Rumors (4 page)

H
ENRY SCHOONMAKER STOOD AT THE INTERSECTION
of two pinched little streets in the old part of town and wondered how soon he could reasonably escape from his father’s parade. The carriage from which Penelope Hayes had winked at him had disappeared—it had been heading in the direction of the East River, though its final destination was almost certainly Fifth Avenue, where she lived. Henry’s family lived along that string of stocky mansions as well, although their arrival, on the Avenue and in New York society, predated the Hayeses’ by many years. But that hardly seemed to matter now. No one particularly cared anymore from where, or when, the Hayeses had come. Penelope had even been able to absent herself from the parade early while maintaining the appearance of some saintly champion of the poor. She was clever—Henry had to admire her for that.

“What a fine young lady Miss Hayes is turning out to be,” Henry’s father, William Sackhouse Schoonmaker, said as he proceeded through the intersection. Henry watched from
behind as his father strode purposefully across the bricked street. “It was so good of her to partake in our little charity, and to stay as long as she did.”

“And you know how she must tire so,” his wife, Isabelle, put in. At twenty-five, she was only five years older than Henry himself, and she spoke in a high, girlish voice that made her sound perennially giddy. She wore an ocelot coat and a hat that was top-heavy with silk roses and stuffed sparrows, and even with a firm grasp on her husband’s arm she still managed to bounce as she walked. “As all ladies do.”

“Young Miss Hayes was changed forever, as we all were,” Mr. Schoonmaker went on, to the
New York World
reporter who had been trailing along at his other elbow and dutifully writing down his thoughts all afternoon, “by the loss of Miss Holland. You see how transformed my son is.”

Both men turned to look at Henry, who was following a few paces behind. He wore a top hat and a black knee-length coat that fit his slim frame well. For while the death of Elizabeth Holland had indeed taken a profound toll on his previously carefree attitude toward life, he had not been so truly transformed as to have given up caring what he wore.

“You see,” he heard his father say as he looked away from his son. “He is inconsolable. The current mayor’s handling of Elizabeth’s death is of course chief among the reasons I intend to challenge him.”

The elder Schoonmaker went on, but Henry had heard the speech many times before. His father had recently decided, despite his enormous personal wealth and the power it afforded him, that he wanted to play in politics as well. His desire to be mayor of a recently consolidated New York City was one of the reasons that Henry had been compelled to enter into an engagement with Elizabeth Holland in the first place, and it was thus also one of the reasons that she had come to such a tragic end. For Henry had seen his fiancée on the last day of her life, and the image of her—alone and frightened in the middle of a Manhattan sidewalk—had been simple enough to interpret.

She had stood there for a few moments looking into him. They had been engaged only a few weeks at the time and, under pressure from their families, they were to be married in a matter of days. Henry’s behavior during that period was not something he looked back on proudly, although it was one of the few times in his life that he had been completely honest with a girl. Just not the girl he happened to be engaged to. He was not proud, either, of his behavior in the years leading up to his engagement, which had earned him a not undeserved reputation as a cad. Still, he could not bring himself to entirely renounce his behavior the night before he saw Elizabeth on that street corner—the night before she drowned. For that was the night that he had invited her younger sister, Di, to the
Schoonmaker greenhouse. It had been, for him, an uncharacteristically chaste night; she had stayed up whispering to him and kissing him with a sweetness and innocence that could not possibly have survived what happened next. Elizabeth had seen Henry and Diana together the following morning, and he knew from her clear-eyed gaze that she understood what had occurred. That knowledge must have driven her to her death—one did not just
fall
into the river and never return. Henry could not deny that devastating fact.

But Henry did not blame himself alone. He blamed his father, too, which was one of the reasons he could not stomach W. S. Schoonmaker’s talking again of Elizabeth as though she were a martyr to his own political cause. He turned and walked back through the marching band that followed in the parade. Above him were tenements, some of them owned by his father’s company, with their unimaginative façades and ersatz Italianate ornamentation. Those little plaster flourishes, which were always crumbling, depressed Henry beyond reason. He caught an elbow against a trombone, causing a small collision of musicians, and heard the music quaver for a moment. The band must have known who was signing their paychecks, however, and there was not even a mutter of complaint. They were after all wearing uniforms in the Schoonmaker colors of sky blue and gold.

Henry kept on, through the band, with all its ear-shattering
horns, through the clutch of ladies that followed, in their white gloves and weighty hats. He heard the ladies saying his name and knew that they had turned to look at the spectacle of the young man moving downtown, against the traffic of his own father’s event. He would hear about it later, of course. His father was fond of threatening to disown him if he did not behave as a future mayor’s son should, although these threats had mostly abated since his father had realized that he might plausibly base his campaign on the current mayor’s mishandling of a debutante’s death and the spectacle of his own son’s grief.

“Schoonmaker!”

Henry’s eyes moved across the faces of the people massed on the sidewalk and the paraders all around him until his gaze settled, happily, on the face of his old friend Teddy Cutting. Next to Teddy was his younger sister, Alice, who was fair like her brother, with the same gray eyes, which were now focused shyly on the ground. Henry had once kissed her in the garden of the Cuttings’ Newport cottage, and she hadn’t been able to look at him straight since. She was the youngest of Teddy’s sisters, Henry believed, although he could never be sure, as Teddy was the only son among several siblings. To Henry this had always been telling: Teddy was the kind of man who had too many sisters.

“Miss Cutting,” Henry said, taking her gloved hand and kissing it. “It is always a pleasure to see you.”

Teddy gave him a warning look. “You look like you’ve had about enough.”

Henry smiled with his characteristic charm at both siblings, and said, “I’m full to the gills.”

“Let’s go, then.” Teddy reached out and put a hand on Henry’s shoulder. He had been one of Henry’s chief sympathizers since the unfortunate events of October. “I know of a lunchroom near here.”

They said good-bye to Alice, who joined a group of young women, and then they moved into the crowd of common people with their faces lowered. The shininess of Henry’s black top hat and the superb cut of his wool coat would have given them away as members of the city’s elite, as would the rich brown check of Teddy’s vicuna jacket, or the stamp of the Union Square milliner on his brown bowler. Still, they made no eye contact with the people in the crowd, and when they emerged onto a side street they hailed the first hackney they saw.

Teddy’s lunchroom was clean and bright, with a floor of small white octagonal tiles and convex mirrors lining the walls. They sat at a small round table made of sturdy dark wood, and they ordered the German beers that arrived in tall glasses with wedges of lemon. Henry felt quiet after several very public hours, and he was grateful that his friend waited to speak until after they had each sipped.

“How are you bearing it?” Teddy asked, placing his glass back on the table. He had taken off his hat, and his blond hair was brushed neatly to the side. At Henry’s wary smile he went on. “I can barely listen to your father’s speeches, and I’m not even related to him. I mean, he hardly knew Elizabeth and then to use her death that way, for political purposes—” Teddy broke off, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Let’s not talk about that.” Henry took a long pull of his beer and then found that he didn’t feel quite so dark anymore. “It’s all hypocrisy and misery if we go that route, and who wants that?”

“Fair enough,” Teddy said, returning his smile. “We’ll just be happy we’re free of ridiculous parades then, and be done with it.”

They clinked their glasses and drank, and in the brief silence that followed, Henry found himself wondering how to open a topic that that they had discussed only briefly more than two months before.

“You are really going to have to find a way to put Alice at ease,” Teddy offered before Henry could speak. He was trying to give Henry a disapproving look, but he couldn’t help a waver of a smile that his friend’s old effect was still at work even in gloomy times. “She gets quiet every time she sees you.”

“Your sister’s too good for me,” Henry replied with a
laugh. “She’ll see that soon enough, and the problem will be solved.”

“She won’t want to hear it,” Teddy answered heartily, “but I can’t say I disagree with you.”

Henry paused to drink, and when he placed his beer back on the table he met Teddy’s gray eyes. “You know, my official mourning period is almost over.”

“I know. Thank God.” Teddy drank, and shook his head. “It’s been dull out in the world without you.”

“We have fun.”

“Yes.” Teddy’s eyes shifted and a memory passed in them. “We’ll have a dinner at Sherry’s, or maybe a hunting party up in Tuxedo.”

Henry twirled his top hat in his lap. “I think I’m going to go to the season’s opening at the opera. Even my father likes the idea—the better to drive home his point about Van Wyck’s poor handling of Elizabeth’s death, when there are sure to be newspaper people around. It’s
Roméo et Juliette,
you know.”

“Well, we’ll have to plan something for afterward, then.”

“Yes.” Henry looked at his hat and began to twirl it the other way. He brought his eyes back up to Teddy’s and returned to the subject he’d so wanted to raise. “There’s something else.”

Teddy had a fair and distinguished brow, and it rose now, ever so subtly.

“At some point, my father will want me to start thinking about another engagement….” Henry paused to clear his throat. “And the girl I find myself thinking about is Diana Holland.”

Their glasses were empty, and one of the waiters in long white aprons appeared to remove them. Teddy asked the man to bring more, and then turned a pained but stern expression on his friend. Henry rarely thought of Teddy as older than himself, but he was reminded of the two years that separated them now.

“That cannot be.” Teddy kept his voice low and looked around to see that nobody had heard.

“But
why
?” Henry could not hide the exasperation in his voice. “You know Elizabeth was even less interested in me than I was in her. All those rumors about their money, about it being gone—that must have been the reason she accepted my proposal. She couldn’t even bring herself to smile at me. And Diana will be in just the same position as her sister, and, unlike her sister, she has a chance of being happy with me. I would be happy with
her
.”

“You know society will not allow it.”

Henry shook his head and cast his eyes about the busy lunchroom. “They will forget.”

“I don’t want to know what has happened between you and the younger Miss Holland.” Teddy paused as their
drinks were delivered, and took a quick sip before continuing. “But if you really care for her, and you seem to, then you must stop being so stupid. Her sister was your fiancée, and she has died under circumstances that none of us begin to understand. Circumstances that you yourself suggested might have something to do with her impending nuptials. Diana may be infatuated with you now, but when she grows up, when she understands more about death and family, when she understands how much she has betrayed Elizabeth by taking up with her former fiancé, it will destroy her. And you know perfectly well how often people will remind her. Society does
not
forget.”

Henry was taking long sips of his beer and trying not to be angry with his friend for speaking negatively of an imagined future that he had promised himself indulgently during the worst moments of the last few months. He had sat across from Diana in her family’s parlor during those first weeks of mourning and imagined the time when she would meet his eyes again, and that eventually all the misery would pass and they could really be together. Diana was the only girl he’d ever met who inspired him to imagine himself as a married man.

“She will come to hate herself, and you too.” Teddy shook his head.

For some reason this brought Elizabeth’s pitiable visage
on the morning of her death back into Henry’s mind’s eye, and he began to think of the part his skirt-chasing—however ardent—had played in what she had done next. His fiancée had then seen him with her little sister; perhaps that had been the single event in ending a bright girl’s will to live.

“Let’s go,” Teddy said gently.

Henry finished his beer, and he placed a bill on the table. He had brought the topic up to Teddy once before and subsequently longed to have said nothing. There wasn’t a thing left to say now.

In the past Henry had always ignored his friend’s advice at his own peril, but still he could not give up the picture of Diana he kept in his mind. Even as he put a resigned sort of smile on his face and placed his hat on his head, he could not help but think of her loose curls and fresh skin, of a gorgeous recklessness that perfectly matched his own.