For Penelope, the agony of having stood so long in a room while being paid so little attention was far greater than any that could have resulted from a physical blow. She was dressed in eye-catching vermilion that enveloped her like plumage, and the lace that sheathed her arms and the suede that circled her waist revealed how dainty she had become since she last had been seen out. Her dark hair was up above her face like a cloud at midnight; her eyes looked acutely blue lined in black, as they were now.
“I never knew how unkind New York could be until today,” she concluded bitterly. For although it was not the kind of thing that was printed in society pages, the reason Penelope had been confined to her bedroom for so long was that she had lost what would have been her and Henry Schoonmaker’s first child. And to make it all the more pitiable, the whole unfortunate episode had occurred while her dashing husband was away at war.
Or not really at war, because Henry’s father, William, had arranged for him to be sent to Cuba, where the danger had mostly passed. And no baby had truly been lost, because she had never actually been with child. That had been a story she cooked up to bind Henry to her and punish the irritating girl he persisted in believing himself in love with. She could not really have been with child, because she and Henry did not really act like man and wife in that sense, except on one occasion, in Florida, when he had been very drunk. For a moment the muscles of Penelope’s face relaxed and her blood warmed at the thought of the summer when Henry and she had been intimate in every back corner of their families’ homes they could manage…but she stopped herself. She was in a room of people incapable of sympathy, but apparently quite capable of delighting in her downfall, and she could not afford to grow wistful.
“Look!” Buck was laboring for a cheerful tone.
After a stubborn pause, she did turn her gaze in the direction Buck had indicated. There, through the crowd of red-faced people shrieking in delight at whatever inanity, moving about the dance floor gracelessly—or, she supposed, with what had come to pass for grace in Mrs. Schoonmaker’s absence—stood a tall, broad fellow in shiny black garb with eyes almost as strikingly blue as her own. There was something wholesome, but also exotic, about his chestnut hair and the sparkle of his smile.
“At what exactly?” Penelope replied in the well-practiced voice that implied she was not impressed.
“It’s the prince of Bavaria.” Buck inclined himself toward his old friend and continued in a confidential tone: “He’s been touring the New World for some time. They say he is soon to be engaged to that little slip of a thing at his side—French, can’t be more than sixteen—but her mama, the countess, was made nervous by all his roving, and has followed along in his footsteps.”
Penelope had to press up on the toes of her satin heels, which were adorned with pearls, and crane her neck to glimpse this creature. Through the crush of evening garb and sweating faces she caught sight of not one Frenchwoman but two, neither particularly tall. The elder fanned herself indifferently, and the younger, who wore a pearl-and-diamond choker, gazed up at the fine shoulders of her escort in dewy adoration. There was something about her untouched skin and wide dark eyes that put Diana Holland back in Penelope’s head, along with a twist of rage.
“He was in Florida when we were there, but I never saw him.”
“You can tell how beautiful the countess once was.”
“Yes,” Penelope agreed, but only after privately noting that lady’s sunken cheeks and rather overdone makeup. The prince was smiling at some sycophant or other with an air of patient disdain, which Penelope recognized from her own repertoire of facial expressions. She felt a touch of sympathy toward him for being so obviously, so painfully superior to those around him, just as she always was. Then he glanced up so that his eyes settled on her and caught the light. She had become tough in the previous months, but she softened at the sight of a man who was clearly of her caliber.
“Oh…Mrs. Schoonmaker.”
Penelope turned, distracted, in the direction of her name, and saw Adelaide Newbold, whose maiden name had been Wetmore. The new bride smiled tightly as she passed, and then swept onward in an insignificant wave of mauve.
“What was that?” Penelope managed to keep her voice quiet, but was unable to wring it of the fury she felt. The ignominy of being cut by a girl who had married at a more advanced age than she, to a man of far less means than Penelope’s husband, was almost too outrageous to believe.
“It is perverse how they all think Miss Broad is so high and fine, all the while giving me nasty faces. Does that make any kind of sense to you?”
Buck’s silence continued as she turned her gaze, slowly, in his direction.
“Does it?”
“Perhaps…” Buck pressed his fat lips together. The plentiful flesh of his cheeks threatened to obscure his eyes. “Perhaps it is that they think—erroneously, of course—that you are out a little soon after your…illness. When your husband is away, that is, and in harm’s way.”
A collection of words have never been more carefully strung together, and yet they could not have sounded more cloddish, stupid, ill-informed to Penelope’s ears. “I’m thirsty,” she snapped. “Get me a drink.”
She did not watch Buck go. Already she was crossing the large parlor on the second floor of Carolina Broad’s new house with proud purpose. The panels of her red silk dress caught the chandelier light, as the lace of the underskirt frothed up around her feet. The elegant people all around her must have suddenly come into some reserves of reason, for they moved aside for her with a suggestion of deference. She stalked to the middle of the room where the girl with the petite stature and Holland-esque face was standing, and promptly looked away from her.
“Would you believe that no one has asked me to dance all night?” she demanded of the prince of Bavaria, allowing the absurdity of the statement to bear up in her voice, along with the flat American vowels.
The prince—he was unusually tall, she realized when she was beside him, and his skin had the glow of all things very rare and expensive to maintain—assessed her with amused, appreciative eyes. His jaw shifted. “No,” he said after a minute.
Penelope cocked an eyebrow and let her chin rise just a little, the better to display the long, pale symmetry of her neck. The countess and her daughter were watching this American girl in her unseemly red gown with an air of European haughtiness, no doubt, but their expressions were irrelevant just then. As she waited, her confidence, as well as the excitement of being in the middle of a room, at the center of attention, of having done something slightly irregular, grew. Then the prince reached for her hand and planted his lips on the other side of the gaudy engagement ring that she had had to buy herself.
“Allow me the pleasure of being the first,” he replied in English just slightly inflected with a foreign sophistication.
Neither she nor the prince glanced at the Frenchwomen as he lifted his arm so that her hand could remain rested against his and aloft while he led her into the adjoining room. Several of Miss Broad’s guests were still dancing, but they parted for them with reverent interest. A hush fell over the couples. They were all watching her now, Penelope realized, and she smirked a little to think how easy it was to win their attention, even after everything.
The prince’s eyes darted once more to her hand before he circled her firmly with his other arm, and moved her backward into a waltz.
“What a pity you’re married,” he said, in a voice that implied a greater familiarity than could possibly have been justified by their few minutes of acquaintance. He was dancing very close to her, closer than an American boy would have—but then she was not shy of holding his gaze.
“Well, you see, my husband is at war,” she replied with a broad flash of smile. “In such situations, you never know who will be coming back, and who is gone forever, and a lady must always be hedging her bets.”
For a moment she feared that she had gone too far, that the prince would find her cavalier assessment of H
enry’s soldiering and possible death unseemly and leave her standing alone on the dance floor. But then he tossed his head back and laughed heartily, until she too laughed, emitting a twinkling bell-like noise in the direction of the coffered ceiling. Then he moved closer and went on dancing her across the floor in a way that made all those people who had so recently snubbed her stop what they were doing and stare at her gape-mouthed. The prince of Bavaria was still laughing, a little smugly now, and this indicated to Penelope that he had a rather perverse sense of humor and also that, over the course of the evening, they were going to have a very good time.
The skirts of the women all around them brushed up against one another to form a solid wall of fine pastels; their mouths, and whatever they were whispering, disappeared behind their fans. Light twinkled from the jewels that sat on Penelope’s wrists and neck and waist and hair. The fearsome Mrs. Schoonmaker had been away for some months, but it had only taken a few hours, and not especially much of her patience, to once again captivate an entire room.
Six
A gentleman travels to become hale and experienced; a lady travels to complete her hat collection, and must be mindful she does not rub up against too much of the world.
——MRS. L. A. M. BRECKINRIDGE, THE LAWS OF BEING
IN WELL-MANNERED CIRCLES
“DRINK UP NOW, BOYS!” CRIED DIANA HOLLAND, IN a brassy tone that would have made her mother shudder, from a location that would have made the old lady weep. “Because it might be a hurricane tomorrow….”
Out of doors the winds were loud and full of bluster, but there was no rain yet. The air inside Señora Conrad’s was hot and festive, and the barmaid with the curly wisps of short brown hair pinned away from her face could hardly see through the crowd of soldiers, from her post behind the long wooden bar, to the open shutters of the saloon and whatever weather lay beyond. The fabric of the white button-down shirt she wore fell away from her lightly sweating skin. The sleeves were pushed up to her elbows and tucked into the long, plain black skirt that was secured with a wide, brown leather belt. Her pretty skin had grown rosy with exertion, and her lashes formed black, pointed coronas around shiny eyes. A mad piano played in the corner, encouraging the droves to drink faster and laugh louder—an imperative they merrily obeyed.
“The rain will begin soon,” Señora Conrad said from her perch at the end of the bar.
“But,” Diana returned gaily as she poured glasses of straight rum for the gentlemen who watched her from the other side, “it is not raining now.”
Señora Conrad’s was off the Plaza de Armas, and the bottles shone with reflected light from the candles lining the elaborately carved wooden shelves. Mostly men came there—Cuban businessmen as well as hordes of the American servicemen who had been stationed on the island since the conclusion of the war. The proprietor was the first wife of an American whose interests in Cuba had dried up. She decorated her generous figure in black as though she were a widow, although in fact Señor Conrad had simply returned to Chicago, where he began trading commodities again and started a second family with his third cousin. But he had loved his Gertrudis, and had left her with a business of her own to live on. There were plenty of gold flourishes in the place, just as there would have been in any of the gentlemen’s watering holes in New York, although the effect was shaded with a heady dose of Spanish gloom. On a Friday night, all the little round tables were circled by men in uniform, who stretched their long legs across the old stone floors and toasted to being far from home.
A thunderclap close by shook the bottles and rattled the windows. The saloon customers quieted momentarily and turned toward the street. Although a distinct wetness hung in the air, still nothing fell from the sky. Señora Conrad made a low, whistling noise; a moment later, the din rose again. Then everyone moved toward the bar, rowdily calling out that they would have another. As the crowd began to roar, the old gentleman bartender, who worked in front of the large oval mirror to Diana’s right, removed his bow tie as if to say that now, finally, he was ready to get down to business. Beads of sweat clung to his forehead—even they were too lazy to move—and though Diana thought it might be interesting to go on observing him, voices all around her were demanding one more. She bent forward, shoveling ice into glasses, setting up another row of drinks.
Working made her arms weary, but it was a kind of fatigue that she’d grown to like. It wasn’t that she needed the money so much anymore—she had saved what she’d earned on the luxury liner, not to mention what she made selling pieces of gossip about the top-drawer people on board to Barnard back in New York, as well as a few little local color sketches, which he had complimented excessively. She was beginning to see that stories were not only to be overheard on the plush settees of drawing rooms at teatime, but might also be observed when one is out, at night, where people congregate.
“What’s a pretty American like you doing in a place like this?” called a man with a wide bushy mustache as she pushed a full glass in his direction. Diana, who was used to such questions, and the rather forward flattery that followed, took his money with an evasive smile. At first it had surprised her how differently men behaved toward her here, uttering phrases or asking favors as they never would have dared in New York. But she quickly came to see that they were a long way from home, and from the women and children they were bound to there, and that distance as well as drink had a way of lowering men’s inhibitions.
A fresh-faced soldier appeared behind the mustachioed man, who was still leering at Diana with rummy eyes, and called out for a beer in a timid voice. He seemed as young as she was, and apparently all his politeness had not yet been rubbed off by his colleagues, because he could scarcely look her in the eye. She gave the boy an appreciative wink before turning to fetch a bottle from the icebox. Winking had become a kind of flirtatious compulsion with her, and as she reached into the cool darkness, she decided she was going to have to cure herself of it before she found Henry. When she turned back around, the boy was gone—as far as she was concerned, anyway. He had become as invisible to her as the rest of the bar.
Diana’s mouth dropped open and a wild energy played in her chest. She had forgotten all the tasks that constituted her job, or how to perform them. The only man in the entire bar that she could now make out was darker than when she’d last seen him, and his skin looked especially tawny against the collar of his white linen shirt. The bridge of his nose was a color that suggested he had been out in the sun that day, and the expression disappearing from his face indicated that moments ago he had been having a careless good time.
“Hello, soldier,” she managed at last, with what she could gather of her breath.
“Diana?” Henry said, as though the sound of her name might confirm her unlikely presence in front of him. “How—” he stammered, “how did you come here?”
“I was looking for you.” All the sentences she’d imagined saying to him since that day at the end of February, when he’d entered a doorway and seen her wrapped up in another man, had escaped her. The only sentence she could think of was the one she’d just uttered, and it seemed to her, at that moment, to contain the only relevant information.
“You were?”
“Yes.”
“I mean—you got my letter?”
Diana nodded. She had received it indeed. The pages were sewn into her suitcase; she had read them a hundred times.
“You don’t hate me?”
There was no gesture that could have communicated how far her feelings were from hatred, but she shook her head in a kind of attempt anyway. Whatever emotion she was experiencing—was it shyness, or trepidation?—was new for her, and she was a little surprised at herself for being unsure in front of Henry after everything that had happened between them, and all she had done to bring this moment about. He was staring at her with those inscrutable black eyes. Her heart had begun to tick with the fear that their meeting was almost over, that her quest would end here with both of them tongue-tied. After a
ll, he was older than she, and more experienced, and perhaps now that he was a soldier, and not just a rich playboy with nothing else to do, he no longer had time for little girls.
The touch of Señora Conrad’s thick fingertips on her shoulder shocked Diana back to the present. The room was still full of people, noisily talking up the working girls or clambering toward the bar and banging their glasses against its worn surface. She glanced at them, at the row of faces red with joy, and then back at Diana. A surprised and knowing light shone in Señora Conrad’s eyes, and after a watchful pause she drew her young employee away from her post by the elbow.
“Come.” The lady gestured to Henry. Then she led them to the rear of her establishment, opened the door to the storeroom, and pushed one and then the other inside.
The room was lined with crates, and the closed door protected Diana and Henry, if just barely, from the racket of an advancing evening. Both were bathed in the honeyed light of a single bulb muted with paper. Diana turned her chin up toward Henry, expecting a kiss, but for a while he could only manage a few disbelieving blinks. Relief, along with a kind of euphoria, had begun to seep into her chest, although Henry’s presence had not yet begun to seem real. He stepped forward, and she parted her lips, but he did not put his mouth to hers. Instead his arms went around her torso, and he lifted her up above him, squeezing her tight. A deeply buried instinct told her to rest her face against his shoulder.
Sometime before the dawn they would begin talking and be unable to stop, and then their hands would roam all over each other. But for right then there was nothing she wanted but to hang like that, her feet suspended a foot from the ground, breathing in the smell that for her had ceased to be like anything but Henry. Not even her most fervent imaginings could have rendered him as good as this.
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