Of course, mademoiselle.” Tristan paused and grinned in a way that a real lady probably would have deemed too familiar, and said, “I could accompany you, if you needed assistance.”

  “That’s quite all right,” Lina said, looking away from him and subtly turning up her nose. “If you’ll just help me on with my coat, I’ll be going.”

  Lina alighted on the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue. Once she had firmed up her story and smoothed out some of the details of her performance, she had traded up from a rather seedy hotel on Twenty-sixth Street to the New Netherland, where the bellboys wore royal blue uniforms. It was a wide building of turrets and arched windows with a dignified brown façade, and it loomed over the buildings around it like a terrific sand castle. She had heard somewhere that the Netherland was the tallest hotel in the world, and that was why she had chosen it over the Savoy, its next-door neighbor, or the Plaza, on the west side of the avenue. The three hotels formed a corner around the southeast entrance of the Central Park, and below them stretched the mansions of Huntingtons, Vanderbilts, and Hayeses. The thought that she lived so near people of that caliber still gave Lina a pleasant little electric shock.