Rumors (26 page)

H
ENRY DID NOT LOOK TO SEE THE CITY GO BY
, and when the Schoonmakers’ private railway car did emerge in the suburbs, he found little of interest in the rivers and icy landscapes that passed. He was not leaving willingly. He was leaving mechanically, which was the way he did everything these days. He had dressed by rote, in high white collar and black jacket, and he had combed and slicked his hair in the same habitual manner. This was the same manner he had used in writing notes to his friends, asking them to be his groomsmen, and to his usual salesman at Tiffany, who had arranged for the rings. The refrain in his mind was a kind of habit too. He told himself over and over that he was doing the good and heroic thing and that his actions would save Diana from certain ruin.

Now, as the train drew him closer to Tuxedo and a fate he found miserable while not yet being able to imagine, he tried to compose a letter that might explain what he had done. Diana must have heard by now. They would all be talking, and
her mother would no doubt weigh against her daughter’s former fiancé for getting engaged again so quickly, without any knowledge of how painful and humiliating the news would be to her other child. He couldn’t stand the idea of Diana hearing from someone else. He would have liked to have held her and shown that it was all for her protection, but he doubted she would want that anymore. He’d never done anything heroic before, and he was unpleasantly surprised by how lousy it felt.

He’d written the letter a hundred ways in his head. He had explained that marrying Penelope was the only solution and the easiest one, that it would give Diana a second chance that circumstances made impossible for him. In one moment, he resolved to tell her that they would always be lovers, and in another that he would leave her alone so that she could have other, grander loves. He drew himself as a valiant savior and Penelope as girl made of pure evil, but he had ceased believing any of those things. There was no way to make sense with words of what had happened.

His bride-to-be was coming for him down the aisle of the train, resting her hands on the velvet seats to steady herself, but beaming with such confidence that she hardly seemed to need to lean on anything. She had been on the other end of the private car with the little girls who were going to distribute rose petals at the beginning of the ceremony, showing off her
new diamond to them. She was wearing a white cashmere coat with a high collar, and her lips were painted the red of pomegranate seeds. Henry watched her coming toward him and crumpled the letter he had been writing to the girl he’d called his true bride. There was nothing more to say.

A
T GRAND CENTRAL THERE WAS AN AIR OF
motion and confusion, and everywhere were men and women in their heavy winter clothes laden down with the impedimenta of travel. The waiting room of the station, with its rows of long, polished benches, were thronged and the sounds of delay announcements and cries for lost family members filled Will’s and Elizabeth’s ears. It was not, in fact, a slow day for travel, as Snowden had insisted it would be: Men who worked in the city were hurrying home to their families, and those who had come on benders and run out of money before the great New Year were heading away in shame. Meanwhile, revelers from the outlying boroughs were flooding the city. Good-byes had taken longer than they should have, and now they had to hurry. They had been warned by Mrs. Holland to be discreet, to do nothing that might call attention to them, but Will and Elizabeth Keller now found that in the rush of arrivals and departures they were all smiles and could not help grasping each other’s hands.

It was almost a new year, and everything was in front of
them. They were going off to make their way, and this time with the assurance that everything was all right at home and with the blessing of the bride’s relations. She was a bride, Elizabeth thought as Will’s large hand gripped her small one, pulling her through the crowd toward the train shed with its arched ceiling of glass and iron. He looked back at her and smiled—for no particular reason, she supposed, or maybe because of everything—and she couldn’t help but laugh. She tossed back her head with the laugh, and the hood of her cloak fell down. She reached up and touched her head, because she had placed her hat in its traveling case and her hair was only covered by a small amount of ornamental lace. She let go of Will’s hand and stopped, so that she might put her hood back in order. That was when she heard her name—her old name, the way it used to be said—and turned.

“Miss Holland, Miss Holland!”

She looked, her face still smiling, her heart full of elation. Then she remembered that she was not supposed to be seen. The crowd was parting and there were several blue uniforms stepping toward her. She felt Will’s hands on her from behind, one on her ribs and the other on her shoulder. She could smell his clean skin, with its faint whiff of Pear’s soap, as his cheek touched hers.

“Run,” he whispered. “You’ve got to run. Just run for the train. I’ll be right behind you.”

It was then that she realized that she should be afraid. Right afterward she was. She could feel the fear, cold in her throat and all down her spine. Then she turned again for the platform where the crowd was still thick, and she ran into it. There were bodies all around her, but she pushed through. Her feet and her panic carried her forward until she heard shouting, growing louder and fiercer with each word.

“Halt!” she heard.

“Stop!”

“Don’t move!”

She kept running until she heard the shots. They were so loud that for a minute she thought they must have happened in her ears. They were horrible and repetitious and they lasted far too long. When they were over, she could barely breathe. Everyone around her had frozen. She turned again, slowly this time, and began to move back down the platform, where there was now shrieking. She was indifferent to her backward fallen hood, and she could not have gotten her hand off her open mouth for anything in the world.

She was moving faster now toward the place where she had last touched Will. It was with a wretched apprehension that she came on him again. He was on the ground now, and his shirt was all torn apart. Everywhere there was his gleaming, gushing blood. The blue uniforms were still there, this time behind a wall of raised guns. She could already smell the
blood, even before she fell down next to him. Even before she began to choke on the odor and on her own tears.

“Will,” she gasped.

His eyes had been closed, and then they opened, and she saw that they were pale blue and filled with fear. They searched for her and then he grabbed at her hand. She knew that he saw her, and she could see that the fear had gone out of his eyes.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you,” she answered.

“I love you,” he repeated with the same pained steadiness.

There was nothing for her to do but repeat it. “I love you,” she repeated over and again. She would never know how many times she said it. There must have been only a few seconds she was by his side, though she would never be sure. She was so full of disbelief that they seemed impossible moments out of time. She remembered seeing his eyelids fall closed again, and that was when she felt hands on her. Her dress was all soaked in blood, and she felt too weak to say anything more. She was being carried away, by those rough male hands, through the crowd. She heard her name—the way it used to be—repeated over and over again by the massed people around her.

They were asking her if she was all right. They wanted to know what had been done to her. But her vision had started to fail, and she felt limp all over, and then everything went black.

B
Y SUNDAY PENELOPE’S BODY WAS SO RIGID WITH
expectation that she could hardly smile. There had been so much preparation, and she hadn’t slept more than an hour the night before. The dressmaker from New York was still adjusting the dress that morning—her mother’s dress was now embellished with new pearls and old lace as it hadn’t been before, and of course it fit better in the torso and trained more at the back. The bridesmaids’ dresses were the ones from Isabelle’s wedding, also hastily redone. It was a shame that she couldn’t have a new design from Paris made especially for her to emphasize her finest features, and that the whole wedding party wasn’t in the latest and best. But none of that mattered now. The wedding guests were assembled, and the tables were set, and the Hollands had most definitely not been invited for the greatest wedding of the year. “The last great wedding of the 1800s,” to borrow a phrase that Buck had repeated to several newspaper reporters. In the New Year, Penelope thought with a flutter of her jet-black
lashes, she would be Mrs. Schoonmaker, and Diana could call on her all she wanted.

Now she could feel the moment—right there, in front of her, down a straight and petal-strewn path—when it would all be done. The menu had been settled and the decorations done according to Buck’s ruthless specifications. The invitations, which had gone out the twenty-eighth by special delivery promising a top-secret wedding of the best people, had proved a powerful lure to New York society. It had been a dull week, because of the holiday, and they were all just sitting around until the New Year passed so that they could travel to more exotic ports in Italy and Egypt. But this was an unanticipated thrill. Today they had traveled to one of their hideaway haunts to witness the union of two of their proudest names, and tomorrow they would be beset by all the uninvited for anecdotes of the Schoonmaker-Hayes nuptials.

The unlucky were at parties in Lakewood and Westchester, planning to celebrate the New Year as best they could and hoping for telegrams filling in what they had missed. The lucky invitees were out there in their rows, waiting. Penelope’s face was done and her waist corseted and her legs hidden by tiers of ivory chiffon. Lace erupted from the V-neck of the dress, and her arms were decorated in tiers of lace bells. There were flowers on her wrists and in her dark hair, and pinned to her white bonnet were yards and yards of Valenciennes lace.
Already the music was beginning. She looked at her bridesmaids—cousins of hers and Henry’s, quickly assembled, as well as poor Prudie, looking quite uncomfortable in a pastel shade, and, as promised, Carolina Broad wearing a very proud expression indeed, and seeming somehow richer—but still could not bring herself to smile. When it was all over, then she would smile.

Buck was there in a dark suit, looking a little sleep deprived and moving, despite his girth, with characteristic grace. He had lined the girls up and was waiting to give them the cue to leave the ladies’ dressing room and walk down the aisle. They were all—all but Prudie—giddy that they had been chosen and nervously anticipating their chance to go. Penelope didn’t want to meet any of their eyes. She was just waiting for the moment when that last pale blue train had disappeared out of the door and it was her turn. Finally the eighth and last went and she was able to take a breath. She turned to Buck and paused as he checked her face to make sure it was perfect. He brought her veil down and fussed with it for a moment. Then the muscles of his face relaxed into a smile for the first time all day.

“They will stop calling brides beautiful after today—you have simply set the standard too high,” he said.

Then she smiled too, a broad, triumphant smile that she knew she would somehow have to do away with before she
walked down the aisle. She had not yet succeeded when she heard the first notes of the music that always introduced the bride. Buck told her to go, and she did.

All of the faces in the room turned to her. Penelope could see them through the scrim of lace, their mouths forming wide, appreciative circles, their hands clasped to their breasts. She had no idea whether she was walking slow or fast. She could scarcely hear the music. The distance to the altar was impossible, and yet she knew she would be there very soon. Henry was still and miserable looking in his shiny black tails, but he would see the genius of all her planning soon enough. He would remember how perfectly suited they were to each other, and see that Diana Holland had been nothing more than a passing distraction. When she reached the altar, she noticed that a few faces had turned away from her. Inexplicably, they were looking back in the direction from which she had come.

By the time the reverend began the ceremony there were murmurs across the ballroom of Tuxedo. She noticed that Henry’s face turned several times to the place at the back of the room from which all the low voices were emanating. That was when Penelope reached for Henry’s hands. The reverend hadn’t arrived at that part yet, but it showed her impatience, and he responded by speeding up the service. Penelope’s heartbeat was so wild in her chest that she scarcely noticed how unresponsive—how cautious—Henry’s palms were.

Penelope had never paid much heed to premonitions, but she knew in a cold, settled way that what the assembled guests were talking about was Elizabeth Holland. She was back, and they were all wondering if Penelope wouldn’t want to know before she promised to have and to hold her friend’s former fiancé forever more. Penelope stiffened and waited for the rings to be exchanged. In her mind she dared all the busybodies in the audience to interrupt her wedding. They were cowards who lived by a code, as she knew well enough. Penelope bargained that if she stood still and left the rumblings unacknowledged, then the crowd would feel they had to as well.

As soon as she felt the precious metal slip over her left ring finger, she said, “I do,” and then, without waiting for Henry to respond, she pulled back her veil and stepped toward him. He had said, “I do,” she was pretty sure, although it hardly mattered. Nobody ever remembered the details of weddings, and anyway what was important was that she had moved in toward him and put her mouth to his. The touch of his lips was as light and unresponsive as his palms, and still it made her heart swoon a little to think that she was kissing Henry, and that Henry was her husband.

Then they both turned back to that room, done up in sprays of white flowers and pearl-colored bows. There was a long, awkward pause. Penelope saw her mother’s social sec
retary standing nervously at the back of the room, her hands clutched together. The diamonds in the crowd twinkled and eyes blinked. Then she saw Buck step in front of the social secretary, as though to blot her out of everybody’s mind. He began to clap.

Then all the faces of the crowd turned, slowly at first and then faster, toward the bride and groom. Some of them began to clap and some of them began to stand. It took only a few moments for conformity to sweep the assembled, and then they were all clapping. It was as though all the best people in New York had momentarily forgotten and had now been reminded that this was a beautiful and touching event. Tears followed for some of the older matrons. She had their attention and knew that right then she was the star of their stage.

The world was steady again, and she dared to take deep breaths. Everyone was clapping and saying how beautiful they were and what a perfect couple and how it just showed you that true love did exist. Her eyes had grown moist, and she looked out at all the guests, who were standing, and she felt full of gratitude that they had all been witnesses to her triumph.