Bright Young Things

by Anna Godbersen

  “All aboard!” the conductor bellowed, and then turned and took hold of the iron handle to pull himself up.

  The girls were still a good way down the tracks, and in a moment of horror, Letty saw that they were going to miss the train. Then she would have no place to go home to. For once Father realized she was gone, he would never permit her to return. Father did not tolerate disloyalty or what he would deem frivolous daydreams. Summoning all the power her voice was capable of, Letty lifted her free arm and sang out, “Wait! Wait for us!”

  The conductor paused, holding on to the side of the train, and squinted in their direction.

  “Please, wait!” Letty‧s voice rang out.

  “All aboard!” the conductor yelled.

  They kept up their pace as they climbed the steps at the edge of the platform, and by the time they reached the conductor, their cheeks were rosy with exertion.

  “Two more,” Cordelia managed once they were just in front of him.

  “I can see that.” The conductor jumped down so the girls could go ahead of him into the car. Cordelia reached back for Letty‧s hand, and they ascended the ladder together. Letty barely noticed the rungs—they were only moving up into the train, and then down the car, along the aisle between green felt-covered seats. The bells began to clang, and the doors slammed shut, sealing the passengers in.

  “I can‧t believe it.” Letty‧s voice was musical with wonder. “I can‧t believe we‧re really leaving!”

  “I thought we wouldn‧t make it,” Cordelia returned in the same awestruck tone, as her breath slowed to normal.

  Letty nodded in agreement. The terror of having to go back to the Haubstadt home ebbed, and in her relief she began to laugh. The laughter became contagious as they located their seats and fell into them. Cordelia went first, sitting close to the window, and Letty followed, slumping against her shoulder in giggles.

  “Tickets?”

  It had not occurred to Letty, in all the furious excitement of leaving, that it would cost anything to ride a train. But before she could reply, Cordelia had taken a worn notebook from the inside pocket of the old trench she wore, and from the middle pages she removed an envelope stuffed with bills.

  “Names?” the conductor demanded, as he positioned his pencil over two soft red booklets.

  “Cordelia Grey and Letitia Haubstadt,” Cordelia announced, handing over the fare.

  “Actually, it‧s just Letty now,” she corrected brightly, twisting to face the conductor. She plucked the ticket back from his hand, and then taking his pencil, carefully began to rewrite the name he‧d entered for her. “Letty Larkspur.”

  There was a touch of knowing disdain in the way he punched their tickets, but Letty decided to ignore the contortion at the corner of his mouth. “To the end of the line?” he concluded.

  “Yes,” said Cordelia. “To New York City.”

  “We‧ll get there sometime tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Yes, I know,” she replied, in that crisp voice that brushed aside any criticism or doubt. That voice had been used over the years to protect herself and Letty both—from cruel classmates and bullying siblings and Letty‧s own doubts. Even now, Letty shuddered at the idea of bearing Union alone, without her friend‧s protection.

  As the conductor moved down the aisle, greeting the other passengers, Cordelia put her feet up against the back of the next row of seats, stretching her long legs, turning the scuffed, narrow toes of her boots in toward each other. She slouched into her seat, sinking until they were the same height; when she turned her face to her left, her eyes just met Letty‧s.

  “So what do you think?” Letty whispered, almost afraid to hear the opinion she nonetheless badly wanted.

  “What do I think of what?”

  “My new name.” She paused and widened her eyes. “Letty Larkspur!”

  “I like it.”

  “You do?” Letty whispered, relieved, even though she‧d known in her heart that the name she had chosen was incomparably pretty. She‧d been turning over those four syllables in her mind for a long time now, to make herself feel better during a long workday, or almost humming them just before she went to sleep, telling herself that everything would be different once she was known by them. That then, finally, her life would be buoyant and shiny and worthy of notice.

  Cordelia pressed the back of her head into the seat and smiled wide. “I think it‧s perfect for you.”

  “Isn‧t it?” Letty squeezed her eyes closed. “Doesn‧t it sound like the kind of girl who steps off the train into a big city and stumbles into a series of lucky breaks, each new one more glorious than the last, until she is known all around town and her name is up in lights?” The sun outside was fading, but what was left of it was playing in Letty‧s blue eyes. Cordelia reached over and drew the pins from Letty‧s hair so that it fell in straight, dark strands around her shoulders. “Doesn‧t it sound like the kind of name that almost guarantees I‧ll be a famous singer? Doesn‧t it sound like me?”

  “Yes, it sounds just like you. Except—you in the big city, far away from drab parlors and the small-minded people who occupy them, and their itsy-bitsy idea of the world.”

  “The version of me wearing fur coats, with a puppy under my arm, and a retinue.”

  “A retinue?”

  “Yes, a retinue. A chauffeur and a maid and a cook—”

  “—a chef.”

  “Yes!” Letty sighed and shook her hair loose around the prim collar of her black dress.

  Besides the three Haubstadt girls, there were two boys who wore their hair with military brevity and the same black trousers and shirts every day, even in the late-summer heat, even when they worked twelve-hour days on the family dairy farm. It hadn‧t always been like that—her father had been a joyful person once, but that was a long time ago, when Mother was still there to show him how. He must have been happy when they were married, because people were always happy when they got married.

  But then Letty remembered the events of the day, and realized that was perhaps not always true. “How John must be crying,” she said softly, thinking what a tender person was at the core of that tall, strong boy and how sincere he had sounded when he‧d said, I do. There was to have been a celebration at the Fields’ that evening, and Letty thought of all those uneaten pies with pity, for surely no one in their house was in a festive mood now. John had been a worse one than Letty for following Cordelia around, hanging on her words, trusting in whatever she thought was interesting or correct, and it pained her to imagine him alone back in Union and yearning terribly. But that pain gave way to another melancholy realization: Letty‧s own flesh and blood probably had not heeded her absence with even half so much woe.

  “John isn‧t the kind to cry.” Cordelia spoke with a sad certainty as she pulled the skirt of her dress down over her knees.

  “I can‧t believe we made it,” Letty marveled again, because she could see her friend didn‧t want to pursue the topic. But some of the glitter had gone out of her voice now, and there was a tightness in her throat.

  “Well, we haven‧t made it yet,” Cordelia corrected.

  But as if in response, the train lurched into motion. And though Letty was afraid of what she had done, she was relieved, too, that she wouldn‧t have to sit around that sad, silent dinner table anymore, always doing as her father told her, and her tender ears would no longer be exposed to his shouting when he was in one of his foul moods. She leaned forward and began to undo the tight lacing of her boots. Once she had shucked them, she folded her black stockinged feet under her thighs and put her head against her friend‧s shoulder.

  “We haven‧t made it yet, but we did make it out of Union.” Letty closed her eyes and tried to dwell only on the audaciousness, and not the sadness, of their feat.

  “Yes!” Cordelia replied, and then she turned to gaze a final time at the only world she‧d ever known. It was a landscape Cordelia felt no love for: Dull and repetitive, any beauty in the greenery onl
y reminding her how bare and brown everything would soon enough become, before the harsh winter. That monotonous and familiar brown that infused everything as seasons stacked up into years. And yet as Cordelia placed a palm against the window, what she saw outside did cause her to feel something like surprise.

  The tallest boy in Union High School‧s class of ‘29 sat on a pile of railroad ties east of the station, watching her. His legs too long, bent upwards, elbows rested on knees, the boyishness of his features suddenly effaced by sorrow. The cuffs of the white dress shirt he had worn to the ceremony were rolled up, and his tie had been removed, so that his Adam‧s apple created a poignant shadow in the dying light. His feet were too large for his lean limbs, and they looked especially ridiculous in the fancy borrowed shoes he wore. As the train went past, Cordelia‧s eyes met his, but he didn‧t raise a hand to make even the slightest wave. It was as though he had been sitting there a while, waiting to see her pass. He must have realized she had left some time before, and then guessed where she‧d be going.

  But a train travels faster than she could ever have imagined, and with cruel concision, he was gone.

  Cordelia gazed out at the cabins on the horizon line, with their kerosene lanterns in the windows. The sky was heavily curtained with purple now, and the small towns and the great spaces in between passed by at a speed that she had known was possible but had never experienced. It was all receding into their past just as quickly as they could have hoped, framed neatly by the train‧s rectangular, black-rimmed windows.

  “I walked right out the front door,” Letty murmured. The lids of her eyes were falling shut, each word following the last more slowly now as the haziness of sleep settled around her. No doubt her day had been long already—she must have been up with the dawn, milking cows, finishing her chores so as to be on time for the wedding—and when she started talking of sad things, she often became tired and withdrawn. “None of them even noticed.”

  Cordelia watched her friend‧s face, which was as quiet and white as the moon, though it glowed with the full vibrancy of the life beneath the skin.

  “Louisa was making dinner, I guess, and the boys must‧ve still been on the farm …”

  Despite her family‧s long history of insensibility, Cordelia knew her friend was wounded by their final indifference, by their failure to recognize that she was leaving forever. It was obvious in the way Letty had gone limp against her shoulder.

  “They probably won‧t even realize until, one day, they open the newspaper and find the name Letty Larkspur … which I suppose won‧t mean anything to them. But they will recognize the picture next to it … maybe a picture of me onstage, during a standing ovation, heaps of roses at my feet …”

  By the time Letty trailed off, her eyes were sealed shut and her lips had parted just slightly so she could exhale the soft, warm breaths of the unconscious.

  Cordelia was relieved she didn‧t have to respond. Escaping Union for the big city was the idea that had bonded Letty and Cordelia to one another, but Cordelia was an altogether more durable creature than her friend, and she knew nothing came so easily as all that—especially fame and fortune and all those treasures that everyone desires.

  Perhaps it was this sharper sense of the realities of life that made Cordelia tight-lipped about her own dream. She had allowed her best friend—her only friend, really—to believe she was simply running for the fun of it. But the real reason was the kind of story an orphan girl can feed on for years, and she knew in some buried way that if anyone had questioned or doubted it, she might have had to curl up and die.

  Outside, Ohio fell away in the night; she was traveling at unprecedented speed toward the place she had always dreamed of going back to. The other passengers in the car had stopped talking. It was quiet, and the lights above had dimmed. If she could have foreseen everything that was to happen in the next couple of weeks, how sleepless and manic and full they would be, she might have tried to get some rest, too. But her eyes were wild, and there was so much electricity in every corner of her head and heart—she was too alive with awake dreams to try to have any of the other variety. She wanted to see the sun coming up in another state, and everything else the world had been holding just out of her reach.

  3

  THE MARSH ESTATE WAS DECEPTIVELY NAMED, FOR THE grounds were expertly manicured by a team of ten gardeners so that its appearance would have none of the wildness that name might otherwise conjure. The place was called Marsh only because the man who had built it had been called Marsh. It sat on the lovely finger of land that marked the eastern border of White Cove, on the north shore of Long Island—a short drive to Wall Street and all the money that was made there, but a long way from the city‧s more sordid quarters.

  The impossibly green lawns were populated as far as the eye could see by a hundred varieties of tree, many imported from the English countryside. Beneath the arbor of their branches walked a girl wearing loose-fitting, pale peach silk pajamas, an old tennis visor, and a mink jacket that was short enough to reveal the fast cadence of her slim hips, even though it was late enough in the day that somewhere, people were already dressing for dinner, and a season when fur is hardly necessary.

  Her name was Astrid Donal. She had a full head of egg yolk yellow hair, cut so that its tips curled against her jaw, and the soft, heart-shaped face of a girl young enough to still have a taste for sweets but old enough to have been quite frequently kissed. If she had been asked the time, she might have guessed from recent experience that it was no longer morning, but it would have been impossible for her to name the exact hour. As for the coat, it was merely an aberration of Astrid‧s temperament that she often felt cold when no one else did. But now, as she wandered across the lawns, she began to feel truly warm, and let the mink slip from her shoulders and fall onto the ground.

  “Miss Donal!”

  Astrid squinted in the bright sunlight to make out her maid on the stone verandah of the home that belonged to her mother‧s third husband, Harrison Marsh II.

  “Telephone for you!”

  Astrid‧s feet carried her up a gentle slope, ending her meander sooner than she‧d really intended. “I lost my jacket somewhere, somehow,” she announced a little breathlessly when she reached the maid‧s side. “Do send someone out to find it, dear?”

  “Yes, miss. Telephone for you.”

  “I heard you,” Astrid replied, hurriedly but not unkindly, as she went into the dimly lit first floor and tried to make her eyes adjust. Her bones had that delightful weightless quality of having not been awake very long, and she smiled a little to think that she could simply skip over the hours when one wore daytime clothes. Was it only one week ago she had returned from her all-girls boarding school in Connecticut, arriving by a private ferry that carried her and her fourteen pieces of luggage across the sound? She had another year at Miss Porter‧s, but somewhere over the course of the last seven days she had acquired the fatalistic notion that she would not be returning there. She wasn‧t exactly sure why, for she could be a very good student when she bothered to concentrate. Perhaps it was that her life here seemed to swallow her so completely, and then everything outside it began to seem vague and unimportant.

  Crossing through the library with its leaded glass windows on either side, she arrived in the main hall at the front of the house. No lamps had been turned on yet, and there was only the bluish natural light coming in from the great windows that flanked the door. The receiver of the telephone lay on its side atop a little polished rosewood table. She paused a moment before picking it up, noticing that her pajama pants had become slightly muddied at the hems.

  “Hello?” she finally said, resting the receiver next to her face.

  “Hello, baby.”

  Astrid‧s eyelids sank closed, and a small crescent emerged at the left corner of her lips. The sound of his voice always made her feel like a precious doll. His voice was like him, big and impressive, and it immediately brought to mind the various places they had
been last night and the many things they had done. “Morning, Charlie. Are you just waking up?”

  “No, baby, I can‧t lounge around like you all day.” In the background, she could hear the voices of men speaking in three-word sentences.

  “No … you‧ve been up for hours, I suppose, seeing to very important things,” she teased. Her eyes were still closed, and she swayed in the cool quiet of Marsh Hall‧s foyer. It had been more than a year now that she‧d been calling Charlie her boyfriend, since the beginning of the previous summer. “Not me. Me, I have been exquisitely lazy, until I got very ambitious and went to see what the grass felt like between my toes.”

  “Good. You‧re getting some beauty sleep. I want my girl to be the best-looking girlie at the party tomorrow.”

  “What party?”

  “The party my father is throwing. It‧s his birthday.” Everyone in White Cove knew that Charlie‧s father was one of the biggest dealers of illegal liquor in New York, and he used his nearby estate as a kind of advertisement for the lifestyle his wares made possible. “I told you last night. Don‧t you remember?”

  “Did you? I guess I forgot,” she replied, not because she truly had no recollection but because she hated ever doing anything according to a plan.

  “Wear the silver I sent you when you were at school. I‧ll have a car come round to pick you up.”

  Astrid tilted her head dreamily to the side. The silver dress he was referring to didn‧t fit her, of course. Charlie always bought things two sizes too large, as though he couldn‧t quite comprehend how much smaller than him she was. But she could have it taken in by tomorrow, she supposed—one of the maids would do the work that night.

  Astrid opened her eyes then and realized that she was not alone in the room. “Are you lost?” she said to a young man wearing a denim shirt tucked into worker‧s pants. He was long and ropey, and his skin was brown from the sun. He had pretty, sad eyes.