Splendor

by Anna Godbersen

  The pleasant sound of plodding hooves was interrupted by the voice of her husband, Snowden. “We don’t want you out in this heat too much,” he said, before adding a gentle “my dear.”

  For as long as anybody could remember, Elizabeth had been the kind of young lady who did not merely heed propriety but experienced the upholding of gentle traditions with genuine pleasure. When they were transgressed, she felt a corollary deep shame, but she was currently protected from voyeurs not only by the folding leather roof, but also by a broad straw hat. Her spirit sagged a little at his suggestion, for she was enjoying the leafy smell and the occasional sight of a long skirt swishing back and forth as a girl strolled with her fellow.

  Elizabeth disguised her disappointment with a docile smile and inclined her heart-shaped face and brown eyes in Snowden’s direction. He wasn’t handsome, but he did have a neat, not unpleasant appearance, with his preternaturally blond hair worn close to his head and his blocklike features unimpeded by beard.

  “You know best,” she added, perhaps as a small consolation, a show of respect to make up for the secret act of equivocation that she committed every time she uttered the word husband. For husband to her was the late Will Keller, while the man everyone erroneously assumed was the father of her child was no more than a kind of shield to protect her from society’s censure. Romance had never been a factor in what only a few people knew to be her second marriage.

  The balance of the phaeton shifted as Snowden leaned forward to give instructions to their coachman, but Elizabeth scarcely heard him. The carriage was turning; the horses were pulling them in another direction, but none of it mattered to her particularly. When she closed her eyes, she was with Will again, walking across the warm brown hills of California, planning out a life together. She had loved Will from the time he came to work for her family—he was just a child then, and he had been orphaned by one of those fires that swept through tenements entrapping the poor souls who lived there in a final earthly conflagration. Neither of them could ever remember when their camaraderie became romantic love, but once it had, that love dictated a whole new way of life. They had been trying to return to California, where they had been happy—they had almost boarded their train—when they were spotted by a group of policemen who shot Will down.

  Elizabeth’s eyes opened suddenly; she was a little startled by where her thoughts had taken her. This mixture of bitter memory, current contentment, and ever-present guilt brewed under the former Miss Holland’s straw hat as their carriage drew out of the park and into an unexpected intersection. They were on the southern tip of the park, traveling past the Plaza and New Netherland hotels and across Fifth Avenue. Their home, a modest eight-room apartment in the Dover, was on the park in the Seventies, but she now saw that their driver was acting on instructions to go downtown. Her lips parted and her irises drifted in her husband’s direction. But he did not turn toward her, and she was not the kind of woman to question.

  They headed down Madison, a fact Elizabeth apprehended with relief. She was less likely to be recognized here, and if she was, then she felt sure that it would be by someone with enough manners not to mention seeing the former virgin princess of elite Manhattan in a public place in her swollen condition. Fifth was where showy people built houses that looked like monuments to worldly accomplishment, so that they could be spied upon and spy back in equal measure. It was the place for people like the Hayeses, whose only daughter, Penelope, was her sometime friend, and who, given the choice, would always pick the dress most likely to draw attention to her person. Now Penelope was said to be such good friends with Carolina Broad, the heiress who in her previous life had been Elizabeth’s own lady’s maid. She was having a party tonight, which everyone had clambered to get invited to as though her pedigree were not make-believe, and which they were all probably getting gaudy for right now, back on that more strutting avenue and everywhere else. The cast members were all different from a year and a half ago, when Elizabeth was the debutante everyone wanted to know. It was dizzying, she reflected, how quickly the sets changed. But she was on Madison now, where the old families lived in handsomer, quieter houses, according to hallowed traditions and without such an appetite for exhibition. Elizabeth was relieved to have no parties to go to that evening, and felt at peace thinking what the plain brownstone faces of those houses signified.

  “Isn’t that where the Harman Livingstons live?” Snowden asked her, after a prolonged silence, gesturing at a stone mansion on a corner. She smiled and nodded, for though she was sure her husband knew the answer, he was allowing her to play tour guide in her native city, and she was happy for the opportunity to accommodate.

  “And there the Whitehall Vanderbilts?”

  Elizabeth nodded again, and as they went farther she answered similar questions and even suggested a few points of interest on her own. It pleased her to be giving Snowden something, even if it was just little parcels of information, and her sense of enjoyment suffered only when she heard him say, “And there the Cuttings?”

  “Oh, yes.” Elizabeth’s voice fell to a whisper, and she turned so abruptly to look that, for the first time that afternoon, enough light fell on her delicate features that she might have made herself recognizable.

  For the only male heir of the Cutting shipping fortune was a boy named Teddy, who’d proposed marriage to her twice, when Will was still alive, without her or anybody else taking him very seriously. He was Teddy, after all, this friend who sat by her at her father’s funeral, and was of such a quiet, subtle nature that he was almost invisible to her when her head was so full of the strapping boy who’d lived in her family’s carriage house. That past winter, when she’d traveled to Florida with her old friend Penelope, Teddy had hinted at the feelings he still harbored for her, and she had hoped, during a brief window between the day she realized she was carrying a child and his enlisting in the army, that he might propose to her again. She had even, if she was being honest, yearned for a kiss or a little tenderness from him, but that was a desire she had since buried rather deep, and now had difficulty looking at straight on. After all, such longing meant the betrayal of not one but two husbands. Even if it hadn’t, Teddy was now stationed far away in the Philippines, and Gemma Newbold was said to be expecting a proposal from him upon his return.

  “And that house…?”

  Elizabeth blinked and tried to shake off the disorienting guilt. The house Snowden indicated was a well-appointed brownstone, three high windows across and four stories tall. It was elegant and understated and stood in the middle of the block on the west side of the street. Over the front door, there was a handsome fanlight of white and gold stained glass. They were in the low Thirties, not altogether far from the house on Gramercy Park where she had grown up and where her family still lived. She should know this house, and yet she didn’t.

  “I’m not sure that I recognize…” Her brow furrowed, she turned toward him.

  “I believe,” Snowden began, a smile creeping onto his face and his gaze now holding hers, “that is where the Snowden Cairnses live.”

  “Pardon?” Elizabeth’s fingers rose involuntarily to cover her heart. Already she could feel gratitude spreading across her chest and edging out the dismay she’d so recently experienced. It was just the sort of house she would choose for herself: large but not ostentatious, serious and well built according to the old New York idea of gentility.

  “The baby will be here soon,” Snowden said simply, “and I thought it was time my wife had a proper home.”

  Elizabeth stared at the house where she would raise her child, becoming surer with each passing second that it was the perfect place. “Oh, thank you, Mr. Cairns, thank you so much,” she gushed when she was able. She blinked at him, still a little light-headed with incredulity. She was terribly lucky, she reminded herself, and should be more vigilant to not forget the fact. The sounds of traffic were growing louder in the late afternoon, and all around them the buildings took on a golden hue from the
ripening sun. The very natural smile that the sight of this house had brought to Elizabeth’s face held. Then Snowden leaned forward and committed an act without precedent. He put his mouth against Elizabeth’s and kissed her.

  There had never been any suggestion of romance between them, and the shock of the gesture changed the temperature inside of her all over again. Perhaps she looked as scandalized as she felt, because Snowden then patted her on the knee the way a grandfather might if she were a young girl up past her bedtime.

  “We can move in as soon as you like,” he told her in a formal voice, before inclining forward and instructing the driver to take them back up to the Dover so that they could begin packing. He did not so much as look at her during the entire ride uptown, and by the time they arrived she was convinced that, if there had been anything lustful in that kiss, it was nothing more than her guilty, overactive imagination.

  Three

  The situation in the Pacific is a stark one, for though the Spanish have been properly licked, the American commanders, before they attempted to hold provinces of 200,000 or 300,000 hostile inhabitants, had scarcely any idea of the size of the Philippine Islands. According to some experts, the American presence there is slightly over half the size it need be to secure the region. In light of this, it is especially heroic for blue bloods of our own city to be serving there, among them Mr. Teddy Cutting and Mr. Henry Schoonmaker, whose exact locations or regiments are naturally not disclosed for safety’s sake….

  ——FROM THE NEW YORK IMPERIAL EDITORIAL PAGE,

  FRIDAY, JULY 6, 1900

  “THEY SAY THEY’LL BE CALLING TROOPS HOME SOON,” Colonel Copper said, leaning forward to refresh his drink from a wicker basket stocked with rum, mint leaves, and sugar. The basket sat on the polished blond planks of a large sailboat, a sailboat that Henry Schoonmaker was steering across Havana Bay. Henry was wearing a white linen shirt, unbuttoned to the sternum, and light-colored army-issue slacks; beads of sweat lazed on his skin. Stubble shaded the aristocratic line of his jaw, and his dark hair was pomaded into sections. When he had first volunteered, he’d been careful to always keep his face neatly shaven, but there didn’t seem to be much point anymore. “Home, and then on to the Philippines where they are really needed.”

  Though the word home had piqued his interest, Henry’s black gaze shifted from the mountainous clouds collecting over the gray-blue water, where vessels of all kinds drifted in the afternoon breeze, and across the length of the boat, where a few army men who far outranked him whispered to pretty local girls poorly disguising their boredom. The ivory sails bloomed overhead; the weather had not yet become anything to worry about, although there was less sun than before and a storm was coming, tonight or tomorrow. The boat, which had been commandeered from a fleeing Spanish naval officer, was as well appointed as some of those the Schoonmaker family maintained, and although Henry felt comfortable at its helm, he was having trouble deriving any pleasure from sailing that day. It had always been one of his diversions, but New York and the person he had been there seemed strange to him now.

  “They’ll be sending us on to the Philippines, then?” he asked, keeping one hand on the polished oak tiller and the other on his drink. His old friend Teddy Cutting was stationed in the Pacific—they had enlisted at the same time, and yet their careers as soldiers could not have been more dissimilar. It was the place where Henry had once imagined he might die, and if not die, experience real danger and then discover what it was to be a man.

  The colonel glanced up, and his drooping mustache rose with the corners of his smile. “Some troops will go, but don’t worry, you won’t be among them, my boy.” As he settled himself back against the pillows that lined the deck, the leather flask on his belt made a swishing noise; it was, like all the colonel’s affectations, suggestive of an expensive sportsmanlike masculinity. Henry had, on occasion, accused Teddy of being too serious, but he heartily wished he could be with him now and escape the idiot company in which he currently found himself. “You are too important to me here.”

  This was not intended as a mockery, but Henry couldn’t hear it as anything else. His great importance was his ability to sail small boats in the bay for the little races that the colonel liked to entertain himself with, ever since the June elections and the peaceful period they had ushered in. He knew he was ridiculous for feeling disappointment at the colonel’s assurance, but he was having difficulty viewing the man, and life under his command, as anything but a joke. Henry brought his glass up to his lips and sipped before looking away across the seascape to the inlet where the ships came into harbor. The Morro glowered from atop the hill, fearsome and warlike, on the opposite side of the bay from the tiled roofs and arcade-lined squares of the old town.

  “No, I wouldn’t let you leave Havana now. Not when the race against Lieutenant Colonel Harvey is in a few days!” Colonel Copper chuckled. Lieutenant Colonel Harvey responded in kind. Henry glanced at them, seeing only the popped red blood vessels on their broad noses, and then away. They said it was only ninety miles between Cuba and Florida, and sometimes in his dreams he swam it. He had been to Florida once, as a civilian, last winter. He had made a terrible mistake there and given into the desires of his duplicitous wife, but he could also remember those warm days before his error, when he still had a chance at something true. “You know, señoritas, Henry here comes from a very old, very prestigious family. The Schoonmakers are said to be one of the ten richest…”

  Henry blinked into the breeze and almost pitied Colonel Copper. After all, he was only guilty of the same delusion that plagued most people: He believed that he wanted to be like the Schoonmakers, to own yachts and Fifth Avenue mansions and be written about in the papers, and he could not comprehend what Henry had only recently begun to understand, that all of that only meant that it was rather difficult to do what one actually wanted to do, or love the woman one was actually in love with. Henry hadn’t even been capable of enlisting right, for God’s sake. Colonel Copper had assessed Henry, determined that he was one of the Schoonmakers, and more or less relieved him of any kind of active duty. Thus had Henry’s vision of patriotic service and experience ended; that was back in April. Most of his days since then had begun with sailing and ended in the humid barracks whispering the name Diana Holland while he tried, in vain, to sleep.

  For a brief moment, Diana Holland’s love had been a possibility for him, the shimmering, pure goal that would give all his shiftless years meaning. But then he’d behaved execrably, and brought a horrid cynicism into that sweet girl’s life. If he was lucky, his dreams about her were from the period when she still had cause to believe in him, but as often as not they were nightmares of the evening when he walked into a room and saw her caught up in the arms of his wife’s brother. There she had been, his girl, in the shadows, against a wall, in the grip of that inveterate gambler. It was a scene that still sickened Henry, but one he knew he well deserved. The memory of it made him want to die, but there was no chance of dying here, except by drink, which he went on downing at more or less the same rate as he had in New York. The only change in him was the color of his skin, which had grown brown in the sun.

  “Aren’t the ladies here lovely and compliant?” he heard the colonel saying behind him, and though Henry did not turn to look, he felt it was safe to assume that he was making awful leering faces at the girls under his arms. “Don’t they wink and flirt as girls back home never let themselves do?”

  Henry was overtaken by the sudden desire either to throw himself overboard or be very, very drunk already. The former seemed the more heroic choice, but upon reflection he realized that the fall would not kill him, it would only get him wet, and already he was sweating in irritation at all the colonel’s inane chatter.

  “Come, Schoonmaker, stop staring out to sea! Let’s get you a girl.”

  An angry light darted through Henry’s black eyes, and his fingers gripped at the tiller. He knew that the colonel was now standing up, because the balance
of the hull shifted below him. Still he refused to look. All of a sudden he was furious, for reasons he could not begin to understand. He only knew he was tired of Cuba, and of himself, and of all the places he’d ever been and all the things he’d ever wanted, save one.

  “Oh, Lord have mercy, Schoonmaker, your wife won’t find out! Live a little, while you can! She can’t be that lovely.”

  “It’s not my wife I’m worried about.” Henry stood and spun around so that he was facing his commanding officer, unbalancing the hull again and causing the ladies closer to the bow to cry out in fright. He remembered one of them saying that she couldn’t swim as she’d stepped nervously from the pier, and though in some corner of his mind he worried for her safety, his thoughts were elsewhere. “But, yes—the woman I am faithful to is that lovely.”

  “Henry,” Colonel Copper went on, growing faux-serious, “I am your superior, and I insist that you have a good time!”

  The two men faced off by the stern. Soon a cloud would pass, and the situation would come to seem absurd. But the colonel was several drinks into his leisurely afternoon, and the righteousness was heady in Henry’s veins. He stared back at the older man with all the rage and confusion he felt toward a life that kept bringing him back, despite all his best efforts, to afternoons of cocktails and boats drifting in no particular direction. Neither said anything, and perhaps in a moment the silence would have reduced them both to laughter. But then a passing cargo ship caused a wave, which rocked their vessel, and the girl who couldn’t swim grabbed clumsily for a rope to hang on to. Her flailing set the mechanics of the boat in motion: The boom swung across the deck, narrowly missing Henry; he was relieved to find himself still safely on board. In the next moment he heard splashing and sputtering, and realized that while he’d been spared, the colonel had been knocked forward into the water.