An Embarrassment of Riches

by Margaret Pemberton

  He knocked back the bourbon as if it were medicine. Never before had he thought of Maura as being stupid or insensitive, but he did so now. Why couldn’t she have seen the bag of worms she was opening by insisting that he spell out his reasons for thinking Aisling unsuitable? Why did something they were both inwardly aware of have to be brought so uglily out into the open?

  As the bourbon went to his head his anger increased. How dare she call him stupid simply because he didn’t want Stasha to be cared for by girls with a brogue so thick you could lose yourself in it? Wasn’t it bad enough that their own son was being cared for by them?

  He refilled his glass. The decision he had made regarding Aisling was one that showed great common sense on his part. He had indulged her where Felix was concerned. He owed it to Genevre not to indulge her where Stasha was concerned.

  He swallowed the bourbon in two quick gulps. And how dare she say that if Genevre had still been alive she would no longer be in love with him? It had been a terrible thing to say. It had been unforgivable. As had been her blatant hint that she herself was no longer in love with him. When she had said that he was no longer the person she had fallen in love with, he had thought that he was going to die. Now he began to feel only righteous indignation. How could she possibly say such a thing to him when he had done everything for her; given up everything for her?

  A pulse began to throb at the corner of his jaw. She was trying to rule him, trying to call all the shots, trying to turn his family home into a refuge for half of Ireland. He would damn well show her that she couldn’t do so. He wouldn’t countenance it. He would move back into his suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel until she learned her lesson and he would take Stasha with him.

  He rocked back unsteadily on his heels. And what of his painful celibacy of the last few weeks? He had wanted to end it with her. Never in a million years had he intended being unfaithful again. But she had left him no option. She had virtually told him that she no longer loved him. She had walked away from him and had slammed the door on him. If she couldn’t be warm and welcoming after he had been away for so long then he would go to someone who would be.

  Maura hurried up to the nursery suite, tears of frustration and anger staining her cheeks. How could their marriage possibly survive if Alexander continued to think of her nationality as if it were a social disease? How could he possibly have said the things he had? How, under any circumstances, could he happily countenance a situation where his illegitimate child would be socially acceptable and their own child would not be?

  She entered the nursery and crossed to the cradle where Felix was sleeping. How, in a million years, could Alexander think of him as being second-best? She reached down and picked him up tenderly, holding him close. The scene downstairs had been hideous, but in a terrible way she was glad that it had taken place. At least now she knew how Alexander truly regarded her. And how he regarded Felix.

  She kissed him on his forehead and he stirred slightly, nuzzling against her. Tears glittered on her eyelashes. She wanted Alexander to stride into the room and for him to say that he was sorry for the things he had said. She wanted him to say that he hadn’t meant them, that he had been disorientated by his long sea voyage and over-tired. She wanted them to be lovers again, for them to be a family again.

  Very faintly she heard the sound of a carriage rumbling from the stables at the rear of the house to the main entrance. Then she heard a door slam. And then nothing.

  The next few days were even worse than she had anticipated they would be. Alexander moved back into his suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, installing Stasha and Stasha’s English nurse in an adjoining suite, and he resumed his affair with Ariadne.

  Henry washed his hands of him.

  ‘It’s insane,’ he said when Maura reluctantly told him that Alexander was once again living at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. ‘No-one walks out on a pregnant wife over an argument over a nursery-nurse. It isn’t sense. It’s lunacy.’

  ‘It was over something a little deeper a nursery-nurse,’ Maura said, not wanting Henry to believe that they were both certifiable idiots. ‘It was really over my Irishness and the problems he seems to think Felix will one day face because of his half-Irishness. And of his belief that Stasha will be able to overcome the problems of his illegitimacy and be accepted in high society in a way that Felix is not going to find possible.’

  ‘If Alexander believes that then he needs his head examining,’ Henry said vehemently. ‘I’ve never heard such rubbish. It’s absolute trash. Utter garbage.’

  Charlie also came to the conclusion that Alexander had been a prize fool.

  ‘You mean he’s back with Ariadne because you took exception to his telling you that if Stasha were one day accepted into circles closed to Felix, it would be a situation that would have his blessing?’

  ‘Because we fell out and yes, that was one of the things we fell out about.’

  ‘But it don’t make sense,’ Charlie said, struggling for comprehension. ‘I mean, it might never happen.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether it ever happens or not,’ Maura said with a touch of impatience. ‘What matters is the way Alexander says he will behave if it does happen. Don’t you see?’

  ‘No,’ said Charlie frankly, ‘I don’t. But I do see that Alexander is making you unhappy and I ain’t being his friend while he’s doing that. Do you fancy a hand of poker? Will that cheer you up?’

  The offer had been well-intentioned but it failed miserably. She needed far more than a game of poker in order to cheer up. She needed Alexander.

  At the end of the first week without him a change came over her. It was pointless wallowing in lonely misery. Her life had to continue and as Alexander had shown scant regard for her feelings there was no need for her any longer to circumscribe her activities with regard to his feelings. From now on she would live as her conscience directed. She would do what Alexander had failed to do. She would join the Citizens’Association.

  The chairman of the Citizens’ Association stared at her in amazement.

  ‘I know that I can’t offer much to the association. I have no personal money and no appreciable social standing …’

  ‘My dear lady …’ Frederick Lansdowne was rendered almost speechless. ‘Your support of the association will mean a very great deal. I’m sure there is no need for me to tell you that your husband owns more land and is landlord of more properties in New York than any other single person, including Astor. To have you come out openly in support of what we are trying to do … Why, it will be of inestimable value.’

  Maura hoped that he was correct in his judgement, but couldn’t help wondering if he was being a little overly optimistic.

  ‘Where one lady publicly ventures, others will follow,’ he said reassuringly. ‘You know our long-term aim, of course. It is to achieve legislature which will put an end to the horrors of the slums once and for all. We want to institute a Tenement Housing Act ruling that no building be allowed to take up more than sixty per cent of a lot and stipulating that windows be cut into inner rooms and that it be illegal to rent out cellars as living quarters. You can have no idea, Mrs Karolyis, of the conditions under which thousands are living.’

  ‘I have a little idea,’ Maura said quietly. ‘I have friends who live in the Bowery and I have visited them and seen the conditions in which they live.’

  Frederick Lansdowne stared at her. Ladies of quality did not have friends who lived in the Bowery. He remembered that she hadn’t been long in America and that in Europe ladies of good breeding quite regularly visited the poor.

  ‘If you have indeed ventured into one of those pits of pestilence then I need say no more to you, Mrs Karolyis,’ he said, wondering how the Karolyis marriage was going to survive the strains that must exist within it. ‘Some while ago we had a group of doctors inspect the tenements. Their report was damning, the general consensus being that not even a dog should be kept in such conditions.’

  He flushed as a terrible
thought suddenly occurred to him. What if she was unaware that as a land-owner, her husband was among the very worst?

  Aware of his sudden consternation and guessing correctly as to its cause, Maura said, ‘The landlord of the tenement I visited is a man named Belzell. The landowner is my husband.’

  Frederick Lansdowne almost sagged with relief. They were not talking at cross purposes after all. They understood each other.

  ‘Would you consider sitting on our committee, Mrs Karolyis?’ he asked, knowing the weight her name would carry.

  Maura thought of Alexander. It would be an action he would never forgive.

  ‘Would I be of real use to you if I were to do so?’

  ‘Immeasurable.’

  ‘Then, of course, I will do so.’

  It was the crossing of her own personal Rubicon and she knew it. From now on she and Alexander would no longer be at an impasse; they would be at war.

  When he read in the Post’s society column that Mrs Alexander Karolyis had agreed to sit on the Citizens’Association committee alongside such luminaries as William Backhouse Astor and Franklin H. Delano, Alexander was nearly apoplectic with rage.

  ‘How dare she?’ he thundered to Ariadne as she reclined behind her breakfast-tray. ‘How could anyone in their right minds have asked her to do such a thing? She’s Irish, for Christ’s sake! Is Lansdowne an imbecile? A moron? Of what use will she be? She isn’t anyone! Not even a Vanderbilt will receive her!’

  ‘Bessie Schermerhorn has been receiving her,’ Ariadne said tightly.

  She didn’t like what was happening one little bit. When she had initially become involved with Alexander she had done so believing him to be legally free. By the time he had told her differently she had become too dependent on him to cut free. She needed him. She needed to be able to feast her eyes on his devil-may-care handsomeness and she needed his skilful, infinitely satisfying love-making. What she didn’t need was a ruined reputation. So far, no cardinal damage had been done. Alexander was ‘a close family friend’. Discreet gossip was being curtailed. It would not be curtailed, however, if by some miracle the Irish girl became acceptable in polite society – and being asked to sit on a committee such as the Citizens’Association committee, and having her name mentioned in the society columns of the Post, was a big step towards such an unthinkable eventuality.

  ‘Bessie is ga-ga. She’s only received her as a favour to Henry.’

  Ariadne drummed immaculately manicured nails on her breakfast-tray. There were times when Alexander was annoyingly unrealistic.

  ‘Other Schermerhorns have been receiving her. Charlie Schermerhorn’s mother. Her sister-in-law.’

  Alexander had been brushing his hair when Ariadne had drawn his attention to the Post’s society column. He picked up his silver-backed hairbrush again and completed the task in savage, angry movements.

  ‘Gussie Schermerhorn has only been receiving her as a favour to Charlie.’

  Ariadne’s sensuously full-lipped mouth tightened. She didn’t like the way the only two men to have befriended the Irish girl had so completely come under her sway.

  ‘You’ve told her, of course, that there will have to be a divorce?’

  Alexander slammed his hairbrush down on the ivory inlaid dressing-table.

  ‘Yes,’ he lied, wondering how he had managed to embroil himself with two such infuriatingly tenacious women. ‘But if our own reputations are to be protected, it isn’t a matter that can be rushed.’

  There was no need for him to spell out the implication behind his words. A contested divorce would be worse than no divorce at all. What Ariadne wanted was for Maura to agree amicably to a divorce on whatever grounds would cause the least damage to Alexander’s reputation, and without any mention of herself whatsoever, and for her then to disappear conveniently with her handsome financial settlement out of his life.

  Not only was Alexander aware that it was an agreement Maura would never come to, but it was an agreement he had no desire that she come to. He had long ago come to regret bitterly his drunken action in walking out of his home and once again into Ariadne’s coils. Perhaps if he had stayed he and Maura would have somehow made friends again. She might even have said that she hadn’t meant it when she had said that if Genevre were alive she would no longer love him. And she might have said that she hadn’t meant to indicate that she no longer loved him either. But he hadn’t stayed. He had left and he had rekindled his affair with Ariadne and now Ariadne was urging him to divorce Maura.

  He shuddered at the thought. Divorce from Maura would mean marriage to Ariadne and though Ariadne gave undoubted satisfaction in bed, she was a bossy woman and a lifetime spent enduring such bossiness was not a prospect to be relished.

  Ariadne slipped out of bed and crossed the room towards him, her French négligé floating wispily around her. ‘Don’t worry, my darling,’ she said softly, winding her arms around his neck. ‘Our problems will soon be over. I promise.’

  Alexander was too grateful that the subject had come to a close to hear any danger bells. He was thinking about Stasha. Now sixteen months old, Stasha was far more interesting than eight-month-old Felix. He wondered how old Stasha would have to be before he could be put on a small pony. He wondered if he should, perhaps, take him and his nurse to Tarna. He wondered how much longer he could keep up the pretext that Stasha was the orphaned child of distant Karolyis cousins. He wondered how he was going to bear going through life having Stasha refer to him as ‘Uncle’and not as ‘Papa’.

  Ariadne had not the slightest doubt as to what she would find when she instructed her coachman to take her to the Karolyis mansion. That the Irish girl was passably pretty she had no doubt. Alexander, after all, had fathered a child by her and, although dangerously reckless, he was also commendably fastidious. She also knew enough of the Irish girl’s background to be prepared for a shallow veneer of good breeding. What she hadn’t been remotely prepared for was her very obvious pregnancy.

  Maura rose from the sofa as Ariadne Brevoort was announced, her heart slamming so painfully she could hardly breathe. It was a confrontation she had both looked forward to and dreaded. She Had imagined it happening in a public place, the Opera perhaps, or Delmonico’s. Ariadne’s effrontery in paying her a personal call at home was so audacious that she had to admit to a sneaking admiration.

  In the few moments between Haines apprising her of Mrs Brevoort’s presence on her doorstep and Ariadne’s arrival in the drawing-room, Maura came to an assumption about the reason for the visit. Ariadne was trying to cloak her affair with Alexander in an aura of respectability. If she could be perceived by the rest of society as being a friend not only of Alexander, but of Mrs Karolyis as well, then the tongues that had begun to wag would be stilled.

  No doubt Ariadne would proffer an invitation to dinner or supper. If she did, she would be very disappointed. Maura had no intention of playing polite games with Ariadne. But she did want to see what Ariadne looked like, close to.

  ‘Mrs Ariadne Brevoort, madam.’

  Maura took in a deep, steadying breath. She wondered if Alexander had been apprised of the visit. She wondered if he had encouraged it.

  Ariadne swept into the room as if she owned it. Her bustled gown was of raspberry silk, a nonsense of raspberry velvet ribbon and veiling was perched provocatively low over her forehead, her silk-fringed shawl was Kashmiri. Maura recognized it because it was nearly identical to one Isabel had owned.

  ‘I want to talk to you about Alexander …’ Ariadne began. She had determined from the outset not to lower herself by indulging in polite niceties with a woman unworthy of them. She wasn’t visiting her socially. She was there on a business matter. She wouldn’t deign to refer to her as Mrs Karolyis, nor would she make any pretence of friendship. She would simply state her business, show the Irish girl the financial advantages of being compliant, and then triumphantly announce to Alexander that divorce proceedings could be immediately instigated.

  Instead
she didn’t even finish her first sentence. She simply stared disbelievingly. Beneath an oyster-silk day-dress the Irish girl’s stomach was unmistakably rounded. She was well aware of the reason for Felix’s conception. In order for the marriage to have caused the utmost anguish to Victor Karolyis it had had to be consummated. Alexander had explained all that to her when he had admitted the validity of the marriage. But after their months of separation, when Alexander had returned from his inexplicable long stay at Tarna and after he had voyaged to England and back, he had not said one word to indicate that he had resumed marital relations with his wife.

  Yet he quite obviously had. Had he been enjoying them after their own reconciliation? An unspeakable thought nearly rendered her senseless. Was he still enjoying them?

  Maura’s sense of shock was no less great. Ariadne hadn’t come in ostensible friendship. There were to be no polite and meaningless exchanges. She wasn’t even going to hide the fact of her adulterous relationship with Alexander. Her referring to him intimately as Alexander was insult enough, but there were obviously worse insults to come. At the thought that Alexander may have sanctioned whatever Ariadne was about to say, Maura felt steel enter her heart. She still loved him but she wasn’t going to allow herself to be hurt by him any more. She couldn’t allow herself to be. To suffer any more hurt would be to die from it, and she wouldn’t give him, or Ariadne, that satisfaction.

  ‘I have no intention of discussing my husband with you,’ she said freezingly, turning to the tasselled bell-pull to summon Haines.

  ‘And I have no intention of leaving until we have a frank and full discussion,’ Ariadne said, rallying herself manfully.

  Maura’s hand hesitated. What on earth was Ariadne going to say? Curiosity got the better of her. She turned away from the bell-rope.

  ‘Does Alexander know you are here? Has he sent you?’ There was an imperiousness in the question that incensed Ariadne. The Irish girl spoke as if she were speaking to an equal – and she did so in an undeniably cultured voice. There was the merest hint of an Irish lilt in it, but nothing that even she could accuse of being a brogue.