Splendor

by Anna Godbersen

  Prudence, Henry’s younger sister, sat glaring at Bradley and Isabelle from a neighboring chair, and Penelope might have wondered if some rather disgusting triangle had not been formed, if she wasn’t so obsessed with her own troubles. Penelope had wasted weeks pining for Henry’s return, knowing full well it would only mean that he would persist in being cold and indifferent to her. But the length of his absence had entrenched her bitterness toward him, and she now found it impossible to derive pleasure from his good looks, or to muster the will to try and convince him that she was the ideal wife, after all. He had been back a whole weekend, and he had not looked her in the eye more than half a dozen times. Meanwhile, everyone seemed ready to view her as the unfaithful party—the injustice of it caused her to set her teacup and saucer down on the mosaic-top table with a touch of violence.

  A moment later, she saw that she had broken it. Brown tea ran over the table, and a wedge of lemon slid to the floor. Penelope stood, shocked at herself for doing something so cloddish. She had always prided herself on her cool. “Oh!” she said, as a maid in black dress and a large white apron appeared from beyond her range of vision and began to clean it up.

  Bradley stood as well, and Isabelle glanced at her with passing concern or disdain—Penelope couldn’t be certain, and she depended so heavily on her ability to read a face.

  “Penelope, are you all right?” Isabelle inquired.

  “Yes, I—” She grimaced a little and tried not to feel vulnerable. “I think perhaps I’m just slightly faint and should—”

  Penelope did not get a chance to announce her intention of absenting herself from the remaining social hours, because just then the butler arrived in the doorframe, paused for effect, and announced: “His Royal Highness, the Prince of Bavaria.”

  Isabelle stood, her cream-colored sleeves sweeping over her person as she smoothed her appearance. Prudence followed, somewhat more reluctantly, rising to her feet a few seconds later. Silent expectation swelled between the walls of the Schoonmaker drawing room. Then the prince entered, wearing an ivory suit and carrying his straw boater in his hand. He clicked the heels of his black dress shoes and made a bowing motion from his neck, before planting kisses on the hands of all the ladies, and whispering to each, “Enchanté.”

  He reached Penelope last, and lingered there, post-kiss, with the tips of her fingers resting against his palm. The maid who had cleaned up Penelope’s spill was still hovering, her head bowed to show her frilly white cap. Penelope gestured toward her, and said, “Would you care for refreshment, your highness?”

  “Champagne.”

  He released her hand but held her gaze. The maid, hearing his desire, took his hat from him and went to fetch the drink. The prince was taller than she remembered, and his eyes were bluer. They seemed not to blink, and they were fixed on her with such blazing intensity, for such an accumulation of seconds, that even she felt a little pleasantly shocked.

  “Have you never been to our house?” she said quickly, when she realized they were being watched. “We have very good rooms here. My husband’s family are quite avid collectors.”

  The prince’s eyes roamed over the coffered ceilings and heavily decorated walls, finally breaking their gaze. “Yes, so I see,” he replied eventually, in a blasé tone.

  Penelope tilted her head, which was piled high with dark hair, and then he lifted his arm so they might take a turn about the room, casually examining the portraits and statuary. As they moved away from the others, Bradley took a seat beside the elder Mrs. Schoonmaker and Prudence returned, huffily, to her book.

  “I cannot tell you how much I have enjoyed the flowers, Prince—”

  “You may call me Frederick.”

  “All right—Prince Frederick. I cannot tell you how much I have enjoyed the flowers, although I imagine you must feel a soupçon of embarrassment over the item that ran in the Imperial this morning, as I did, and I hope you do not think I would ever be so vulgar as to have made a public record of your thoughtfulness.”

  “It was not thoughtfulness.” The prince smiled broadly, showing his large, healthy teeth, and Penelope found in the following moments that this was precisely the compliment she longed to hear. His nose was more robust than Henry’s, which she supposed was owing to his royal blood. “You know my dear, on the Continent, when a man—a real man—sees something beautiful that he wants, he does not waste time feeling embarrassment over it. He shows it. That is all I have done.”

  Pleasurable buoyancy filled Penelope’s chest, and she smiled, slowly but surely, for him alone. She had forgotten how wonderful it was to flirt with someone new. As they walked, they kept a safe distance between their bodies, except that her elbow did rest in the crook of his. That place where their arms touched began to hold a certain magic for her, as though it was a suggestion of how much more of him would like to be in contact with her.

  “Is that what you are, a real man?” she asked in a faintly amused tone.

  “I am sorry for you if your…acquaintance has rendered you so unable to recognize one,” he returned in the same airy manner. “But I assure you, from this day forward, you will never again have trouble distinguishing between the real thing and the less solid variety.”

  They had come around another outcropping of antique divans and alabaster torchères, and turned back in the direction of the hall. The afternoon light played against her high cheekbones and the glossy hair of the dashing visitor. She smiled involuntarily, and when she looked in the direction from which they had come she realized Henry was lurking, just outside the drawing room. He had paused at the door, so that he appeared framed in the double height mahogany entryway, wearing a brown suit and boater not unlike the prince’s.

  “What a lucky thing to have a visitor who is not only charming but also so terribly instructive,” she said, looking at Henry but speaking to the prince in a low, lush tone. “It is my sincere wish that your company will not prove an aberration.”

  The prince’s blue eyes darted from Penelope to the figure in the hall, and he took in the scene without loosening his grip on her elbow, or otherwise trying to physically distance himself from her. For a married woman and a man who was known to be courting a French aristocrat, they were audaciously close.

  “But why would I be so foolish as that?” The prince returned, just before Henry tipped his hat forward over his eyes and continued on his way.

  Penelope turned her face toward her visitor and gave him a slow, purposeful wink. “I don’t imagine you will be,” she said, and then drew him toward a private corner, where they could talk without being heard, but where the light was strong enough that he would fully appreciate her beauty. As they settled in, and accepted refreshments from a liveried footman, she idly suggested, “You know, my father-in-law is throwing a party this evening, in honor of my husband, who has just returned from serving in the army. Perhaps you should come, and prove how very not foolish you are?”

  Nineteen

  Coney Island, that summer safety valve for the urban masses, that wild playground for grownups, where inhibitions are left behind and raw humanity always rises to the surface….

  ——FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL PAGE,

  MONDAY, JULY 16, 1900

  THE YOUNG COUPLE DESCENDED THE HIGH TRAIN platform and joined the droves moving down Surf Avenue and then toward the boardwalk, looking like any other couple, he in his soft brown suit and straw hat and she in white shirtwaist and a long navy skirt. The only detail that set them apart from the other shrieking, sun-touched pleasure seekers was her short hair, but one would hardly notice it, tucked under the matching boater she wore, which partially obscured her face. She kept a few steps behind him until they arrived on the boardwalk, and then he reached back and circled her waist in his arms.

  “I’ve missed you,” Diana whispered to Henry, biting her bottom lip because she meant it so much. Seeing him was sweeter now, she couldn’t help but feel, after their unjust separation. “I can’t stand being apar
t.”

  “It’s unconscionable,” he replied dryly. Then he laughed and gripped her under the shoulders, lifting and swinging her around him so that her feet flew in a circle above the ground. His slender lips twisted up in a smile. “I think I’m losing my mind,” he added, almost shouting now. “I miss you so much!” But no one on Coney Island cared enough to listen to another pair of sweethearts, driven to foolish excess by their love, and any self-incrimination was drowned out by the squealing and savage laughter, by the whir of the carousel and the crash of waves in the distance. The air was warm, despite the salty breeze, and it didn’t take long for Henry to remove his coat and for the top buttons of his shirt to come undone. They were a long way from the parlors of Manhattan.

  The afternoon was young, and for a while they were giddy. They rode the Steeplechase—Henry holding her securely in front of him as the mechanical horses lurched forward—and took in low entertainments. Diana had been all over the country by now, but still her stomach fluttered and her eyes popped at what she encountered there. They saw moving pictures and a bearded lady and a tattooed man and a dwarf and a giant, and afterward they rested under a striped awning and drank beer and ate fried clams. They looked at each other with happy, sun-washed eyes and soaked each other in over happy silences.

  “I’d like to do this every day,” Henry said after a while.

  Women in flouncing bathing suits revealed naked calves as though it were all very regular, taking in the catcalls and lazy, appreciative smiles of gentlemen with handlebar mustaches, not a one of them appearing scandalized. Diana reached over and let her fingertips graze Henry’s jaw, which had always been for her a favorite part of him. Since they were last together he’d shaved, and the skin was smooth as girl’s now, which contradicted the taut pensiveness in his brow.

  “But why shouldn’t we?” she replied, affecting lightness.

  “Because you have the strictest mother in all New York…,” Henry began, lifting his bottle of beer to clink it against Diana’s.

  “…to whom I pay absolutely no attention…,” interjected his paramour, giggling as she brought her bottle up to touch his, before taking a long sip.

  “…and I am married to the most fearsomely controlling socialite this town has ever seen.”

  “Oh,” Diana replied insouciantly. “Her.”

  “Yes, her. God, why didn’t we elope when we had the chance?” Henry’s voice was dark, although the blinding seaside light struck him with such loving force that his skin appeared all golden, and Diana could almost see through the thin weave of his white collared shirt. He was leaning back in his folding wooden chair, ankle rested against knee, and he would have appeared, to any casual observer, like a man in a perfect state of repose. But Diana had been at his side a great many hours by now, and she heard the worry in his tone. “We should never have let either of those harpies see us. We should never have come back to New York.”

  “That’s just what Elizabeth says,” she remarked, almost as an afterthought, as she gazed out to sea. “She says it’s no place for us.”

  The wooden folding chair made a noise against the weather-beaten boards as Henry pushed it back. “You told Elizabeth about us?”

  “Of course—she’s my sister!” Diana laughed and put her hand, gently, on Henry’s shoulder. “Anyway, don’t make that face, she approves.”

  “She does?” Henry shook his head in bemusement. He paused, considering. “What do you suppose she meant, ‘no place for us’?”

  “New York, Manhattan, parlors and ballrooms, racetracks, Long Island estates…,” Diana sighed, and shrugged happily, pausing to look out at all the merry passers-by. “She says we’ll never be allowed to be together here,” she added, and though she intended this explanation lightly, she heard her voice become low and portentous against her will. “That to be happy, we must leave.”

  Henry stared at her intently and brought his trousered ankle back to his opposite knee. He removed a cigarette from his shirt pocket and placed it between his lips, only looking away from her to strike a match. He shook it out and dropped it between the boards, and as he exhaled he met Diana’s eyes again.

  “Let’s go,” he said. The slow, summertime manner was gone, and she stared as his throat worked. Meanwhile the rest of him remained still and poised. Diana reached over and took a cigarette from his shirt pocket for herself. They held each other’s gaze as he leaned across the small round table and lit it for her.

  “Go where?” she replied in time.

  His black eyes ranged to the waves, the activity on the sand, and back to her. “Where else do Americans go when they are sick of their own country? Paris.”

  “Paris?” Diana inhaled and exhaled quickly. Smoking reminded her of the silver streaking rain in Havana. Since running away she had become a more natural smoker, and she found she was glad of the habit now, for her heart was beating fast and the tobacco calmed her. She didn’t know quite why his suggestion made her nervous; chasing after him all by herself had come to her so naturally. But she’d left, that time, with the hard knot in her belly of having committed a terrible act. She had been seeking something quite specific. What Henry suggested would mean giving up everything she had known for a place she had never seen, and a future she could not begin to picture. “But what would we live on?”

  “I have a little money of my own, money my mother left me….” Henry exhaled a cloud of smoke that briefly blurred his fine, tanned features, and then flicked the rest of his cigarette away. “I can’t stand pretending, I can’t stand playing children’s games with Penelope. I can’t stand thinking about you all the time and not being able to have you. Please, let’s go; the rest will fall into place.”

  Diana closed her eyes and let her assumptions about the rest of her life, and all the days that would fill it, slip away. She nodded to herself, as though to summon courage, and then she felt across the wooden table for Henry’s hand.

  “You want to go to Paris with me?”

  Both his hands covered hers. “More than I’ve ever wanted anything. I’d go tonight, if you said yes.”

  “Then yes. Let’s go tonight.”

  A slightly nervous practicality now entered Henry’s voice: “The Cunard line transatlantic sails on Tuesdays. So we can’t actually go until tomorrow.”

  When she opened her eyes, the rays of sunlight were too white, too extreme to see anything for several seconds, but she smiled through it, and soon enough Henry’s face came into focus. For a long time neither said anything, while the blood pumped in and out of their chests at wild speeds. The afternoon had begun to fade by the time they left the little wooden table and walked back toward the train, moving more slowly than they had before but with greater purpose. This time they didn’t bother finding seats on opposite ends of the car, and Henry extended his arm over her shoulder when they sat down beside each other. As the train lurched into motion, carrying them back toward their homes, where they would pack a few things and say good-bye to the people that mattered, Diana glanced out the window at the Ferris wheel rising like a full moon above the park. The rest of her life lay out below her, as though she were staring at it from an extreme height, from one of those trembling cages that the Ferris wheel brought up and around. The idea of everything that was yet to be made her feel dizzy, and alive, and terrified, and she was glad Henry was coming with her, wherever it was she was going.

  Twenty

  THE WILLIAM S. SCHOONMAKER FAMILY

  REQUESTS YOUR PRESENCE

  AT A DINNER TO BE GIVEN IN HONOR

  OF THE RETURNED HERO

  PRIVATE FIRST CLASS HENRY SCHOONMAKER

  MONDAY THE SIXTEENTH OF JULY

  AT EIGHT O’CLOCK

  AT THE SCHOONMAKER RESIDENCE

  FOUR HUNDRED AND SIXTEEN FIFTH AVENUE

  THE TWO MRS. SCHOONMAKERS STRODE ARM IN arm across the polished floor of the main hall of their family mansion. That afternoon, as they dressed for the dinner party, it had occurred to Penelope tha
t her mother-in-law was in a particularly good mood, and they had over the course of a few hours grown sisterly again. The house was full of the smell of hyacinth and tuberose, and from the labyrinth of small galleries and parlors the sounds of polite social discourse could be heard. They were robed like goddesses, the elder woman in a column of pale purple crepe de chine, with a deep oval neckline, her fluffy blond hair descending diagonally on either side of her doll-like face; the younger, in an empire waist dress of gauzy white with a black velvet bodice and beadwork of shimmering gold. The sleeves billowed, but her phosphorescent shoulders were entirely bare, and her dark hair rose up from her unblemished forehead and was gathered in an elaborate bun festooned with ostrich plumes. Pink gold and diamond earrings twinkled against her jaw.

  “I like your prince,” the elder Mrs. Schoonmaker whispered as they approached the first floor parlor, where already their guests were sipping aperitifs and waiting to be greeted.

  “Oh, he’s hardly mine,” Penelope protested, but faintly. She was feeling terribly regal after the attention he had paid her during his afternoon visit. Each of her gestures since then had been theatrically self-confident. “Anyway, the papers say he is soon to be engaged to the Comte de Langlois’s daughter.”

  “All the better, my dear.” Isabelle giggled, and then continued in a self-indulgent rush: “I myself am quite sick of Bradley. I have been for a year now, but I always go back to him when I have nothing better to do. I thought artists would be more interesting than gentlemen, but they make love with the same words other men do, and when it comes to giving tokens of affection, they have less money at their disposal. You are very clever to be flirting with Europeans, and noble ones at that.”

  Then they entered the oak-paneled room, where men in black jackets and women in tulle and ribbons and jeweled chokers burbled admiringly at the vision of their hostesses. String music played in the next room, and bushes of cherry blossoms emerged from gilt inlaid vases, erupting above the heads of the guests.