Beautiful Wild Read online

  “My dear, you do know I see all you do, don’t you? You and everybody else, too. He is your fellow, isn’t he?”

  “But, I mean—” Vida bit her lip. She was utterly surprised by this tide of feeling—it was only a game she wanted to win, after all. Why should she be acting like a ninny whenever it was suggested that he had feelings for her? “He’s hardly mine.”

  “Modesty does not suit you, dear. I like you better as yourself. You remind me of me when I was your age. You have the gift of bending the world to your will. He may not be entirely yours now. But he will be yours, if you want him.”

  “But he was promised to his brother’s wife?”

  “Oh.” Dame Edna batted away the question with her gloved hand. “It was one of many little attachments for both of them a few years back. Nothing close to an engagement. He is seen with another girl at parties and things every season or so, as I’m sure you know.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard that about him. I’m not the sort of girl to be troubled by such a reputation.”

  “I like that about you, and I didn’t think you’d be put off by a few dalliances that are entirely historical,” the dame said, her eyes narrow and glittery in appraisal of Vida. “I don’t think you should be worried about her. I like you very much—you are a young woman of intelligence who knows how to enjoy society, very fun without being silly, with a perfect sense of exactly where the line is between spirited and debauched—and I think you will have quite a celebrated career. I expect we will be friends a good long time, and do each other many little favors.”

  Vida put on an evasive smile, and decided that she had been quite right to make an ally out of Dame Edna. They would indeed see each other often wherever the adventurous and monied go. Plus, as Vida was beginning to realize, Edna really did believe that Vida could get Fitz—she wanted it for her own reasons, too. “I will look forward to that,” she said.

  All the while they had been talking the ship continued its steady path, ripping a seam in the endless ocean. They had left the endless blue dome of earlier, and now gray mist enveloped the deck, so that there seemed to be no sky at all, and Vida noticed, as she let the air release from her lungs, that the crowd had thinned out. Only a few strollers remained on the lido deck. And coming back in their direction was the woman Fitzhugh had once romanced—Camilla Farrar, still on the arm of her husband.

  Dame Edna stepped in their path. “It’s a wonderful ship, Mr. Farrar,” she said with cunning directness. “I hope you’ve been enjoying the space I have devoted to it in my column.”

  Though Carlton wore the expression of a man who has just bitten hard on gristle, he did shake the hand of Edna, as he might have with a business associate. “Yes, thank you.”

  Camilla was not so cold. She kissed the dame on either cheek. “We’re so glad to have you on board,” she said in her soft, breathy voice.

  “I’ve just been talking to the most charming young woman—may I introduce you?”

  “Yes, please,” said Camilla, and at the same time Carlton grunted, as though to say, If you must.

  Vida, realizing she was the charming young woman in question, scrambled to her feet.

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said, offering her hand to Camilla, who took it with an easy smile.

  “Mrs. Carlton Farrar,” said Dame Edna, “please meet Miss Vida Hazzard.”

  Camilla’s hand went limp in hers, and as quickly as she had offered it she pulled it away. “Oh,” she said. And after a long, rather miserable moment, she added, “Well, it was nice to meet you.”

  The Carlton Farrars strode off, disappeared belowdecks, and Vida turned to Edna to see what she made of the odd exchange. But she didn’t seem to have noticed anything awry. In fact she leaned in, quite confidentially, and said, “You’ll see if you can use that to your advantage somehow. Now, you must promise me a little something in return, for that is how civilization marches on, by the trading of shiny chits back and forth. . . .”

  Before she had a chance to make her request of Vida, the high, fluty voice of Mrs. Hazzard interrupted them:

  “It’s chilly, Vidalia, we ought to go in.” Vida had almost forgotten that Mother was sitting on a nearby deck chair with Father, discussing the dinner rolls, no doubt, and whether they were baked on board or had been brought from the mainland, for all San Franciscans have a belief in their sourdough, and that it cannot be properly made without the special quality of air in their hometown.

  “I don’t think we’ve met,” her father said, rising to his feet and coming over to offer his hand to Dame Edna.

  After a few pleasant nothings were exchanged, Dame Edna said, “I am a great admirer of your daughter. The man who marries her is lucky, for she will take both of them to the stars and back.”

  “Thank you. We are partial, of course. To us she is the stars themselves.”

  “Isn’t that nice. I was just telling her that the gossip is that an engagement announcement between her and Fitzhugh Farrar is imminent, and I wanted to confirm with her before I print anything.”

  “Oh, well . . .” Her father seemed unsure about the correct thing to say. “Already?”

  But Vida cut him off: “You shall be the first to know, Dame Edna.”

  “Very good. I am filing my column from Honolulu in four days, and I will have to have a scoop for my readership, who will have been a whole week without good gossip, poor dears. Mr. and Mrs. Hazzard, a true pleasure. I will see you at dinner.”

  And with that she swished on, her green skirt shifting and then disappearing into the fog.

  “Let’s get indoors, shall we,” said her mother, taking Vida’s arm. “I’ve just realized something terrible—you’re in suite seven, and we’re in suite six.”

  “So?” Vida asked, glancing at her father, who rolled his eyes at this superstition of her mother’s. Mother had been raised by a nanny from the old country, who had filled her head with any number of old wives’ tales, so that the whole family was forever throwing salt over their shoulders.

  “How can you say that? Together they make thirteen, and that’s bad, very bad. Let’s go in. We shouldn’t go out tonight.”

  “Yes, by all means, we must beware portentous numbers,” her father agreed lightly as he took Vida’s other arm. After a contemplative pause, he mused: “My dears, do we trust that woman?”

  “Oh! Vexations everywhere,” Mother said. “We can’t really trust anyone but each other. And then there’s what she said. She said this young man, this Fitzhugh, has had a string of associations. But it’s too late, of course. Vida simply must marry him. God forbid he doesn’t propose. And then what shall become of us all?”

  Vida wasn’t sure whether she was more annoyed with her mother for calling him “this Fitzhugh,” or that she had obviously been listening in on Vida’s conversation. “It’s hardly his fault,” Vida replied hotly. “Women just throw themselves at him.”

  “Be that as it may,” her mother replied, “it is your reputation that will suffer if this engagement rumor comes to nothing.”

  “Really.” Vida sighed in irritation. “We have danced together all of three times; I hardly think anything has occurred that could tarnish me.” But even as she said this, Vida’s eyes burned a little at the thought that her mother was right, that girls’ reputations were ruined all the time over less, and then they were never invited anywhere, and were shut off from the world to grow old alone, and what a terrible waste that was.

  “Nevertheless,” said Mother.

  “It’s cold tonight,” said Father. “Doesn’t a nice broth and a game of cards sound lovely? What say you, Vidalia, can we stay in tonight?”

  “Arnold, you can’t be serious, she must keep it up tonight.”

  “But my dear, you just said—”

  “Never mind that. Think, Arnold, you must think! If she is absent, another girl might swoop in—if this Fitzhugh is so easily distracted, she cannot miss a chance to meet him.”

  “My dear, have you not hea
rd the phrase about absence and the heart growing fonder?”

  “Oh really—do you think that’s how I got you?”

  “Wasn’t it? Do remind me.”

  “It’s not your memory that is the problem, darling. Men know nothing. You can trust me on that.”

  And so her parents blathered on in their gentle, anxious way, as they descended from the high deck, through stairways and corridors toward their own well-appointed cabins. Vida was only half listening, nodding just enough that she would seem obedient to both of them. Her mother always won these little exchanges, anyway—and even if they had both been opposed, Vida would have found a way to the first-class dining room later on. For once she had set her sights on something, she did not rest until it was hers.

  Five

  “Miss Vidalia Hazzard.”

  The butler announced her arrival, and then Mr. Selvedge arrived at her side to escort her through the grand first-class salon. Vida felt wonderfully unhurried about her entrance, and also about everything else. She had spent several pleasant hours with Nora getting ready, and she knew herself to be incandescent. The crowd buzzed at the sound of her name. Maybe because of the swirling rumors, or maybe because of her appearance, which was immaculate as usual but possessed that extra brightness that comes with a crush. She was wearing an absolute confection of a gown, tiers and tiers of a pink just slightly redder than white—suggestive of matrimony, without being too obviously a wedding dress. Her dressmaker on Union Square had convinced her to buy the thing some months ago, saying that it was particularly flattering on her. It had been a little too much for any event she had yet attended. But now, with the idea firmly planted in Fitzhugh’s mind, not to mention everybody else’s, the appearance of Vida in a dress that could not but invite a picture of her veiled, at the altar, seemed opportune, and perhaps the perfect stroke to bring her campaign to the brink of success.

  The night was perfect, and she felt that she was, too. She accepted Mr. Selvedge’s hand and he escorted her through the crowd to meet the Duke of Devonshire, and his wife, Margarita Hollings-Blue, the famous hostess, and then two young Astors, and a man who had invented a new process of petroleum extraction, and whose entire life was now a grand tour.

  “Charmed,” she said to the young man, Henry Dries Stahl, when she had determined he had nothing more of interest to say. She had a creeping suspicion that he might ask her to dance and wanted to get away from him before he did.

  “We must play a game of tennis before we arrive in Honolulu,” she said to the Duchess of Devonshire, when she was sure that lady’s friendship was a coup she could undertake at another time.

  “Isn’t it strange?” Lilly Adell, the young widow of a department store heir, asked her, just as Vida was trying to escape her company. Lilly, she had just noticed, was sort of drifting with Vida from one cluster of people to another.

  “What is?” Vida asked, startled by the peculiar question.

  Mrs. Lilly Adell had seemed in a light, elegant mood moments before, but her expression had another quality now. Strange, and rather faraway-seeming.

  “This carpet.” She was gazing fixedly at the pattern of exuberant curlicues of purple and gold beneath their feet. “I mean, it’s beautiful, just acres and acres of such beautiful carpet. But it’s all just to make it seem like we’re on land. We’re not! We’re a thousand miles from anywhere, and the ground floor of our building, if you can call it that, is the surface of the ocean, and beneath the surface of the ocean—it’s just a vast unknown, do you see what I mean? It could be mermaids down there, but also monsters.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Adell,” Vida said, trying not to laugh at this morose turn. “Did you have too much to drink at lunch?”

  “No. It’s just odd, do you see what I mean?”

  “That all of a sudden you believe in mermaids? Yes, that is odd.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s such a lovely party, yet such a heavy feeling has come over me. The weather’s bad tonight. Don’t you think?”

  Vida squeezed her hand. “Have these bores done you in? You don’t have to stay, you know.”

  Lilly squared her shoulders in resolve. “Oh, yes I do. I am twenty-five. If I don’t meet a man this year who seems likely to marry me, I am done for. They say you’re the kind of girl the men flock to, and that if I stay by you, I’ll meet some worthy fellows, too.”

  “Oh.” Vida shuddered at Lilly’s assessment of her situation. “I hardly think that’s the right mindset in which to meet a man.”

  Lilly glanced at the beautiful people leaning on columns, showing off their fine clothes, their enviable social connections, their jewels, and their spouses. They were enjoying being looked at, and looking at everyone else. Vida had heard the story, how Lilly’s husband was trampled in a streetcar accident two years ago, but she had seemed perfectly gay until this moment. “My God, it’s freezing,” the widow said. “Oh, maybe I should go to bed early.”

  “Absolutely not.” Vida made her expression very serious. She had not realized what a strange person hid within this beautiful and conventional façade, but she liked Lilly very much for revealing her weirdness now. “Upon reflection, I have concluded you should not be alone tonight. You must stay where there are people and have some fun.” Vida grabbed Lilly’s hands and pulled her toward the fireplace. “Come, let’s pretend to be getting warm while we look around and see who might be worth your time.”

  They whispered together tête-à-tête while covertly glancing at the gentlemen in the room. Henry Dries Stahl was rich, but had nothing to say. Freddy Flynn, Flora’s brother, was handsome, but liable to drink too much and become boorish. Hollis Granger was funny, but he had a peculiar smell. And then there were a lot of men who were all-right-looking, and were capable of holding a conversation with a woman, but were already married. Finally, Vida’s eye settled on an Englishman with some title or other, who was tall and wore a pleasant, open expression, and who she had seen at breakfast alone reading a book. Mr. Selvedge was passing then, and Vida wasted no time flagging him.

  “There’s a favor you must do for me,” she said.

  “Anything,” Selvedge replied with a little dip of the head.

  “That British fellow who sits alone at breakfast, what’s his name?”

  “Oh, that’s Lord Morrow.”

  “Is there a Lady Morrow?”

  “His mother, but she retires early and sleeps late.”

  “Would you mind sitting Mrs. Adell beside him this evening for dinner?”

  “Wonderful idea. Let’s make the introduction now.” Selvedge offered his hand to Lilly, and she took it, and off they went.

  Vida watched Lilly walk away. Her head was high and steady as though the rest of her were pulled on wheels. Her lips swayed with that subtlety exhibited by girls bred from birth for a smart marriage, and her black train trailed over the carpet that had inspired her to say such melancholy things. For a moment Vida felt melancholy, too, thinking of all the years her new friend had labored to mold herself into the perfect bride, only to be left as she was now. But she would be all right, and meanwhile Vida had her own match to pursue. She turned to the grand hearth, pushed her bosom in and up so that it would catch the best light, pivoted to grab a passing glass of champagne. She sipped and took in the room. Mr. Selvedge was coming back her way.

  “Any more seating changes you would like me to make?” he asked. His eyes were merry, and she could see he wasn’t really annoyed.

  “As it happens, my parents won’t be coming this evening after all. I’m sorry to tell you so late—you do go to so much trouble. Perhaps you could find another table for me to join?”

  “It’s no trouble at all. And you weren’t seated with your parents this evening in any case.”

  A sweet wind filled Vida’s lungs. “Why not?” she asked with a coy sideways glance.

  “Mr. Fitzhugh Farrar asked that you be seated at his table. I do hope you don’t mind. All the sporting fellows always ask to be sat with him, so you may f
ind it a bit of a bore.”

  Oh, I don’t care about that, Vida very nearly said out loud, so thrilled was she to hear that not only would they be seated together, but that Fitzhugh himself had requested it. “I’ll manage, somehow” was what she actually said with a little wink.

  “It is always a pleasure,” Mr. Selvedge replied, winking back, “to be of service to a young lady who enjoys herself. May I escort you to your table, Miss Hazzard?”

  A happy gust surged in Vida, and she held her hand aloft for him to take, and then he paraded her past the Blues of Park Avenue, and Mr. and Mrs. Louis Jones, and the rows and rows of footmen and waiters, past the oil paintings and statuary and potted palms and gilded doodads, and into the dining room, where a quartet was playing mildly, and where many of the first-class passengers were already seated, just waiting to see her as she came through the door. Mr. Selvedge commented on who was who, but she scarcely listened. For one thing she knew already, and for another she was concentrating on moving just the way a girl like her was supposed to, with grace but also with a little frisson of flirtation, and on lowering herself into her golden chair with as much elegance as possible, while still keeping her waterfall of a skirt away from her feet. She was as Dame Edna had described her—she knew just how to walk the line. To be decorous enough not to run afoul of good society, yet never falling into conformity.

  “Can I get you anything?” he asked as he poured champagne from the large bottle in the silver urn.

  “No, thank you, Mr. Selvedge,” she replied, letting her fingers rest at the base of her champagne flute. “I have everything I need.”

  Beyond several plates and sets of silverware and glasses of every shape was a small tent of white cardstock with her name scrawled in dark ink. At the next setting, there was an identical name tag that said simply Fitz. As the other members of their dining party leaned in to find their own names, she nodded and smiled a remote, elegant smile, all the while thinking to herself that the real fun would begin when Fitzhugh sat down beside her. Fitzhugh, with his neat and gleaming hair, his tails and tux and white tie, and she, in a shade just slightly pinker than a wedding dress, beside him like they were already a match announced. It had been her parents’ idea, of course. But she was making it her own, moment by moment, spinning pleasant fantasies of the adventure her marriage would be. Rosa de Hastings was at a far-off table this evening, looking a little dour, and Vida thought of the sense of triumph she’d feel when it was all settled. Dame Edna’s article would proclaim it in the newspapers, and everyone who doubted Vida would have to admit that she had taken a grand prize. She was trying to calculate how many days until then—until they reached shore, and the news could be cabled back to San Francisco—when the chair beside her was pulled back. Her smile flickered on, and she turned, hoping to see the young man whose name she had just been savoring in her thoughts.