Envy (13 page)

“A
RE YOU ALL RIGHT
?”

Elizabeth opened her eyes slowly, and then the ballroom of the Poinciana came back into focus: the bodies swaying across the parquet floor, the white latticework of the ceiling, the string music soft from behind a screen. She realized that she had rested her head on Teddy’s shoulder during the dance, but she answered truthfully when she said, “I am.”

“You’ll let me know if you would like to sit, won’t you?” She had never before noticed the worry lines that sometimes emerged on her old friend’s forehead. His skin was otherwise so soft and unblemished, and she wondered when and how he’d come by those marks.

Like the other women in the room, Elizabeth wore light, evening-appropriate colors—her ivory dress was embellished with embroidery of pale pink—but in the hours since dinner she had lost track of everyone else. She knew that the kind of people she had always been comfortable amongst populated the room—they were the people her mother wanted her to be
seen mingling with, and she was grateful to feel safe and light enough to do so now. Her neck, as gracious and slender as a swan’s, was bedecked with her grandmother’s jewels, which her mother had carefully packed for the trip, and her pale hair was arranged in piles above her head. The cooler evening breeze came through the open windows, and for a moment she felt quite perfectly at ease.

“Do I look tired?” her small, plump lips parted, and she let her eyes flutter between open and closed.

“No.” Teddy smiled from one corner of his mouth, and moved her, in smooth glides, away from the center of the room. “You look lovely.”

She smiled faintly and nodded.

“I’ve so enjoyed getting to spend time with you these last days,” he went on.

“I have as well.”

“They are such lovely hours, the ones I get to spend with you. They’re something I feared I’d never experience again….”

Out of the corner of her eye, Elizabeth noticed Henry coming in from the lawn. He approached Mrs. Schoonmaker, whose hair was arranged in shiny curls with feathers on top of her head, and whose polka-dot chiffon dress gathered in a low V-neck over her chest. Penelope glanced at his feet and then back to his face, and her eyes widened. Elizabeth knew
that look well—she had seen her old friend angry, with servant girls and members of her family and—on one especially notable occasion—with Elizabeth herself.

The Schoonmakers were across the room and there was no way to know what words passed between them, but at the end of their brief conversation Henry removed Penelope’s hand, which was sheathed in an elbow-length black satin glove, from his shoulder and left the room. For a reason that she couldn’t place, the scene filled Elizabeth with foreboding, and she looked to Teddy to ask him what he thought it was all about.

“Elizabeth?” he said before she could question him.

She nodded that he should speak, but he exhaled self-consciously and had to look away. They waltzed in a few circles before he began again.

“I only wanted to tell you that when I proposed to you, so many years ago now, it seems—”

“Less than two, the last time.” A whisper of a smile appeared on Elizabeth’s face, even though the memory this conjured was a sad one. It had been in Newport, where she had stayed for a whole month and grown dizzy and lovesick over her distance from Will. He had managed to send her letters—she couldn’t remember anymore how they’d gotten away with it—which had been full of his fear that she would lose interest in him while she was away. Her eyelashes sank down.

“Yes, that’s right, it was not even two years ago. When you were a guest of the Hayeses.”

Elizabeth couldn’t yet bear to open her eyes, but she knew from his breathless tone how nervous and in earnest Teddy must be.

“Anyway, what I meant to say, what I
want
to say, is that I was sincere then, and my offer still stands.” She had never heard his voice so shaky. “I would still—”

“Oh, Teddy,” was all Elizabeth could manage. She was afraid that if she didn’t stop him she would begin to cry on the dance floor and then there would be no stopping all the feeling, or holding in any of the secrets. But perhaps he misread her sadness for another emotion, because he went on.

“Do you think you could love me? Perhaps marry me? I mean, not now, necessarily, but maybe in time—”

Elizabeth came to a sudden halt on the dance floor. She thought of Will on their wedding day in a brown suit that he had bought for the occasion, and shook her head instinctively. He had still been wearing that suit when she had rushed away from him, and it was that suit that had soaked up his blood on the platform in Grand Central Station.

“Perhaps in time, Teddy,” she said, even though the idea of frothy white flowers and trousseaus and groomsmen in a row filled her with revulsion. She met his gray eyes, which were watching her so sweetly and attentively. She’d known,
even that summer when she was still so naïve, that if she had never known a man like Will, then Teddy might have given her a very happy life.

“In time,” she repeated. Her voice sounded mechanical, but she meant it as a confirmation. In time, there would be nothing so sweet to her as words like those. She tried to smile, but she knew the effect was no good, for all the color had drained from her lips. “You know, if it hadn’t been for my experiences last fall and before—” she began, wanting to give him some kind of an explanation. But she stopped herself, realizing this was neither the time nor the place. “Just now I find I am very tired after all. Won’t you excuse me?”

Her skirts and jewels, her gloves and laces, the pins that held up her hair and the strings that held in her ribs, all felt very heavy then. She didn’t know if she would even be able to carry them across the room. But she could not be out, among the throng, in all that adornment any longer. She wasn’t able to look at Teddy as they parted, and so she had no idea whether he had understood her at all.

T
HERE WERE MANY WOMEN IN POSSESSION OF
youth and beauty gliding across the dance floor of the Royal Poinciana that Saturday evening, which was covered by an arched white wood ceiling but remained open to the elements via its large, thrown-open windows. Carolina felt she must be the loveliest of them all. Her brown hair was divided into two sections so that it both rose above her forehead in a high pouf and curled down her neck in a ribboned tail. Around her throat rested a double strand of pearls and garnets that brought out the green in her eyes, and her arms were sheathed in flutes of antique lace. She knew that the skin of her broad forehead very nearly glowed under the varicolored lights, and that in the South her smattering of freckles indicated a kind of thoroughbred tawniness. The only element out of place was her partner, Percival Coddington, whose breath was fragrant with the chicken fricassee he had eaten for dinner.

“What a pleasure it is to dance with you,” Percival said. Carolina knew what it was to be uncomfortable in this world,
and she understood the meaning of the sheen of sweat on his forehead. He was nervous, poor thing, and she did feel a little bad for him. Still, she knew she was wasting whole minutes of her promising new life, of her late-blooming loveliness, on him. His cavernous nostrils were just at her eye level, and his damp hands were in far too familiar a position as they swayed to the music of Bailey’s Orchestra, which played behind a screen painted with underwater creatures. Hundreds of guests were amassed along the edges of the room, and the dance floor was crowded with young couples. There were far brighter, far richer, far better-dressed people in the rosy shadows, blotted out by the army of waiters, and here she was with a moderately moneyed nobody who had not yet learned to breathe with his mouth shut.

In another moment she might have dwelled on the irony that, only a few months ago, the chance to hold the attention of a Percival Coddington would have seemed to her a very lucky turn indeed. But she was entirely different now. She did not have time for such sentimentalities. Her throat began to constrict, for no matter how rudely she twisted her head around, she could not get a glimpse of Leland anywhere.

Of course, her day with him had already been long and close to perfection. But foolishly she had insisted that she be delivered to the hotel in time to bathe, apply her maquillage, have her hair done, and still leave an hour in which
to be corseted and to push all the tiny pearl buttons of her suggestively white dress through their holes. He had agreed almost too amicably, and then he had gone off to play golf with Grayson Hayes. She had worried the whole time that he would not return in time to escort her in to dinner, perhaps so much so that she had made his tardiness come true. That was when she had fallen prey to Mr. Coddington, who had insisted on discussing the caste system of the Fijian islanders through the first three courses. She had seen Leland when he came in late, and she now feared that in choosing a few hours with her maid over golfing (which she had never played) she had lost his interest.

“I never did see what people liked about old Carey Longhorn,” Mr. Coddington said—cruelly, Carolina observed—before she finally lost her patience.

“I hardly see how you are in any position to—” she began, but was saved from causing a scene by the sight of her afternoon companion over her partner’s shoulder. He was grinning, with that mouth that was handsomely too large for his face, and the blue of his eyes was sparkly in the low light. Carolina stopped dancing, and Percival let go of her hand a second later. “Mr. Bouchard.”

“Miss Broad.” He tipped his head and then turned on his heel. “Mr. Coddington, may I cut in?”

Percival’s nostrils flared, and for a moment it appeared
that he was going to be vocally unhappy about it. But then he acquiesced, and Carolina felt her hand taken up again, with much more force this time, as she was moved backward into the crowd.

“I find I must apologize to you again,” he offered, though Carolina was barely listening. The gleam on her partner’s strong white teeth, the width of his shoulders, the solid size of him, were too overwhelming. “If I had noticed that you were cornered by that tiresome ass—forgive my language—I would have saved you a long time ago.”

Suddenly the music was louder, exultant, as though her own inner sensations were being re-created by horns and strings. She would have liked to go on staring at Leland, but she reminded herself how Elizabeth never seemed to need anything from her suitors, or even to be particularly interested in them. She turned so that he could appreciate her profile and looked out at the crowd and felt very satisfied to be right where she was.

For there was Lady Dagmall-Lister, dancing with her young male companion, and there was the famous architect Webster Youngham dancing cheek to cheek with one of the junior Mrs. Astors. They were all dressed in their finest, as though life really were some magical stage play in which every moment ought to be illuminated with its own bright spotlight. Earlier, everyone had murmured over Mrs. Henry Schoonmaker,
dancing with her adoring husband, his dark eyes full of mystery but his hands on his wife. She couldn’t see them now, but she noted Diana Holland, who was wearing a different dress than the one she had dined in earlier; Grayson Hayes was nowhere to be seen either.

Carolina was a little disappointed that Elizabeth had already gone to bed, leaving Teddy Cutting without a partner, for it meant that she would not be forced any longer to witness her former maid’s entry into the rare world of which she had once been the undisputed princess. For a moment, Carolina wondered uncharitably if her onetime mistress had found another member of the staff to have midnight assignations with. But it didn’t matter, really. There were plenty of witnesses to Carolina’s total acceptance into the fold, and some of them might even cable their contacts in the newspaper business about it tomorrow. They were all her friends, or something nearly as good—they had to be nice to her, they had to have her on their little trips now. She was possessed of her own intrinsic social value, and none of their petty jealousies or little games could take that from her.

“Miss Carolina Broad?”

When the diminutive man in the bow tie said her name, Leland came to a stop. She realized that she was no longer dancing with the man who that afternoon had given her reason to anticipate a possible proposal, and then she felt herself,
however irrationally, beginning to hate this messenger, who was waiting patiently off to the side, and whatever it was he had to say to her.

“Yes?”

“You have a telegram.”

“Well, give it to my maid, then,” she replied brusquely, as if she were in the habit of receiving late-night telegrams, before moving back toward Leland. He waited for her beside the white latticework on the far side of the dance floor, which protected the guests from the view of the inner workings of the kitchen. There was a real grapevine climbing up it—Carolina had surreptitiously checked earlier in the evening.

“I did.” The man paused, and there was something terrible in the way he hesitated over his next words. “She said that you should be summoned at once. She said you would want to respond immediately. Our correspondence room, where you may want to avail yourself of our telegraph, is on the first floor, just past the—”

A thousand harsh words for this man brimmed in her throat, but somehow none rose off her tongue. Carolina knew that the disappointment of being taken away from the center of things was humiliatingly obvious in her face, although when she looked at Leland she did attempt a brave smile. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she managed.

“I hope so.” Leland’s features were so full of kindness
that she could not look at them. “Do you want me to accompany you?” he offered.

Whatever the news, some instinct told her that Leland must not hear it. She shook her head and turned to the man with the bow tie, who led her away from the dance floor, where everyone worth knowing and everything worth seeing would continue to go on without her. As she stepped back into the main lobby of the hotel, she looked at the elaborate pattern of the carpet and felt the horrible tightness of her high-heeled slippers with the little gold crests on the toe.

The correspondence room was all polished oak and gadgetry edged in gold. It was well, almost harshly, lit, and Carolina felt ungainly again beside the fastidious little man. He handed her the telegram, and for a moment she wished that she could hand it back and make it untrue. She wished she could return to the ballroom and go on dancing with Leland forever. But there was nothing that could undo the finality of what she read:

THE WESTERN UNION TELEGRAPH COMPANY

Carolina closed her eyes and folded the telegram. A long, cold shudder passed through her body. The events of the day, in all its illuminated perfection, seemed very far away now, but she couldn’t help but realize what awfulness had passed while she was thinking highly of herself and dashing around in horseless carriages. Her memory was overwhelmed by the image of him, on the docks that day, and how very much he had wanted her to stay.

Then, just as quickly, her sadness gave way to another emotion. It seemed impossible that Longhorn could have expired so quickly, and for a moment she was angry that no one warned her of the possibility. But there was no one to blame, and no matter how her heart yearned for it, nothing Leland could do to save her from this. She tried to look as high and mighty as before, and told the man in the bow tie that she would need tea in her room, as there would be much packing to do.