“You mustn’t think—” Fitzhugh glanced at her, realizing what an unromantic thing he had said.
“I understand perfectly. Don’t worry, I’m not so delicate as to be offended by the ways of the world.”
“No.” Fitzhugh winked at her, and she winked back, and for a moment she remembered the night they met, how she had watched him playing the game of society as well as she played it. How much she’d wanted to meet this male version of herself.
She remembered it all, as she might remember a story vividly told by someone else. She gazed at Fitzhugh, trying to see him anew. He had inherited his strong jaw and blue eyes from his mother, and it seemed to Vida a sure sign of what he would become. Not daring, but shrewd; a man who could read a room and play it to his advantage. Well, Vida reminded herself, that was who she was, too. Unsentimental, ambitious. Yet she could not escape the sense that she had set her eyes on a great prize, and that it was disappointing that it should be so easily won.
Every inch of the room was encrusted in something gold-colored, or in polished wood, or strung up with velvet, or painted in oils. And yet it felt small to Vida, and very cramped. There were so many people between her and a door, and she had a sudden desperate need for a wide-open space and a view of the world from a solitary height.
Who was she? Sal had seemed to know, but he was nowhere to be seen now, and anyway he had never been inclined to tell her how to act or who she ought to be.
“Where’s Sal?” she asked.
“Sal?”
“He said he was leaving tonight—I wanted to say good-bye.” She wasn’t sure if Fitz’s long expression was because she had reminded him of the loss of his friend, or because he suspected what Sal meant to her. Or because he already knew. “We spent a lot of time on that island,” she said quickly. “We were friends, too.”
“Of course. Well, ask the butler—but he’s probably gone already. That’s Sal’s way. He doesn’t like good-byes. He just likes to be gone.”
“Gone?” Vida wasn’t in control of her face.
She wasn’t sure how she left Fitz.
Crossing that room was like fording a wide river.
There were so many people in the way, and she needed badly to get past them, around them. But everyone wanted to take her hand and whisper a blessing. She was half-mad during the eon it took her to find the butler. Then she wasted yet more precious minutes trying to convince him that she really did want to see Sal—that Sal—and that yes, it must be now.
Now. Her mind was wild; she was so flushed. Time kept ticking away and she wanted to tell everyone now, now—she must see him now. Why, why had she not acted till now?
In the lower levels of the house, in the servants’ quarters, she could hear all the stamping and talking above. After so many days so congested with events, with things, with shopping and learning new names and new streets, she was grateful for the relative quiet. She would have traded the world hammering at the ceiling above to have one more minute in the cab with Sal.
To know what would have happened if they had gone on kissing.
What the next kiss would have been like, and the one after that.
To know what might have been on the island if they had never been rescued.
“What, Sal?” said the housekeeper, emerging from her office and glancing sidelong at Vida’s ornate dress. The butler was with her, and Vida felt sorry for interrupting what might be their one moment of rest all day. “But he left hours ago.”
How could she explain? She couldn’t. She just let her emotions be obvious on her face. “Please,” she said. “Please help me. I have to find him.”
The housekeeper’s eyes rolled to meet the butler’s. They seemed to converse without words. Then he nodded at her, she sighed as though she had seen it all before, and they hustled Vida into a plain cloth coat, and then into one of the cabs waiting at the side door, telling the driver to make haste to the Farrar pier.
Thirty
“Careful, miss!” cried the stevedore as she rushed by him. “The dock is icy.”
“Thank you,” Vida called back. But she was heedless. Her cheeks flared pink in the cold air. The pier was crowded, but the scene looked puny and insignificant under the endless night. The white haze of previous days had cleared. She could see the stars—they were fewer, strewn in a different pattern, than the stars over the island. Yet those pinpricks in the curtain of the sky seemed to whisper of a vast and unknown world. “Wait,” she called back to the stevedore, “where is the Farrar pier?”
“Third from the far end, miss!”
She tried not to run. But she couldn’t help herself. She felt exactly like a romantic heroine in her fine dress and a plain coat, moving as fast as she could through crates and pyramids of trunks to catch the ship before it departed. She could picture herself just how Sal would see her when he spotted her from the top deck.
She would be breathless, and he would have stars in his eyes.
He would be waiting for her to come, and she would appear at just the right moment.
And whether their second kiss would happen as soon as they found each other, or would be weeks in coming, was just another mystery sweetening on her tongue.
This picture was so vivid in her mind that she did not at first believe what she saw beyond the Farrar kiosk.
On the black water of the Hudson with its shimmery ice floes was the transatlantic steamer, trailing its wake of churning white foam, still large but growing smaller by the second. Her heart was pounding crazily. How badly she wanted to be on that ship, and how impossible it was to cross the water and reach it. Vida felt too broken by this impossibility to weep. She wanted to cross that freezing water that now separated her from Sal, but couldn’t. She wanted to drown in it.
She had been lucky in so many ways. Above all, she had been lucky enough to meet her true self. And she had abandoned that person for a world of gowns and parties she did not even like. Vida would have traded any treasure in the world to have Sal’s gaze on her, to feel his fingertips brush over her hair, down her neck. But that was gone—that was all gone now.
As she returned along the pier she saw nothing, heard nothing.
All she felt was her own fury at being unable to go back in time, to make it so that she had arrived earlier. When she arrived on the street she wasn’t sure of her own name or address, she was heedless of who saw her, who witnessed her in this state, who might understand what she was up to and spread stories of her badness. So it took her a long time to realize it was her name that a woman was calling.
“Vida, darling!”
Then her focus became sharp, and she saw Camilla in the open doorframe of a waiting cab. Whereas previously her heart had pounded wildly, now it was quiet as the moon. Vida remembered Camilla watching her on the island. Could Vida still trust her as she had then?
“Don’t worry,” Camilla said as she arrived at Vida’s side. “Nobody knows I came.”
“How did you know where to find me?”
Camilla lowered herself from the carriage, and lifted her skirts up so as to not muddy them in the slush, and came to Vida. “I saw you leaving the ballroom,” she said, and gathered a fistful of Vida’s skirt, and put it in Vida’s hand, so that her hemline would also be protected as they made their way back into the waiting cab. “And I recognized the wildness in your eyes. Mr. Hess, the butler, told me where you were going. He used to protect my secrets, too.”
“Oh.”
“Come on, it’s a big party, no one will have noticed that you were missing.”
“You don’t think so?”
“All women get overwhelmed at parties that are held in their honor. It would be strange if you didn’t go off to be with your maid and have some sherry to fortify you for the rest of the night.”
“Is that how it always is?”
“Of course not. There’s much stronger stuff than sherry.” Camilla smiled wanly. “Once you’re married you’ll find out about that. I’ll help you. Don’t
worry.”
That wasn’t what Vida had meant to ask about, but she felt too blown apart to make any sense. They did not speak again. Camilla took Vida’s hand in hers, and Vida knew from the warmth of her grasp that Camilla wasn’t going to tell the Farrars where Vida had gone. Camilla knew exactly what to do—which side door to tell the driver to stop at, how to navigate the warren of servants’ stairs, so that they arrived back in the great ballroom of the Farrar mansion as if from a little reprieve on the terrace.
Although Vida felt that she had just traveled a vast distance, nothing here had changed.
How long had she been gone? So much had happened. Yet here everything was as it had been. Except maybe there were more people crowding the dance floor, and their talk was louder, and the excitement had reached a manic pitch.
“Give a little wave to Fitz and Mother so they notice you,” Camilla whispered in her ear. “And let’s go to the ladies’ lounge and have some brandy so you can get your wits back.”
Vida lifted her hand in the direction of her fiancé and allowed herself to be led.
The brandy stung her mouth and snapped her back to this place. To the rose-flocked wallpaper, the statuary and lamps, the footstools and cut flowers of the ladies’ lounge.
“What is this all for?” Vida said. It seemed like a dream.
“Don’t ask questions like that, they will drive you mad.”
“You’re right. I know you’re right. The girl I used to be would never ask nonsense questions like that.”
“Good. It’s good you’re talking that way. Here, have some more,” Camilla said, lifting the cut-glass bottle to refill the crystal tumbler in Vida’s hand. “Don’t worry, you’ll forget.”
“So you did know, when you saw us on the island?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
“Please don’t be coy with me.”
Camilla’s beautiful face was blank as a page.
“Please,” Vida repeated pathetically.
Camilla sighed and looked at her hands. “I didn’t know then. It was all so strange there. It was the expression on your face in the ballroom tonight. I knew that face,” Camilla’s eyes found Vida’s, “because I often wore it myself.”
“Because you were torn between two men.”
“Yes.”
“You were in love with one man, and married to another.”
“Yes, something like that.” Camilla removed the tumbler of brandy from Vida’s unsteady hand. “Your heart is frantic now. I can see its flutters through your dress. But these passionate impulses, they go away. Today I would trade anything to have my husband back, though he never thrilled me the way—the way the . . . other did.”
“But what if it doesn’t?” Vida whispered. “What if the happiest I will ever be was on that beach? What if this feeling I have for Sal doesn’t ever really go away—what if it just withers and dies from neglect?”
“Then I suppose you had better go find him. But Vida, I know you. I see who you are, what you want. Isn’t it this—a very grand life, tours of Europe, new clothes every season, belonging to that rarefied company who decides who eats at the best tables, who is invited into the finest rooms, and who isn’t?”
“Well, yes,” Vida sighed. That had been what she wanted. When Camilla put it that way it seemed ridiculous to disavow an old and long-held dream for something that had already sailed so easily into and out of her grasp.
“Good,” said Camilla. “Now drink this up and let’s go down.”
Vida did as she was told. When she stood up she was dizzy and the room dazzled her with the stars that exploded in her field of vision, and she was glad of Camilla’s support as she moved into the hallway. “But Sal. On the island we were . . . we could have . . . I felt that . . . what I mean to say is, what if I love him? What if I love Sal? What if that was real love?”
“Hush,” Camilla said.
There, suddenly, and then passing very close in the other direction, was Dame Edna Sackville. Where did she come from? Vida wondered. Then she felt the keenness of the gossip’s gaze, it was blinding, and saw the emerald of her gown, so reminiscent of another, long-ago party. When Vida saw it she remembered the way Dame Edna had described her in the column—the glamorous Miss Hazzard—and she straightened up and tried to look the part.
But her heart wasn’t in it. She felt hollow inside and couldn’t move her face at all; Camilla had to nudge her back in the direction of her fiancé.
Thirty-One
For the second time that week, Vida woke up shaky all over. There was a piercing, throbbing feeling somewhere in the region behind and just south of her smooth forehead. When she moved too quickly her stomach lurched and she knew she must not do that again. In the not-so-distant past, she had experienced days of dehydration and hunger, sunburn, and the innumerable agonies of living mostly outside without any suitable footwear. The combination of the feeling behind her forehead and the complaints of her stomach was, without qualification, much, much worse.
She had only herself to blame.
After she and Camilla returned to the ballroom, there had been champagne, and after the champagne had come burgundy, and after burgundy there had been champagne again. The waiters had made it easy, but it was undoubtedly she who had accepted. Just as Camilla had promised, no one else noticed her despair. But still, she had wanted to be anywhere else. Champagne had, briefly, taken her somewhere else.
That throb behind her eyeballs blunted her memory—she was sure that there were some things she didn’t remember at all. And yet other scenes rose in her mind, vivid and shaming.
Scenes of her too-loud laughter, her too-exuberant dancing, scenes of her gossiping spitefully with whomever had gossip worth hearing.
Someone had laid out the morning papers beside a carafe of water and a silver urn of strong tea. But why say “someone”? That someone was Nora, of course—Vida just didn’t like thinking of how Nora must have had to help her out of her dress, how Nora must have seen her so pathetic and awful. Vida had been rescued at sea, so she knew what it was to be saved, and yet it was nothing compared to the gratitude she felt regarding Nora’s circumspect kindness this morning.
With a teacup and saucer carefully cradled in one hand, Vida lifted the pile of newspapers and placed them on the coverlet. The front page of the New York Star had run an illustrated picture of her dancing with Fitz, and though she looked a little more gay than she supposed was strictly appropriate, the pen-and-ink version of herself did seem to be having fun, and wasn’t that her job as the newest member of the Farrar empire, to distract from other troubles by seeming fun?
The Daily Chimera was beneath the Star, and Vida’s breath stopped momentarily when she saw the little gold-edged notecard.
For Miss Vida Hazzard
Compliments of Dame Edna Sackville
She didn’t know why it should seem ominous, so she shooed away her foreboding. The picture on this front page was also of her, though it was a portrait that had been done back in San Francisco, and there was something about her likeness that was unmistakably not quite as chic as it would have been if it had been done in New York. She drank more tea, thinking everything would be better again soon, and she opened to the page where her story would be told.
She read that page’s headline with a detached curiosity:
Secret Island Liaison of Farrar Fiancée!
Such was the pitiful malfunctioning of her brain that she had to think another moment before concluding that she was the fiancée in question; that the liaison was a speculative one to do with Sal and not with Fitzhugh; and that Fitzhugh was the one she was engaged to be married to.
She herself was Vida—she didn’t think it could hurt to just remind herself of that point for clarity’s sake, given the fragile state of her poor mind.
Then she reminded herself to breathe. Breathing was awfully important.
Her eyes skimmed the article, which had no details of a liaison, and was
entirely based on a few words overheard in a ladies’ lounge. Words that Vida herself had said, she knew, but which had been twisted around suggestively so that it sounded like much more had happened than actually had. Dame Edna was a genius at suggesting carnality without ever saying anything very straightforward.
When Vida reached the last sentence, she refolded the newspaper and put it aside.
Then she saw that the notecard had a note scribbled on its back side.
Dear Vida,
I’m sorry we won’t be allies. I did have such high hope for your social career. But things being as they are, I can see that you are going to deprive me of my big wedding story, and I had to get ahead of my competitors. You’ll understand.
I wish you luck, whatever you do.
D.E.S.
The cold-bloodedness of it was shocking, but also rather bracing. Vida put aside the papers and the note and the tea. Her hands functioned well; her mind was becoming nimble again. She turned toward the nearest mirror to have a look at herself. Oddly, a smile was spreading across her face.
Vida was led by a waiter through the empty private dining room on the third floor of the Waldorf-Astoria. The walls were lined with portraits of men in double-breasted suits with drooping walrus mustaches and a glint in the eye that signified, to Vida anyway, their ability to win and hoard great wealth. Otherwise everything in this place was the same mahogany color. A beam of sunset came through the far window, and this seemed wrong, somehow. Sun did not belong in this place where men smoked cigars and spoke of industry. She was glad she had worn a new suit in a dark shade of blue—fitted to her small body, but not too showy.
When he heard her approach, Fitz glanced up from the papers spread before him.
His face was drawn and sad. His eyes were tired. She had an instinct to go and comfort him, but sensed she should wait to be asked to sit down.
“You’ve seen the papers.”
Fitzhugh’s fingers drummed the table. He took in her expression, and then he glanced at the window. “In a moment, my family’s public relations man will be joining us, and we will discuss how exactly we’ll go about refuting this false story, and what sort of retribution is suitable for Dame Edna. He’ll want to know if Dame Edna seemed a little daffy on the island? If she drank too much seawater perhaps? But first, I want to know how not true it is.”
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