That Churchill Woman

by Stephanie Barron

  Mamma did not drive.

  Jennie raced across the lawn to cut Fanny off, skittering into the gravel a few yards from the team. One of the donkeys brayed and kicked out with its front leg. Fanny pulled up. Her hands sawed at the reins and her breath came in fearful gasps. She did not look at Jennie until the donkeys were under control.

  Jennie waited, too, then scrambled into the dogcart beside her. “How wonderful to see you, Mrs. Ronalds,” she said, offering her hand. “You look as bright as a new-minted penny.”

  “And so do you not,” Fanny exclaimed. “You should have been a boy, rolling under the wheels, all blood and dirt.”

  “I wish I were a boy! Papa is smoking a cigar on the porch. Are these your donkeys?”

  “Do you like them?”

  “I’ve never seen any before. They aren’t exactly handsome, but Papa says spirit is always preferable to looks.”

  “They have too much of that,” Fanny said feelingly.

  “May I drive them?”

  “With pleasure.” She handed Jennie the reins. “If you can manage them, you may have them, Miss Jeanette.” She leaned close, awash in the scent of violets. “Your father taught me to drive, did you know?”

  Jennie knew. She knew a number of things, in fact, and she wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about them. She knew that Fanny gave her presents, for instance, because Jennie was Papa’s favorite. He had taught her to handle the reins long before he had attempted to teach Mrs. Ronalds. And he had told her once that Fanny’s hands did not hold a candle to hers. Jennie had good hands and a better seat and neither could truly be taught, but she did not say any of this to Fanny.

  She touched the flank of the near donkey with Mrs. Ronalds’s whip, and the pair moved joltingly up the drive, where Leonard Jerome stood waiting, smoke wreathing his head.

  “Their names are Willie and Wooshie,” Fanny told her. “Good riddance to them.”

  Jennie would have liked to ask which donkey was which, but she suspected Fanny had no idea.

  * * *

  —

  She spent the rest of spring rattling up and down Bellevue Avenue in the dogcart, goading the donkeys with a whip. Camille came along, of course, although she was terrified of speed and of Jennie’s driving. The donkeys’ raucous bray made her flinch. She clenched the sides of the dogcart, her face ashen. Nothing could compel her to stay behind, though, because Camille loved Jennie with a ferocity that was the most Jerome thing about her. In return Jennie made very sure that Camille was never hurt.

  On several occasions when the two girls were down at Sheep Point that spring, Mr. Schermerhorn appeared silently beside them with his dog. They never knew when to expect him, but when he and Matilda were there, the time on the beach became a lesson hour. He found them living sand dollars, green, purple, and blue, which he called Clypeasteroida and explained were really flattened sea urchins that burrowed into the sand. When Jennie touched them, they felt furry.

  “Spines,” Mr. Schermerhorn informed her. “Or, properly speaking, cilia. Think of them as myriad feet that propel the urchin across the sea bottom.”

  He explained that the white disks that Jennie thought of as sand dollars were simply skeletons, or “tests” as he called them, stripped of living flesh and bleached by sea and sun.

  “Every shore is a vast charnel house,” Mr. Schermerhorn observed. “Each step we take is taken upon bones.”

  It was his talent for blending science with the macabre that enslaved Jennie. Entranced, heart pounding, she followed his words, holding her breath. Camille was content to gather Matilda into her lap and listen, but Jennie asked question after question. What did the sand dollars eat while they were still sea urchins? What ate them? How long did they live before turning to white tests? When the Recluse left them in his baffling way, breaking off sometimes in mid-sentence with a gesture to his Scottie, she did not speak to Camille immediately. She was too busy absorbing all he had taught her.

  “The little girls are always so sandy,” their older sister, Clarita, complained when they clattered through the cottage in their stout boots. “It’s so much lovelier to stroll the Cliff Walk with you, Miss Hallam.” Clarita was wearing longer dresses this spring and never went outside without gloves or a hat, which Jennie found ludicrous. Miss Hallam was her governess—a timorous young woman, engaged to a clergyman, who relied upon Dobbie to control little Leonie and “the Middles,” as she called Jennie and Camille. Jennie submitted to her lessons in French and deportment and tore out among the daffodils and blown dogwood the instant she finished her midday meal.

  Papa visited from New York when he could. He visited Mrs. Ronalds rather oftener, something Jennie and Camille discovered and did not tell the others. Willie and Wooshie took them farther abroad in Newport than they admitted, and once, down near the public wharves in town, they spied the Clara Clarita, rocking gently at a hired slip. It was not a weekend that Papa was at home.

  “One steamer looks very like another,” Jennie told Camille hurriedly. “That one must belong to someone else.”

  “But it has the same name,” Camille pointed out. “Which is very odd, Jennie. There can’t be two families with a Clara and Clarita in them.”

  “Perhaps Papa came on business,” Jennie suggested, “and must leave as soon as it is done. He would not wish to disappoint us all. So he never told us he was here.”

  “Shall we go see him?” Camille asked hopefully.

  Jennie reached out and grasped her little sister’s wrist. “Promise me you will never go near the yacht unless Papa asks.”

  “But why?”

  “Papa will have gone to his business. But if you run down the dock calling for him, Captain Thayer will know. He’ll send for Mamma. And then Papa will be in trouble for having kept his visit a secret.”

  The two girls looked out over the docks to the sea beyond. “Jennie, let’s go home,” Camille whispered. “Maybe Papa is already there.”

  * * *

  —

  During the stretches of rain in April and May, Mrs. Ronalds was often at the Jerome cottage, singing duets with Clara Jerome while Jennie and Clarita played the piano. The two women trimmed hats and sewed embroidery. They read to each other from Godey’s Lady’s Book. They ridiculed outlandish fashions and practiced new dance steps together and taught them to the girls. Fanny’s sons, who were two and four years old, remained firmly at home in their nursery. Jennie was not entirely sure that she had ever seen them. Although Fanny’s gowns were as elaborately hooped as Clara Jerome’s, the gauzy fabrics and colors she wore gave an impression of lightness, Jennie decided, of petals fluttering in a breeze. When she left them, ducking hurriedly into her carriage under cover of an umbrella after dinner on a wet evening, Clara invariably murmured that dear Fanny is like another sister, and What a comfort that she left New York.

  Sometimes when Jennie was alone, she paraded in front of her mirror with carefully gliding steps, practicing Fanny’s charm.

  * * *

  —

  In June, the first trickle of summer families returned to Newport. Minnie Stevens (who would one day be Minnie Paget and entertain the Prince of Wales with her scurrilous stories) arrived with her parents and her little brother, Harry, and a passel of servants to stay in a hired house on Bellevue Avenue. Mrs. Paran Stevens was building a new place on the heavily treed lot behind Mr. Bennett’s Stone Villa, in a style known as Steamboat Gothic, and she spent most of her time bullying her architect. Minnie spent most of her time careening up and down Bellevue Avenue with Jennie and Camille in the dogcart. There was always room for another passenger; the girls were adept at squeezing together and the donkeys were game to pull anything.

  When Alva Smith (who would one day be Alva Vanderbilt) arrived with her family, and Consuelo Yznaga and her three sisters moved into a third rented house next door to the Smiths, Jennie b
riefly considered charging a penny per dogcart ride, but Camille was so shocked by this mercenary impulse that Jennie never acted upon it. Alva was a pugnacious and wiry redhead. She rode her horse recklessly about the town and engaged in fistfights on street corners with boys, who lived in terror of her. The girls went bathing together at Bailey’s Beach, wearing navy-blue wool flannel dresses with long sleeves over full-length flannel bloomers. Jennie’s was trimmed in red nautical braid, Camille’s in white. They had bathing shoes to match. None of the girls could swim but they loved to jump up and down in the rollers where the sand met the granite rocks. In the dusky June evenings, cleaned and fed, they met in one another’s backyards and chased fireflies. Alva was the only one who insisted on keeping them, stifled in a jar until one by one the lights flickered out. Her lack of mercy both appalled and fascinated Jennie. Alva, she realized, enjoyed her power over weaker creatures. Jennie decided never to be one of them.

  * * *

  —

  Papa arrived on the first true summer weekend prepared to squire both his wife and Fanny to a dance at Bateman’s Hotel, which was the center of Newport’s social world. He brought with him his great friend August Belmont, a fabulously wealthy Rothschild partner who was rumored to be Jewish. Belmont and Papa both loved racehorses and were members of the same clubs. Jennie watched Mr. Belmont arrive that night from her perch on the upstairs landing. He had dark hair and eyes and a trimmed set of black whiskers curving along his jaw. Mr. Belmont liked to wear elaborate silk waistcoats, and his topper was always cocked at a jaunty angle. He smelled deliciously of something she identified years later as ambergris. Mr. Belmont liked to hoist Camille in his arms and spin her around in the air; Jennie, at nine, was too tall to twirl.

  Papa had explained to Clara Jerome that Belmont was a bachelor here in Newport until his wife, Caroline Perry, moved north with her summer household. The Belmonts had built a brand-new cottage called By-the-Sea, which sat on an immense lot at Bellevue and Marine Avenues. Mrs. Belmont was a descendant of Commodore Perry, and, being from a naval family, had always summered in Newport as a child; but now she brought liveried footmen in powdered wigs from New York to serve her in July and August.

  From their bedroom window later that evening, Jennie and Camille avidly studied the four grown-ups as they entered Papa’s carriage. Mrs. Ronalds had flowers in her burnished hair. Mr. Belmont hovered at her elbow, his hands on the verge of caressing her shoulders where they sprang whitely from her evening gown. His voice had a brutal quality that fascinated Jennie; she decided it might be like a leopard’s.

  Mamma was handsome rather than pretty, she thought; a fine-looking woman, Papa always said, which signified something deeper and far better than beauty, Jennie knew. As the consort of the King of Wall Street, it was Mamma’s duty to inspire envy in men and women alike. She wore a fortune in Tiffany diamonds that night.

  “Once the grown-ups are gone,” Jennie whispered to Camille, “let’s play dress-up.” She loved to steal into Mamma’s room and plunder the wardrobe. Camille would wrap herself in elaborate shawls, while Jennie hobbled in high-heeled slippers with her mother’s hoops swaying around her waist. The glimpse of a different self in Mamma’s mirror—tall and strangely curvaceous—excited her. And it scared her, too.

  * * *

  —

  Now that it was June, Newport had a thrillingly festive air. Lights blazed in every cottage window. Bellevue Avenue was choked with carriages in the afternoons as ladies paid calls and took their airings. Jennie and Camille did not see Mr. Schermerhorn at the beach anymore. The crowds of outsiders, bathing and picnicking and promenading across the sand, had driven him back behind his drawn shades at Chepstow House. Jennie imagined him there, turning shells in his fingers. She ran down to Sheep Point very early every morning in case he was walking Matilda now at dawn, but she never caught him.

  It was also in June that the Rebel general Lee moved his troops into the Shenandoah and J. E. B. Stuart won a dreadful cavalry engagement against General Pleasonton. The Union garrison was attacked at a place called Milliken’s Bend, Papa read aloud, as he sat over his coffee and newspaper in the breakfast parlor. Hush, Leonard, Mamma scolded—she did not like him mentioning the war in front of the girls, but Jennie listened to every detail. The idea that men were fighting each other while she jumped from boulder to boulder below the Cliff Walk in the mornings was difficult to believe. She had finished The Children of the New Forest and kept its survival lessons in mind. Unlike Alva Erskine Smith, she did not punch Newport boys, and had actually allowed a few of them, like Minnie Stevens’s brother, Harry, into her donkey cart—although she never let him drive. This was a calculated gamble on Jennie’s part: if the Rebels reached Rhode Island and she was forced to hide as an orphan in the woods, Harry might sell her a pair of trousers.

  In Winchester, Virginia, Confederates surrounded and slaughtered six thousand Union men. By the end of June, as Rebel forces crossed into Maryland at Harper’s Ferry, the Union general, Hooker, was relieved of his command, Papa told Jennie, and someone named Meade took over the Army of the Potomac.

  Papa showed Jennie the columns of dead men’s names printed in The New York Times. In the days after July 3, when the battle in a place called Gettysburg seemed to be finished and Lee had retreated south with his survivors, the lists of War Dead were endless. The battle began on a Wednesday, the first of July. When Papa received the Saturday edition of the Times, shipped by Sunday’s train to Newport, the whole space above the fold was one enormous headline:

  THE GREAT BATTLES.; Our Special Telegrams from the Battle Field to 10 A.M. Yesterday. Full Details of the Battle of Wednesday. No Fighting on Thursday Until Four and a Half, P.M. A Terrible Battle Then Commenced, Lasting Until Dark. The Enemy Repulsed at All Points. The Third Battle Commenced. Yesterday Morning at Daylight. THE REBELS THE ATTACKING PARTY. No Impression Made on Our Lines. The Death of Longstreet, and Barksdale of Mississippi. Other Prominent Rebel Officers Killed or Wounded. A LARGE NUMBER OF PRISONERS. Gen. Sickles’ Right Leg Shot Off. OTHER GENERAL OFFICERS WOUNDED. OFFICIAL DISPATCHES FROM GEN. MEADE. THE BATTLE OF WEDNESDAY. REPORTS FROM PHILADELPHIA. THE BATTLE OF THURSDAY. YESTERDAY’S BATTLE. Our Special Telegrams from the Battle Field. NEWS RECEIVED IN WASHINGTON. NEWS RECEIVED IN PHILADELPHIA. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DISPATCHES. REPORTS FROM HARRISBURGH. REPORTS FROM COLUMBIA, PENN. REPORTS FROM BALTIMORE. THE GREAT BATTLE. COL. CROSS, OF NEW-HAMPSHIRE, KILLED.

  Jennie ran her index finger under the lines of type. They did not tell her the one thing she wanted to know.

  “Did we win, Papa?”

  “I suppose,” he replied, scowling. “But at terrible cost, Jennie.”

  That morning there was a solemn celebration of Independence Day. Gentlemen clapped each other on the back as they met in front of the tables where ladies poured out lemonade and tea. A band played and children raced down to the sea’s edge, trailing kites. There was an archery competition for the ladies, and Fanny Ronalds competed. She wore a white canvas archery coat with pagoda sleeves over her hooped skirt and looked breathtakingly fetching with her quiver of arrows at her back. Jennie longed to look as dashing and begged Papa for archery lessons.

  “You must ask Mrs. Ronalds to teach you,” Papa told her.

  The idea made Jennie feel, for once, shy. She had enjoyed being superior to Fanny with her driving hands and her riding seat. But when she asked if she could try to nock an arrow in her bow, Fanny was instantly serious. She held Jennie’s hands in her own to guide them.

  “Relax your shoulders,” she said, “and turn your face slightly to the side, just so. You must let the bow do the work for you, Jeanette. Start by standing only a few feet away from the target.”

  When Jennie managed to hit the cotton-battened sphere on her fourth attempt, Fanny removed her pin from her carnation corsage and handed it to her with a smile. Jennie gasped. It was the prize August Belmont had presented
to Fanny that very afternoon—a gold arrow with diamond head and tail.

  “You must drive over every morning in the dogcart after breakfast and practice with me,” Fanny told her.

  * * *

  —

  By the seventh of July, the Union’s relief at having turned the tide of war was so great that celebrations broke out all over Washington. But Papa said immediately that he must head back to New York on the Clara Clarita.

  Jennie overheard her parents late that night on the staircase landing.

  “Stay, Leonard. A gentleman has no real business in New York in summer. Particularly this summer. You could have such a lovely time sailing here. We’ve received so many invitations—”

  “Somebody has to fiddle while Rome burns,” he interrupted tiredly. “I’m as good a Nero as any.”

  Jennie had never heard that depth of weariness in Papa’s voice before, and she felt a creeping chill in the pit of her stomach—a whisper of desolation—that he would have to travel all by himself while the rest of them stayed in the Newport sun. She got up early the next morning to kiss him goodbye, running downstairs in her bare feet and nightdress.

  Papa held her close, his whiskers like a boar-bristle brush against her cheek.

  “Why must you go, if we won the war?” she implored.

  “We won a battle,” he corrected. “Remember the list of War Dead I showed you?”

  She nodded.

  “Mr. Lincoln will need more Union soldiers now. That means he’ll call the draft.”

  Jennie frowned. “Dobbie says the Irish don’t want to fight. That it’s not their job to free the slaves.”