Splendor

by Anna Godbersen

  As Diana approached and perched on the corner of the bed, she saw that the garnet-colored wallpaper reflected on her lovely, sleeping sister, and lent a little color to her pale cheeks.

  “Oh, Liz,” Diana said as she picked up her sister’s hand. It was limp to the touch, but then Elizabeth had never had a particularly firm grip. Her sister’s mouth opened and closed and she exhaled, and Diana took that as encouragement enough to go on. “I have taken your advice, I’m leaving—we’re leaving,” she went on in the loudest voice she could manage, which was not much more than a whisper. It was so incredible to her, what she was about to do, and even with her considerable powers of imagination she found she could not conjure what her life would look like in even a month’s time. “I am so sorry I won’t be here to greet your baby. But we will write often…and, as you said, it’s the only way Henry and I can be together.”

  For a time she prattled on—quietly, for she supposed it was really better not to wake Elizabeth if her health was indeed very poor. Her words almost slurred together, so heady a mixture of emotion was she feeling: anticipation, nerves, and now a touch of guilt for leaving her very pregnant sister behind. She might have gone on longer, even though the day was advancing and she had an appointment to keep, when her sister’s fingers strengthened against her palm.

  “Liz?” she whispered.

  “I’m not feeling well,” Elizabeth said dreamily, without opening her eyes.

  “I know,” Diana answered sympathetically. “But you’ll feel better soon. Can I get you anything?”

  “Teddy.”

  “What?”

  Then, in the same soft voice: “Could you get me Teddy Cutting, please?”

  Diana’s mouth fell open. This was very odd. She might have dwelled longer on it, or on memories of her sister and Teddy walking arm in arm several months ago when they were all in Florida, but the door opened just then. Diana swung her head around to see the full figure of the housekeeper.

  “Hello, Mrs. Schmidt,” Diana said. “Liz really isn’t feeling well. She’s talking nonsense.”

  “Yes.” The broad-faced woman stepped into the room. “I think you had better let her have her rest, miss.”

  Diana sighed and glanced a final time at her sister, who pushed one side of her face and then the other into the heaping pillows. “Don’t forget, Di,” she whispered into the down.

  “Good-bye, Liz.” Diana bent forward to kiss her sister’s forehead, as though suddenly she were the older and more mature of the two.

  “It’s time to go,” the hovering Mrs. Schmidt said, and Diana knew that she was right. It was time to leave it all. Diana put her hands down on her thighs in a small gesture of readiness, and then she allowed herself to be escorted out of the room and down the stairs.

  “Is my brother-in-law still in?” she asked at the front door.

  “He has gone out,” Mrs. Schmidt replied.

  “Well, please tell him good-bye for me,” she said. Then, in a less convincing voice, “Please tell him I look forward to seeing him soon.”

  “Very well.”

  Once Diana had fixed her wide straw hat back on her head, she picked up the case, still hidden under her long gray coat, and went out into the day. Young girls who worked in grand houses were passing on the walk, and carriages and streetcars hurtled down the street in competition. She took a deep breath for courage, but before she could descend the stairs she had not been vigilant enough, that her plan had required greater caution. Standing near the curb, wearing a fitted brown jacket over her white dress and a plain cloth hat, was Edith.

  For a moment, Diana convinced herself that the distance was sufficient, that she would be able to escape unnoticed. But then her aunt gestured to her, and there was nothing to do but attempt a smile and step in her direction. Once the two women were close enough, Edith put an arm around her niece’s shoulders, and drew her away from the Cairnses’.

  “Have you heard the news?” the older lady said. Despite the blue sky above, there was grimness in her tone.

  “No…” The possibility that her mother had known, all along, what she was up to began to dawn on Diana, and she was ashamed when she realized that she was still afraid of Mrs. Holland’s wrath.

  “Last night. William Schoonmaker…he passed.”

  “What?” Diana’s eyes became wild. Her aunt’s face had gone pale in the search for words, and her gloved hand flew to cover her mouth.

  “This came for you. I managed to get it before Mrs. Holland, and thought you would want to see it before you…before you did anything else.”

  She handed over a small scrap of paper, which Diana unfolded without hesitation. All of her nervous trembling had left her; a kind of silence began to settle within.

  Dear Di—

  A tragedy has occurred which I am sure you will read about in the papers, if not today, tomorrow at the latest. This series of events prevents me from meeting you this afternoon. I will come to you soon, and we can do as planned next Tuesday.

  —H.S.

  So it would not be today. She looked up at the buildings around her, familiar in their square arrangements, standing shoulder to shoulder along the avenue, as they did on all the avenues, which ran straight up and down the island. They were not going to disappear before sundown after all. Then she crumpled the note in her hand. There was almost an absence of feeling within her—moments ago there had been such surging anticipation, and she could not yet tell if it was relief or disappointment or something else that had taken its place. A terrible event had occurred in the life of her lover, and for many hours now she’d had no idea. The light was no longer nostalgic—it seemed almost strange.

  “In my day, we used to swallow notes like that,” Edith said.

  The sense of disorientation began to ease for Diana, and she heard herself laugh. “Do you really think that’s necessary? I thought I’d just leave it in the gutter.”

  Edith smiled now, too. “It would be a little overdramatic, wouldn’t it? Come, you’ve had a surprise. I promise not to ask you any questions, but I do insist we go have a long lunch somewhere where they serve champagne all day….”

  Diana let her shoulders rise and fall in agreement, and the two ladies held tight to each other as they made their way downtown. After all, when would she again have a free afternoon with her aunt? She would be leaving next Tuesday, and there are never as many hours as one hopes for in a week, as they always go by too quickly, and one never knows how one could possibly have spent the time.

  Twenty Six

  Congratulations are due to Mr. Leland Bouchard and Miss Carolina Broad, whose engagement is being announced far and wide this morning. Invitations will, by all reports, go out today for a Sunday wedding at the Grace Church. While we long to be believers in love at first sight, the skeptic in us wonders if this mad dash to the altar is owing to motor car enthusiast Mr. Bouchard’s need for speed, or if it has more to do with the rather vast social difference between a girl whose connections do not go back even a year, and an august family who might, given enough time for reflection, come to think better of the match?

  ——FROM CITÉ CHATTER, WEDNESDAY, JULY 18, 1900

  “IT SIMPLY WON’T DO,” CAROLINA SAID, STARING INTO a reflection that she had come, in a few days, to like more than she would ever have imagined. Was it possible she had grown taller in only a week’s time? Of course she was standing on the dressmaker’s box, and the six-foot triptych mirror now elongated her figure three times over. But surely her eyes were a purer shade of green. Her dark hair was pinned above her head, so that Madame Bristede—the dressmaker Longhorn had chosen for her during their short friendship—could better see to the elaborate lace-and buttonwork of the high neck, which Carolina knew to be very flattering even as she disparaged it. She and Leland had agreed, in the rush of their engagement, that they didn’t care what anybody thought, and that they had wasted too many years apart already. In less than a week they would be married.

  “I am
doing all I can, Miss Broad,” said Madame Bristede from her position by the pearl-encrusted hem. The elaborate dress had already been under construction for Carolina, but it had not been intended as a wedding dress, and so in the last twenty-four hours black netting had been painstakingly removed form the full, flouncing skirt and replaced with ecru point de gaze. Two young ladies in the corner with fatigued but agile hands were busy constructing a train embellished with ostrich feathers and opal beads. Near them sat a red-haired maid, who Carolina had insisted upon borrowing from Mrs. Carr for the week, watching the proceedings in quiet amazement and holding her temporary mistress’s street clothes folded in her lap. Ever since glimpsing her at the hotel, Carolina had been obsessed with finding a way to have her sister closer to her, and after the proposal, to see that Claire witnessed the wedding. Now she had. “But I have less than a week to finish, and so I am very sorry to say that it will have to do.”

  Then the dressmaker looked up at Carolina, as though she had just remembered that she was no longer talking to a lucky nobody, but the future Mrs. Leland Bouchard. Part of Carolina wanted to rail about the monumental importance of this gown, this wedding, and, indeed, of herself; but the majority was too full of bliss at the impossible direction of her life to sustain anger. The memory of Leland’s quite public proposal rushed back for her—as it did several times an hour—causing her lungs to swell and her eyes to grow pleasantly moist, and then she found it impossible to persist in being difficult with Madame Bristede. She smiled. Madame Bristede smiled, and then returned to her task. No, she would save her exacting impulse for the florist and for Isaac Phillips Buck, who she had hired to oversee everything about her last-minute wedding, and who was now looming by the wall. It was very lucky that Penelope had not needed him for anything that week, she had commented earlier, to which he had responded with a politic silence that she simply had no time to interpret.

  “Delivery for Miss Broad,” said the dressmaker’s assistant, poking her head around the door. It was true that Carolina had come to possess everything a girl might want, but her ears tingled pleasantly at these words anyway. “From Mr. Bouchard. The Lord and Taylor salesman is here to deliver it.”

  “We are quite busy.” Madame Bristede did not glance up from her work. “Just have him leave whatever it is.”

  “He says that he has a particular message, and that it is for Miss Broad’s ears only.”

  The dressmaker looked up at her demanding client with weary, questioning eyes.

  “It will only take a minute,” Carolina told her. She still felt nice about the idea that something was being given to her, although the phrase “Lord and Taylor” had not been a welcome one.

  Sighing heavily, the dressmaker stood and motioned to the girls in the corner. Claire followed them, to her sister’s chagrin—but of course, both girls were extremely cautious of not appearing to have a special relationship. “Be very careful,” Madame Bristede said to Carolina, gesturing at the detailed skirt, after which they all left the room.

  The bride-to-be stepped gingerly down from the box and walked to the worn blue velvet sofa in the corner.

  “My dear Miss Broad, how enchanting you look.”

  She twisted her neck to see, over her shoulder, Tristan’s familiar figure as he swaggered into the room. The sight of him did not do kind things to her mood.

  “Mr. Wrigley, I hope you are delivering something very nice, as I have already paid you quite handsomely so that I might be spared your presence.”

  “You did, it’s true, and promptly.” Tristan’s smile did not waver, and his gaze burned on. “But I’m afraid the bit about the package was a ruse.”

  “Then I think you’d better leave,” she replied coldly.

  “Ah, but we have business.”

  “I think not. We had business, but that transaction has been completed.”

  “Yes. That transaction has been.” Tristan moved forward with that same easy and attentive manner that made him so successful with silly women shoppers at the department store. “But that was before you became engaged to Leland Bouchard, which I should say makes you richer by at least half, not to mention brings you into one of those families who do still care about things like breeding, and would probably be less enthusiastic about their son’s choice of bride if they knew what she really was.”

  Carolina’s stung lower lip fell, and a fresh dose of outrage began to course through her. “That’s robbery,” she replied indignantly.

  Tristan shrugged. “Call it what you like. It doesn’t mean you don’t want me quiet and happy.”

  He had ambled quite close to her. Now he leaned forward, bringing his face near enough to hers that if he spit a little when he spoke, she would feel the wetness.

  “You revolt me,” she hissed, pulling away.

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  She reached for the small purse, which she had idly placed in the corner of the sofa upon her arrival, and removed a twenty-dollar bill, which she kept there in case of emergencies. “Here,” she said, without meeting Tristan’s eyes. “It’s all I have. I charge everything these days, you know, so I’m afraid you’ll just have to consider yourself lucky.”

  “Ah, but Miss Broad, don’t you think—”

  “Buck!” Carolina yelled shrilly. Tristan instantly drew back. Buck, meanwhile, came hurrying through the door, as fast as he could manage, considering his rather large person.

  “Yes, mademoiselle?”

  “This man is harassing me. Please see that he is not allowed near me again.”

  She kept her eyes averted as Buck hustled Tristan from the room. His feet shuffled against the floor, but he went without a fight. Then she took a breath, and waited for the unpleasantness of the phrase “what she really was” to fade.

  Carolina remembered how, as a child going to sleep, her mother would whisper she had been made for better things, and that if only her father had lived longer, he would have seen to it that she had a different kind of life. Mrs. Broud had been a beauty, and so Carolina had harbored the belief that she herself might someday be admired for her looks, and considered rather grand. But it was no longer merely a belief. She was a Bouchard, so it was a fact everybody would have to plainly acknowledge. Or anyway, she would be in a few days, she thought as she came up to her full height and stepped onto the dress box, dividing her reflection into three perfect pictures of a bride. After that there would be no questioning what she really was.

  Twenty Seven

  Today William Sackhouse Schoonmaker, one of the great men of his generation, will be laid to rest in the Trinity Church Cemetery in upper Manhattan. He would seem to have been at the height of his powers, and rumors have circulated about what his son might have said to him, just before the fatal episode, that could have given such a shock.

  ——FROM THE SOCIETY PAGE OF THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF

  THE WORLD GAZETTE, WEDNESDAY, JULY 18, 1900

  “WHAT DOES SHE THINK SHE’S DOING HERE?”

  There was no wind, and the sky above the cemetery at 155th Street and Riverside was truest blue. The large green leaves on the trees were motionless, like the white headstones that stood in their eternal rows, up and down the hill, from Broadway on toward the Hudson, which was visible over the black hats of the fine ladies who surrounded Diana Holland as she quietly observed the solemn occasion. She was too far from the reverend to hear what he was saying; of course the burial of a man like William Schoonmaker would be a crowded one. Motes of pollen hung in the air like gold dust. They were telling, Diana thought, and if she were writing about the funeral in a literary way, instead of from the perspective of a society gossip, she would have described them just as they were.

  “They say she and Henry Schoonmaker were in India together, and that she cut her hair in a Hindu ritual…”

  Diana turned her face sharply, so that her eyes met with Mrs. Olin Vreewold’s. She had been talking to Jenny Livingston, the old maid, and though the look Diana gave was enough to sile
nce them, both ladies persisted in assuming sour expressions under their black brims. The story of what Henry had said to his father was being passed around, although happily the papers were shy of printing so untoward a story during the week of the old man’s funeral. Diana couldn’t be sure if they would feel the same way next week, but by then she and Henry would be gone. In the meantime, she wanted to make as much money as possible. Her old friend Davis Barnard, who wrote the “The Gamesome Gallant” column, had long ago told her that death has a way of flushing scandal out, or else burying it forever.

  “Perhaps he wanted her here,” Jenny whispered when Diana’s gaze was again averted.

  Before she could decide on another way to respond, the plaintive drone of bagpipes picked up and the crowd began to disperse. As the elegant, black-clad mourners turned and walked away from the fresh grave, she saw others like Mrs. Vreewold and Jenny Livingston, who stared at her with piercing scorn. The onset of a blush was heating Diana’s cheeks, and she lifted her chin defiantly at the silent scolds. She had always been unconventional in her way, but she had never received stares like these.

  Then Henry came, wearing his black frock coat, which must have been unbearable in the heat, and a black crepe mourning band on his left arm. His handsome face was exhausted and sad, and he met Diana’s eyes for longer than he probably should have, considering the scene. It took only a moment for him to communicate to her that he would have cleared a small village to be alone with her right then, and she tried to return the sentiment with a tiny, darting smile. Penelope hovered there beside him like a loving wife, just as she had all afternoon, but her face was covered with a black veil, and so it was impossible to see if she was sincerely aggrieved or merely clinging to her position as Mrs. Henry Schoonmaker. On his other arm hung his stepmother, Isabelle, who—one could see, even through her veil—had the face of a woman struck by lightning. By then Henry was gone, moving up the hill, to where the family coach waited.