Envy

by Anna Godbersen

  She floated on her back and paddled aimlessly, and the shouting from shore grew indistinct. The beach cabanas and umbrellas were far away, and the hotel, with its place settings and carpets and lawn games and bicycles, farther still. Grayson was sitting in the sand, waiting beside her wicker chair, but he wasn’t in much of a mood for high excitement, either. He followed her dutifully, but some of the recklessness had left him, and he seemed to have run out of things to say. Whenever she turned to him she was met only by great, sad, yearning eyes. Meanwhile, Henry seemed to believe everything was as it had been between them, and she was playing along with his game. Diana had directed whole scenes in her head, imagining what it would be like to confront Henry, and all the witty, devastating insults she would hurl at him. But another part of her wondered if she would have the chance. Perhaps he would go on sending her little notes forever, never noticing how hard her heart was to him, and the only difference would be that they would have returned to New York and she would have to put them in the fire.

  Meanwhile, she’d grown trusting of the ocean, and in the midst of her contemplations a wave picked her up and then buried her under its arm. She had to swim hard to get back to the surface, and when she did she shook the water and the bright sun from her eyes. She kicked to keep her head up and pushed the hair back from her face. Then she blinked, trying to see in the light again, and realized that Henry was bobbing a few feet away from her. His eyes were attentive, and his sharp shoulders just emerged from the water.

  “Are you all right?” he said, paddling toward her. But there was a smile secreted in his concern, and she knew he was proud of having found her like this. “Say, nice spot you found here.”

  “I’m fine.” She gave him a steady, unkind look, and began to swim away.

  “Diana, I think I’ve realized something about—what’s wrong?”

  “Are you asking what’s wrong with me?”

  “Yes….” He paddled toward her. “You seem…”

  For a moment, it was too vast and terrible to put into words, but she felt another wave come on, and this saved her from any silence or outburst. She ducked under it and held her breath, and when she came back up she looked for Henry. She was ready to get out of the water, and as soon as she told him where things stood, she could.

  She spun around, and when her sun-spotted vision settled on the place where Henry surfaced, she said, “I saw you.”

  “You saw me swimming out to find you?” he asked. Then he looked over his shoulder, as though he feared some other witness.

  Diana’s legs and arms worked to keep her afloat, and she breathed in gulps. “I saw you and Penelope on the terrace of your suite, and so I know that all those stories you told me about there being no love between you, and all the lies about leaving her, were just as false as every sweet song you ever sang me.”

  A few seconds passed before Henry appeared to comprehend what she’d said, and then he cried out, “No!” He swam closer to her and tried to reach for her arms, but she floundered away. His fingertips grazed her skin, and she sensed a kind of desperation in them. “You don’t understand what you saw. I mean that it’s not what it seemed. I am going to leave her, I told her—”

  “There’s nothing between us anymore, Henry.” This line had occurred to Diana in the hour after she realized his deception, and she had thought it to herself and even whispered it in the mirror hundreds of times since. She had no idea how she would wince when she finally had to say it to him, and she was relieved to feel the water swell under her with the current. “We’re quite done,” she added, as though that finalized things.

  In the next moment another wave crashed over them, and it sent her wheeling head over heels back toward shore. She didn’t fight this one. She let it drag her in. When she could feel the sand below her, she stuck her feet in, and then she began staggering out of the water. She was unsteady at first, but she kept on bravely and didn’t look back.

  Thirty One

  My spy at the Royal Poinciana, where many of our brightest New Yorkers have been enjoying the sun, has gone silent. The last note informed that Diana Holland has been paid much attention by her sister’s former fiancé’s new wife’s brother, and that the young lady would seem to be blushingly returning his affections….

  —FROM THE “GAMESOME GALLANT” COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK IMPERIAL, WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 1900

  IT WAS THE HOUR WHEN THE WOMEN WENT UP TO their rooms to dress for dinner and the sky went from tedious blue to a kind of fireworks. All along the wide veranda of the hotel, fathers and husbands and brothers drank afternoon cocktails and reclined in the large rattan chairs in the fading orange and purple light. They folded newspapers across their knees and accepted telegrams on silver trays. They smoked cigars and talked about the golfing and the hunting and the driving they had done that day and, in lower tones, how the markets back in town were doing. Down on the far end, leaning against the white wood railing so that he would be least seen, Henry was trying to get drunk in a hurry all by himself.

  There was little else for him to enjoy. Days had gone by in Florida, each one like the last. He was formal with his wife in public, and avoided being with her in private. He watched Diana laugh with Grayson Hayes and go off to the beach with him after breakfast. Now he knew she no longer hoped for him, and he felt the full idiotic weight of his many missteps. He had known that morning, after having been with Penelope, that he was a fool, but until a few hours ago he’d believed that Diana would never find out about it. Moreover, he’d seen that look on Penelope’s face when he’d called her bluff—she could no longer ruin Diana as she’d once threatened. Her own reputation was too much at stake. But that was a precious insight that he couldn’t use now. It was useless to him, just like every other pointless thing in the whole pointless world.

  He had taken for granted his own smoothness and taste, his ability to discriminate and have his pick. It was an unhappy realization that when something mattered, when he actually cared, he was a hopeless boor tripping over himself and destroying everything in his path. That morning, before Diana had told him how much was changed in her, it hadn’t been so bad to see her in Grayson’s company. But he’d made the mistake of reading the society columns over one of the other gentlemen’s shoulders, and it had confirmed his worst fears.

  “Henry!”

  Even the sound of his own name irritated him, although he did glance up dutifully in time to see Teddy approaching over the rim of his julep. Teddy was already wearing his dinner jacket, and, unlike Henry’s, his tie was neatly in place. Henry was wearing a dress shirt of fine Italian linen, although he had forgotten his cuff links and left the top two buttons undone. He sipped from his glass and grimaced a little, even though there was no one else whose intrusion he could have tolerated at that moment.

  “Henry,” Teddy said again, when he had crossed the thick boards of the porch and reached his friend’s chosen column. “Where have you been hiding?”

  Henry shifted his black eyes away from the Coconut Grove, where a few women who had completed their post-tea transformation were strolling with men they thought were in love with them. There were a lot of flounces and parasols being twirled idly, and he couldn’t stand any of it. “I wasn’t hiding—I just haven’t had the stomach for the party anymore.”

  “I know just what you mean,” Teddy replied.

  “I doubt that,” Henry said darkly. He was being ridiculous, he knew, but Teddy had long suffered Henry’s silly behavior, and that was too old a habit to change now. He didn’t, anyway, seem to mind too much.

  A waiter appeared, and Teddy gestured at Henry’s drink. “Two more, please.”

  “You might as well order four—that man takes forever,” Henry muttered, although the waiter was by then already gone. He waved his hands lethargically, as though the futility of every little thing was too great a problem to get very worked up about.

  “I am tired of it, and I think my reasons are not so different from yours.”

>   Henry looked at his friend slantwise, and noticed for the first time the furrows above his brow. “Oh?” was all he managed. He was sure that Teddy’s reasons could not be half as devastating as his own.

  “Yes.” Teddy’s tone was firm as he looked out toward the sea, and for a moment the orange light of sunset was reflected in his gray eyes. It made them look washed out and much older than he was. “I think I’m going to give it up for a while.”

  Henry, who had been experiencing his life as though it were a well that he was at the bottom of, was irritated by this turn of phrase. “Give it up?” he returned ironically. That would be easy enough for Teddy, he supposed, who had finished college and managed not to get himself married.

  “You’ll be all right without me,” Teddy replied with a rueful smile.

  “You’re serious?”

  “Oh, completely so.” The waiter appeared with their drinks, and both men turned toward the porch railing and looked out contemplatively for a moment. The light was still blazing on the grounds, and it reflected on both heads of slicked hair. Henry’s jaw worked as he anticipated his friend’s response. “I’m going to war.”

  “To war?” Henry found that he was too stunned to sip.

  “Yes, I’m joining the army.” Perhaps because Henry went on staring at him with incredulous, bulging eyes, Teddy added: “I was in the cadets in prep school.”

  Henry had to look away. They had gone to the same prep school, but he couldn’t remember his friend doing anything like that. “But where—?”

  “I hope to become an officer and to see action in the Philippines. I’ve already written to my father’s contacts at Fort Hamilton, and hope to enlist as soon as I return to New York. I can’t wait for tomorrow—I’m going to be leaving tonight, after dinner.”

  This all sounded hopelessly far away to Henry, and he could not help but look appalled. Just thinking about it made his skin crawl under his shirt. He considered several more profound responses, something like “My God” or “Bravo.” What he did finally say was: “But you could die.”

  Teddy put his elbows against the rail and leaned forward. “Of course I could die.” He clutched his drink and smiled a little. “But I can’t stay here forever, staring appreciatively at the new girls in the latest dresses and drinking from four in the afternoon till four in the morning. No, that would be a poor use of a life. I don’t want to hide from danger—that’s not what it means to be a man. I don’t think so, anyway. To look in the face of hard things and keep moving forward—that’s what one has to do.”

  It was not lost on Henry that what Teddy described as a poor use of a life was more or less his life. But he found that he was not insulted. He was rather affected by the phrasing, in fact, and so only half-listened to what Teddy said next.

  “I’ve been speaking to that lovely creature you were engaged to once, Elizabeth Holland, and I find she makes me want to search out the profundity in things. She is so tiny and frail, and yet she came back from harrowing experiences, and seems no longer to tolerate frivolities. How could she, now, when she knows what it is to be alive as we do not?”

  Teddy paused to put his hands over his face. Henry might have wondered if his friend wasn’t stricken by impossible love, too, if he had not so quickly changed the subject.

  “Anyway, it’s a young country. And I want to be responsible to it, to its interests and its standing in the world. If not me, who, Henry? I am a good leader; I know how to explain men to themselves.”

  They both pressed their elbows against the wood rail and gazed out. The atmosphere was warm and full of virtually imperceptible disturbances that caused the palm fronds to rise and fall as though they were sighing. Henry was thinking of the younger Holland sister, of the way she could go from being an impetuous girl to a knowing woman in a few seconds and never lose the stars in her eyes, and of how his life had seemed to him when he’d believed he had her. Surely that was not a waste.

  Then Teddy hung his head, and in a slightly different voice, went on: “Perhaps when I come back I will deserve the life I want.”

  The women in their ruffles were heading back toward the hotel, emerging from the palms like whitefish in a stream and heading up the stairs. Down the veranda, the sound of greetings and high heels on wood planks rang out; it was dinnertime, and no one could hide now. First Teddy and then Henry pushed away from the railing and finished their drinks. Henry clapped a hand on his friend’s shoulder as they joined the crowd.

  “I’ll miss you,” Henry said. “You had better not really get killed.”

  “The same goes for you,” Teddy replied lightly. “On both counts.”

  Henry chuckled agreeably, and thought to himself that there was no need to worry. He had made the situation with Diana very bad indeed, but he was beginning to see the glimmer of a chance that he could fix it. Teddy was right. Life was a short window, and there was no sense in doing the wrong thing over and over even if it was so difficult to stop. When they got back to New York it would be all different for Teddy and different for him as well, and he would be very careful to do the right thing and not get killed by his wife or himself or by anybody else. There was something to live for, after all, if only he could keep his sights fixed on it.

  She was coming up the stairs on the arm of Grayson Hayes, wearing a dress of ecru tiered eyelet and a vast hat, and though she wouldn’t meet his eyes, he still felt her loveliness in his knees. He didn’t mind that she was on Grayson’s arm anymore, and the thing he had done to her had to be faced. There was plenty of life left, and if he had to, he would use it all to get her back. The time had passed for making promises to her—all that was left for him was to act.

  Thirty Two

  Always stay sharp on railways and cruise ships, for transit has a way of making everything clear.

  —MAEVE DE JONG, LOVE AND OTHER FOLLIES OF THE GREAT FAMILIES OF OLD NEW YORK

  THE GUESTS OF THE SCHOONMAKER PARTY—WHAT was left of them, anyway—took the same elegant private car back to New York, although they were far quieter and more subdued on the return trip. Penelope remained frozen in her seat, imperturbable and still despite the jerks and shakes of the train. The light came through the window in lively stripes, but her face remained unchanged, her eyes fixed on the carpet at her feet or at her husband, who sat opposite her. He wore a cream-colored shirt, which she had given to him, and his black trouser–covered legs were crossed. He was reading a volume of poems, a thing she had never known him to do, and he did not bring his eyes to meet hers even once. When he had to speak to her he looked at her knees. She was still suffering from that horrid, choked feeling that had been stifling her ever since her husband had rejected her in the hotel suite, and she was having difficulty finding a reason to do much of anything. Though he had been civil to her since their confrontation, and she was beginning to doubt his resolve to leave her, she could not bring herself to feel triumphant.

  Even getting dressed that morning had brought her no pleasure, and now Penelope was paying for it in a mauve linen day dress that was perfectly in style but did not—she knew—show off her best features. Or not exactly suffering, because she felt so blank that even that didn’t really matter. She slumped, in heaps of mauve, and managed to gaze a little farther down the aisle, where the Holland sisters sat cozily beside each other.

  Diana drowsed on her sister’s shoulder, her face as soft and pink as a little cherub. A very young cherub, thought Penelope. A very irksome one. Elizabeth, who was only partially visible to her, stared out the window, very much awake, as though she were contemplating the end of man. For the first time, Penelope wondered if Liz truly was carrying the dead stable boy’s child. In the hotel, she had mostly suggested this possibility out of a desire to say something as nasty as she felt. But now Elizabeth was looking so stone-faced that Penelope wondered if it weren’t the case.

  The other sister, meanwhile, looked as though she hadn’t a care in the world. Her face tilted upward toward the light in her slee
p, her dark curls falling gently across her rosy skin. As far as Penelope could tell, Grayson had succeeded only in tiring her out. He had disappeared again, to the bar car, where he was spending a lot of time. That had seemed normal enough until just that moment, when his little sister remembered a muttered comment of Grayson’s about how much money he had lost in Florida—some of which Henry had loaned him—and how that was just the beginning of his debts.

  Diana now persisted in looking neither wrecked nor ruined by his attentions. She was a tramp, of course, Penelope thought, although it was a shame that, as Henry had pointed out in their Florida hotel suite, she could no longer tell the world about it. Despite a devastating case of ennui, Penelope managed to cock a listless eyebrow, for it suddenly began to occur to her that she might be able to use that information, after all. The whole world didn’t need to know the girl was a whore—there was only one man who needed to be made to see it. Then she rested her pale oval of a face on her own sharp shoulder, and let the rocking of the train soothe her into sleep.

  Had New York ever been so cold?

  Penelope wasn’t sure if it was her brief period in the sun that made the bone-chilling end of February seem so intolerably dark and sad, or if it had always been that way. She had had too much of Henry’s silent indifference on the train, and so on the evening of their return she pretended that her parents had missed her too much, and she went alone to their house to dine. Her mother had invited some “amusing” people, as usual, and she spent all of the meal rendering them completely unamusing with her barrage of inane questions. Penelope let her large, painted eyelids fall slowly, portentously, shut and allowed herself to feel the full tragedy of having worn such a becoming dress—it was black lace overlaying an ivory satin, and showed off her slim waist to fullest advantage—on a night when only imbeciles would see it. Candles flickered in the center of the long, squat Romanesque table. When her brother pushed back his chair and excused himself, she half-smiled her apologies and followed him into the adjacent smoking room.