The Second Mrs. Astor

by Shana Abe

  “All but one,” said their mother.

  “All but one,” Katherine agreed. “But with so many laudable gentlemen to choose from, I can afford the loss of just this one.”

  Madeleine had a brief and wholly convincing vision of Katherine stepping from the motorcar as they pulled up to Jack’s French Renaissance mansion; Katherine lifting her gloved hand to him, accepting his short, elegant bow, magnesium bursts flaring; Katherine sailing onward and upward into the life of the new Mrs. John Jacob Astor IV, trailing gemstones and velvet and tears in her wake.

  “Madeleine,” said their mother again, in an even more urgent tone.

  “I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”

  And she would be. It was only the stupid newspapers making her so nervous, that was all it was. Not even the newspapers that would come out tomorrow, columns and columns that would be, no doubt, dedicated to tonight’s upcoming, phenomenal gala. No, she was disquieted over the papers that had already been printed, that had taken care to mention her name alongside Jack’s with a sort of vicious delight, that had underscored the fact that she wasn’t going to be his hostess tonight, that she wasn’t the only young socialite of looks and means invited (which made sense, as there were over five hundred of New York’s finest invited, but anyway) and that there was still no ring at all to be seen on Miss Force’s left hand, not even a speck of one, after seven months of trying.

  Implied, if not yet directly printed: What a dear girl she was; what a solid, faithful girl, the kind that one might suppose may be always counted upon to be waiting in the wings. How very different this girl was from Mrs. Ava Astor, so divinely gifted and charming, who’d never had any problem obtaining whatever she desired, even a divorce.

  The colonel’s dinner party and cotillion tonight was predicted to be the spectacle of the season. Or perhaps, Madeleine mused, she was going to be the spectacle, the Girl Who Clung to Hope.

  The auto smacked into another pothole. She swallowed hard, wishing for water—no, wishing for wine, for whiskey (which she’d only ever tried once, on a dare in school; it had been like drinking fire), because even false courage was courage of some sort.

  She had been seen at Jack’s side for all this while, all these months, over and over. Restaurants, theaters. His box at the Metropolitan Opera House, number seven (Lucky number seven, she’d said, and he’d smiled and replied, It seems so now) in the famed golden horseshoe. The Christmas Ball.

  The word was out—according to these anonymous writers, penning their poison columns from their grimy little desks, in their grimy little newspaper offices—that tonight would surely be the night that Colonel Astor would announce his engagement to the adolescent Miss Force. That it had to be tonight or never, because how cruel would it be otherwise, as he was having over two hundred for dinner and another three hundred more for the dancing to follow, and every lion of society would surely turn up to hear the news?

  Except, of course, as both Madeleine and Jack (and definitely Mother) knew, there would be no announcement of their engagement, since there had been no proposal. Not yet.

  She didn’t want to care so much about it. It was foolish to care so much. Why did it matter what a bunch of muckrakers printed?

  But oh, the idea that he was only toying with her, that he might not ever ask . . .

  She’d constructed sandcastles of reveries around him, his lucid eyes and his lined face and his tanned, competent charm. She dreamed of him: the hook of his nose; the way his hair gleamed honey in the open sunlight and his irises took on a cast of faraway blue, but his moustache always stayed the same brown; how when he walked, he squared his shoulders and jabbed the ground with his stick, as if the tap-tap of his pace should be heard and marked by all, men and beasts and even the tiny insects sleeping beneath the sidewalks.

  She’d let him kiss her practically in public and had felt herself floating like a lark in his arms.

  Color and shade rippled past the motorcar. As they ventured farther up Fifth Avenue, the mansions grew taller, more stately, sketched in bold layers of snow. Row after row of gabled and copper-roofed palaces sprouted from the plain pavements and dirt, blotting out the sun, the moon, the sky.

  At the age of eight, Madeleine had voyaged to France for the first time with her family. After a week submerged in the delirium of Paris—and over her mother’s protests—they’d removed to a vineyard so ancient and idyllic that the ground had melted up all around it, submerging the river-rock base of the crush house, the thick weedy bottoms of the vines, their stalks and stakes. The rich black soil was soft and sucking with Madeleine’s every step, pulling at the soles of her boots. All the wild trees leaned, branches akimbo, toward that living dark earth. Everywhere she roamed that summer, the vineyard had seemed to whisper, I am older than ages. You are a spark of nothing compared to me.

  Manhattan’s Millionaires’ Row was man’s rebuttal to that vineyard’s earthen grace. Warlike, glorious, every inch of the chiseled marble and limestone and wrought iron was hard and unyielding. The soil here would never rise. Nature would never regain the ground it had conceded.

  “One more block,” Katherine said, and Madeleine took a steadying breath.

  “Do I look all right?”

  Katherine smiled, lifting a hand to adjust one of the diamond-and-topaz clips nestled in her sister’s hair. There were three of them, two smalls and a medium, fashioned as shooting stars. Her Christmas present from Jack.

  (She had gotten him a cigar cutter fob, gold to match his watch, with her initials engraved on the back. He’d worn it every day since.)

  “Better than all right,” Katherine said. “You’re luminous. Utterly prepared to illume.”

  The Astor chateau spread its massive shadow along the street; the automobile began to slow. A line of motorcars idled in front of the mansion, and a handful of pressmen huddled along the sidewalks, long-coated figures powdered with snow, hats and umbrellas turning white. The nearest one noticed the Forces and his camera jerked upward, and then they all did, one after another, as though linked by a puppeteer’s string.

  Their limousine came to a stop, still seven cars away from the main doors.

  “We’re sitting ducks out here,” said Katherine.

  Mother leaned forward. “You’re right. Let’s get out now, before they surround us entirely.”

  A pair of footmen had noticed them, as well, trotting up to the automobile’s doors.

  “You are a queen,” Mother said to Madeleine quickly, in those last few moments. “Head high. Show them all you belong here.”

  Swathed in ermine, Mrs. Force stepped out of the limousine.

  Katherine gave Madeleine a wicked smile, then followed. There was a sporadic dazzle of lights, but most of the flashes, Madeleine knew by now, were going to be aimed at her.

  She gathered her skirts. She slid across the squabs and raised her right hand to the footman awaiting her, exiting the auto in a slither of mink and ice-blue brocade, trying to show as little ankle as possible.

  The flash-powder explosions began, hot lights surrounding her, men shouting her name.

  “Miss Force! Look this way, please!”

  “Miss Force! Over here!”

  She kept her gaze cast down, focusing on her feet, the slippery folds of her gown. The wet gray slush of the pavement.

  Think of Jack.

  The footman released her hand, keeping an umbrella positioned above her head.

  “Miss Force! Did you help plan the menu?”

  “How many dances will you share with the colonel?”

  “Any surprises in store for this evening?”

  She had to look up to orient herself, to make certain she was heading for the porte cochère. It was a mistake. Within seconds, she was blinded, and the only thing to do then was to pause and wipe all expression from her face until her vision cleared.

  “Miss?” It was the footman, paused with her but politely concerned, and Madeleine gave a nod and moved forward again, this time with a s
erene, slim smile, as if she’d meant all along to let them fix her there, frozen as a deer in the road.

  “Miss Force! Miss Force!”

  And then she was past the open doors, past the inner bronze entrance gates and into the glass-domed hall, her heels striking wood and stone instead of concrete. The air swept by her more temperate, and the snow disappeared, and she did not have to picture Jack any longer because he was there before her, smiling at her, taking up both of her hands in his own.

  “Madeleine,” he greeted her, his tone low and intimate. He bent his head to place a kiss upon her knuckles. She felt the warmth of his breath through her gloves.

  In that moment, it was all of it, every bit of it, worth it.

  * * *

  Did you help plan the menu?

  No. Wives planned menus. Or, in this case, personal secretaries.

  How many dances will you share with the colonel?

  Any of them, all of them. As many as he wished.

  Any surprises in store for this evening?

  Only Jack himself knew the answer to that.

  * * *

  The portrait of Mrs. William Backhouse Astor, Junior—Lina, the Mrs. Astor—hung with frigid magnificence upon a buff-plastered wall of the Fifth Avenue residence. It dominated the reception room, looming larger than any of the other masterpieces arranged nearby. It had been done by Carolus-Duran during the acme of Mrs. Astor’s tight-lipped beauty; her painted flesh gleamed like the pearls around her neck against the russet background and the black satin of her gown.

  Beneath the portrait was a leopard-skin rug, one upon which the living Mrs. Astor used to stand to greet her guests, so that anyone fortunate enough to have gained entrance into these hallowed halls would be presented with the delight of double Mrs. Astors, both smiling grimly in welcome.

  Madeleine took careful note of that painted smile, along with the pearls and the diamond-decorated fan and the impressive ruby so discreetly, yet openly, displayed upon the ring finger of Mrs. Astor’s bare left hand.

  Behind her, the Knickerbocker guests of Lina’s Knickerbocker son drained cocktails and conversed as they waited for the dinner to begin. Bankers, Wall Street speculators, railroad barons, timber barons, plantation owners; potent, important men with interests in tobacco and politics and steel . . . and all their stiff-backed wives, all very much the age of her mother. The nape of Madeleine’s neck crawled with their attention.

  They’d swiveled and smiled at her as she’d entered the chamber on Jack’s arm. Smiled with such pleasantly blank expressions, and took her hand and looked her not quite in the eyes, and the whole time Madeleine had marveled, I thought they’d be more terrifying.

  But then Mrs. James Cardeza was in front of her, Charlotte Cardeza, that war dragon, who regarded first the colonel and then her with that same bland, genial air, and Madeleine came back to herself with a start.

  She thought, Are they all pretending?

  All those tittering scandal sheets were still being read. Madeleine’s lack, the scant merits of her blood, her family’s fortune, were still being weighed against theirs. Even Jack couldn’t protect her from that.

  Katherine approached, carrying two coupes brimming with champagne.

  “Those sleeves,” Madeleine murmured, without turning from the painting.

  “That expression,” Katherine murmured back, handing her one of the etched crystal coupes, spilling a little on her glove. She lifted her glass in mock salute. “She looks as though she feasts upon orphaned children gone astray in the woods.”

  “Hush! Everyone will hear you.”

  “Never fear. I shall spend the evening as orthodox as a nun.”

  “That would be a first. How much champagne have you had?”

  “Honestly? Not nearly enough.”

  Night had fallen, and it was still snowing outside, stronger now, thick and fast, cushioning all the outside sounds. The windows shone sable with curling fringes of frost, and all up and down the chamber shadows clung to the floor and ceiling and furniture and walls, a slightly milder sort of black than the black outside, sliced with patches of light.

  Jack’s Manhattan residence was made of stone. Beneath the caramel oak woodwork, beneath the many rugs of wool and silk and royal tiger and polar bear, beneath the towering marble columns and archways and imported Italian tiles, was stacked block after block of sober hard stone. So with the snow keeping outside noises outside, and the stone trapping inside noises inside, everything in the chamber echoed, amplified, voices and footsteps and breathing; the splashing of the water in the fountain out in the entrance hall; laughter and veiled looks and the smell of floor polish and beeswax.

  Gray, antique tapestries undulated with the draft against the walls, labored and slow, like the respiration of old elephants, but even those didn’t dampen the sound.

  It was a concert hall of a house, a colossus twisting of a house, crammed with rare and beautiful things yet at the same time composed mostly of hollow air, of wraiths. It seemed impossible that anyone with a pulse could actually reside here, much less thrive.

  She had dined at the Fifth Avenue mansion exactly three times before—informal dinners, family dinners, nothing like tonight—and on each occasion, she’d sensed how very easy it would be to be pulled apart by the history and expectations of this place. The life she would be required to live just to survive here.

  Mrs. William Backhouse Astor, Junior, had designed the whole of her home to ensure that everyone but herself was made small in its rooms. And right now, Madeleine definitely felt small.

  She should turn around. She should mix with the other guests. She should confront their stares and tilt her head and smile, as grim and unapproachable as the famed woman in the painting.

  “I only wish it was over already,” she said under her breath.

  Katherine opened her fan, hiding the lower half of her face behind a spread of feathers as she drained the last of her champagne. “Who knows? Tonight may be the night he musters his nerve.”

  “May,” Madeleine said.

  “May,” her sister concurred, matter-of-fact. “But either way, you’d better buck up. Even in the midst of clouds and doom, we must remain sunny. Mother will wring our necks otherwise.” She snapped her fan closed. “Sunny,” she hissed. And then, much louder: “Excuse me. I see Mother conversing with the Pulitzers, signaling me with her eyebrows that I need to come over.”

  And, fan and coupe and all, she was gone.

  Jack came near. The volume of conversation in the room dipped considerably before picking back up again. Madeleine sent him a brief, welcoming glance, then returned her gaze to the portrait. She deliberately avoided looking at the ruby ring.

  He said, “She would have been fond of you, I think.”

  Madeleine couldn’t help it; she allowed herself a dubious pursing of her lips.

  He noticed. “No, sincerely. She was formidable in her way, of course, but also fair. She valued virtue. Goodness.”

  She thought of the stories she’d heard—of débutantes melting into tears at Lina’s smiling insults, of grown women fleeing town in shame over her snubs—and bit her tongue. From the corner of her eye, she could see Jack rotating the signet ring on his pinkie, almost fretful, and wondered that such a man could have been carved from the flesh of a woman like that.

  His nails were short and glossy, evenly filed. She liked the shape of his hands, the blue tracing of veins just visible beneath his skin. She liked the experienced look of those hands. Here was someone, surely, who could teach her how to banish whatever specters haunted these halls.

  Madeleine said, “Your mother was a remarkable woman. I’m sorry we never met.”

  “Yes. Yes, so am I.”

  But he sounded distracted. It gave her the nerve to face him, angling herself so that the light from the candelabra nearby fell full upon her features. With her face upturned and the diamond stars in her hair, the blue of the gown that matched her eyes and set off the cream of her c
heeks, she knew how she looked. She should know; she’d planned it down to the last detail.

  That was the sum and skill of her life now, it seemed. How to make herself alluring to this magnetic, just-out-of-reach man.

  His brows drew downward, his lashes lowering. He seemed almost pained.

  She remembered their kiss, their only one. His lips had been silky soft, his moustache scratchy. He’d tasted of mint and cigar and everything forbidden and unknown that she longed to explore, to sink her teeth and fingers and soul into. She’d felt herself expand with his kiss, her spirit swell and spill out of her like Katherine’s champagne overflowing from its shallow glass, and she couldn’t imagine that he looked at her without remembering it, too. Without craving more, as she did.

  Without dreaming of more, as she did, waking up sweaty and breathless in the middle of the night.

  Jack turned away from her, just enough to break their connection.

  “Those ink-stained villains out there,” he said now, shaking his head. “I’m sorry about that. I can keep them off the property itself, but they’ve got free rein of the sidewalks and streets.”

  “I know. It’s all right.”

  “I despise how they harass you. I despise that it’s because of me.”

  “Really. It’s all right.” She tried a smile. “I’m following the patented Astor method for dealing with them, you know. I won’t break.”

  He exhaled, slow, quiet, beneath the ebb and swell of chatter filling the chamber.

  Now, she thought. Ask me now.

  Maybe he read her mind; maybe he only read her hope. When he spoke again, he sounded almost weary.

  “You’re seventeen still, Madeleine. You’re so young.”

  A surge of anger flooded through her, but she kept her tone carefully neutral. “So everyone keeps telling me. Young is not an unpardonable offense. Young does not mean I cannot make rational decisions, or abide by them.”

  Her ire had revealed itself, after all. They gazed at each other in surprise.

  “I beg your pardon,” Madeleine said. “I am young, I suppose, but I don’t feel especially young inside.”

  “That’s curious,” he said somberly, “because people call me old, you know.” His lips twitched. “At least, they do behind my back. But when I’m with you, I don’t feel especially old.”