“She wanted to marry him very badly?”
“Oh, yes, before even—” Elizabeth stopped herself and smiled at Teddy. She still felt uncomfortable being a gossip, even if Penelope was the object of the loose talk, and anyway, she knew that down that route lay her own deceit. But she was pleased to hear that, in Teddy’s estimation, too, Henry did not love his wife. The idea that her sister and Henry might still prove a great love story lifted her spirits.
They started off walking again, although they drew closer together now. They moved easily by each other’s side, their slender, white-clad limbs carrying them forward in neat tandem. They looked at each other, one after the other, but grew bashful and turned away. She glanced up again, the light dappling both their faces. She blinked, and Teddy returned her smile, which was very natural and based on nothing in particular, or maybe everything. For the first time in months she believed her life could be long and not all clouded over with misery.
“Don’t worry, Liz,” he said. “I won’t make you talk about any of that anymore, or anything that makes you even a little uncomfortable.”
Then he took her arm, imbuing her with a lacy sensation of well-being, and they walked on below the soaring palms. Perhaps, she mused, the thick, clean air in Florida had been good for her after all.
Twenty
A SOCIETY BRIDE’S INSECURITIES!
BEAUTIFUL HEIRESS FEARS SHE WON’T
HOLD HER HUSBAND’S ATTENTION,
WORRIES THE SERVANTS WILL NOTICE
A SPECIAL REPORT BY THE “GAMESOME GALLANT”
PALM BEACH, FL—Here in Florida, we have been the witnesses of some very surprising developments: Even Mrs. Henry Schoonmaker suffers from the paranoias that prey on all married women—namely, that their husbands may lose interest in them. It seems that she clings to her brother, Mr. Grayson Hayes, in case her new husband abandons her on the dance floor, and is in fact so insecure on this point that she will not travel without that gentleman….
—FROM THE NEW YORK IMPERIAL, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1900
FOR PENELOPE, THE SECOND DAY IN PALM BEACH began auspiciously enough. She pushed her black silk sleeping mask up on her forehead and saw that the maid had come already and drawn open the French doors so that a little bit of ocean breeze permeated the rich surroundings of her suite. After dinner the night before she had washed her hair, and it hung now like a dark question mark over her pale shoulder. The champagne-colored sheets were smooth against the skin of her arms—they were much finer than the ones the Schoonmakers used, and she made a mental note to find out where they came from. Most important, her husband was by her side, and though he was still asleep, and snoring quietly into his plump down pillow, it was the most intimate they had been since their marriage. She hesitated to wake him just yet.
She closed her eyes and rolled into the soft space just next to him on the bed, but she was careful not to come too close. She wanted him to stay there, just like that, awhile longer. He was warm, and she could sense the quiet working of his body even though he was wrapped up in bedding. If she moved too quickly she might frighten him, and she knew he might sleep for a good while yet.
“Mrs. Schoonmaker?”
She cracked one eye open and glared at the girl who had come through the door. It was her maid, in her starched black-and-white uniform, and though her mouth was forced upward into something like a smile, the effect was more akin to distress. Penelope unlaced the sleeping mask and tossed it onto the floor, so that the girl had to tiptoe forward and bend over to pick it up. That was when Penelope noticed the newspapers that were folded under the girl’s arm and remembered that she had instructed her to bring all of the Schoonmakers’ clippings to her room personally every morning. Penelope knew that distance was the true engine of desire, and had hoped that in her absence all New York would again grow jealous of her many, many possessions.
“You can leave them there,” Penelope said, pointing to the table that had been erected and laden with juice and coffee and pastries in the middle of the large room. The girl obliged hastily, though perhaps a little too hastily—there was something ominous about the way she scurried from the room.
Penelope propped herself up and shook off the last, lazy vestiges of sleep. She let her eyes linger on Henry’s golden back for one second longer, and then swung her feet to the floor. She tied her robe around herself and went over to the tray of breakfast things, where she had a sip of coffee, took a deep breath, and felt happy for the last time that morning. For in the next second she saw the headline, and all of the hateful parts of her personality surged up.
She read a few lines but stopped as soon as she realized the gist of the article. Then she stormed back to the raised platform, and up to the lavish, disheveled bed, and threw the newspaper at Henry’s head.
“What the hell?” he cried, coming to life and tossing off the sheets.
Penelope fell onto her knees and grabbed a pillow, which she aimed at Henry for good measure. He caught it in midair, and grabbed his wife by the wrist.
“What in God’s name is wrong with you?” he asked, holding her arms against the bed.
“What’s wrong with you?” she spat back at him, once she had freed herself and taken several deep breaths.
Henry picked up the paper and then he too fell back into the pillows. He read a few lines before putting the paper down on the heaps of bedding that separated his wife from himself. His hands pressed against his hair furtively, trying to get it all back in place. “I didn’t have anything to do with that,” he said eventually. His inability to meet her eyes did nothing to quell her ire.
“In what sense, Henry?” She brought her robe tight around her body, which still trembled a little in fury. She turned her face into a pillow, her jaw jutting petulantly, but kept him securely in her gaze. “You mean you didn’t personally write it? Or you mean you didn’t do anything to give anyone the sense that any of it might be true? Because I’m not stupid, and if you expect me to believe the latter, you are mistaken.”
“I only meant—”
“You don’t mean anything!” Penelope shrieked. “Even after you promised to be good, I saw you trying to speak with her yesterday at the beach. The way you look at her, with your pathetic, longing gaze, you idiot bastard!”
She rose to her knees again, and—only half-conscious of her actions, so heated was her blood—began to rip the paper to shreds. The strips of paper fell down around them, the cheap ink smudging the sheets she had moments ago taken such pleasure in. When she was done Henry just stared at her, his eyes as big as they ever got.
“Why should I look like the fool? I am the sympathetic one in all this. What I ought to do,” she went on, climbing off the bed and walking hotly toward the tray in the center of the room to retrieve her coffee, “is call the paper and tell them my version. I’ll tell them how I loved my husband, was faithful to him, packed his bags for his every trip. But he had eyes only for Diana Holland, whose virginity he took one snowy night—”
“Don’t do that.” Henry stumbled off the bed and came walking toward her, still wrapped in a sheet.
Penelope turned her back on him and sipped her coffee. “What alternative do I have?”
She knew she had his attention now, and felt no need to turn around and confirm the fact.
“We’ll go to the beach again today,” Henry finally said.
“What good will that do?”
“It will show everybody that that column was fiction,” he went on tentatively. He had taken a few steps toward her; she could sense him at her back. “Maybe it will inspire some piece that contradicts the one you just tore to pieces.”
“It deserved to be torn to pieces,” Penelope shot back hotly.
There was a pause, after which Henry said, “Yes, it did.”
“You’ll take me to the beach?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“And later, you’ll sit with me at dinner, and dance all the dances with me?”
> Henry was just behind her now, and he put an awkward hand on her shoulder. “Yes.”
Penelope kept staring away from her husband, and so he couldn’t see that her winner’s smile had returned to her face. “Oh, and Henry?”
“Yes?”
She closed her eyes and enjoyed the placement of his hand for another few moments. She breathed deeply, and her whole torso moved with the breaths. “You’ll never make me look like a fool again, will you?”
“No,” he said at last. “Never again.”
Twenty One
A man is made in the rough-and-tumble of the world; a lady emerges from the flossy back rooms of her own imagination.
—MAEVE DE JONG, LOVE AND OTHER FOLLIES OF THE GREAT FAMILIES OF OLD NEW YORK
“WHAT ARE WE DOING?” CAROLINA ASKED WHEN she stopped giggling.
Leland Bouchard’s automobile, which he had had shipped at great personal expense from New York, had come to a sudden stop after several rough leaps and dives. They had traversed more than one dirt road that day, and though Carolina had been to Coney Island when she was a child and gone on the roller coaster, she had never taken a ride quite like this one. It scared her a little, but in a way that made her feel happy and filled her with inexplicable hilarity. Leland, who had long ago done away with his jacket and rolled his white shirtsleeves up to the elbows, revealing forearms that were almost ungentlemanly in their strength, gave her a slightly wild smile. The road was overgrown with jungle, all ropey and shadowy, and from somewhere out in the greenery they could hear the cawing of birds.
“Aren’t you hungry?”
There was nothing funny in what he said, and yet she found herself giggling a little again as she replied, “Why, yes.” She had not in fact eaten all day, and had several times grown frightened that Leland could hear the faint rumblings of her belly, although mostly her attention had been occupied by other things.
He leaned forward and looked at her intently. “You sure? You’re not tired? I’m not boring you?”
Carolina threw back her head and laughed. “Bored? There aren’t any dull moments in your world.” She hadn’t had a lot of practice in flirtatious tones of voice, and did not have to use one here, for what she said was absolutely true. Besides driving up and down the rough roads, they had already seen alligators and giant sea turtles and all manner of strange flora and fauna. She did think, a little regretfully, of the sky blue day dress with the ruffled hem that she’d had her maid lay out for her that morning and planned to wear to lunch. But that was a short-lived concern. It was well past two and lunch had already been served at the hotel, and anyway, she found that the opportunity to show off another dress paled in comparison to another hour or two with Leland. Her only real complaint was that her yellow gingham jacket and matching skirt had grown a little damp from cavorting all day in the heat.
“Good,” he said. “I’m starved.”
He came around to her side of the car then, and opened the door for her. She let him help her out of her seat and hold her by the hand as they traveled up a pair of boards, which lay over slightly muddy ground, leading the way toward a small shack that was built against the trunk of a great banyan tree. She clutched her wide straw hat with one hand, and Leland’s palm with the other, as they moved upward as though along a balance beam. She had taken her gloves off at some point, and was pleasantly surprised to feel Leland’s skin against her own for the first time. She didn’t worry even a little about the swampy earth below or what would happen to her skirt if she lost her footing.
Once her eyes adjusted to the indoor light she saw that the roots of the tree had grown through some of the windows, and that the unfinished floorboards had been placed to accommodate them. There was a young boy fanning the room with palm fronds, but the place was not a fancy one. The few diners who were left at that late hour wore no jackets and barely looked up to note the arrival of the fine people from New York. A heavy woman who seemed to know Leland ushered them to one of the red-and-white-checked cloth-covered tables, and asked him how long he was staying this time.
“Not long enough,” Leland said happily. “This is my friend Carolina,” he added.
“Pleased to meet you.” When the woman smiled, she exposed a wide gap between her two brown middle teeth. The skin of her face had grown thick and creased from many years in the sun.
“And you,” Carolina replied. Mr. Longhorn had once or twice tried to take her to down-and-out places for a different kind of thrill or to hear the music they played there, and she had balked each time. In New York, she hated missing even the smallest opportunity to display her new things and know that they were envied. But with Leland, she didn’t mind that no one of special importance was there to see them. In fact, over the course of the day, she had increasingly come to savor being in his presence alone.
“We’ll have two shrimp gumbos, please,” Leland said.
“Spicy?”
“Yes.” He glanced back at Carolina and she realized she had again been staring at him witlessly. She wondered if it wasn’t the hunger and its attendant light-headedness that made her behave so gauchely. “What are you looking at? My nose, I know—it’s burned. And too large.”
She recognized the painful redness only after he’d called attention to it, and realized that he had not, like her, had the protection of a hat. She couldn’t stop herself from reaching out and touching the skin of his cheek. The new color looked painful but also brought out the beautiful blue of his eyes.
“It’s a perfect nose,” she said, meaning it. His nose was broad, but well structured, like the rest of him.
“You are too kind! My mother blames our French ancestry for the monstrosity.”
Just then the gap-toothed woman appeared to place bread on their table. Carolina thoughtlessly reached for the basket, breaking off a large piece and putting it in her mouth. She was chewing exuberantly when her large eyes rolled to where Leland sat beside her, and saw that this time he was staring at her. In the next moment she felt the dampness under her armpits and became aware that she’d sweated through her ivory silk shirt. She swallowed hard, and reached for the little jacket, which she had stupidly taken off and draped on the back of her chair.
“What’s the matter?” Leland grabbed her by the wrist before she could reach for her jacket.
“Nothing, I—”
“Your face just fell a hundred stories. Something is wrong. You’re bored, aren’t you? You don’t like this place, do you?”
“No! I love it.” Carolina began laughing again at the absurdity of what she was going to say next. “It’s only that I’m in such a state, and I fear I smell terrible, and I’m stuffing food in my face like a barbarian because I’m so starved—”
“I love a woman with an appetite!” Leland grinned at her, and then put his perfect nose against her shoulder. “And I like the way you smell.”
She looked at Leland and he looked back as though there was nothing strange or inappropriate about gazing at each other in a backwoods shack on an out-of-the-way dirt road in Florida. They might have gone on like that for who knows how long, but their food arrived, and the steam that rose off their bowls was so laden with spice that it made her eyes water a little.
Her hesitation must have showed, because the next thing he said was, “Don’t you like spicy food?”
She lowered her face to the bowl and inhaled.
The Hollands, like all the old Dutch families, believed in everything in moderation, and disliked strong tastes of any kind. She had often wondered what it would be like to eat food outside of their narrow tastes, but then, of course, she had been taken under wing by an older gentleman whose stomach could not handle anything very strong, and so she’d never been able to find out.
“Not out west? I would have thought on the ranch you’d have eaten all kinds of things that we New Yorkers would be terrified of.”
Carolina’s eyes rolled to the beamed ceiling. Suddenly the full import of everything she had said over the c
ourse of the day began to dawn on her—for until that moment she had bubbled over with tales of her childhood adventures on horseback and sleeping on the range and staring into mine shafts. She had borrowed liberally from the stories Will used to tell her, for he was an obsessive consumer of any book that touched on the western states. She had guessed, rightly, that all of this would entertain a man like Leland, but had somehow failed to consider the possibility that he would remember any of it, or ask her any further questions. She had also forgotten, in the last hour, that a ranch had become a part of her fictitious personal history.
“Out west?” she stalled. The spicy smell had gone to her head now and her nose had begun to run.
“Yes—don’t cowboys love hot peppers and Tabasco?”
Carolina drew her wrist under her nostrils to wipe away the moisture there.
“Oh dear, did I say something wrong again?”
Leland brought his napkin up to her eyes and began to dab away the tears, which had continued to emerge there, even against all her willpower. She tried to think quickly, but already an explanation was tumbling from her mouth. “Father loved everything spicy. Even pancakes! It was our family joke. None of the farmhands or any of his employees could match his taste for it. The memory of all that makes me a little sad, is all, and I haven’t been able to eat anything but bland food since he passed.”
“Oh, my darling. I’m so sorry to have made you think of all that.”
She shook her head, and tried to stop the tears, which were quite naturally running down her face now. “It’s all right.” A brave smiled played on her lips.
“Maybe you would like it now?” Leland’s brows slanted downward at the corners in a show of sincere concern. “Maybe it would bring the memory back in a good way.”
“Well, I suppose I could try,” Carolina answered tentatively.
Leland dipped his spoon in the stew and brought it up to Carolina’s mouth. He watched her to make sure it was all right, but then she nodded and he brought the spoonful forward into her mouth. The gumbo was even hotter than she had imagined. It was delicious and lit up her whole mouth. In the next moment, she felt the heat over her entire body. The one bite made her realize how hungry she had been, and when she had swallowed it she asked for more.
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