The Second Mrs. Astor

by Shana Abe

  In all her life, she had never tasted bread so fine.

  She drank tea by the gallons until she grew tired of it and switched to water and dry white wine . . . which France also offered in abundance.

  “I wish you would try the turbot,” Jack said one night, their last night before they were to depart for the Riviera, and then North Africa. He gazed at her from across the restaurant table, ignoring the anxious waiter and the other patrons (ogling, because in a rising babble of languages, one after another they’d realized with whom they dined) and the constant churn of noise from outside, all the motorcars and coaches and people hurrying past the windows with their collars turned up.

  The rain struck the panes in slender clear daggers, always falling.

  “Just one bite,” he said, setting down his knife and fork, touching his napkin to his lips. Nestled in its little green glass bowl on the table, the flame of a candle bent and trembled.

  The turbot lay slick and unpleasant on her plate, drowning in capers and congealing butter. In her mind, she imagined lifting the fork, flaking apart its flesh, and nearly at once her throat closed with nausea.

  Jack reached out his hand to her. She smiled at him tightly, their fingers meshed. Along with her diamond engagement ring, along with the other sparkling rings she wore to make him happy, they wore matching wedding bands, plain gold, unadorned.

  Madeleine looked from the rings to his face, trying to find the words to placate him. She hated worrying him. Tonight he looked nearly as haggard as she felt. He looked nearly . . . vulnerable, which was a word she had never once associated with John Jacob Astor before. Yes, vulnerable—because of her—and that pained her.

  Yet in the end, all she could offer was, “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  The next morning, figuring the math, she finally understood why.

  She hadn’t caught a cold.

  February 1912

  Alexandria, Egypt

  The wet weather followed them all the blessed way, from Paris to the coast. The steamer they’d booked in Villefranche had navigated the rain and waves without undue effort, but instead of the limpid beryl sea Madeleine had been hoping to see, for days the Mediterranean remained a cheerless, opaque froth.

  As they churned toward the harbor of the fabled city, Alexandria loomed gray before her: drab gray sky, drab gray sand. Gray, dull little houses that resembled nothing more than the massive gray stones stacked in blocks along the shore, slathered in seaweed and foam. Blackened, skinny masts from the myriad boats dotting the water bobbed up and down, up and down, stabbing at the clouds.

  In the near distance rose the replica Pharos, that lost ancient wonder of a lost ancient world, now nothing more than a shadowy smear of a lighthouse, shrunk small behind the lens of her porthole glass.

  Standing there in her cabin, looking out at it all, Madeleine exhaled a slow, sad breath.

  “There, there,” murmured her maid, as she fastened the clasp of Madeleine’s necklace. “It cannot rain forever, madame.”

  “Can’t it?”

  “It won’t,” said the woman. “You’ll see.”

  Rosalie Bidois, a firmly proper lady’s maid taken on back in New York, was the most optimistic Frenchwoman Madeleine had ever met.

  She hoped that Rosalie was right, that the rain would soon stop, that the clouds would scatter to the four corners of the earth to reveal a benevolent blue sky.

  She turned and caught a glimpse of herself in the wardrobe mirror, a girl washed to gray like everything else, her hair pulled back, her dress and hat darkly sensible. Only her earrings showed any color, Burmese rubies that dangled like fat drops of blood from her lobes.

  Her gaze strayed downward. She turned sideways in the glass and ran her hands over her front, trying to feel the tiny lump of her baby beneath her corset.

  “Your coat, madame.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You will keep it buttoned?”

  “Yes.”

  At least the temperature had risen enough for her to leave off her furs. In Villefranche, she’d been able to switch to a topcoat of gaberdine, a slim harbinger of brighter days to come.

  Three sharp knocks rattled the door. The porter, ready for her trunks, Jack standing right behind him in the cramped hall.

  “Shall we go? I’ve already sent Robins ahead with the rest of the luggage. It’s going to take some time to wend through customs, I’m afraid. These port towns at the edge of the world. It always does.”

  “All right.”

  Kitty, already leashed to keep her in check, pushed past both men, straining to reach Madeleine, her tail thumping against Jack’s leg. Her leather collar pulled tight against her neck, but she kept her focus on Madeleine, panting.

  “Oh, hello, yes.” She cupped the dog’s face in her hands, smoothing the coarse brown fur. For some reason, Kitty had warmed up to her tremendously in the past few months, obeying some doggish logic Madeleine could not work out. Kitty followed her around now nearly as much as she did Jack, leaning against her heavily whenever she could. By the end of the day, all of Madeleine’s skirts would be coated with dog hair. (The impressive Rosalie would inevitably return the skirts to her closet two days later, pressed and spotless.)

  It would have been, as Jack pointed out, cruel to leave their dog behind for so long a period. Besides, he’d spent years taking her everywhere, and Kitty loved to travel.

  Which was apparently true. At the very least, Kitty loved to be with her and Jack, so surely that was close enough.

  “Hello, my good girl,” Madeleine whispered to her. “Are you ready for an adventure?”

  “She always is.” Jack stole past the porter and the maid to buss her on the cheek, his free hand lightly and briefly gripping her elbow.

  Ever since she’d told him her news, back in Paris, the worried cast to his eyes had vanished. He’d gathered her close to him, his lips against her temple. She’d breathed in that bergamot and amber scent of him, closing her eyes, wrapping her arms around his waist. Like the Airedale, like a child, she’d leaned heavily, letting him take her weight.

  He’d wanted to know only was she certain, and when did she think . . . ?

  Yes. And, August.

  Whenever her husband gazed at her now, all Madeleine saw was a slow burning joy. It practically lit him from within.

  She wished she felt the same. She wanted to feel the same. She wanted her heart to be as lifted as his, to keep them in harmony, because she adored their harmony and always had. But so far, all she could bring herself to feel about her pregnancy was a thin, distant amazement. Like all the tumbling, strange changes in her life now were happening to someone else, and she was only watching them from afar, observing all their fascinating little facets.

  Look at that lucky girl, that newlywed in her coat and lace and jewels. Consider her fine life, her husband, her unborn child, and still all she does is complain about the weather.

  She never said anything to Jack about this new, faraway side of her. She couldn’t lie to him, not about anything that really mattered, but that didn’t mean she had to tell him everything, either. It seemed kinder to let him believe her silence was tranquil contemplation; that her newfound gravity was Madonna-like, not simply detachment.

  It occurred to her sometimes that she ought to feel guilty for her lack of feeling. She ought to feel shame, at least. But even those moments would slip away from her, fading off into insignificance.

  Kitty licked her hand. Madeleine gave the dog’s head another rub, then put on her gloves.

  “Let’s go find Egypt.”

  * * *

  The New Khedivial Hotel did not, as a policy, allow its guests to house their pets in its splendid apartments. Cats were considered bothersome and dogs dirty, but Jack was so accustomed to circumventing this particular rule that he merely smiled as he handed the wad of cash notes to the manager, who pocketed it without blinking and bowed deeply before conducting them all to their rooms.

  They were
only stopping for the night before heading to Cairo. She’d passed in a haze through the grand lobby, barely noticing the décor. But once ensconced in their suite, Madeleine had collapsed into a chair and leaned back her head, and all she saw was fussy gilt and silk wallpaper and shiny French brocatelle, and anonymous oil paintings of pastel sunsets blushing behind trees. A few Roman-looking busts gazed back at her, blank-eyed, from veined marble pedestals.

  This room could have been anywhere. Any superior hotel room, anywhere in Europe or America, anywhere she’d ever been.

  What an awful long way to have come for more gilt.

  CHAPTER 18

  It rained and gloomed until Cairo.

  But I sleepwalked until then, letting your father’s meticulous plans buffet me this way and that. I had absolute trust in him to keep me safe, no matter how much I did not or could not see happening around me. I remember falling into my dreams that night in the hotel in Alexandria, relieved enough to be in a downy soft bed that did not rock, relieved even more to have my husband next to me.

  (On the steamer from France to Egypt, there had been some mix-up with the ship, or the tides, or the captain or something—I still don’t quite know; it was explained in a rapid torrent of French—and in the end, all we could manage to procure in first class were single cabins with narrow bunks.)

  I hope it doesn’t shock you, me telling you these things. I hope that someday, when you are married, you will read these words and think, “Of course.”

  I mean for you to know, in every motherly way that I can convey it, that your parents were in love. That we were twin spirits in love. And how special you were to us from the very beginning, the spark born from us both.

  Anyway, Cairo. We stayed at Mena House, naturally, so close to the pyramids, with its modern amenities and tram service and stables and swimming bath. We meant to take in the sights and then meet Margaret Brown and her daughter a few days later aboard our rented dahabiya for the journey up and back down the Nile.

  I went to bed that first night in gray, fuzzy Cairo still asleep. Already asleep.

  Overnight, the rain marched out into the desert, evaporating into clouds. The next thing I knew was the dawn.

  February 1912

  Cairo, Egypt

  She opened her eyes. Everything was covered in stars of rosy gold light, a color so warm and intense that it seemed not quite real. The pillow beneath her cheek was scented of lavender and lemon; with the glowing pink stars and the perfume and the rumpled covers all around her, Madeleine sat up, groggy and blinking, and wondered where she was.

  Jack was asleep to her left, one arm flung over the quilted silk counterpane. The light poured in from the quartet of floor-to-ceiling windows to her right, festooned in mulberry gauze and masked with carved wooden screens punched through with star-shaped holes, hundreds of them, each one aglow.

  From somewhere nearby came a tinkling of chimes, high and delicate.

  Cairo. The desert, the Nile.

  She slipped out of the four-poster, careful not to wake her husband, and padded to the windows. It took a moment of fumbling to realize the screens didn’t open outward or in, but slid on rollers along metal tracks, overlapping each other. She pushed them apart with both hands.

  The sunrise flooded over her. She had to squint against it, raising a hand to shield her eyes, and only then did she realize she stood at the edge of a very wide balcony, and the windows weren’t really windows at all, but doors left open to allow in the air and sun. She took a single step out and swam in the burgeoning dawn. Her hands and feet and nightgown were rose; the walls were rose; the sky was rose streaked with bronze and copper, a thick band of lapis still lingering low to the west.

  Before her, right directly before her, soared the great pyramids of Giza, so towering and perfectly formed, so radiantly orange-pink with dusty blue shadows, that they looked like the painted backdrop of a play. They looked simultaneously both near and far, impossible to touch and impossible not to want to.

  The wind stirred and the chimes sounded again, a pretty pair of them dangling above a table set close to the railing, their pipes and tails flashing. A bird in the gardens below began to sing, a low, mellow warble, soon joined by another; beneath them came the sounds of early morning traffic, motorcars and donkeys and roosters and voices, all reaching her from somewhere unseen. The hem of her nightgown ruffled against her shins, and even though she stood there in her bare feet, clad only in a sheath of fine lawn and lace, Madeleine realized she wasn’t cold. Finally, at last, she wasn’t cold.

  “Egypt,” she said aloud, letting the breeze steal the syllables from her lips. She wanted to laugh, so she did, making hardly any sound at all. Inside her, deep inside her core, something seemed to unclench.

  “Baby,” she whispered, cupping her hands over her womb, feeling perhaps the slightest hardness where she had been soft before. “Little baby, here we are.”

  She felt at once that anything was possible. That she could leap over the balcony railing and clamber down the side of the hotel like a monkey, run across the grounds, across the clipped green grass and in and out of the palms until it all melted into sand. She could run up the pyramids themselves, all the way to the top, giddy with the power of herself. With the power of being free.

  There wasn’t a single reporter or photographer in view, only a stooped figure in a robe in the distance, slowly pushing a hand mower in front of the far hedges.

  “What a view,” murmured a voice behind her, and Jack came up, pulling her back against his chest. She sighed, resting against him.

  “It’s incredible, isn’t it? I never thought I’d see anything like this.”

  “I meant my wife,” he said, his jaw against her ear. “My ravishingly lovely wife.”

  She laughed again. “I was just imagining myself as a monkey. The better to scale the pyramids.”

  “I thought you were a mermaid?”

  “Mermaids do not suit the desert.”

  “True enough.” He lowered his head to her neck, breathed against her skin. “Let’s make you a gazelle. Graceful, fleet. A creature of the wadis and steppes, right at home in the heat.”

  She lifted a hand to his hair, turned her face toward his.

  “Perfect,” she said.

  * * *

  She did not run up the pyramids. No one ran up the pyramids; one might clamber awkwardly up them, block by enormous block, or else be lifted and tugged and pushed by whichever guides could be hired with enough piastres to carry the tourists practically in their arms the whole way.

  Maybe a real gazelle could have managed it. But Madeleine was, in the end, a pregnant woman still worn out from a long series of voyages. Her spirit was willing; her body was not. And she didn’t like being lifted by strangers. It felt too much like the pressmen back in New York, trying to touch her, trying to crowd her, trying to get her to react to them however they could so they could write it up and publish it and laugh over it.

  She managed seven blocks, then waved away the beaming men attempting to coax her higher. She sat with her feet dangling over the edge with Jack sitting beside her, peeling a boiled egg from the basket of food the hotel had packed for them. Two more guides squatted behind them, ready to lower her down again.

  Jack handed her the egg. She took a bite, gazing out at the rippling sand.

  “Still happy, Mrs. Astor?”

  “Yes.” She looked at him sideways from beneath the brim of her Panama hat. “Are you, Colonel Astor?”

  Like her, he faced the sands. Below them milled more tourists and guides, and camels adorned with bells and blankets, walking in trudging lines. Rosalie was down there somewhere, too, waiting for them, along with Robins, Jack’s valet, but Madeleine couldn’t pick them out. All the American and European women carried parasols; everyone, of both genders, was hatted. A line of native women in robes and veils sat at makeshift wooden stalls, selling everything from figs and oranges to crocodile teeth.

  It wasn’t yet noon
, and the sun felt fierce. In the early desert light, beneath his own Panama hat, Jack’s eyes paled to silver, and his skin warmed to honey.

  “I am,” he said soberly, “without question, the happiest man in the world.”

  * * *

  At midday, they took a carriage back to the hotel, Madeleine sleepy enough to lean her head against his shoulder. She tried to keep her eyes open but couldn’t; it didn’t feel as if she slept, though. She still heard all the city around her, the clip-clopping hooves of the horses, the lilting calls of the street vendors, children constantly begging for baksheesh, horns bugling. The pace of the calèche along the crowded roads was erratic, surging and slowing, but even that didn’t rouse her.

  When they reached the hotel, she drifted into their suite, kicked off her shoes, and aimed for the bed. Rosalie barely had time to unpin her hair before Madeleine embraced her pillow and sank into peace.

  * * *

  That night, that second night, long after dinner, they swam together in the huge marble swimming bath. Fires in iron braziers marked the edges of the pool, casting dramatic dark shadows along the stone and water. Jack told her that later on, after all the guests had retired, the bath would be drained and cleaned and refilled again for the next morning, so that each new day it shone clear and fresh, an aquamarine jewel gleaming at the edge of the desert’s dust and heat.

  A pair of attendants waited silently in the dark by the cabanas, minding the towels and stars.

  The water in the swimming bath felt like her skin, exactly the same temperature somehow. It was certainly warmer than the air, cooled to an arid crispness with the fallen sun, and best of all, they had it nearly to themselves. There was only an older German couple sharing the pool with them, who clung to the steps near the shallow end and had said nothing beyond guten Abend, occasionally chortling and splashing each other with the flats of their hands.