“I’ve got to go along with you on that, Ben,” Donovan chimed in.
Sara spoke quietly, fervently. “Three-quarters of the people in New York live in tenements. The Eleventh Ward has almost a thousand people to every one of its thirty-two acres. The only city that even comes close to that is Bombay. The buildings are fire traps without sanitation or ventilation, the stairs choked with garbage, common privies constantly stopped up—”
“Who’s making them—”
“Hundreds of people crammed inside tiny rooms, poverty-stricken newcomers who have no alternatives, no choices—”
“Then why don’t—”
“—and from a safe distance uptown, the owners count their profits and stuff more people in, more rent-paying tenants—”
“Let ’em leave, then!” Cochrane boomed, finally drowning her out. He laughed falsely to break the tension. “What did they come here for, a handout? How do they expect to live, bunched up down there like ants? It’s a big, wide country,” he said, spreading his arms and smiling with odious magnanimity, “there’s room for everybody. Let ’em move west, or south, wherever they want. It’s the land of opportunity, isn’t it? Everybody starts out the same, am I right?”
Nods and murmurs of agreement. Alex watched Sara turn a teaspoon over and over on the cream lace tablecloth; her face was smooth, but the long fingers pinching the spoon were white from strain. “Of course, that’s a little easier to say if one is sitting in a Louis XVI chair, dining on lobster and tournedos at one’s Venetian Renaissance table.” She softened the words with a smile that made the others titter in self-conscious amusement.
Cochrane didn’t smile. “And that’s easy to say if ‘one’ doesn’t have to lift one of her dainty little fingers to live like a goddamn queen.”
“The lobster is excellent, by the way,” Constance put in diplomatically when the silence went on too long. “Maine, isn’t it?”
Sara sat back in her chair. The tension seemed to drain out of her, replaced by fatigue. The brittle look she sent her husband down the length of the table was a combination of weariness, contempt, and spite. Alex saw it; if anyone else did, they gave no sign. It made him shiver.
A little later, a maid came in and spoke quietly in her ear. She put down her fork, smiling in apology. “Would you excuse me for just a few minutes? It’s Michael.”
“Is he ill?” worried Mrs. Donovan.
“No, it’s only a nightmare. He’s been having them rather frequently. I’ll just run up—”
“Leave him be,” Cochrane commanded. “The only problem Michael’s got is that he’s spoiled. As long as he knows you’ll come running, he’ll keep on having his dreams.”
“Carla says he’s been crying for twenty minutes, Ben. I really think I should—”
“Leave him.”
A pause. Sara folded her napkin with great care and laid it beside her plate. “Do you know,” she said slowly, looking at no one, “I think I’d better look in on him just for a moment. Please don’t wait dessert on me.” She rose and went from the room.
Alex spoke up into the new silence, talking on about Newport, hardly aware of what he was saying. Cochrane’s dark eyes narrowed on the wine glass he spun in slow half-circles beside his plate. Alex took unwilling note of his small, fleshy hands and beefy forearms, the round, powerful breadth of his shoulders. A prickling sensation started at the back of his neck and crept up his scalp. He was glad Sara had won that battle of wills—the thought of Michael sobbing alone in childish terror was not to be borne. But he wondered what price she would pay for the victory later.
It was her usual punishment, crude and unimaginative. He hadn’t inflicted it on her in more than a year, but neither of them had forgotten anything. At least it came swiftly—but tonight she had known it would. She preferred it that way. Sometimes he postponed his retribution, and the anxiety she suffered waiting for it added to his satisfaction. She had infuriated him tonight, though, and he didn’t have the patience for delay.
His timing was flawless. He pushed the door open—it was unlocked, of course; the one and only time she had locked it he’d broken it in—at the moment she was extinguishing the lamp beside her bed. In the sudden blackness he was invisible, but she could hear him moving and she knew what he would do. She made a clear target in her white nightgown. His hands clamped on her shoulders. She gave an involuntary cry, a pointless, nearly mute protest, hearing the tearing of cloth and the quick whistle of breath through his nose. Her hands flew up, flailed, pushed.
“You had a lot of opinions tonight,” he panted, backing her into the bed. Why was she fighting him? She couldn’t not fight him. His sweating weight crushed her against the mattress. “You tried to make a fool out of me.” She cut off his string of curses by whispering, “I didn’t have to try, you did it so well yourself!”
His hands slid into her hair. Backing up enough to turn her, he thrust her face-down into the sheets. There was no need to muffle her mouth. He knew she wouldn’t scream—Michael would hear. She only gasped when he shoved himself into her, using his body like a sword. This was the moment when her mind usually shut down. She would fix on an image of anything, past or future, and not let go until it was over. But tonight she couldn’t stop fighting. The pain, the bruises, none of it mattered; she had to throw the vile weight of him off her, she didn’t care if it killed her.
He didn’t hit her—he hadn’t hit her in five years—but he had a better way. He hauled her up, hands mashing her breasts, his hard sex buried deep, and grunted into her hair, “We’re sending Michael away to school.”
“No. No.”
“Do him good. There’s one in Germany I heard about. Military academy.”
“Please!”
He almost climaxed then; she could feel his obscene excitement. “It’s what he needs. They’ll make a man out of him.”
She started to curse him. He pulled her head back by the hair and she gasped again.
“In the fall. He’ll go away in the fall.” When he felt the wetness of her tears on his wrist, he couldn’t hold back. “Sara,” he ground out like an oath. The slap of his thighs against hers was loud and ludicrous, the sound of victory; but she welcomed it, thanked God for it. He shoved her down again and pulsed into her, groaning, teeth grinding.
When it was over, he kept her pinned a little longer, stroking and squeezing her buttocks in a travesty of after-play. “Good night,” he whispered in her ear. As soon as his hands left her, she jerked upright. But her legs gave out; she dropped to her knees beside the bed. She saw his broad backside outlined for a second in the dim hall light when he opened the door. Hot loathing brought bile up into her throat.
She used the sheet to haul herself up and collapsed on the bed. He’s bluffing, she thought, he has to be. If he sent Michael away, he would have nothing left to use against her. It was a trick. When chills racked her, she dragged the covers over her head and tried to stop shaking. A trick, another torture, that’s all it was. Maybe he wanted something from her. What? Something she had, something she could barter for Michael. She turned her head into the pillow to muffle a soft, desolate scream, because there wasn’t anything left.
Eight
ALEX SNATCHED A GLASS of champagne from the silver tray of a passing waiter while Mullaly’s String Orchestra struck up another waltz. The waiter, poor bastard, was rigged out as an English footman, complete with knee breeches and powdered wig. It was that kind of a party. Alex calculated that the cost of the food, spread out under the stars in the Casino’s Horse Shoe Piazza, amounted to about half his yearly salary. And this was only the first supper; at midnight, there was to be a second one, even more elaborate.
If enough people stayed around for it. From the look of things, the Cochranes had been expecting at least two hundred people—“every swell in Newport,” he recalled Ben prophesying—but so far only about forty had shown up. About half that number had bothered to attend the “ground-breaking ceremony” earlier; swells inde
ed, overdressed and uncomfortable, standing around a great sandy ditch in the middle of Cochrane’s lot and listening to him christen his new home “Eden.”
Eden, for God’s sake. Alex thought of how Sara’s careful smile had wavered when she’d heard that; but she’d kept her eyes on the ground, seemingly fascinated by the hole her husband was digging, his patent leather evening shoe looking ridiculous against the shovel’s muddy edge. Alex had willed her to look up so that he could smile at her, send her a message that said, No one who knows you believes you had anything to do with any of this. But she never had. She probably knew it already; she’d probably worked out long ago that if she worried about what people thought of her solely because she was Bennet Cochrane’s wife, she would drive herself crazy.
Still, he wondered how she was taking the spectacular social failure this evening represented. Renting the Casino for the night must have cost Cochrane a small fortune; at eleven, they were to be entertained by a troupe of dancers he’d hired and had sent up en masse from a Broadway revue. Each guest had been given a “favor”—pearl brooches for the ladies, diamond stick pins for the gentlemen. Orchids and camellias and hothouse roses tumbled over everything, banked in masses or twined in the pine-green lattice along the long, curving walkways. Clearly, the evening was intended as the Cochranes’ grand debut into Newport high society. What was equally clear was that Ben couldn’t have chosen a better way to demonstrate the pathetic improbability of being allowed so much as his big toe in the door.
If it weren’t for Sara, Alex might have relished his host’s mortification. But he felt her chagrin as he glanced around at the empty tables and empty chairs, the legion of liveried waiters standing around with no one to wait on. Sara was dancing with Ben now; from this distance, in the romantic glow of candles and rose-colored lantern light, her face looked serene. But he knew by now how eloquent her masks could be. Did she think of this night as a personal humiliation, or had she known in advance what would happen and now only worried about Ben’s reaction? He suspected she had few illusions left. Rising in society was her husband’s goal in life, not hers. Alex thought of her tiny room, with its books and pictures and photographs. She would be happier living a quiet life, he was sure of it. This one didn’t suit her. But then, maybe he was deluding himself; maybe she was past being able to live a “simple” life, because all the luxuries and accouterments that surrounded her were so constant and unremarkable by now that she took them for granted.
He sipped his wine moodily, watching her. Her low-cut evening gown was of rich, imperial purple; she’d caught up the long train in one hand to dance. She wore a diamond stomacher whose price he could only guess at, and around her slim throat blazed a dazzling necklace of sapphires and more diamonds. No doubt she traveled to Paris twice a year, like Constance, to buy a completely new wardrobe. She had on enough jewelry right now to finance a small Baltic country for a couple of years. For the first time he wondered if she did her settlement house work at least partly out of guilt. If so, it was an admirable but misguided motive. It wasn’t her fault her husband was a capitalist millionaire. And somehow he was sure it was Ben, not Sara, who found charm in the idea of weighting her down from head to toe with precious stones.
“Not dancing, Alex? What’s wrong, are you sick?”
He hadn’t noticed John Ogden standing beside him until he’d spoken. “Maybe later.” He smiled, setting his drink down on a convenient break in the lattice grille he was lounging against.
“Never knew you not to take advantage of so much feminine pulchritude, my boy. And think of the daughters’ dowries.”
Alex stroked his mustache and tried to decide if he’d just been insulted. Not that it mattered—he would, of course, return a bland smile in either case—but it was worrisome to think that his mating habits, so to speak, which he thought he handled with admirable discretion, might be so well understood by the man who employed him.
“I wanted to speak to you about this office you’ve set up, Alex,” Ogden said, his tone shifting from jovial to serious.
He’d been half-expecting this. “You surprise me if you don’t approve, John,” he said diplomatically. “It’s not just convenient for me, it’s also efficient.” He’d rented a house on Pebble Drive about a half mile from town, half in the woods and half on the water, and he’d turned part of it into a drafting room. “It’s got a telephone, so I can call New York in minutes if I need—”
“I know all that. And I don’t say I wouldn’t like something like it myself if I had to spend the whole summer up here. But it’s certainly no public endorsement of the firm, is it? You’re invisible out there in the middle of nowhere.”
“Oh, I’d hardly call it—”
“You should’ve taken something on Bellevue, or Narragansett Avenue or Thames Street, something public. We’re building a million-dollar house here; it would’ve been good for us to have our local office in plain sight for the duration.”
“You’re probably right, I didn’t think it through.” This was a lie; he’d thought it through, then chosen a place he could stand to live in for the next three months. “But Newport’s incredibly tight-knit, you know, John, and word of mouth is still our best advertisement. If Cochrane ends up with a good house, I don’t think we need to worry about people not knowing who built it for him.”
Ogden grunted. “Maybe,” he conceded. “I still wish you’d consulted me first. But that reminds me—I already know of someone who’s watching the progress of Cochrane’s house with more than just casual interest.”
“Who?”
“Marshall Farley.”
Alex pursed his lips in a silent whistle. Marshall Farley was the textile king of the East Coast; he was so rich and owned so many mills that there was always some government investigation going on into his business holdings, trying to ferret out monopoly trading.
“He wants a Newport ‘cottage.’ He told me so himself. If he likes what he sees going up on Bellevue Avenue this summer, there’s every likelihood he’ll come to us—to you—to build it for him. And he’s about four times richer than Ben Cochrane.” Ogden paused, watching him. “Well, I see you’re able to contain your enthusiasm pretty well.”
“No, no,” Alex protested, laughing to cover his unease, “it’s wonderful news. I’m very glad to hear it. Very glad. It’ll be good for the firm, and it goes without saying that it’ll be good for me.”
“But?”
“Nothing. Really, I’m delighted to hear this, John.”
Ogden took off his steel pince-nez and began to polish them with his handkerchief. “I’ve been in this business for about thirty-two years, Alex,” he said, squinting up at him. “I can tell the difference between flash and substance, and I can separate competence from genius. As far as I’m concerned, you’re one of the most brilliant natural architects working today. You’re inventive and eclectic, and you’re not so mired in the classical past that you’re afraid to take advantage of technology if you think it’ll get you where you want to go. I’ve never known anyone who’s better at combining practicality with—well, for lack of a better word, with what I’ll call mysticism. You’re unique.”
Alex could feel the heat of emotion rising to his cheeks. He blushed only on rare occasions, and this was one of them. “Thanks, John,” he muttered gruffly. “Means a lot.”
“I haven’t finished.”
That broke the tension, and he laughed. “You mean there’s more?”
“It looks like your reputation is about to take off in a big way, assuming things go well here in Newport. Naturally, I’m delighted for you. What concerns me is that your professional dedication won’t have time to keep up with it.”
He stiffened. “My professional—”
“Poor choice of words, sorry. What I meant was, you haven’t figured out yet what kind of architect you want to be. Because of that, if you don’t mind my saying so, you’ve got a big chip on your shoulder. There’s not a damn thing wrong with the house you�
�re building for the Cochranes—about ninety-nine percent of the people in the world would cut off an arm to live in a place like Eden. But look at you—you can’t help it, you sneer when you even hear the word.”
“I’m sorry, I wasn’t—”
“On the other hand, you’re almost as full of contempt for the new styles, the modern architecture. You’re skeptical about that on aesthetic grounds, but I suspect you ridicule Eden because you’re a snob.”
“I’m a snob—!”
“Yes, in reverse. Listen, Alex, take my advice. You don’t have anything to prove anymore. Your future’s assured, if you want it to be, so what you need to do is forget about your own past. You don’t say much about it, and that’s your prerogative, but I think it’s holding you back. Understand what I’m saying?”
Yes and no. Alex cleared his throat. “It’s good of you to take an interest, John. I appreciate it, and I’ll certainly give a lot of thought to what you’ve said.”
“You do that. Oh, I almost forgot.” He pulled an envelope from his inside coat pocket and handed it over. “The partners decided you deserve a bonus. Maybe this’ll help clear up some of that fuzziness in your thinking, eh?” He gave him a friendly pat on the arm. “Just keep doing what you’ve been doing, and in a year or two I wouldn’t be surprised if you were one of us. Wouldn’t that be something? A partner by the time you’re thirty. Christ, Alex, I envy you. You’ve got the world by the tail.”
“John—I don’t know what to say. I’m very grateful.”
“Then that’s all you have to say. Look, I’m going to try to sneak out of here before the entertainment starts—if I leave now, I can just make the last ferry back to the city. Make sure we hear from you every few days—that’s in addition to mailing in your reports, of course. And I expect you’ll be coming to town once in a while as well, won’t you?”
Another Eden Page 9