Twilight
A Novel
Katherine Mosby
For Bill Gaythwaite
and the friends
who stood by me
when it counted
Freedom is what you do
With what’s been done to you.
—Jean-Paul Sartre
Contents
Epigraph
One
It would be misleading to say that the course of…
Two
Gaston Lesseur was an unlikely lothario, permanently rumpled, and prematurely…
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Praise
Other Books by Katherine Mosby
Copyright
About the Publisher
ONE
It would be misleading to say that the course of Lavinia’s life was diverted by a kiss, or that a chance remark would change the continent on which she lived, although both things were true. Lavinia Gibbs was not known for being either sentimental or a helpless romantic. There was nothing helpless about Lavinia at all. She was, in fact, among the most practical members of her graduating class at Miss Dillwater’s Academy, a trait much commented upon in her 1917 year-book. Born at the turn of the century, Lavinia seemed always older than her years, but this was due to her reserve rather than her wisdom.
At boarding school, she had been told about a kiss the janitor’s son had stolen from Maybel Skeffler, a senior who had excelled at archery until her feminine charms became so ample they impaired her ability to pull back a clean shot with the bow. All the girls had talked about the kiss in hushed tones, in the safety of the darkness, from their narrow cots, recounting Maybel’s description long after she had been taken home. It had been a revelation that was disturbing and delightful in equal measure: the heat of his lips had made her swoon “down there.” Afterward, even though the janitor’s son was forbidden to set foot on the school grounds, just the sight of his father pushing a rake against a gravel path was enough to make Maybel Skeffler dizzy and liable to cry for no reason she could explain to her teachers.
Once, on a trip to Europe the summer Lavinia was thirteen, she had watched a couple embracing in a damp alleyway below the window of her hotel bathroom. It was the woman’s moan that had caused Lavinia to hoist herself out of her bath and stand, dripping and soapy, on the closed lid of the toilet from which she could see, when she stood on her toes, the figures blending their bodies in the dank shadows that seemed to lick at them, swallowing now a chin or brow or shoulder.
By the time Miss Kaye, Lavinia’s governess, knocked on the bathroom door, issuing directives about the attire Lavinia was expected to wear to dinner that evening, Lavinia had already been marked by the moment as surely as if she had been branded. Remembering the way the woman’s voice had fluttered upward in the night, carrying a breathless urgency, Lavinia was flooded with enough jealousy and shame to make her ears burn.
That evening, before she joined her family in the hotel’s rococo dining room, Lavinia spent an unusually long time examining herself in the standing mirror that filled a corner of the suite she was sharing with Miss Kaye. Lavinia had been told from time to time that she had beautiful eyes and lustrous hair, but the very fact that those two features had been singled out for comment signified to her that nothing else was worthy of praise.
Her mother had been a great beauty in her youth and even now, aged by unspecified “female” illnesses having to do with the birthing of her four children, Eliza Gibbs possessed an austere eminence that could still cause an appreciative murmur to sweep through a room when she entered, usually a little late and always impeccably attired.
Lavinia recognized in her own face the sharp, almost fierce, features of her father, a man whose distinguished career on Wall Street was only furthered by his passing resemblance to a peregrine falcon. It had given him an air of confidence that men respected and women found attractive in a vaguely primitive way; his was the face of a warrior and suggested a vitality and intelligence that were rarely questioned.
“Of my two girls,” her mother was fond of saying, “you were given brains and Grace was given beauty and you should both be grateful for having been given any gifts at all, as there are plenty of girls who have neither. Besides, you are a Gibbs. Your name alone guarantees you a standing in society that most will never attain.”
While those words were not comforting, Lavinia had enough horse sense to accept the truth they contained, even if it was bitter. Miss Kaye was more diplomatic: “A woman can do a great deal to commend herself to the opposite sex.” Unfortunately, most of the young men Lavinia encountered at cotillions and debutante balls were less moved by the virtues of good posture, good manners, and good breeding than Miss Kaye supposed.
It was true that Lavinia was never a wallflower, the way Juliette Langhorn was, or Ruth Marshall, girls about whom unkind jokes were made by boys and girls alike, but if Lavinia was not at a loss for dance partners, it had as much to do with her sense of humor and her capacity to follow even the weakest lead as with her ability to be “alluring.” Occasionally Miss Kaye allowed Lavinia to wear scent on her neck and would coil Lavinia’s black hair in elaborate coiffures that showed it to advantage. Miss Kaye also had eyedrops from Germany that dilated the pupils, thereby highlighting Lavinia’s best feature.
But the fellows who flirted with Lavinia never steered her across the dance floor to the balcony where, unchaperoned, they could importune her for a kiss. Her sister, Grace, older by two years, complained incessantly about forward boys and how she’d had to slap two different suitors. By Grace’s eighteenth birthday she had rejected one proposal of marriage and was on the verge of accepting another.
Grace, moreover, was petite in stature, and before Lavinia had begun to menstruate she was already taller and more broad-shouldered than her older sister, a fact both her brothers teased her about with cruel delight. Ambrose, the eldest of the four children, the first son and father’s favorite, called Lavinia “Mongo,” which was the name of the African giraffe in the Central Park Zoo. Her younger brother, Gordon, the baby of the family and her mother’s pet, called Lavinia “the vine” or when he was feeling particularly peevish, he would taunt her by chanting “four-story lavatory.”
In addition to her concerns about her height, which made her feel ungainly despite her ability to move with surprising grace, she was also self-conscious about the fullness of her bust. Her mother and her sister were small-chested and, while it was never openly discussed, Lavinia was given the impression that there was something lewd about having large breasts, or at least unladylike. Mrs. Gibbs liked to disparage the laundress by saying she looked like a “wet nurse” or that Mrs. Brower’s riding accident was because she was so top-heavy it affected her center of gravity. When Lavinia turned sixteen, Mrs. Gibbs told her not to take any sport at Miss Dillwater’s Academy that required her to run, and before the holiday was over to have Miss Kaye take her to Lord & Taylor for a corset.
“And be sure to get one with bone stays throughout—not just at the waist,” Mrs. Gibbs added. “You don’t want to look blowsy or fast, if you know what I mean.” In the photographs of naked women her brother Ambrose hid under the sheet music in the piano bench, only the very well endowed were represented, which embarrassed Lavinia almost as much as the discovery of her brother’s secret stash.
The problem of her bust was only compounded by her height. Because she was tall for her age, if she were paired at dance class with a boy who was small for his age, his face was level with her chest. To avoid having a nose nestled in her cleavage, Lavinia would hunch her shoulders forward to a stoop just sufficient to protect her from the hot breath of blushing boys. Lavinia worried too that the consideration Miss Weingarten showed her dur
ing gymnasium at school was a sign that Lavinia’s appeal was doomed to be appreciated only by the wrong gender, like a frequency too high or low to register with the average male.
It was therefore all the more surprising to Lavinia when her brother Ambrose’s friend Jasper Perkins monopolized her at a cotillion honoring enlisted family members of the Knickerbocker Club. This was not only because he had earned a reputation at Yale for exploits with the “ladies” that couldn’t be discussed among the “ladies,” but because throughout the dinner she had watched her sister, Grace, flirt frantically with their brother’s notorious blond friend.
They had known him from childhood; indeed, he had been the subject of many a cautionary comparison their father cited for his sons. Jasper’s wildness had on two occasions required him to be taken home with a note the chauffeur delivered to his mother revoking Jasper’s welcome in the Gibbs household for a period of six months. These exploits, of course, only made his company all the more desirable to the Gibbs boys and during those periods in which they were meant to be deprived of his malign influence, they simply met at his house, where the supervision was considerably more lax.
Lavinia had not forgotten the way Jasper had tormented her in the days she still cared about dolls by running them over with the Lionel train her brothers kept set up on the floor of the playroom. Jasper had never actually destroyed the dolls but they were nicked and scarred from his damaging games and general derision. “Jasper didn’t have sisters” was the explanation Miss Kaye offered for his peculiar delight in making both the Gibbs girls cry before he lost interest in them entirely. It was from Jasper that Lavinia first heard the slang names for female anatomy, and it was Jasper too, who at twelve had appalled Miss Kaye by drawing nipples in red ink on a petticoat that had been hung to dry in the laundry room.
Not only was his attention at the cotillion unexpected, and therefore all the more significant to her, but Lavinia had never seen Jasper so combed and creased, and she was thrown off guard, allowing herself to see him as others did: handsome. Perhaps it was because he was attired in the white dress uniform of the Navy, his shoes polished to a mirror-like sheen she’d been told might reveal the undergarments of the girls who stood too close to their reflecting surface. Or perhaps it was because she could smell, under his lemony after-shave, a musky scent she would henceforth associate with masculinity. It may also have been the way Jasper cut in so smoothly before sweet, pudgy Herbert Burling had completed even one tour of the dance floor with her that made Lavinia so susceptible to Jasper’s charm.
But it was not his charm that would haunt her later, when she compared the touch of other men to his. It was his unabashed sensuality, almost feral in its simplicity, that Lavinia found so compelling. First, he had gently moved her chin with his gloved finger, positioning her head so that her gaze was directed at his face instead of just to the right of his shoulder. Lavinia was unaccustomed to being regarded with such undisguised pleasure, and the boldness of his eyes had been disconcerting. Then Jasper pulled her firmly against him, not allowing her to create the cavity between their bodies that was her automatic protection against unwanted contact with boys.
She understood immediately when he pressed himself against her that he was aroused. “If you are trying to shock me,” she said to him, continuing to hold his gaze as they moved together across the polished wood as smoothly as if skating, “you have failed.”
“If you are trying to dazzle me,” he replied, continuing to maintain just enough pressure so that she could feel the way in which his body pointed at her like an insistent finger, “you have succeeded.”
“I think you are confusing me with your other conquests. I may be inexperienced but I am not naïve.” And with those words she broke off the eye contact that had bound them in an intimacy more alarming to her than the fact that she kept her thighs positioned to cradle him against her so closely she could feel him push against her pubic bone.
Jasper just laughed. “I didn’t realize you had an ingénue’s need for sugary words that melt on the tongue. I would have thought we could have used our tongues to more satisfying purpose.” As he said this, he spun her flamboyantly in a double turn as they cornered the ballroom.
“Jasper Perkins,” Lavinia said, “I’ve known you too long to ever play ingénue to your scoundrel.” Returning her eyes to his, she added, “even if I wanted to.”
“Rogue certainly and bounder is a given, but not scoundrel. I’m too well bred, and usually too well dressed.” He lifted his eyebrows in mock beseechment and pushed himself more forcefully against her as they rounded the next corner and swept in wide exaggerated strides past the bandstand.
From across the room Lavinia could see Miss Kaye discreetly signaling to her. Miss Kaye, in her dowdy blue wool gown that never managed to shed the odor of mothballs no matter how much rosewater she sprinkled on the fabric before wearing it, was lifting her handkerchief in a tentative wave, like someone at an auction whose hesitation becomes increasingly expensive.
“If you don’t like my attentions you have only to say a word,” Jasper said to the curl sagging down her neck just behind her ear, despite Miss Kaye’s efforts with a crimping iron.
For a moment Lavinia thought about lying, pretending she was offended by his arrogance and assumption. But, feeling his breath on her neck, she knew she was not enough of a hypocrite or actress to feign indignation, and besides, the truth was that she could feel the pull of a desire she had feared would always elude her, because she was a “lady,” and not an especially beautiful one at that.
“I don’t think it’s your attentions I dislike,” Lavinia said. “I think it’s you. But I won’t let that stop me from giving you a proper send-off.”
With his hand on the small of her back, Jasper led her past the potted palms and the stone urns that flanked the terrace. Though Lavinia could never be sure how far she might have ventured, had not her mother’s voice penetrated the night air like a sudden frost, it was a question that Lavinia revisited over and over. She never told anyone about their few moments alone, Jasper’s outrageous behavior, and her full complicity in the kiss and the momentary caress of her thigh, keeping it even from Miss Kaye, from whom she had previously had no secrets.
Lavinia wondered whether Jasper had talked of it to her brother Ambrose in a moment of bravado or camaraderie or sheer loneliness during their time together at the front, before Jasper was wounded and died of sepsis in a trench so muddy even his brilliant hair was dun-colored with dirt.
It was alternatingly a source of relief and indignation for Lavinia to realize that her brother would probably not have believed it, even if Jasper had revealed the brazen way she had responded to his brazen behavior. Lavinia wondered why she had not simply slapped Jasper at the outset, or, at the very least, stopped dancing with him at the end of the first waltz. Or, to be more accurate, she knew perfectly well why she had permitted him to do as he did and it worried her.
Lavinia feared her lack of umbrage revealed a character flaw from which she had been saved only because “some clumsy fool” had spilled wine on her mother’s gown, prompting Mrs. Gibbs to end the evening abruptly. Mrs. Gibbs had gathered up her girls and Miss Kaye in such a rushed departure that Grace had to leave without her rabbit’s fur muff because it could not readily be found in the recesses of the cloakroom.
On the way home, Grace had remarked sulkily that Jasper was certainly acting badly to have ignored the women at his table when common etiquette required him to see to it they all had an opportunity to dance.
“But Jasper has always been a bit of a barbarian and he was probably drunk or out to win some kind of bet. He’s probably laughing about it even now, with Ambrose or Peter Shiller,” Grace concluded pointedly. Lavinia didn’t reply, although the insult was not lost on her. Instead she smiled to herself in the shadow of the backseat, content to have made her sister jealous, and aware that the less she said about it, the more it would irk Grace.
Years later, Lavi
nia could remember with auditory exactitude the sound Jasper’s chin made as it rasped against her ear, suggesting he had shaved too quickly and had missed a patch of stubble on the underside of his jaw. She could also summon to mind the trace of champagne and tobacco she had tasted on his lips when Jasper kissed her, and the shock of cold when one of his bright gold buttons grazed her skin.
In the years following the Great War, Lavinia was advised by her mother that the pool of suitable men had been so drastically depleted that Lavinia might have to consider a cripple or a Catholic for a mate. “You know, Lavinia,” Mrs. Gibbs had counseled, “one can accustom oneself in youth to a certain amount of unpleasantness. Indeed, most marriages depend upon that ability. And the longer you wait, the more compromise you will have to accept, and the harder that will seem. Don’t let yourself grow stale upon the shelf, my dear.”
On other occasions, Mrs. Gibbs exhorted Lavinia to follow the example Grace set in marrying early and well. It did not reflect well on the family otherwise. Even Miss Kaye expressed concern in her oblique, solicitous way. “I personally washed all the linens in your hope chest with lemon juice and vinegar, my dear. I didn’t want the lace to yellow. It never looks as nice once it has yellowed and then you’ll have to use a caustic and that can be corrosive to the cotton fibers.”
A few months before her twenty-seventh birthday, Mr. Gibbs took his daughter into his study one evening after dinner and closed the door. He took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, screwing up his face as if in anguish. After a long moment had elapsed in which Lavinia stood before his desk waiting to hear his admonishment, for a visit to his study with the door closed could mean nothing else, he finally burst out with “My God, are you determined to remain a spinster? Can’t you even make an effort? Do you fancy yourself a pearl beyond price?”
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