Rumors (27 page)

I
T WAS WELL PAST MIDNIGHT—THE NEW YEAR HAD
come, and in the Hollands’ home the wailing had stopped. The women sat at the great worn, wooden table in the kitchen, and all around them was a devastating silence. The kitchen was not a room any of them had ever spent much time in, but it seemed the most secretive place they could go. It was where they were least likely to be found. That night was the first time Diana had seen her mother prepare broth, which she did assuredly, before placing it in front of her elder daughter. She had insisted at several points throughout the night that Elizabeth drink it, and Elizabeth had a few times brought the bowl to her lips. But she did not give the appearance of drinking any, and the level of liquid in her bowl never went down. Diana watched her sister, who was slumped against the table. She had wept so hard it seemed impossible that she had not wrung out everything inside her.

It had been too much for Edith to take, and she had gone to her room so that her nieces wouldn’t see her cry any
more. Diana herself felt empty. She could not imagine an end to the emptiness. It seemed to her as though everything that was good and true had been blasted out of the world. All those things had been crushed, destroyed, made to disappear.

“Elizabeth, you must eat. You must try to sleep,” her mother said. Diana couldn’t remember the last time anyone had spoken. It could have been hours, or it might have been seconds. The cacophony of chimes and noisemakers, of revelers in the street leaving Midnight Mass or the Hungarian Peasant Ball at Madison Square Garden, had died down in the meantime.

When the policemen had brought Elizabeth home, proud and triumphant of what they had done, Diana had taken her upstairs and washed her in the bathtub. Elizabeth couldn’t then do anything for herself, and there was little she could do now. Her hair had dried, and even though she was wrapped in a blanket, she shivered. She took a long time in responding and when she did she managed only a flat “I can’t.”

“Elizabeth,” her mother went on slowly, “you might not be able to now, but you must soon. Everyone knows that you have returned, and they won’t understand that you loved Will. They can’t know it.”

Elizabeth’s brown eyes moved very slowly to meet her mother’s. She blinked and her dry lips dropped open but she didn’t say anything. Diana wished that she could make her
mother stop talking. She knew, even now, that Mrs. Holland was incapable of not considering her social position.

“They think you were kidnapped, Elizabeth. That’s what they’ll believe, and we can’t contradict them. This family has suffered, my dear. We have suffered too much. We will lose everything if they know what Will was to you…what you were to him. What you did. Do you understand me?”

Elizabeth looked blankly at her mother. Her eyes moved, slowly, until they met Diana’s. The sisters stared at each other for a few moments, and Diana set her lips together at the thought of their mother’s cold practicality. The younger girl’s brows moved toward each other and she shook her head just slightly to let Elizabeth know how she felt about all that. “She understands,” Diana said finally, speaking for the sister she knew could not speak for herself.

“Good. I don’t want it to be this way, my dearest, but that is how it is.” Mrs. Holland put her small, lined hands on the table and pushed herself upward. “We will shelter you for a while, but soon enough you will have to see people. You will have to seem happy that you are home. It is a lucky thing we are a polite society—no one will ask you what you have endured. But you must not give them reason to wonder.”

Diana watched her sister, whose hair was undone and who seemed dead to every comment. How little everything that had ever happened to them mattered now, Diana thought.
Their mother smoothed her black dress with her hands and sighed.

“I will not force you to marry again, my dear Elizabeth,” she went on. “In any event, Henry Schoonmaker is by this time already wed to your friend Penelope Hayes. It happened very quickly and quietly this same evening. What a strange, strange day it has been.”

Diana heard the news of Henry’s wedding with something like neutrality. Of course in a world of arbitrary and horrific murder Henry would choose a girl like Penelope. It would have shocked her beyond breath if someone had told her he was not now to marry Penelope, and it seemed almost a blessing that it should be over so quickly. She flinched, even so, and only hoped that Elizabeth hadn’t noticed. She had enough worries already without thinking of Diana’s heartbreak.

“I must sleep,” their mother concluded suddenly. She pulled back her skirt and walked toward the door without meeting their eyes. “See your sister doesn’t stare at the wall all night, Diana—you must get her into bed somehow,” she added as she passed through the door.

They listened to the creak of the stairs above them as their mother retreated to her own room. Diana closed her eyes and exhaled. She was exhausted, but among the many things she could no longer imagine was sleep. She guessed Elizabeth couldn’t, either. When she opened her eyes, she
saw that her sister was looking right at her, and there was something new in her expression. Diana blinked and then, when she saw that the new intensity had not faded, she went to Elizabeth and sank down on the rough wood planks beside her and leaned against her lap. She threw her arms up around her sister’s waist.

Elizabeth’s face, which had still been touched by the sun when she arrived in New York, had now gone entirely white. She was so lacking in strength that it seemed a moderate gust could have blown her away. There was nothing to say, Diana knew, but she felt that if she clung to her, then that human warmth might bring her a kind of comfort. She closed her eyes and tightened her embrace.

They sat like that for a while, and then Elizabeth said, “Did you really love Henry?”

Diana was so surprised to hear her sister speak a full sentence that she did not at first realize what was being asked.

“Did you love him the way I loved Will?” she asked.

The younger Holland sister would not have guessed that these questions, at the slightest examination, made her heart flutter and yearn, or that the idea of Henry, once it was in her thoughts, made her not angry or despondent but instead full of an undeniable desire. This longing was the first emotion she had been able to feel since she had heard about the awful thing that had happened to Will. She knew if she could satisfy
that feeling in any way, no matter what it did to her dignity, she would.

Diana closed her eyes and nodded, trying to keep from crying again. “Yes,” she said at last.

Elizabeth brought her hand to Diana’s hair and smoothed it with a slow steadiness. The younger girl had never felt so akin to her sister in all her life.

“Then we’re going to get him back for you,” Elizabeth whispered as she bent to fully return her younger sister’s embrace.

Outside, the world was quiet and dark. There was a new snow on the ground, but everyone in Gramercy, and up Fifth Avenue, and downtown, where leisure and comfort were not such givens, was inside by now. The New Year had come, but nothing in it seemed even remotely real.