Besides, the conversation quickly moved on to nail colors and matching them to your lips. Mary Van de Coop held up her perfectly manicured fingernails to her lips to show a match. “It’s tea rose,” she said.
“Divine,” Jeanie said.
“Thank God for Cutex!” the blonde, Kathleen, called out from her seat next to Clarissa. She didn’t impress me much, this Kathleen woman; she seemed prepped and primed as Jeanie’s first lady, agreeing with and echoing anything that she said.
“I don’t care for the matching look,” Clarissa said. “I think it’s garish.” Then she looked across the table to me. “What do you think, Beatrice?”
I looked from Mary Van de Coop’s nails to her matching lips and didn’t want to say the wrong thing.
“I don’t wear nail polish very often; I’m terrible at doing it myself—”
“Darling, you must go to the salon; they’ll do it for you!” Mary cried out.
“But I do like the tea rose color,” I said.
I couldn’t help it; I was judging these women for their lightweight conversations and their material obsessions, just as I had judged everyone after the accident, everyone from my dearest friends from high school to my newfound friends in the dormitories. Looking back, I could see they were doing the best they could, trying to entertain me, to talk about anything that would take my mind off Charlie, but I resented them for it. Anything they spoke of seemed childish and petty. I seemed to have been thrust into the world of adulthood overnight. How could I relate to these people anymore? I’d thought back then. How would they ever know how it felt? We’d never be able to go back to our gushy conversations about boys and first kisses and possibilities. My mind was already drifting just like it had all those years ago, and to a painful place.
* * *
Officer Johnston had shown up at my parents’ door in Pennsylvania with his hat under his arm. It was an accident. Charlie and the other apprentice at the mechanic’s shop had been fixing the starter crank of Mr. Holden’s car, the dairy farmer from the other side of town. When they were done it had been my brother Charlie’s job to squeeze his bicycle in the back seat, drop off the car with Mr. Holden, then ride his bike back to the repair shop to finish up the afternoon. It was one of Mr. Holden’s farmhands who saw the black smoke erupt from the winding road behind the haystacks. The police said they thought Charlie had taken the turns too fast and that one of the wooden wheels had become loose, causing the car to flip over. He was unconscious when they found him trapped inside the overturned car, and by the time he got to the hospital he’d stopped breathing altogether.
5
I’d only been away at college a few months when Charlie died. The Dean was sympathetic and allowed me a three-month leave. When I returned to school it was for a few days at a time; I’d go to my classes, then take the train back home to take care of my parents. I was terrified of leaving them alone. My father threw himself into his work. He owned a chain of warehouse-style grocery stores in Pennsylvania. They weren’t anything glamorous; there was very little shelving and structure, mostly boxes piled on top of boxes, which required less stocking shelves, and less space, but because of that he’d been able to keep the prices down and he’d continued to be very successful even after the economic crash because so many people shopped at his stores instead of the fancy ones to save money.
Being home without my brother walking through the door at the end of the day was too painful, so my father started spending all hours at the stores, negotiating deals with vendors, keeping items affordable, working among it all in the warehouse. People loved him for that and remained loyal. Those stores gave him something to do, a purpose, and he knew he was making a difference in people’s lives when the loss of jobs and industry was crippling to so many families. But my mother was a different story. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t eat and couldn’t sleep. Within two weeks she had withered to skin and bone and I was scared that if I wasn’t around to keep an eye on her and distract her from her thoughts, then she might simply give up on living.
When Charlie and I started school my mother volunteered in the school nurse’s office, so all the kids at school knew and liked her. As we got older she volunteered at the elderly persons’ home, too. One day she took me with her to visit the old folks. She mostly just rewrapped a bandage or asked the men and women how they were feeling and made sure they were comfortable, but I remember how surprised I was to see her with her patients, how confident and knowledgeable she seemed. I also marveled at how soothing she was to these strange old people and how grateful they were for her help. I desperately wanted to help her, but there was nothing I could do.
When I finally returned to college my classmates didn’t know what to say or how to act. Their sympathetic eyes, their silence when I approached them after class, the extra kind behavior because they were too embarrassed to say anything real—it made me go numb, pretend it wasn’t happening.
They tried to help me. They invited me to parties, they tried to get me to the socials and arrange a date for me for the formal, but I had changed. I wasn’t the person they’d met a few months earlier. I regretted those last few months I’d spent away from my brother with these new friends, and all the time we had wasted talking about the boys at Yale and Harvard. I’d thought I was so accomplished, being one of a handful of girls from back home who went to college. I’d thought I was better than him for going when he chose to stay in our hometown fixing cars, but after the accident I wished I had never left home and part of me blamed those girls for taking up so much of my time. They all wanted me to go back to the way I was when they first met me, but that would have been impossible. Every smile felt forced; every laugh felt like a betrayal. I was mourning for my brother but also for my parents.
I tried to bury myself in Shakespeare and Dickens, Melville and Poe, as a distraction. I rushed into secretarial classes at the last minute and was the first to leave when the bell rang. I learned to type faster than any of the other girls, but while I stuck it out for another year, I just couldn’t stay.
I tried to go home, but my father insisted that I not move back to Pennsylvania. He made excuses—they were preparing to sell the house, to move to a smaller, more manageable home; there would be no room; I’d be in the way but I knew what he was really doing. He didn’t want me dragged into their continuous cloak of grief.
So I took the Greyhound to New York City. I was determined to start fresh, meet new people who would only know the new me, the way I was now, people who would not expect glimpses of my former self. My father gave me enough money to rent a small room in a girls boardinghouse in the West Village off Fifth Avenue. The room was barely big enough for a bed, a dressing table and a small armoire. From a tiny window in the living room I could just see a corner of the arch in Washington Square Park.
* * *
I took a job as a secretary at Forbes magazine answering the phone and typing memos for a grumpy old editor called Mr. Savage. When he conducted interviews in his office I brought coffee for him and his guest. One spring morning I delivered coffee on the silver tray and set it down on the desk.
“You must be the lovely secretary I’ve been hearing so much about,” the guest said.
Mr. Savage grunted and shuffled his papers, a sign that he was eager to get started.
I asked if there was anything else I could get for them and after I glanced at the guest I had to force myself to look away. He was devastatingly handsome, a little older than me but not too much, tanned, smiling and dashing, with perfect white teeth. His face looked chiseled, and the chalk stripes on his suit gave him a long, lean look.
I had also felt quite fresh that day. Daddy had sent me a card with a little money and I’d spent the weekend shopping at Macy’s. That morning I was wearing, for the first time, my brand-new red suit and my mother’s fur stole.
I busied myself at my desk straining to hear the interview. It was about the economy, again, and what was being done to help the banks get b
ack on their feet. The handsome man was a banker, it seemed, and his responses were optimistic and cheerful. From what I could hear I believed every word.
On his way out he stopped by my desk and thanked me for the coffee—saying it was some of the best coffee he had ever tasted in his entire life. I told him I didn’t believe him, that it was regular old office coffee. He smiled an enormous smile and placed his card on my desk. Harry J. Bordeaux. “May I call on you,” he asked as if it wasn’t even a question.
“Oh, I don’t know; I’m still quite new to the city and getting acquainted,” I said. It had been almost a year.
“How about this,” he said. “I’ll call on you and you can decide then whether you’ll turn me down.” He tapped my desk twice, turned and walked out through the big glass doors.
Three days later he took me to dinner at the 21 Club. We sat in a private dining room in the wine cellar with a group of fifteen of his work friends and their wives. I had been adamant when I left Vassar that anyone who knew me now would only know the new me, the hardened, reserved, cynical me. But that night among strangers, I had such a wonderful time I must have smiled the whole time. I smiled so hard that my cheeks hurt when I got home. I felt like a grown-up, not the child I’d been the two years prior, the child who’d been hiding and scared of everything. Harry introduced me to his friends proudly and awakened something in me that I thought had died along with Charlie. My New York life suddenly felt alive and full of promise. As the weeks went by I found myself falling in love with this astonishingly seductive man, his world, his friends, his life, and soon I began to envision this as my life, too.
Everything happened so fast. Harry took me out on a date every Wednesday and every Saturday for three months and then he proposed.
“Darling Beatrice,” he’d said one night when he was walking me home after a few too many gin martinis, “we have a good time together, right?”
“Of course we do.” I kissed him.
“And I think I make you happy,” he went on.
“You do.”
“Well, good, because you make me happy, too. And I’m not getting any younger; there should be a Harry Junior running around and we’d make fine-looking children.”
“Oh, Harry,” I said, steering him along the sidewalk, thinking he was drunk. “You’d better get me home before you get yourself arrested.”
He stopped in his tracks and after walking a few more steps I turned to check on him. He was down on one knee.
“Harry!” I said.
“Marry me.”
“What? Are you joking? You can’t ask me like this, here! It’s almost one o’clock in the morning!”
“Well, I’m an unconventional kinda guy, and I’m asking. So is it a yes or a no? Please say it’s a yes. Oh…” He felt around in his inside pocket and pulled out a ring, holding it up to me. “I almost forgot. I’ve been carrying this around with me for the past few days and if I don’t give it to you now I’m going to lose it, and I can’t do that because it was my grandmother’s, one of a kind, an antique.”
I stood there stunned, looking from the beautiful ring to his grinning, shinning face.
“Oui or non? Oui or non.”
“Oui, of course, oui!” I said. “Oui, oui, oui! Now get up, you great fool.” I pulled him up to standing and we kissed right there on the sidewalk.
* * *
There were times during our engagement that I questioned why Harry had picked me, out of all the girls in New York City. He could have had anyone and they would have been far better suited to the Bordeaux family than me. Harry was raised in a town house off Park Avenue and summered in Providence. I was a country girl, he knew that, but I sensed he wanted something different from what he knew. He seemed to enjoy taking me to dine in expensive restaurants, introducing me to powerful businessmen and educating me on this brand-new world. I think he enjoyed making me happy, where perhaps another woman with his social standing may have been less impressed, less enthused, because she’d seen it all before. I can’t honestly say I loved all the extravagance all the time, but I always let him think I did because I was sure it made him feel proud to offer me that life.
* * *
Harry’s mother insisted on taking me to the bridal salon at Bergdorf Goodman to select a wedding dress.
“Now Beatrice,” Harry’s mother said, shaking her head when I got excited about a simple but elegant white column-style dress. “This is going to be a spectacular day and we’ll have hundreds of guests who want to see who our dear boy is choosing to marry, and to see you in all your splendor. You have a duty to look the part.” She let her eyes drop and linger on my pale pink day dress; then she abruptly signaled for us to regard more designs. A beautiful older woman directed a younger woman to try on the dresses for us while we sipped tea and Harry’s mother shook her head at each one, brushing some away as if the mere sight of them offended her. I loved all of them and was more excited and surprised at the idea of our own private showing.
“Yes.” She finally clasped her hands as the bridal associate and the younger model carried out and struggled to hold up a huge, showy gown with a tight-fitting bodice and a full, wide skirt that could have swallowed ten of me whole. “Would you like to see the model in this gown, Mrs. Bordeaux?”
“This one is far more suited to the occasion,” his mother said.
“It looks very heavy,” I said. “Can I help you?” I began to stand to assist the two women, but his mother wrapped her hand around my wrist and eased me back to my seat. “I’m not very tall; isn’t this style too much for me?” I said. “I thought perhaps the more simple dress would be a good choice because I could wear it again.”
His mother closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. I knew I’d disappointed her. Or maybe her son had disappointed her by choosing to bring me into his family. But when my mother married my father she wore a dress she already owned, and she wore it many times after, too. I’d dressed up in it for years as a child, until it was filthy on the bottom, and I had envisioned my own daughter doing the same with mine, but I couldn’t picture that happening with this piece of art that Harry’s mother had her eye on.
“We’ll see the dress,” his mother said.
“Of c-c-course,” I stammered. “You have far more experience in this sort of thing than I do.” This seemed to please her.
I ended up with the gown she selected. It took four months and eight fittings for it to be ready and it used thirty-eight yards of satin and twelve yards of tulle.
I was so excited for the day to finally arrive and the morning of the wedding flew by so fast, various people dressing me, fussing with my hair, my face, while others scurried around setting up the grounds for the reception.
We married at Harry’s family home in Providence. A white tent was erected in the garden and over 250 guests were in attendance. I knew it was an honor to have such a wonderful celebration for our wedding day, but I couldn’t help but feel terribly nervous in front of all those strangers, all eyes on me as I walked down the aisle and danced at the reception.
Every table was dressed with white linens and white roses and then there was my enormous white gown. When I tried to sit at the wedding table to eat a few bites of food I was so nervous that I’d spill on myself and embarrass the family that I didn’t eat a thing and sipped champagne instead to calm my nerves.
My parents had never been to anything so extravagant in their whole life, and I couldn’t help but notice how my small family seemed out of place among all of Harry’s family and friends. I caught a glimpse of my mother as I walked down the aisle toward Harry, who was standing under an archway of roses. My mother looked so petite and frail, and the pale yellow color of her dress made her look a little unwell. I felt a pang of regret as I continued down the aisle, wishing I’d spent more time with her prior to the wedding and helped her find a brighter, more lively dress for the occasion.
It may have all been for show, but part of me hoped the excitement of the weddin
g day would bring my mother back to life, even if just a little. For years she’d struggled to get out of bed and face each day, but now we had Harry. Having him as part of our fragile family, I hoped, would somehow help in filling a void. And I was sure that when we had a baby it would help matters even more, bringing new life into my family’s home again.
6
We were only a week into summer, but it was already the day of the Golden Cup Regatta.
Harry and I were invited to Winthrop Aldrick’s yacht, an enormous vessel that fit at least fifty partygoers, and with more luxurious amenities than most would have in their home. Dolly and Clark were also guests aboard the boat, as were Clarissa and her husband, Mitchel, and a few other faces I recognized from the Manor.
The town was packed. Montauk Mae, one of the yacht club’s own, had won the previous year’s trophy in Detroit, which meant that Montauk now had the privilege of hosting this year’s races. Hundreds of yachts lined up and anchored down around the perimeter of Lake Montauk, providing party boat after party boat. They had entered through the opening to the Long Island Sound that Carl Fisher had blasted when he first bought the land a decade earlier. He had used dynamite to open up a channel from the freshwater of Lake Montauk to the Atlantic Ocean, giving the town a bay to keep its boats and access to deep-sea fishing, as well as a yacht club for the well-to-do. No one could have imagined then that his foresight could lead to an event as magnificent and popular as this.
Jeanie had been making a big show of telling people all week how she and her husband would be dividing their day between Mayor Fiorello La Guardia’s yacht and that of banker and businessman Harvey Dow Gibson. “Our presence has been requested at both soirées and we simply can’t choose one over the other,” I’d heard her say repeatedly to anyone who would listen over breakfast at the Manor, while practicing her swing on the tennis courts or while lounging at the Beach Club. “It’s really quite a to-do! How could we possibly turn one down? We just don’t want to insult them.”
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