Splendor Page 6

  Luckily for Carolina, Amos Vreewold entered the private room behind her box just then. She saw, in a second, how easy it would be to absent herself, and avoid a visit from Portia Tilt’s well-made companion.

  “Why, Mr. Vreewold,” she began, gathering herself. “You must excuse me, I was just on my way to the ladies’ lounge for a freshening-up. Surely you will have much to discuss with our dear Mr. Bouchard.”

  “Vreewold…,” Leland said, turning, engaging the other man in conversation, “you haven’t changed even a little!”

  She put her fists into her skirt, to draw it back from her toes, and reminded herself that in this, her second social season, she already occupied the most coveted box at the opera. She had followed the lead of her friend Penelope Schoonmaker and chosen a signature color with imperial connotations; Penelope’s was red, hers was purple. She was not to be trifled with. As soon as she stepped into the curving corridor, she came face-to-face with Tristan Wrigley.

  “Can I help you?” Her voice was ever so low, ever so refined.

  The man met her cool stare with a smile that spread slyly across his face and twinkled with charisma. He had a fine American jaw, and cheekbones that might easily convince an inexperienced girl that he came from good people. Like the real gentlemen in attendance, he wore shining black tails and a white bow tie, which fit him with certain flair. Though she would have known him anywhere, she maintained her indifferent, unresponsive gaze. Still, below her ribbons and her bows, underneath the bones of her corset, a layer of sweat began to collect on the skin of her ribs—for after all, it would have been impossible to completely forget how he entered her life, during that wild, impressionable period when she was just a lady’s maid recently fired by the grand Holland family, making a fool of herself in all of Manhattan’s best hotels.

  His muddy golden eyes swept her figure, taking in the pearls at her décolletage and the tiers of chiffon that hung about her like delicate aubergine leaves. After an inappropriately long pause, he emitted a slow, appreciative whistle. “I would say so.”

  Carolina straightened. That angry, righteous feeling, which was such an inescapable piece of her personality, was seeping into her lungs. “Excuse me?”

  He rested his shoulder jauntily against the curved wall of the corridor. The music of the orchestra sounded muffled and far away here. No one had yet passed them, but how long could that last? “I see my Carolina has done well for herself.”

  The phrase “my Carolina” came off his tongue purposefully, as though he wanted to remind her of the night he’d surprised her with a kiss on the mouth in an elevator, or of that brief period—after Mr. Longhorn had died, but before she knew the kindness he had bestowed upon her—when she had believed herself helpless, and had depended on Tristan for shelter and other things better now forgotten. That he would lord these events over her put a match to her rage, and heated the tender edges of her ears. But then she remembered herself, and glanced back toward the box. The curtains formed a sliver, through which she could make out, with relief, silhouettes of Leland and Amos bent in conversation.

  “I am not anybody’s Carolina,” she returned.

  Tristan shrugged and took a step toward her, leaning in close enough that she caught a faint whiff of onion on his breath. “I can’t pretend I made you all on my own, but you know very well you couldn’t have gotten here without me.” The tone of his voice was lined with malice now. The smile became a grimace. “Longhorn was my idea, or had you forgotten? I believe you owe me some gratitude…Miss Broud.”

  Carolina’s blood quickened, and she quivered a little at the sound of her true surname, and wanted very badly for it all to be over, for none of it to be true. She stepped away from him, as though that might make their past together, and all the other ways she used to be, disappear. Her movement was quickly mimicked, and he held her gaze as she backed away.

  “Who is this?”

  Carolina’s heart thudded. Her eyes grew round. She turned, and saw Amos and Leland, stepping out from the box and into the corridor. Jovial expressions faded from their faces as they took in the sight of the handsome, flashily dressed fellow who was most certainly not one of their people. The boy she had been dreaming about for months was no less handsome when he wore an unhappy expression, Carolina saw. The suggestion of a territorial instinct lent an imposing quality to his features, which she discovered that she liked. In seconds, she knew that she would do anything to keep him from discovering what she really was—she would do anything just to keep him.

  “I have no idea.” The timbre of her voice was so light and sure, that she wondered for a moment if perhaps she was an actress at heart. When she turned back to Tristan, her face communicated nothing but a profound lack of recognition. “He thought he knew me, but he was wrong.”

  “Well, then, he should move on,” Amos said.

  Something murderous passed through Tristan’s face, but she felt a little calm already. She could tell she’d silenced him. Perhaps, too, the image of two tall gentlemen from old families, looming in white tie and black tails, made him less intent on his mission than he had been in the previous minutes. In all their strange times together, Carolina had never seen Tristan intimidated. She was glad to see it now. He bowed curtly, and backed away.

  When she turned again toward Leland, she saw that his broad, handsome features were still hung with a little possessive anger, and it gratified her. “Poor fellow,” he said, trying to shake it off. “He read about Miss Broad in the papers and dreamed he’d have a chance of whispering pretty things in her ear.”

  “Maybe he thought he could get invited to her next grand fete,” Amos added, laughing.

  “Come, gentlemen, there is no need to mock a nobody.” She tossed her head and gave an easy laugh. All of a sudden she wanted to be alone with Leland, to look at only him. “It was so kind of you to visit, Mr. Vreewold,” she declared in gentle dismissal. “Good night.”

  Then she and Leland stepped back into the box, with moony faces and bright eyes that were only for each other. She beamed radiantly as if to say, unequivocally, that whatever had just occurred was nothing. Less than nothing. Meanwhile, she could see in his posture and his glances, she could feel in the way his hands brushed her skirt and arms, that a few little waves of jealousy had carried her even further into his affections. Several boxes to her right, she knew that Tristan must be retaking his seat, but she would not have deigned to look in that direction.

  They remained in her prestigious box several more hours, being spied upon and whispered about all across the grand opera house. Carolina’s face was lit with happiness, her movements were effortless, as though no threat had been posed. Only once, on the carriage ride back to Sixty-third Street, did her calm exterior falter, and for a moment she trembled at what a humiliating scene she had narrowly averted. Leland noticed it, and asked her what was wrong.

  “Oh, it’s only that occupying old Longhorn’s box makes me miss him,” she lied, pressing her eyelids together as if allowing a shudder of pain to travel across her body. “He was my father’s good friend, you see, and had promised him that he would protect me, and now that he is gone I really am an orphan, and all alone in the world….”

  “My poor Miss Broad!” he exclaimed as he reached out for her. “But you see you have two strong arms around you now, and you must not feel alone!”

  As the carriage rattled and shook in the direction of home, as she rested her head against Leland’s shoulder, she felt something wonderfully opposite of loneliness. It had occurred to her that Tristan’s interference had perhaps been fortuitous after all, for whatever little stories she had had to tell to make him go away had inspired Leland to draw her, protectively, possessively, closer to him. For the great majority of Carolina’s life, she had felt a constant mute frustration that events would never go her way, but then, all of a sudden, her luck had changed, and now it seemed every charmed second was sure to unfold in her favor.

  Nine

  Meanw
hile, I have begun to wonder whether Diana Holland is ever coming back from Paris to begin the craze amongst New York’s well-dressed ladies for hair worn short.

  ——FROM THE “GAMESOME GALLANT” COLUMN IN THE

  NEW YORK IMPERIAL, SUNDAY, JULY 8, 1900

  “HOW LUCKY I FOUND YOU JUST WHEN I DID, because I’ve been looking forward to seeing the poet’s house, but I did not, in truth, want to go alone!” Diana Holland ceased her stubborn, boyish little march and turned to face Henry, wearing an expression of happy embarrassment for having babbled so long. He’d watched from behind as she walked away from him before, in anger, at times, or in sadness, but never had she moved the way the other girls of her set did, like Penelope or her sister—practiced, proud, as though their skeletons were made of platinum, and as though their heels never quite met the ground. Of course, at this particular moment, the place they were searching for was miles from rooms that demanded to be entered in such a formal manner. The scene was devoid of elaborate drapery, or dainty statues, or the kind of people who considered a lady’s gait a worthy topic of conversation. Beyond Diana’s figure, about which floated a dress of undyed fabric, there was only dense verdure and a steel-colored heavens. “I mean,” she amended in a softer voice as she gripped the broad straw hat that covered her absent curls, “I am so glad I get to go with you particularly.”

  The poet was some old Spaniard, long fled or long dead. Henry couldn’t quite grasp the name—it had a minimum of eight syllables, and in Di’s fluid pronunciation it sounded like nothing more than lovely nonsense. Who the poet was did not matter to him particularly (Henry owned many books, but few with cut pages), for it was Diana’s vitality he was pursuing, up the hill and away from the city; the literary shrine was, for him, incidental.

  “I am glad, too,” he replied simply. Then she took several steps back in his direction, gazed up at him with a face relaxed and glowing, and kissed him for perhaps the twentieth time that day. These were not the kisses of lawn parties, earned after hours of persuasion and the slow erosion of a debutante’s sense of propriety. They were not stolen or hidden—they were easy, and full of joy. Diana had always possessed a kind of gorgeous, reckless innocence, which he would have liked to drink in; she was even more courageous to him now that he knew she’d traveled so far, and by herself. Earlier he had made an observation along these lines, and she’d gleefully responded: “I am seventeen now!” with such touching irreverence he could only laugh. It was as though his life had begun again late Friday evening, and every hour since then had been as wondrous and full as a day in the book of Genesis.

  “There, I think I see it!” Diana withdrew her lips from his and pointed—pausing a kiss that seemed to go on endlessly from one hour to the next, with short breaks for speech or sustenance—up the hill, where Henry could just make out the jutting angles of a white walled villa. The city was below them, stretching out toward the sea, as well as the square where they had eaten croissants and drank café con leche that morning amongst languid gentlemen smoking cigars. The barracks lay between them and the crooked streets of the old town. Henry glanced back once, thinking fleetingly of his obligations there, and then hurried to catch up with Diana as she charged toward the house.

  A few long strides and they had crested the hill. The ground dipped below them, and then rose again underneath the villa, a single-story structure that had once been white, ringed by an impressive terrace. Palms sheltered the area, which had fallen into disrepair, weeds colonizing the paths that connected the small buildings that dotted the property, and little turquoise birds darted in and out of the thick foliage. Henry followed Diana across the lawn and up the stairs of what must once have been the main house, where they encountered an impressive wooden door, carved and worn, and secured with a huge iron lock.

  “We’re shut out,” Diana said, frowning, resting her fingers against the handle as though to confirm the fact.

  “Perhaps we could break a window,” Henry ventured, gesturing toward the glass panes to either side of the main entrance.

  “No! No, no.” Diana’s eyes grew round at the suggestion. She took his hand and drew him along the terrace, which was covered with tiles that had, once upon a time, been painted with geometric blue and white patterns. “We can’t touch a thing,” she admonished sweetly. “I’ve heard from all kinds of people at Señora Conrad’s that it’s just as it was when he left it, all the books are in the same place, and God must be watching out for it because it is immune to thieves. They say,” and now her voice sunk to a whisper, and she twisted her neck enough that Henry recognized a conspiratorial expression on her crescent face, “that he wrote his best verses here, that when he left it was over for him.”

  Around the house they walked, peering in at beaten leather armchairs and moldering book-crammed shelves. A peachy afternoon light broke through a sky that was otherwise a study in fearsome grays, illuminating the old candelabras and paintings and masks that adorned the walls that had once housed a sedentary life. It was the ruins of an existence very different from their own, and they moved around the grounds as though through the hushed halls of a museum. Diana became absorbed with the magic of the site, and he became absorbed in her, watching an aura of fascination suffuse her features. She glanced back at him, her shaded eyes wide open as though to say, Can you believe we’re here, in a place like this?

  Perhaps because she was so occupied in imagining the recitation of verses that had occurred there on long-ago evenings, while Henry remained distracted by the loveliness of her unselfconscious heart-shaped face—shadowed by palms, touched by breezes—neither at first noticed the drop in temperature or the moisture accumulating in the atmosphere. They had nearly traveled around to the front again, their hands still clasped as she led him from one window to the next, when raindrops as big as grapes began to hit the terrace.

  “Oh!” she gasped in surprise, looking up at the sudden precipitation. Then they both broke into a run, hurrying across the wraparound terrace, which was quickly becoming slick, and down the stairs. But their instinct to run from the rain, Henry soon saw, had been a foolish one. By the time they had dashed across the field, the large drops were fast becoming an onslaught. Henry’s shirt would have been soaked through, had they not so quickly reached the shelter of a garden shed with a thankfully broad metal awning. He tried the door, and found it secured from within, although by then all the fear and surprise had left Diana’s face, and she was gazing out at the sheets of falling water, which were forming rivulets down the hill, in delight.

  “We’ll drown if we try to make it back to the city now….” Henry dried his face with his hand. From where they stood, he could see all the way down to the bay, where children were no doubt running for the shelter of arcades and the sewers would soon flood.

  “Yes,” Diana agreed. “But how grand!”

  “How grand,” he repeated, realizing she was right. He had a sudden sense of the lushness around him, of the colors being unusually vivid, of each inhaled breath being impossibly full. Everything petty and extraneous in the world was about to be washed away. “And look—how lucky!”

  A few feet to his left was a little round white iron table, and two chairs covered with the same chipped paint. Diana’s pearl-like teeth emerged between her small, full lips as they stretched upward in pleasure. She undid her hat, and then they both moved to the chairs. Henry opened the covered wicker basket he had been carrying. Neither was hungry, so he pried open the two bottles of cola that Diana had packed for them that morning, when it had still been dry and sunny, and lit them each a cigarette.

  “Isn’t it amazing how the sun gets through, even in all this?”

  Diana had settled into her chair. Her pink skin glistened with the moisture, and her hair clung, damp and dark, around her soft ears. Though he didn’t want to take his eyes off her, he did, eventually, turn to catch the golden rays that were indeed visible despite heavy rainfall, despite the blacks and grays trying to outdo each other in the sky.
The smell of earth rose up, mingling with drops fresh from heaven; water against the metal awning up above made for cacophonous music. He took a sip of the sweet soda, and a drag from his cigarette. His breath had slowed already, and after the long walk and the quick dash, his body was beginning to feel calm. Even though he was a volunteer soldier in the United States Army, he had perhaps never been so far from the comforts that had characterized every day of his twenty-one years. They were a good way from town, and yet he felt he had everything he needed. He turned his dark eyes on the girl whom he had dreamed of so often over the previous months. Beside him, at that very moment of existence, at the heart of a torrential downpour, she was exquisitely real, and she, too, seemed content to go on sitting there forever. She exhaled cigarette smoke into the humidity and reached out for his hand.

  Consciousness came pleasantly over Henry. Faintly, beyond the door, he could hear boots, the distant voices of men, reveille. He was back in the barracks—it had been the nearest place for them to run to, the night before, when the rain let up. Though some part of him had longed, irrationally, to sit on that spot forever, drinking cola and smoking cigarettes and watching all the different ways that rain could sweep across a green acre, they had agreed they should try to get back to the city before darkness fell. But he liked being with Diana this way, too: sleepy and pliant, her face partially obscured by ill-behaved curls, the peachy arc of her shoulder just emerging from beneath a blanket. She murmured and stirred a little in her sleep, pushing against him in a way that brought to mind a newborn kitten.