The Luxe l-1

by Anna Godbersen

  She walked the more than twenty blocks to Grand Central without letting her feet bother her. The delicate Elizabeths of the world would not understand, of course walking like this in the middle of the night would frighten them or tire them out or destroy their reputations. But to Lina, it felt dignified and good. When she saw the great building, with its imposing classical façade, turreted towers, and oval-shaped windows, she broke into a run.

  Inside, the terminal was almost empty. There were a few people, covered in light blankets and napping in the long wooden seats. Lina hadn’t thought to look at a clock in a long time, but it seemed much later here than on the street. She hurried across the waiting area, her low heels clicking lightly against the marble, until she reached the ticket counter. The attendant was asleep, and she had to knock on the glass to wake him. When he finally heard her, he pushed the black cap away from his eyes and leaned forward. Lina gave him her most hopeful face. He was young, probably not much older than she was. He looked like he might sympathize with her mission.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, focusing his sleepy eyes on her.

  “I want to know…” Lina began, and then stopped herself. It occurred to her for the first time that she might look a bit crazed, that she was carrying no luggage and hardly wearing the proper clothes for travel. “Could you tell me,” she began, trying to make her voice sound confident, “was there a young man who came through here tonight? He would have been going west? Maybe to California?”

  “A young man?” The ticket counter attendant repeated slowly, a faint smile spreading across his face. “What kind of a young man?”

  “About your age, I guess.” Lina felt a little breathless and she didn’t know why the attendant seemed so amused by everything. “He would have been traveling alone.”

  “A young man traveling alone? And why would you be trying to find out where he was going so late at night?”

  “That’s none of your business.” Lina pulled the coat around her and tried to look as entitled as possible. She wanted to do what Elizabeth would have done in the same situation, and so she turned her chin upward and to the side. “Well,” she went on, “are you going to help me, or are you just going to stand there?”

  “I would like to help you,” the attendant drawled, his eyes sparkling at Lina. She couldn’t imagine why, but he seemed to be looking her over with a certain interest. “But I work for the New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad. If your fellow was going to California, he would have been taking the New York Central.”

  “Oh,” Lina replied in a smaller voice. She must have looked a little sad and confused, because the attendant pointed across the huge waiting room.

  “Their operation is in the next hall over, right through that doorway there.”

  Lina nodded in thanks, then turned and began to run in the direction he had pointed.

  “If you can’t find him, come back and pay me a visit…” he called after her. Lina paused to have a look back and caught a wink from the attendant. She couldn’t be sure, because she had never been flirted with before, but she thought perhaps the railroad attendant was doing just that. This seemed like a good sign. She managed a smile, and then resumed her hurried pace across the marble floor.

  At the New York Central ticketing booth, she found an older man who was fully awake and completely indifferent to any charms she might possess. He wore muttonchops, which did nothing to disguise a large, shiny face.

  “He was tall, you say?” the New York Central man replied.

  “Yes, tall, with very light blue eyes and a handsome face. He wouldn’t have had much with him, and he would have been traveling alone.”

  “We get plenty who fit that description.” The man paused to rearrange some papers, as Lina looked on urgently.

  “But not so many late of a Friday night. I know who you’re talking about, and he left on the eleven o’clock train to Chicago. If you say he’s heading to California, I’d imagine he’d transfer there for another train, take him all the way to Oakland.”

  “What time is it?” Lina said, her heart sinking. She knew from the way he was speaking that the eleven o’clock was long gone.

  “It’s ten to two.”

  “When is the next train to Chicago?” she asked, pressing her callused fingers against the marble counter.

  “Not until morning, young lady. Seven o’clock is the next Chicago-bound train.”

  Lina thought about going back to the Hollands’ and facing Elizabeth again. “I’d like a one-way ticket to Chicago.”

  The attendant gave her a skeptical look. “All right. How much money do you have?”

  Lina’s eyes fell to the ground. She felt in her pockets maybe Will had left train fare for Elizabeth there? But there was nothing, of course. He would never have left money behind, when Elizabeth had so much. “I don’t have any,” she said pathetically.

  “Well!” the attendant said loudly. “Come back when you do.”

  Lina turned away from his window and walked back between those churchlike rows of seats. They seemed to go on forever, and she considered for a moment settling into one. Perhaps she would be swept up by the social reformers, and sent to a house for loose women. That would be a fittingly awful end to her evening, and anything seemed preferable to facing Elizabeth again.

  All the locomotives were asleep under their glass dome, and beyond them to the east was the shantytown of Dutch Hill, where the new Irish squatted. A girl like her might go in and then never come out again. Will gorgeous, perfect Will had made sure that he had the means to escape the Hollands, but Lina could go only as far as her feet would carry her. She walked swiftly and without looking at anyone as she left the station.

  When she emerged back on the street, she found the noise and lights almost shocking. There were cheers with every exploding spray of color in the night sky. Up above her, the universe was expansive and incandescent, but it seemed to Lina to be mocking her, reminding her that while it was large and glittering, her own world was small, unforgiving, and inescapable. She hated her job and herself, but most of all she hated Elizabeth. It was Elizabeth who had ruined everything, before Lina even had so much as a chance to win Will.

  Tonight she had been too tired and too poor to get out, but as she looked at the New York sky, so big and so full of eruptions, she knew that there had to be a way.

  Twenty Nine

  There are those old-fashioned mothers who believe that windows should be always closed to prevent corrupting agents from entering their daughters’ bedrooms. We take a more modern approach: fresh air in moderation is healthful for young girls, and on seasonal nights the windows of their bedrooms may be left open.

  — VAN KAMP’S GUIDE TO HOUSEKEEPING FOR LADIES OF HIGH SOCIETY, 1899 EDITION

  THE FIREWORKS WERE STILL ECHOING OFF THE brick façades of New York, although it seemed to Diana that the loud merrymaking had finally taken itself somewhere farther downtown. She looked at her own reflection and saw the round, black pupils and dark, generous lashes of a girl whose mind was full of deliciously wrong thoughts. Diana could not have felt any more adored if he had actually been there with her. Henry’s failure to attend his public debut with Elizabeth felt like a long, charged glance from across a room full of people, or a dangerously delivered secret love letter. And of course, she’d already experienced both.

  Diana pulled the little plush footstool that she was sitting on closer to the full-length mirror with the gilt edges, and brushed those few, determined curls back from her forehead where they belonged. It had been at least an hour since Claire had helped her off with her dress, washed and rubbed her feet, and put her hair up for the night. But Diana wasn’t tired. She felt energetic and a little silly. She liked the sight of herself in the long white chemise, which was loose and a little see-through around her small, round breasts. She gave herself a pout and examined the skin of her neck. “It’s really not a crazy thing at all,” she whispered to her own reflection, “that you can’t stop thinking a
bout me, Henry Schoonmaker.”

  “I can’t say I disagree with you.”

  Diana nearly fell off her stool, scrambling upward and instinctively putting her arms across her chest. She was speechless with embarrassment. She turned slowly to the window, which faced the gardens behind all the houses on their block, and saw a slightly disheveled version of the man she had been thinking about all night.

  “What are you doing here?” she whispered, taking a step toward the long double windows, which she had left open just a crack to let some of the cool night air in. He was standing outside, on the narrow wrought-iron balcony, wearing blue trousers that were rolled above the ankle and a white dress shirt that was crumpled and a little dirty. He was looking at her with amusement and a little something else, which Diana would have liked to think was desire. The big, elegant line of his jaw was turned at a three-quarter angle, and contained evidence of a smile being barely suppressed. “I mean, how did you even get here?” she went on, when it seemed that he might go on staring and never say anything in reply.

  “I took an alley off of Nineteenth Street, hopped the Van Dorans’ fence, and then hopped yours. From there it was a quick climb up the trellis.” Henry gave a little flourish with his hand and bent in her direction. “And here I am.”

  Diana bit her lip, feeling self-conscious about the appearance of her bedroom for the first time ever. The light pink silk that covered the headboard of her square little bed, the piles of books on the worktable, the old bearskin rug that covered the floorboards near the fireplace it all seemed very old-fashioned and very girly at once.

  “I was thinking about you all night,” she told him shyly. Henry was wedged between the wood and glass of the window and the iron railing of the balcony. She realized that his face had been browned by the sun.

  “I wish I could say the same.” She opened her mouth but then Henry winked, before she could misunderstand his words. “I was drunk from two till ten, at least. But once I got some good black coffee, I can safely say that the only thing I could think of was you.”

  “Truly?” Diana’s mouth spread upward into a full, guileless smile, and her cheeks warmed with color.

  “Yes, I ”

  “Di?” came a muffled voice from the other side of the bedroom door.

  Henry instinctively ducked. Diana thought first of her mother, and then of Claire, standing in the hall. Her heart raced. She looked at Henry, her eyebrows moving together in fear and disappointment. She ached to touch him. She wanted to pop the buttons off his white shirt one by one and then drag him down onto the rug. Henry bent his head and looked at the door, and then back at her. He was trying to ask her something with his eyes.

  “Di?” the voice said again. “Can I come in? I ”

  Henry lifted his hands up, asking her what he should do, and she raised her arms above her head, waving them at him ridiculously. Go! she mouthed. He turned quickly, still with the gentle smile on his face, and prepared to do as she’d told him to. She heard an ominous creaking from the trellis, and then something like wood beginning to splinter, but she didn’t dare go to look. The door from the bedroom was being pushed open.

  “Di?” Elizabeth said timidly as she peeked her head around the door.

  “Oh!” Diana gasped, turning to look at her sister, whose dress was torn and wet, and whose hair was falling down as though she had been caught in a gale.

  “Is that all you’re wearing? You’ll catch cold; you should close the window ” They both turned in the direction of the backyard when they heard a crashing noise, a rustling, and something like a cry of pain. “What in the world?”

  “Just the people from the parade, I’m sure,” Diana said quickly and assuredly, moving to close and lock the windows before her sister did. She tried but failed to see what Henry was doing down below. “Are you all right? Your dress ” She pointed to her sister’s enormous pink skirts, which looked like they had recently been used to clean the kitchen floor.

  “Oh, I…I tripped going down the stairs. I was going to get some water, and my skirt must have snagged, and ”

  “Have you been crying?” Diana interrupted. Her sister’s eyes were puffy and angry-looking.

  “No. I mean, maybe a little.” Elizabeth looked almost shyly at her sister. “It’s just that…” she trailed off, but she kept looking at Diana in an almost vulnerable way.

  Diana stared back, unsure what exactly Elizabeth was trying to say. After all, she had seemed so content to be abandoned by Henry earlier. Evidently, the embarrassment had set in. And so the anxiety of being caught with Henry faded, and even Diana’s annoyance at having the precious moment interrupted. She was almost concerned about her sister. She was almost sorry for what she wanted.

  “Yes, it’s only that…” Elizabeth sighed, as though she couldn’t find the words to match what she was feeling, and let her shoulders drop. She put her hands over her face like she might start crying again. “Do you remember that Vermeer painting that father gave me?”

  Diana rolled her eyes. “He gave the Vermeer to me.” She remembered the story of the painting very clearly. Her father had bought it from a Paris art dealer while Mrs. Holland was pregnant for the second time, and he had always intended for it to hang in his second child’s room. But then Elizabeth had impressed everyone with her understanding of its composition, and so Father decided that the painting would hang in Elizabeth’s room until Diana was sixteen. But by the time she turned sixteen, her father was dead and no one was willing to discuss the placement of pictures. “But then you insisted on having it in your room,” she added, with a touch of bitterness.

  “Oh,” Elizabeth said, in an off-key voice that assured her younger sister that she didn’t remember it that way at all. Diana shrugged she hardly needed to win fights like this one when there were handsome men engaged to her sister making late-night visits to her window. Elizabeth took a big, teary breath. “I guess it doesn’t matter now. But I just wanted to…I mean, if it would be all right…” Elizabeth’s shoulders sank and she put her hands over her face.

  “You can sleep in here if you want.” Diana went to her sister. She wrapped her arms around Elizabeth and pressed her close.

  As she helped Elizabeth out of her dress, she tried not to think about Henry and those few, brilliant moments when he’d stood at her window. She knew she should just be glad that they hadn’t been discovered, especially now that she saw how clearly distraught her sister was by everything.

  But even as they lay down to sleep side by side for the first time since they were children, Diana couldn’t help but hope for another little glimpse of the one bachelor in all of New York she could not have.

  Thirty

  One of the many parties given last evening in celebration of Admiral Dewey’s return to our shores the fete in the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom was also expected to welcome the recently betrothed couple of Mr. Henry Schoonmaker and Miss Elizabeth Holland. While Miss Holland attended, looking exquisite as always, Mr. Schoonmaker never arrived, leading certain cynics to wonder if his passions have turned elsewhere so quickly.

  — FROM THE “GAMESOME GALLANT” COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK IMPERIAL, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 1899

  HENRY WAS AWAKENED BY THE ROUGH SWATTING of a broadsheet against his face. He reached down and felt his torso; he had slept in his clothes, and not on his bed, either. The inside of his mouth was chalky. His arms felt raw, as though they had been scratched at by a herd of feral cats in the night. He touched his forearms and felt cuts, bubbled over by new scabs. All of this dawned unkindly on Henry, who had been dreaming of Diana Holland’s soft white skin.

  “Henry…open your goddamn eyes,” came the low, angry voice of his father. William Schoonmaker spoke in a nasal, irritated tone even in his carefree moments, and this did not seem to be one of those. “Do you want some orange juice?”

  Henry cracked one eye and then the other. The looming form of his father came unpleasantly into focus. “Do you have orange juice?” Henry asked
meekly.

  “No.”

  He was fully awake now, and he knew where he was. The little room where he was sitting, under the long shadow of his father, was the same room where he had laid down for a short rest last night, in order to recover from the epic party on the yacht. It was his own study, adjacent to his bedroom, a good, dark room to nurse a headache in. Though apparently that was no longer on the agenda.

  Henry looked from the sneering face of his father to the pale maid who hovered behind him. She was wearing a black dress with white cuffs and a white collar, and she was holding a tray with a cut-glass pitcher full of a liquid that certainly had the appearance of orange juice. Henry opened and closed his pasty mouth, and then looked back at his father.

  “Don’t give him any, Hilda.” Henry’s father took a few steps forward and clasped his hands behind his back. “Now, Henry, I see that you are in quite a state, and it seems possible to me that you don’t remember last night with perfect clarity. I have done some research, however, and I am here to help you remember. Hilda and I are here to help you remember.”

  Henry looked back at the maid. She had been with his family for some time, and she had kept his secrets before. She wouldn’t meet his eyes now, however. Her skin was an unhappy pallor, and her eyes were fixed on her tray. Henry looked longingly at the orange juice, and then turned his eyes to his father, whose great frame was clothed in a three-piece suit of metallic brown-gray fabric. It was the kind of costume that impressed mid-level railroad employees and servant girls. Henry tried to give his father a look that showed it did not impress him.

  “Go on, Hilda,” his father was saying. “Tell Henry what you told me.”

  The girl paused as long as she could, which was long enough to make both herself and Henry wretchedly uncomfortable, and then said, “I saw a young lady leaving quite late last night. She wore a beaded gown of a reddish color, and she made quite a noise when she left. The dress looked new, sir, and quite expensive.”