Splendor: A Luxe Novel (22 page)

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Teddy seemed pained by this news. “I wish I could see her.”

“Oh, but you should.” They were moving away from the grave, gravel and dirt scattering underfoot, and Diana was regaining some of her exuberance, despite the sad day. “It was curious—she didn’t say a word to me the whole time I sat with her, but then when I was getting ready to leave she said your name. I thought I had misheard, but then she instructed me, as clear as day, to get her Teddy Cutting.”

“But I couldn’t, it would be so improper to visit her in her condition, and—”

“Teddy,” she interrupted. They were coming up a flight of stone steps that were rather worse for wear, and he supported Diana as she stepped ahead. All around them women were whispering about her, saying that she would be ruined by what she had done, hoping that it would come true so that they could have a little entertainment to twitter over in their identical drawing rooms, which were all decorated in the same self-important colors and littered with the same useless objects, made twice as useless for having been gilded on every surface. “Don’t be ridiculous. You are her friend, and if you are her good friend, you will visit her when she is ill, no matter what anybody thinks.” They had come onto the street, where the carriages waited, and for a moment he fixed those sad gray eyes on Diana and considered what she had said. “Thank you for that,” he said after a while. There was something chastised and yet hopeful in his face now. “You are right, of course. Can I offer you a ride home?”

Up ahead, the Schoonmakers had already pulled away. The bagpipes wailed on by the newly placed headstone, and further off, boats made their way down the Hudson. Nobody else was going to drive her, she realized, and anyway there was solace in the polite company of Henry’s best friend, who at various points had played witting and unwitting supporting roles in their romance. In any event, he was already guiding her to his coach, much to the disdain of the hateful hens presently deriving disgust and fascination from what they imagined had occurred between Diana Holland and Henry Schoonmaker.

Twenty Eight

The living are made of nothing but flaws. The dead, with each passing day in the afterlife, become more and more impeccable to those who remain earthbound.

——MAEVE DE JONG, LOVE AND OTHER FOLLIES OF

THE GREAT FAMILIES OF OLD NEW YORK

THE REVEREND’S DRONING HAD CEASED AND THE bagpipes had picked up. Henry’s eyes went skyward. The air was full of life, but he felt washed out inside and unsure what emotion belonged there.

The crystalline blue above and delicate green of the leaves looked all wrong to him, as did the rich earth file://C:\Documents and Settings\nickunj\Desktop\book.html 10/28/2009

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he’d just helped to shovel over the body of his father. The old man had always seemed so frightfully imposing to Henry—from the time he was a motherless boy hiding behind his governesses’ skirts until the day Schoonmaker the elder had insisted his son marry Elizabeth Holland or be disinherited. Now the father was powerless; he would soon be dust. They had never been close, and Henry knew that if anything he should feel as though an oppressive winter garment had suddenly been removed from his shoulders. But as he stood there, blinking at all those sympathetic faces, he began to feel that the summer sunlight was, bizarrely, rather cold.

A few days before, he had longed for Paris. Today he would have given anything to be there already, sleeping in Diana’s arms in some garret room where no one would think to search for him.

When he saw her, it required everything he had not to halt the Schoonmaker family’s ascent and go bury his face against her breast. She was standing there, petite and beautiful, her face even more rosy and gorgeous than usual against the black crepe dress she wore. A black ribbon, which held her hat in place, made a dramatic line under her small, pointed chin. Those soft brown eyes, protected by thickets of lashes, stared into his until he almost couldn’t bear it.

“It’s time to go,” said Penelope, at his side. She wore a fitted black dress and a hat of gleaming feathers, and yet she had been surprisingly subdued and dutiful all day. Henry glanced over at his best friend, Teddy Cutting, who was standing with the other pallbearers a little way off. This was one fact that Henry felt unalloyed gratitude for—that good old Teddy should have returned to New York just then. Later they would have a drink and set things right. Now, with a nod, he communicated to his friend that his mistress needed company, and then he took his stepmother’s arm, and began to move up the hill with the others.

In a few moments he was accepting a final round of condolences from various business associates of his father, loitering by the family coach, who he, in truth, had difficulty distinguishing from one another.

“Henry,” Isabelle wailed, once they were situated in the coach. She blew her nose loudly into a black handkerchief. “Whatever will we do now?”

The horses were urged into motion; soon they would be making the long trip downtown via Broadway.

He glanced behind him over his shoulder, through the small window in the back, at the hordes paying their last respects, and at the river, which glittered reflecting the afternoon sun. He had no idea what she should do now, and yet a strange voice—unfamiliar to him, and yet decidedly emanating from his own throat—said, “We are Schoonmakers. We will carry on.” To his left, from Penelope’s general direction, came a barely audible snort. His sister, Prudence, sitting across, gave him an aggrieved and skeptical look.

“He was a man,” Isabelle went on, in the broken, awed voice of eulogy. “A great man. He was too good.” Henry’s dark eyes glanced to his right, where his stepmother sat amidst an abundance of black crepe, her complexion gone pale as never before, her girlish yellow curls invisible under her hat and veil. Nobody had ever called his father too good, even without the heavy emphasis on the intensifier, not even when he was a child. He was surprised by the thought that perhaps Isabelle, who was after all a second wife of only a few years, who had not borne her husband any children, felt that her position in the family was vulnerable. There was something profoundly stricken in her aspect, and he decided after a moment’s reflection that it was more likely that she felt guilt for her romantic antics in the months before she became a widow.

Then her hat came off, and he realized for the first time how bizarre the heart is. For he could see, in her red eyes and ghostly pallor, that amongst whatever other emotions, she had, once upon a time, loved him, and that the memory of that lost affection would haunt her forever. “Oh, Henry, you must carry on. He had so many hopes for you. He talked of how his Henry was a Harvard man and how he would take over the family business and what a charmer he was”—here, Penelope snorted again, although the older Mrs.

Schoonmaker paid her no mind—“and what a good representative of the family he would be, once he grew out of his wild stage.”

The carriage hit a bump in the road, and all four were jostled. Isabelle was thrown forward and then back against Henry, who could not have felt more shock if the carriage itself had sprouted wings and taken flight. He couldn’t remember a time when he was not painfully aware of his father’s dim view of his louche lifestyle, nor could he recall the old man offering him a single encouraging word. His stepmother, file://C:\Documents and Settings\nickunj\Desktop\book.html 10/28/2009

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meanwhile, had rested her head against the breast of his black coat. “You will see,” she went on, her tears beginning to soak through to his shirt. “He was hard on you so that you could be great too, and you will learn in time that he was always right.”

Henry placed a hand on her tremulous shoulder, and tried to sit up, straight and powerful, as though he were trying on the part of the son his father had always wanted.

Twenty Nine

Is it true that one of those sons of top-drawer Manhattan, who went very publicly to enlist, was not in the Philippines at all, as had been reported? If so, what was he doing, and is his wife now wondering what kind of man she really married?

——FROM CITÉ CHATTER, WEDNESDAY, JULY 18, 1900

THE RIDE BACK TO THE SCHOONMAKER MANSION on Fifth was interminable, and nobody spoke except Isabelle, whose words were almost indecipherable through her sobbing. It was a rather maudlin and over the top display, in her stepdaughter-in-law’s opinion, and had entirely to do with the fact that the young widow had spent the afternoon of her husband’s demise flirting with that letch of a painter Lispenard Bradley. But she had nothing to worry about—for dead husbands could not, after all, seek divorces. Henry could, as Penelope was painfully aware, and he no longer had the rather forceful disapproval of his father to dissuade him from such a scandalous course. William Schoonmaker would have kept Henry in line, but now Henry was the head of the household, and could be as improper as he liked. Already his intention of leaving his wife, which he had apparently stated quite plainly just before the old man croaked, had become a story and made the rounds. If Penelope had known her father-in-law was in such poor health, she certainly would have thought twice about lingering in the hall so long with the prince of Bavaria pushing amorously against her.

As there was no longer any way of correcting that, she had tried today to play the good wife. This was not a coveted role for her. Even when she had been in love with Henry, the idea of seeing that his suits were pressed and that the maids were bringing him fresh coffee and that someone was seeing to his correspondence bored her. It was a little insulting now, and made her feel menial, second rate, which she absolutely was not. But what would she be if she was stripped of the title Mrs. Henry Schoonmaker, when she had not even been married a year, when there were no children to tie her to the family? Her dearly won position in the social firmament would evaporate as surely as William Schoonmaker’s last breath.

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husband’s side. She did have that. They would remember, later, if Henry persisted in making his affair with the Holland girl public. But if Penelope was to seal a sympathetic impression of herself in their minds, she was going to have to keep up the act. How difficult this might prove to be did not fully occur to her until they had stepped down from the coach, and she heard her name being called out.

“Yes,” she turned. The day was fading, and it was difficult to determine who had spoken.

“Mrs. Schoonmaker, over here.” By then she recognized the voice, and in the following moment she saw Prince Frederick, waiting inside a fashionable black phaeton with the cover raised up. There was no driver, and he held the reins idly in his large, gloved hand as though he might, at any second, take off.

She glanced behind her, hoping nobody had yet noticed the visitor, but Henry had already traveled some distance up the steep limestone steps of his grand family home, with his stepmother leaning heavily against him.

She kept her eyes on the ground as she approached. “You should not have come today,” she said, and then flicked back her lashes suddenly, so that despite her shy posture, her blue eyes would be revealed with sudden drama.

“No…” He was smiling at her, again, in that impossibly subtle, urbane manner he had. “But I couldn’t help myself. Anyway, you are the Mrs. Schoonmaker now, and I expect you need a drink.”

“I do,” she replied, letting him see what an effort it was for her not to return his smile. “How very clever.”

“Why don’t I escort you to dinner then? Take it from me, your husband will be busy with paperwork this evening, and I think he would appreciate my showing you a good time.” Penelope raised an eyebrow and pretended to mull his offer. The tangerine light of an advanced day was especially lovely on the defined jaw of her royal friend. His eyes darted up toward the Schoonmaker house, where the windows had been draped in black, and then back at her. The tactical matron in her knew she should stay inside and tally condolence letters, but then Henry had not said two words to her over the entire day, and the part of her that was an angry, snubbed girl of eighteen overwhelmed the rest.

“All right—if you insist. But know it is against my better judgment, and only because you are here in our country for such a devastatingly short time. Only, wait a little, will you? I hate these black clothes.” The prince rested his elbow on the polished side of the coach and leaned forward to reply, in a serious voice she had never previously known him to employ, “I would wait for you forever.” She winked and turned to follow her husband. She was already inside by the time she realized how completely this last comment had lifted her mood.

In the late afternoon, Penelope had hoped Henry wouldn’t notice as she slipped out of the house dressed in elaborately draped carnelian organdy and a pearl-encrusted aigrette. By the time she was being swept across the dance floor of Sherry’s by a certain strapping royal, however, this was no longer among her concerns. Because, as her companion had pointed out a few times already, only a fool would ignore so incandescent a wife, and she wouldn’t at all have minded if Henry had had to watch, for a few moments anyway, the appreciative glances Frederick kept bestowing on her bare shoulders and lean form.

Indeed, everyone was staring at her, and as Frederick rested his hand on the small of her back, she felt the thrill of a low murmur circling the room and the sensation of being talked of once again. He was wearing black tails and his hair was slicked—he looked like Henry, like any very handsome gentleman of the upper class, except that there seemed to be more of him than her husband, and he was focused on her with such delightful intensity. She knew they made a very pretty picture. Long before she had played the ingénue in order to marry into one of the oldest and best families in New York, she had created minor stirs like this one for sport. It felt good to do it again, good to be moved about on the floor by such a nicely put-together gentleman. But then, when the music stopped, she saw that even the divorcée Lucy Carr did not bother to hide her disgust.