The Second Mrs. Astor

by Shana Abe

  It must be her line. Her mind was a fizzy blank.

  She stared back at them helplessly, the roar of her blood louder and louder in her ears.

  In the back of the house, someone sneezed once, twice.

  Dorothy Cramp, who had been so bitter with envy that Madeleine had won the part of Ophelia that she’d threatened to renounce the League, glared at Madeleine from beneath the tin of King Claudius’ crown.

  “How long has she been thus?” Dorothy said again, biting off every word.

  The fizziness in Madeleine’s brain cleared; she remembered her song, her wild dance, what to do. She got through her next lines and then swept off the stage in a storm of petals and leaves, and spent the rest of the show watching him from behind a slit in the stage right curtain.

  * * *

  After the curtain call, which included a pelting of bouquets, backstage was a jumble of cast and crew, everyone talking and laughing. Props teetered in precarious piles; willowy young women in wigs and trousers jostled back and forth, abandoning their wooden swords and bulky vests, hugging and kissing and telling each other how perfect it all was, how spectacular, and how next year they would tackle Molière or Marlowe and all the world would bow at their feet.

  Madeleine accidentally bumped shoulders with Dorothy and smiled—part apology, part dare—but Dorothy ignored her and walked away.

  By the velvet-swathed entrance to the house stood Mrs. Ogden Mills, a matron so prominent and formidable that Madeleine could not recall seeing her even once without at least four strands of pearls around her neck, no matter the time of day. Amid all the bustle and mayhem of the play’s aftermath, she remained as motionless as a graveyard statue; even caught up in the giddy we-did-it silliness bubbling around them, none of the Junior League débutantes dared to venture too close.

  “Miss Force,” Mrs. Mills said, lifting her brows and tilting her head toward the man standing, also unmoving, slightly behind her. “Have you met the colonel?”

  Of course Madeleine hadn’t; she wasn’t even officially out yet. There was no reason at all for someone like John Jacob Astor IV to have taken notice of her.

  She was still in her mad weeds. She dripped with wilted petals and curling leaves. Her hair was fraying from its braids; candytuft dribbled down her shoulders, teeny white starbursts at a time. A stolen glance in a small rectangle of a mirror tacked to a flat revealed her eyes, pale blue smudged with kohl, her skin plastered white, cheeks and lips still painted red as blood.

  The colonel glanced where she did, noticed the mirror. The skin along her cheekbones began to prickle with heat.

  “Jack,” continued Mrs. Mills, oblivious, serene, “I would like to introduce you to Miss Madeleine Force, daughter of William and Katherine Force of Brooklyn and, of late, Manhattan. You saw her as our Ophelia tonight. Madeleine, Colonel John Jacob Astor.”

  There was no choice but to extend her hand. He accepted it, his fingers folding firm and warm over hers.

  “How do you do?” she asked faintly.

  “How do you do,” he echoed, soft.

  It was as though her vision failed and she could not see him, in spite of the fact that he was right there in front of her. She didn’t see him so much as feel his presence; the warm, tanned glow of his skin, the knowing curve of his mouth, the air of a man who knew what he wanted and was not bothered by the wanting, because everything he touched was already his.

  Madeleine felt thirteen again, back on that rock-scrubbed beach—that moment when their eyes had met, and his smile seemed just for her.

  From somewhere near her left shoulder, a pop of light flared, died, but she didn’t turn her head to see what it was.

  “You were excellent tonight,” the colonel said, letting go of her hand.

  She stopped herself from wiping her tingling palm down her dress. “I could have been better, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t see how,” he said, and with a nod to Mrs. Mills, angled away. A moment later, he was gone, devoured by the crush.

  Mrs. Ogden Mills sent Madeleine a pointed look. Madeleine smiled tightly, murmured her thanks, and retreated slowly, gratefully, back into the Junior League crowd.

  * * *

  It was only much later—hours later, as she lay sleepless in her bed and stared out her window at the cascading, moon-silvered clouds—that Madeleine realized the pop of light backstage must have been a magnesium flash from a photographer, stealing for himself that moment when Colonel Astor had first taken her hand.

  CHAPTER 2

  Your father’s courtship of me began with a daily delivery of fresh hothouse flowers, starting the very morning after we were first introduced.

  Someday I will teach you the language of flowers, my darling. Of how you, as a gentleman, will initiate your wooing with a floral message aimed only just slightly sideways, signifying nothing beyond the suggestion of yes, I have seen you. Yellow bud roses in fern, perhaps, or a spray of violets. A simple corsage, something modest and easily pinned to a bodice, should the young lady so desire. At this stage, always choose a bloom both sweet and candid, one to which no respectable mama could take offense.

  Only after that (no fewer than four weeks of teas and picnics and cotillions, and before you groan, believe me, I know how tedious that becomes) may you move on to the flowers more opulent. Gardenias, pearled and intoxicating. Carnations, peach and lemon and cherry. Too many people (Europeans, really) consider carnations to be nothing but a vulgar American indulgence, but in my opinion, there is no blossom more intricate, more deliciously, thickly, fragrantly lavish, than a carnation.

  So. After months of courting, you are at last allowed to consider sending red roses, but only if your intentions are sincere. Red roses have but one meaning. You will not be forgiven for mistaking it.

  After the roses—after the conquest—what is left? Orchids.

  In the fullness of time, I trust, the woman you love will tell you of those.

  July 1910

  Bar Harbor, Maine

  The brick-and-cedar prison that was the Forces’ summer residence might easily have been a metaphor for Madeleine’s entire life: cramped, elegant, strictly contained. Although not one of the sprawling “cottages” famously dotting Millionaires’ Row, there was no aspect of the house that was not perfectly proper, and perfectly predictable: the handful of Old Masters paintings on the walls, the trompe l’oeil fresco in the dining room (Persephone accepting a pomegranate seed in her palm), the Aubusson rugs, the immaculate gleam of the teak handrail topping the banister that guarded the stairs. The windows were small but ocean-facing, never inviting much of the light or wind inside.

  Everything in the Force household, and in Madeleine Force’s world, was exactly as it should be, and everything was exactly as it always would be. Not a single enhancement had been made in all of her memory, except for the Louis XVI ormolu chairs her mother had brought back from Paris three years ago because the cranberry satin cushions matched the runner in the foyer.

  It was a wonder that Madeleine herself had managed to change, to expand from infant to child to young woman, within these walls. She thought she had grown; despite the evidence in her mirror, sometimes she wondered. The rooms and hallways did seem more claustrophobic than they had years ago, but otherwise her world seemed always, always the same.

  Yet the globe did spin on its axis, and the seasons did flow from one to the next like water along the smooth, certain bed of a stream.

  It was the height of summer, the weeks long and shimmering with heat, and the cottagers had descended upon Bar Harbor in a whirlwind of yachts and straw hats and billowing white linen. Drowsy shops, hungry for customers all winter, suddenly bustled with patrons; up and down Main Street, jolly banners snapped in the breeze, announcing fresh clams or imported cigars or exclusive Parisian tea-gowns. Newport, of course, had its matrons ossifying in their marble palaces—but Bar Harbor’s balmy months boasted a slightly franker, more daring crowd.

  And, as had been true eve
r since Katherine’s debut, breakfast at the Force home (whether in Bar Harbor or New York) was punctuated by the arrival of flowers, which their butler placed strategically, jewellike, all around the dining room.

  Pink sweet peas by the chafing dish of buttered eggs. Rubied dahlias at the other end of the credenza. Zinnias, marigolds, and hyacinths positioned between the pearlware figurines along the fireplace mantelshelf. Twin clusters of roses (one cream, one canary) in crystal bowls by the saltcellars.

  Each delivery was accompanied by a small pasteboard card, which would be carefully collected and handed to Madeleine’s sister, who kept them in a stack by her water goblet for the duration of the meal. And even though not a single one of her beaux ever called before noon—Madeleine imagined they weren’t awake before then, anyway—Katherine dressed as if one might emerge unexpectedly from the side hall or the drawing room at any moment, ardently demanding the next dance.

  Katherine at breakfast was a vision in lace and chiffon, powdered and perfect. Katherine at lunch was a vision, and Katherine at dinner was fairly staggering. Katherine, in short, was always a vision, and it was no surprise to Madeleine that the florists in town were kept so busy on her behalf.

  So although she was glad of the scattering of fresh flowers that brightened the lead-shadowed room, Madeleine was used to them. She barely looked up any longer whenever some clever new arrangement appeared nearby.

  A single, ivory-colored card was placed by her plate. Her plate.

  She looked at it aslant, her cup of café au lait paused halfway to her lips.

  “Miss,” murmured the butler, and stepped back into the gloom.

  Madeleine set her cup upon its saucer.

  “Who’s it from?” Katherine inquired, taking a sip of her own coffee.

  In deep indigo script, the card read:

  Pansies, for thoughts.

  —JJA

  For a heartbeat, she could not move. For a heartbeat, she only swooped inside, the heady and helpless feeling of falling from a very steep height. Then she blinked and looked around until she found it: a small nosegay on the sideboard, captured in one of the few rays of sun to pierce the chamber. The mauve edges of the petals glistened so sheer and crisp they looked dipped in sugar.

  “Maddy, who is it from?” Katherine asked again, focusing on her eggs.

  “Colonel Astor,” Madeleine said.

  Katherine’s eyebrows climbed; Father lowered his newspaper; Mother inhaled sharply. Wordless, she held out her hand for the card. With a sense of breaking free from invisible chains, from gravity itself, Madeleine rose, walked around the table, and gave it to her.

  “My heavens,” her mother said, turning the card around and around, as if there might be a hidden message somewhere in the margins. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s from Hamlet. It’s a reference to something Ophelia says.” She took a breath; did the air taste of sugar, too, or was it only her sudden and unbounded imagination? “I told you we met last night, remember?”

  “You told me you were simply introduced to him in the crowd backstage. I assumed he was there to congratulate everyone on the performance.”

  Madeleine shook her head. “We hardly spoke. We shook hands. That was all.”

  “Hardly all,” Katherine said, leaning far across the table to steal the card from their mother. The chiffon folds of her morning dress drooped dangerously close to her eggs. “That must have been quite a handshake.”

  “I suppose he’s sending flowers to all the girls in the cast,” Madeleine said. Her own dress was ecru muslin—thin, fetching, everyday. She rubbed a pleat between two fingers. “Perhaps he’s only being kind.”

  Katherine tapped the edge of the colonel’s card against the gloss of the tabletop, then slid it back toward Madeleine. “Little sister. Even you are not that naïve, surely.”

  No. She was not.

  * * *

  The art of stillness—that classic and stultifying hallmark of a true lady, at least according to Mother—had never been one of Madeleine’s best skills. It seemed to her that remaining frozen in time and place really only suited hunted creatures. When she’d said so aloud one day during deportment lessons at Miss Ely’s School, her teacher had retorted that there was surely no creature more hunted than a young, pretty heiress.

  Point scored.

  And yet, in Madeleine’s hidden heart, she could only marvel at the obedience of her peers, those girls who could sink into such quiescence that their voices never rose, their skirts never twitched with a restless foot as they sat; their hair was never mussed and their jewelry never fiddled with. She wondered if they fell asleep like that, facial expressions composed and pleasant, hands arranged neatly over their bellies and legs pressed together.

  She wanted a gallop, not a trot. She wanted the sun burning her face, the wind ripping at her hair, rather than the soft, safe comfort of salons and tea parties and early evening soirées.

  And yet.

  The al fresco dinner at the cottage named Beau Desert had been on the Force calendar for weeks. It was one of the more coveted invitations of the season; barring actual death, Madeleine knew there was no avoiding it. The afternoon layer of low, lustrous clouds streaking abalone across the sky had at last dissolved away. This close to sunset, the horizon glowed empty and clean, an incandescent heaven melting into the darkened bay. The Porcupine Islands in the distance bristled green and ochre and velvet black above the water.

  Beau Desert’s splendid garden itself, so neatly composed of shell-and-gravel paths, nodding flowers and fragrant herbs, had been enhanced for the evening with silver-trayed offerings of champagne and cold canapés, and a string trio playing from a gazebo nestled amid the pines. Paper lanterns crisscrossed the sky overhead, radiant embers, whimsical fireflies, swaying gently on their wire lines with the breeze.

  The dinner tables, dressed in damask and wisp-thin china, had been arranged atop the scattering of grass rectangles and ovals and squares framed by the paths. (Anticipating a spongy lawn, Mother had insisted they all wear slippers with low heels.) As twilight began to descend in earnest, women in pale silken sheaths and men in white tie glided through the trees and flowers, meeting, breaking apart, ghosts with soft chattering voices and bursts of muted laughter.

  Despite the paper lanterns, the garden supplied plenty of shadows. Mother and Father stood sipping champagne with their hosts by a trellis frothing with honeysuckle, but Madeleine had lost sight of her sister not five minutes after their arrival. The last she had seen of her, Katherine had been headed toward the rose maze with an admirer on each arm.

  Katherine, confident queen of both admirers and dinner parties, knew she’d have at least another twenty minutes of venial sin before they’d be seated for the meal.

  Madeleine was hardly queen of anything. She stood alone in the sifting crowd and felt surprisingly unmoored, even though she had known this party and these people most of her life. She looked around, searching for (not him, certainly not him) anyone from the League—Carol or Nathalie or Leta—but either none of her friends were here yet, or else, like Katherine, they were taking quick advantage of the secret corners of the estate.

  So she became one of the ghosts. She sipped from her own flute of champagne and rambled down a path of crushed oyster shells that gleamed before her like an ashen ribbon, unwinding into the dusk.

  The air began to cool. It wasn’t long before she regretted her own silk sheath, floaty layers of coral edged with lace and very little else. She handed her glass to a passing footman and shivered, just for a moment, as the wind skimmed along the exposed skin of her chest and neck and upper arms. It ruffled through her hair, wayward strands already coming loose from her Psyche knot, and turned the pearls at her throat into stone.

  The string trio began a new piece, the barcarolle from The Tales of Hoffmann. She paused beneath a gold bobbing lantern, closing her eyes to take in the notes, imagining how she would dance to it, the placement of her feet, the ma
n who would hold her in his arms—

  When she opened her eyes again, she saw, utterly without astonishment, a second shadow overlapping her own.

  “Miss Force,” said the colonel, just behind her. “Pardon me. I hope I don’t startle you.”

  Madeleine turned to face him. “Not at all.”

  He was elegant and black-clad and taller than she, enough so that she had to tip back her head to meet his gaze. It was a strange sensation, and an unfamiliar one; Madeleine was tall for a girl, and most boys her age looked at her straight on.

  She thought, This is what it’s like to feel dainty.

  They studied each other, motionless in the hitch and trick of the swaying gold light. He seemed almost exactly as he had the night before, his hair precisely cut and combed; his ebony tailcoat immaculate; his expression a combination of gravity and absolute focus, as if nothing else existed in the world other than her.

  She remembered that day on the beach in Newport; how she’d thought him comely. But comely wasn’t the right word for him, she thought now. It was too simple, too shallow to describe him. It was true that he had little of the muscular charisma of the young men she’d spy down at the docks, sunburnt and joking, sons of lobstermen grown to be lobstermen themselves, hauling in their daily catch. But neither was he one of the pale, paunchy gentlemen of her father’s circle, who golfed leisurely and dined voraciously, and spoke only of market fluctuations and real estate prices and the abundant promise of industrialization.

  When she had been still in pinafores, Colonel Astor had outfitted an entire regiment in the Spanish-American War and then gone with them to do battle down in Cuba. He was a scion of the most blue-blooded family in America, head of a massive fortune, and distant cousin of President Roosevelt himself. He had traveled the globe purely because he’d wished to do so, visited lands her imagination could not stretch to encompass, and in the hush of the moment, Madeleine could very nearly catch the scent of those wild, exotic adventures still lingering upon him like a perfume—gunpowder and sharp spice and the dust of faraway trails.