Beautiful Wild

by Anna Godbersen

  The only moment when something did not look just as she had known it would was when she saw Alva Vanderbilt herself. She was sitting on a chaise surrounded by sycophants, and Vida realized in an instant that the grand dame was no longer the young woman of twenty who once hosted a fancy dress ball to open her house and prove to New York’s high society that she was one of them. She was a dowager now, dressed impressively, but not at all in the latest style.

  “She’s so old-fashioned,” said Vida.

  “Oh, well, what does she have to prove?” Fitzhugh said, as though her indifference to the changing times was admirable.

  But there was something mummified in her that frightened Vida, made it seem that she believed she could win against nature. Like the women on the island who had clung to their modesty, their propriety, their high-necked dresses and their rigid etiquette in the face of the unstoppable weather and the pull and push of the tide. Vida wanted to explain this to Fitz, and knew she couldn’t. That she couldn’t made her feel alone, even at the center of the swirl.

  They advanced beyond this scene and through picture galleries and salons that smelled of cigar smoke—the sound of string music always reaching them faintly from just one room over—and Vida did as she knew she ought, and smiled without showing her teeth or seeming too eager. Vida tried to enjoy the appreciative glances in the direction of her dress—which really were very flattering—and the ripple of interest that followed wherever she went.

  At the edge of the ballroom, they came across a couple that Fitzhugh seemed to know well. “This is Adele Jones,” Fitz said of the woman, who was festooned in heaps of pale red chiffon. “We’ve summered together in Newport since we were children.”

  The men stepped a little away, and bent their polished heads together to confer over something important-seeming in private.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Vida said, and offered her hand in greeting.

  Adele Jones appeared irritated to have been thus abandoned by her companion but she said, “I’m just charmed.”

  “I’d love to see Newport,” Vida went on, undeterred by this minor cut.

  “Oh, I’m sure you will. Though our rugged little coast is I’m sure nothing compared to what you’ve seen with your own eyes.”

  “How could it be? The island was a beautiful place. I was frightened often, and glad to be found, but you should have seen the view from the summit. The world went on and on, as though there were no people in it.”

  Adele’s face puckered. “Is that a good thing?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought so.” Vida could see that she had gone wrong somewhere. She had been guileless when she should have been alert to the layer beneath what was said aloud, and also the layer below that, and the layer below that again. She had forgotten how rivalrous women could be with each other in these kinds of rooms—how rivalrous she had once been. But she went on, determined to explain herself: “I was very in love with grand cities and civilized gatherings and all of that—but I must tell you, there is nothing quite as beautiful as the world with no building or road to mar it, the world brand new but also ancient, everything untouched by the busy agendas of people like us.”

  “You’re too profound for me, dear,” said Adele with a smile that was neither warm nor charmed. “But I can see that you’ve gotten quite a lot of sun. How will that look on your wedding day?”

  Vida smiled more brightly and held Adele’s gaze until Adele was shamed into looking away.

  “Vida,” said Fitz, turning back from Adele’s husband, wearing an expression that began as a warm smile but was tense, alert to trouble, ready to change into something else at any moment. “Will you dance?”

  “Oh, yes,” Vida said, relieved to leave the conversation she had muddled somehow. She lifted her arms, and let her fiancé place his hands at her waist and wrist and move her backward, into a dance. “I don’t think that woman liked me very much.”

  “I heard what she said. I love how you look. Anyway, she will like you. We went around together for a time, so she might take just slightly longer than everybody else to admire you as I do. But she will. They all will. Don’t worry.”

  She was glad she wasn’t the same girl as before—the kind who would puzzle over a slight all day and all night. It was easy now to move away from Adele Jones. Whatever she had against Vida didn’t matter to Vida at all. She didn’t have to play by those rules.

  As they moved across the floor, through the rise and fall of bodies, their own frames lifting up off their toes and coming down to their heels as they turned and turned and turned to the music, she experienced that peculiar sensation, that coming back on shore after a long swim. She missed that sensation—that rocking that was just a memory of being rocked by the sea. “I’m not worried,” she said, and her lips parted in a smile that was not about this room, or this moment at all.

  “Then what?”

  “I was just thinking of this day when I swam out too far in a bad current and Sal followed me—he showed me how to swim along the shore until I was out of it. It might have been scary, but it wasn’t. I was so pleasantly exhausted afterward, and it was as though I saw where I was for the first time. Where all of us are, I suppose. It was a good day.”

  “Vida.”

  “Oh, dear.” She snapped back from the memory, and produced the high tinkling sound of her most effervescent laugh to put him at ease. Why had she revealed so much? Yet she had that crazed feeling, like standing at a cliff’s edge with no desire to step back to safety. “Sal’s your friend, I know—”

  “Vida.”

  “There’s nothing to confess, it’s just that—”

  “Vida!”

  “But we did become close. In fact, I felt that—”

  “Vida, enough!”

  She was startled by the vehemence with which he cut her off. She couldn’t think now what she had been about to say. She was confused, unsteady. The mania of the previous moment evaporated. Fitz glanced around, to see if anyone had noticed. But the room was noisy; everyone was a little drunk and consumed with their own business.

  “Enough,” Fitz said. He said it quietly, but with more force. Vida understood that he was forbidding her from saying more on the topic of Sal. “It impressed me very much how brave you were through the whole ordeal. But now that you are saved, now that we are to be married, you should put it in the past.”

  Vida felt stung by his vehemence. That he had so forcefully told her what to do. But she could put that away. She had to. She effected a cheery tone. “Yes! You’re right, of course. Let’s be married, let’s have it all over with as soon as possible, and then we can go off with our bags, lightly packed, in search of the next summit.”

  “Summit?” When Fitz’s brow folded up in confusion it had the strange and winning effect of making his eyes seem more blue than the moment before.

  It made him look very handsome, and Vida smiled, thinking of how he would look in a little cabin on a remote peak in the Alps. She laughed again, more naturally this time. “Yes. Once the wedding is over you can resume your explorations, to new summits of all kinds, and I’ll be with you, of course, to mend the mosquito netting and pick the wildflowers.”

  “Vida,” Fitzhugh said as they reached the edge of the dance floor. He led them through a doorframe and into a quiet hall.

  “Why do you keep saying my name like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I am a child that must be managed.”

  “I hardly think you are a child. But I do need you to listen carefully. And understand. I am the sole heir of the Farrar shipping concern, and it would be unseemly for me to risk my life adventuring all over the place. I am needed in New York, to oversee the business. My life is here now.” He grasped her hands and met her eyes with an expression of urgent and—she couldn’t help but think—humorless conviction. “Our life. You understand?”

  “Yes,” Vida repeated like a bright student, although the way he was staring at her made her feel rather l
ike he were the man in charge of ticket sales for the Farrar Line and she was a customer being rushed into buying a first-class ticket she did not at all need. “Yes, I understand. I just feel a little faint.”

  “Do you need some air?”

  “Yes—and to be alone for a minute.” If she could be alone for a moment, could master herself, she could be the woman Fitz expected her to be. “I’ll be back soon.”

  Fitz nodded, he smiled in his rakish way. “All right. Don’t be gone long.”

  It took a great deal of maneuvering through crowds to find a place that offered fresh air and was not already populated by cigar smokers.

  Then, as she was trying to find her way to the servants’ quarters, to someplace private and quiet, she saw Sal, moving away from her down a hallway, like he was always moving away from her.

  “Wait!” she called. She glanced behind her to make sure no one had heard, then she called out again, louder this time.

  He paused reluctantly, as though realizing he couldn’t escape. When he turned, his expression was serious—though a momentary smile flickered across his face when their eyes met. Then it was serious again, almost weary.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “I was just trying to find a quiet place not full of people shouting to be heard, with a little night air. Can you help me?”

  His eyes searched the ceiling. “There are a hundred servants here who could help you better than I could.”

  Vida didn’t think that was true. She wanted to say so, but knew she shouldn’t. “Why do you keep running away from me?” she asked instead.

  “Why?” He smiled again, but sadly this time. He glanced over her shoulder, then back at her. “I don’t think you really need to be told why. I had a strong feeling for you. I can’t have that feeling now. You’re different. You aren’t who I thought you were.”

  The clatter of metal platters falling somewhere close by startled Vida. She was aware of her surroundings—of the chandeliers, but also of the large staff. I had a strong feeling, Sal had said. She hadn’t known he would be so direct. She wanted him to tell her everything. She was afraid, too. Her pulse raced. Anyone might have heard. “Shhh,” she whispered. “Don’t,” she said. “You offend me. I’m not different. But that was a different place. We have to forget it.”

  “Yes.” Sal gave her a curt little nod. “I know. That’s why we should not talk.”

  He was gone before she could think better of what she had said. Then she was alone in the grand hall. Her throat pained her, but not as much as her heart. Her heart was a field of anguish. She held her belly, wishing she could tear all her frippery off her body.

  Twenty-Eight

  “Oh, Vida darling, listen to what Dame Edna has written about you now,” said Mother from her side of the breakfast table, which was topped with marble, and then with every imaginable pastry.

  This mention of her name in the press did arouse a curiosity in Vida, but perhaps not with the naughty pride it might have before—a fact which she tried to tell herself was on account of the excess of champagne she’d imbibed last night. At the current moment Vida was spread across the chaise of the salon in their hotel suite, a cool compress on her forehead, trying her best not to think too much. The region behind her eyes was not at all right.

  “Again?” said Father. “You’d think there were no other young women in New York.”

  “None who have survived a shipwreck and are about to be married!” Mother replied with probably more volume than the situation warranted (though it was entirely possible that was just Vida’s impression, on account of the dull ache behind her eyes). “Anyway, she’s our Vida—doesn’t it please you to see her every utterance lauded in print?”

  “Of course it does, dear,” Father said, lifting his own paper as though to shield himself from his wife’s vociferous defense. He used the opportunity to wink theatrically at his daughter, and add: “But I reserve the right to tease her about it.”

  “Oh Daddy, stop,” Vida replied, and pressed the heels of her palms into her eye sockets.

  “Anyway, she writes that you quite impressed that grand Mrs. Vanderbilt with your stories of building thatched roofs on the desert island.”

  “But not the story of how I hunted wild boar,” Vida muttered, rolling onto her side and becoming quite intent upon the raised arabesque pattern of the yellow silk chaise.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Mother drolly sipped her tea.

  And Father—Vida supposed—made a gesture that implied she’d been too free with the passing trays of champagne last night.

  “Didn’t you have fun?” Mother persisted.

  It was getting a little silly, she knew—a little unbecoming of a girl who would be a wife by New Year—to be lying on a couch with her back to her parents, pouting over nothing. She mulled her mother’s question seriously and said after a few silent moments: “I did . . . just not as much as I thought I’d have.”

  Her father, bless him, didn’t laugh, but there was mockery in his voice when he replied, “The horror. Whatever shall we do?”

  “Go shopping, probably.”

  “Yes, good idea, and put it on the Farrar account.”

  “You’re terrible,” said Mother, but in an adoring way, so that Vida knew she rather liked the idea.

  Vida swung her legs to the floor and gave her silly parents as earnest a face as she could manage and clasped her hands together like she did when she was a little girl. “I always thought I was too big for our little world. That I belonged in ballrooms like last night. You know, the most storied ones. Do you think it’s strange that I felt disappointed by that? That I feel disappointed by the whole thing?”

  Before, her father had been directing his private asides her way, but now they were addressed to his wife. “What does she mean by ‘the whole thing’?”

  “Do you think she means what I think she means?”

  “Yes—yes, I think she does.”

  “Vida, darling, Fitzhugh is the perfect match. If you’re disappointed by him, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong way of life.”

  Vida had not seen her parents’ faces so alarmed since they’d been on board the Vida, in those surreal hours where she remembered what a hot bath and an iced drink were like. They hadn’t yet trusted their own eyes about their daughter’s survival, and she had had to persuade them to let her go off on her own for even a quarter hour at a time. She had hoped in that quarter hour to somehow run into Sal, to see if he was feeling what she was feeling. But that had proved impossible, and meanwhile the machinery of engagement had moved on—it seemed a wedding planner had been hired by wireless, and she couldn’t even remember saying yes. “But what if he’s not?”

  “Oh Vida, you were always like this, even when you were a little girl.” Mother sighed from the depths of her being and took the grave step of folding and setting aside The Daily Chimera. “You always wanted so much. Too much. You will have to learn to be satisfied by someone, or something, and soon, or your life will be aimless, and you won’t be anybody at all.”

  Well. That did sound bad. Vida, chastened, averted her gaze.

  She might have taken this very sage-sounding advice as the gospel truth had the genteel little bell not dinged just then, and one of the head concierge’s liveried minions appeared. “Pardon me,” he said, tilting himself into the room.

  “That’s quite all right,” Vida said, waving away his apologetic tone. “We are a small family of three—we welcome any distractions.”

  “Very good, mademoiselle. This came for you.”

  Vida glanced at the small box in the servant’s hands, and experienced a strange twisting fear in her gut—what if it was from Fitzhugh, what if it was a beautiful piece of jewelry, and she didn’t want to have to send it back, and then she would have to marry him? She wasn’t even sure why this prospect should frighten her, but it held her oddly frozen between the doorway and the table where her parents watched her.

  “Go on, Vida,” her mot
her said, in the tone she had used to tell Vida to eat vegetables as a child. “Take it.”

  Vida reluctantly accepted the box into her hands. “Thank you,” she said.

  He dipped his head and retreated through the door.

  It was then that she noticed that the box was plain brown—it was not from a fancy jeweler or one of the department stores on Ladies’ Mile. She lifted the lid and saw the folded pocketknife, which once upon a time she had used to cut her hair.

  “What is it?” Mother asked.

  Vida couldn’t explain everything it signified. “A blade,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” said her mother. “Oh no, oh no. If you accept a blade as a wedding gift, it means the marriage will fail. Don’t you know that?”

  Vida was about to find her father’s eyes, to share this disbelief in her mother’s silly superstitions—that the gift of a knife could sever a relationship for real.

  “Well,” her father said amiably. “Is it a nice one?”

  “Yes,” Vida said. Her heart had begun to kick.

  “What are you saying?” Her mother had gone pale. “You have to go, give it back immediately!”

  “Yes,” Vida whispered. The knife had reminded her of something, some true part of herself. She wanted to hold it, but she couldn’t stand the idea of accepting it as a parting gift. “You’re right.”