The Second Mrs. Astor

by Shana Abe

  Gold-leafed sconces, pilasters, cherubs, medallions. Gold-leafed tables and chairs, cabinets and commodes. There were still rooms in this hulking home that Madeleine had barely explored, but it seemed to her that Lina Astor had not spared her hand at gilding every lily she’d ever seen.

  Sometimes, some mornings (like this one), it hurt her eyes to try to take it all in.

  She sank deeper into her cushioned chair by the fire, gathering her cardigan tighter around her waist. Dug her heels into the nap of the rug (woven with little identical birds, wings spread, beaks agape), as if that might help. She wore opals this morning, maybe to counter all of that unrelenting gold. Black opals, eldritch and fiery, stone rainbows captured on her fingers and wrists.

  “It’s so kind of you to have me over,” said Margaret Brown, seated in the easy chair opposite hers. She leaned back, looking completely at home, her legs scissored at the ankles, her toes pointed, like a ballet dancer’s. “As I mentioned over the telephone, I could have saved you the trouble and stayed at the Ritz.”

  “Oh, no,” Madeleine said, rousing. “I’m so happy to see you again. It’s lucky for us you were on your way through to Newport and the train was delayed. We’re glad for the company, honestly.”

  She heard the tremble in her voice, just barely noticeable, and closed her lips tight to swallow it down.

  Margaret lifted her cup of tea, examined the spiral of steam that rose from its surface. “It’s a big house, Mrs. Astor.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  Madeleine dropped her gaze to her lap. The wind outside quickened, rotated, became a gust that groaned against the windowpanes.

  Margaret uncrossed her ankles. “Don’t worry. The place will grow on you, I’m sure. It can be rough sliding into someone else’s territory at first, even if they’re long gone. Ghosts in the walls, I guess. The artwork, the furniture, even the pattern of the china.” She cocked her head, smiled at the old-fashioned peonies circling her cup. “Someone else’s ideas about living, sleeping, entertaining, manifested all around you. But you’re tough, Madeleine. Bright and tough. You wouldn’t be where you are right now if you weren’t. You’ll make this place your own.”

  “I hope so.”

  “Hire a decorator,” Margaret suggested. “Spread some of your own soul across these rooms. This isn’t Europe, after all. We’re allowed to stir things up here. In fact, we’re expected to. Not everything in America is chiseled in eternal stone.”

  “A decorator?” Madeleine looked up, around. There was so much gilt. “I hadn’t thought . . .”

  “Well, think it. Change things, invite people over, all those four hundred lovely, lovely people, and show them what you can do. Show them who you are.”

  “We were considering a luncheon.” Madeleine pinched at the cuff of her thick plum sweater, rolling the wool between her fingers. Why was she always so cold now? It seemed this winter in New York was the coldest of her life so far, and it had hardly even snowed. Just day after day of bitter blue sky, anemic thin sun. That wind. “Nothing too elaborate, of course. Only something close enough to Christmas to be festive, but not enough to intrude on anyone’s plans, but . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Not many have responded favorably. Quite a few people are already so busy with the holidays.”

  Margaret raised both eyebrows, said nothing. Tasted her Ceylon.

  Madeleine rushed on. “And doubtless many will be traveling, like you. Visiting family near and far. It was all very last minute, anyway. Jack and I have hardly been in town long enough to catch our breath.”

  Margaret stood, walked to the table that held the tea service. In the giant square of iced light from the window, she waved away the footman who approached, pouring herself another cup.

  “Do you know what they call themselves back in Denver?”

  “Who?”

  Margaret added a thin stream of milk to her cup, lifting the creamer expertly high and then low, her eyes narrowed, before placing it back upon the silver tray. “The elite. The leaders of Colorado high society.”

  Madeleine looked at her, waiting.

  “‘The Sacred Thirty-Six.’” She returned to her chair. “The thirty-six best families of the Rockies. The thirty-six who determine who is good, who is bad, and who is merely uninvited. At least here it’s only a number, and a bigger one at that. Four hundred. Plenty of room, so to speak. Out there, it’s only thirty-six, and they had to throw in a sacred. To make it all so much more special.”

  “Are you a member?” Madeleine asked, but thought she already knew the answer.

  Margaret smiled; for the first time, the secret mirth about her vanished, replaced with something fiercer, darker. She swirled the tea in her cup. “I was a shop girl. Did you know that, Miss Madeleine?”

  “No.” She was genuinely surprised. Nothing about Margaret Brown, no matter her plain speaking, indicated anything but a background of culture and education.

  “Came west from Missouri as a girl to meet my brother in Colorado. He was a miner, and we were going to make our fortune out in Leadville. But women weren’t allowed to mine, not for gold or silver or anything else. It was thought to be bad luck. I ended up in a dry goods store, and I was grateful for it, because it was decent work. Steady work, even though the pay was peanuts. Every day, I dealt with real folks in real life. Folks without a penny left to their names, desperate for a speck of anything to send home to their families back east. Desperate for any brush with Lady Luck. It turned out that Lady Luck, in the end, noticed me. I was a poor girl who fell in love with a poor man, and married him. A man who later on became rich from gold. I was nineteen when we wed. He was thirty-one, days from thirty-two.” She shot Madeleine a glance from beneath those dark lashes. “Did you know that?”

  “No,” she said again.

  “Nineteen. Thirty-two. But it’s different out there, you know. Out west. Fewer women by far, at least in the far-flung mountains and plains. No one raised much of a fuss about it. We were happy and poor, and then we were happy and rich. And after that . . .”

  She drifted off, the tea half-lifted in her hand, forgotten. Past the closed doors of the morning room, there were maids conversing, very low. There were footsteps, and the muted, solid sound of well-oiled doors opening, closing. Letting in and out the ghosts.

  “After that,” Margaret said, “I began to raise my voice. For charity, for laborers. For the rights of the miners, of women and children. To take a little—just a little, mind you—from the Thirty-Six and send it back to those who’d made their silk-stocking lives possible. The starving men dying in their tents, in the banks of snow. Their families left behind, left up there at altitude with nothing, trying to find their way in rags back to any kind of secure base.”

  Margaret seemed to recall her tea. She looked at it with something like revulsion, then slowly lowered her hand to the arm of her chair. Without her mask of mirth, she seemed older suddenly, lined and fatigued.

  “Those pinched-nosed biddies in Denver would sooner kiss the lips of the devil himself than invite me into their homes.”

  Madeleine sat forward, tucking her feet beneath her. The fire in the hearth popped, a bright cherry burst.

  “How courageous you are.”

  “Courageous? No. Just saw the truth of things, that was all. Saw the truth, and tried to change it.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No.” Margaret sighed, resting back. “Maybe a little. Not enough. It’s never really enough. That’s not how our world turns.”

  Madeleine felt, shockingly, her eyes begin to burn. A hot band of sorrow cinched her, constricting her chest. To control it, she made herself very still, exhaling silently through parted lips, her fingers curled beneath her legs. She blinked away the tears, scowling at her knees.

  The fire. The maids. The hundred doors of this empty, haunted mansion, opening and closing. Men dying in tents.

  It all echoed through her, over and over and over, all the ghosts ris
ing up, taking command.

  “Madeleine,” said Margaret carefully. “Are you feeling perfectly well?”

  She freed a hand to wipe quickly at her eyes. “Oh, yes. A bit tired, that’s all.”

  “A big house,” said Margaret again, very soft.

  “I miss the heat, I think.” She rubbed her eyes again, then pushed the opal rings covering her fingers back into place. She stared down at them, so heavy and vivid, and heard herself say, “I ache to be warm. I know it sounds woebegone, it sounds silly, but honestly, I do. And not just warm by the fire as we are now, roasting on your left while freezing on your right, like a chicken half cooked. Warm from the air, from the green trees and the sun, surrounded by June. June! It feels as if this winter has dragged on forever, and it’s only December still.”

  “The cold can whittle you straight down to the marrow, I swear. I do know that.”

  “I just don’t—” She swallowed hard against the thickness in her throat—stop crying, don’t be stupid, don’t cry—and when she spoke again, the tremble in her voice had flattened out. “I just don’t know when it will be warm again. That’s all.”

  The door to the room swept open on its silent hinges. Jack walked in, still shrugging out of his overcoat, trailed by Kitty and a footman. He tossed the coat back to the footman without looking (who caught it expertly mid-air in a slither of satin and wool), smiling all the while.

  “Hello, sweet wife. Good morning, Margaret. Madeleine sent word that you’d come.”

  He leaned down to kiss Madeleine on the forehead, his moustache prickling. She averted her eyes but lifted her hand to brush his cheek, her fingers falling away as he straightened. “Quite a brisk morning out there! I’m happy to see you both by the fire.”

  “It does make a difference,” Margaret said. “As long as we don’t run out of wood.”

  Jack laughed, headed to the tea service. “No chance of that.” He glanced around, impatient. “Wilton? I’d like some coffee, please. And whatever assortment of cakes or pastries the kitchen has on hand. Maybe some of those macaroons from yesterday, if there are any left.”

  A new footman—not the one with Jack’s coat; Madeleine was still trying to remember everyone’s names—inclined his head and murmured, “Right away, sir,” before backing out of the room.

  “Do you know, darling, I’ve been considering your idea about adjusting the meal schedule.”

  Madeleine tried to sound interested. “Oh?”

  “Breakfast was too early today, I think, because I’m half-starved now, and it’s nowhere near noon. Margaret, are you staying for lunch?”

  “If you’ll have me.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Actually, if you’ll have me, I’m staying overnight.”

  “Are you? Wonderful. Madeleine could use the company.”

  They were nearly her own words, minutes before. Nearly, but she had said we, and he had not.

  She kept her gaze on the window, the pallid light. She drew the air in past her teeth, blew it out again, slow, restrained, exhaling the tightness in her chest.

  Jack planted himself on a cut-velvet settee, slinging an arm along the high, scalloped line of the back.

  “What’s on the schedule for today, ladies? Shopping? A ride through the park?”

  “Jack,” said Margaret. “Let’s talk about January, instead of today.”

  He smiled again, tapping his fingers against the wooden scroll topping the settee, and for no reason other than that, Madeleine remembered him in their bed last night, the touch of his hands against her, hard and hungry and eager, burning warm, because the cold never seemed to infect him, not ever.

  “January? Is there some momentous event approaching?”

  “Maybe.” Margaret shot a glance at Madeleine, then back to Jack. “I’m taking my daughter Helen to Egypt. She’s never been, and has been pestering me about it for ages. I suppose it’s something all the young people want to do now, the Egyptian grand tour. It’s become a contest to see who can collect the most postcards from Memphis or Cairo or Thebes. The Sphinx, the Valley of the Kings, all that. I heard even Pierpont Morgan’s headed to Khargeh soon to inspect the ruins. Helen’s going to be studying at the Sorbonne, so we wanted to get in the trip while we could. Have you ever wintered in Egypt?”

  Jack drew up one leg, crossed his ankle over his knee and flicked the cuff of his trouser leg back into place.

  (—and she had stroked that ankle, that knee, dragged her nails up the flesh of his shin, learning his joints, the hard separations of muscle against muscle, masculine and lean, her mouth and body mastering every bit of him, ankle to knee, knee to thigh, thigh to—)

  “I haven’t. I’ve been there on occasion, but only for a few weeks at a time.”

  “Egypt in winter is the absolutely best time to go.” Now Margaret’s gaze returned to Madeleine, very direct; Madeleine dragged herself back to the present. “It’s warm without the brutal heat of summer. The temples, the stars, the sunsets. The history and art—they’ll steal your breath away. There’s nothing like traveling to open the eyes and inspire the spirit. We’re setting off in January. Why don’t the two of you join us? If not for the whole tour, at least for some of it?”

  “Egypt,” said Madeleine, sitting up, and the word tasted like spice in her mouth, something rare and wonderful and perfumed. She’d never been farther south on the Continent than Marseilles, never traveled anywhere beyond the pearl-chokered salons of New England and Europe.

  Egypt.

  And then that word, full of spice, transformed itself into a new word, an even better one, resonating down through her bones: Escape.

  Jack was watching her, his fingers now still. She met his eyes and curved her lips and tried not to look pitiful or pleading. Kitty lumbered over, sprawled along the rug at her feet with a satisfied grunt, soaking up the heat from the hearth.

  “Egypt,” he said. He rapped another hard tattoo against the wood. “What a marvelous notion.”

  CHAPTER 17

  We took the Olympic across the pond. It was a beautiful ship, still more or less new, having only been in service since the summer before. I remember thinking at the time that it was the grandest ocean liner I’d ever been on. There weren’t many on board we knew, which was sublime, and no reporters at all, which was more sublime still. We found only a handful of people in first class who were even nodding acquaintances, including J. Bruce Ismay.

  Ismay. President of the International Mercantile Marine.

  Chairman of the White Star Line.

  (Or “Yamsi,” as he called himself in the supposedly secret messages wired from the Carpathia to White Star’s New York offices, attempting to commandeer another ship to spirit him away to England after the sinking. So that he could cower there across the Atlantic, where the United States Senate inquiry could not touch him.)

  That bastard. Even writing out his name now makes my teeth clench.

  Our entire voyage to Europe, Ismay could not stop boasting about White Star’s upcoming newer, better steamship (not yet launched), built as a sister ship to the one we traveled on. He and your father spent countless hours discussing all the technical aspects of both steamers, the tonnage, the reciprocating engines, beams and displacements, deck plans. Jack was always keen on delving into those sorts of details. He was an amazing man of science, in his own way. His inventions won all sorts of accolades and awards.

  I’ll show you some of the write-ups, his ribbons and certificates and sketches. I’ll put aside some of the instruments from his home laboratories.

  Your father and Ismay would stay up late into the night in the smoke room of the Olympic, holding their sessions, and when Jack would return to our stateroom, he was always starry-eyed and reeking of cigars.

  Which, of course, I never minded.

  Which now I would give my right arm to smell again.

  I don’t know. All those rapt, late-night conversations about Titanic. I think maybe they seeped into him like a poi
son.

  Yes. Maybe he was poisoned with the thought of that newer and better ship and her maiden voyage; sick with longing to see her all spick and span and untested.

  Maybe that was why.

  Perhaps Bruce Ismay was right to try to flee. Were he standing before me now and I had a pistol in my hand, I might easily put a bullet in him.

  January 1912

  Paris, France

  France was awash with rain. Not just any rain, but a miserable sleety slush that shifted back and forth from hard stinging drops to wet flaky splats, soaking through even the thickest of oilskins. From the moment they’d reached Cherbourg, it had begun, and had not relented for more than an hour or so a week later. Paris appeared to be weeping, all her famous façades stained with streaks of dirty gray ice. Medieval gargoyles retched watery sludge into leaky lead gutters; puddles and rivulets of melt mirrored the silver, sullen sky.

  Whenever Madeleine went outside, her hair frizzed, and her breath frosted into clouds.

  The air smelled of gasoline and horses and wet manure.

  It was not warm.

  There were, of course, history and art aplenty, but the stars remained hidden, and the sunsets descended uniformly gray. At least their suite of rooms at the Ritz-Carlton was well heated, as was the lobby and all the fine restaurants nearby to be found. But she still wore her furs wherever she went—she would wear them to bed if she could—and the tips of her fingers and toes nearly always felt numb. It was the strangest burden, this chill she carried with her. It felt like a fever wracking her, except she shivered instead of sweated.

  She must have caught some manner of a flu-ish ague, which was horribly unfair, to be sick on her first trip abroad with her husband. But she was, and all she could do was hunker through it.

  Her appetite waned. The sight of food, no matter how elegantly plated, left her queasy; the odors of sautéed meats and rich sauces were enough to make her leave the table. All she could bear to consume was freshly baked bread and softened cheese—which, happily, Paris had in abundance. She gorged on long crispy sleeves of baguettes, sometimes still warm from the oven, their crusts crackling at her touch, tender white insides ready to be devoured. She’d tear into them with her bare hands (if nobody watched), smear them with salted butter and goat cheese, a touch of jam, fig or pear or green tomato.