Envy: A Luxe Novel Part 14

"That you might have a job for me."

The woman's painted red brows soared at that. "Oh-ho? And why would I give you that?"

The muscles of Carolina's face loosened in surprise. She had imagined that the difficult part would be bringing herself to ask for the job-that actually acquiring it should demand more from her was quite a shock. "This is a business, isn't it?" Carolina asked lamely.

"Yes, it is," Madame Fitzgerald snapped back. She let her eyes go all the way up and down Carolina's fine fur coat. "Not a shelter for high-and-mighty types who've bit off more than they can chew. What would you do anyway? Sit in the window?"

"No, I...I...can sew." She took a faltering step forward. She clutched at her coat, but suddenly wanted to show her old self, too. "This coat was a gift from a friend of mine, but it doesn't mean anything. I was for many years a lady's maid for the"-here Carolina's throat dried up, but she forced herself to say the name-"Holland family."

"Were you, now?" Madame Fitzgerald's earlier irritation subsided as she savored this amusing revelation.

"Yes." Carolina marched on through her humiliation. "Until this last fall."

"Well"-the woman shrugged, coming around a table and toward the door-"show me how you work, then."

"All right." Carolina tried to put on an eager smile, and placed her suitcase on the floor. She stepped forward, but was stopped by the expression on Madame Fitzgerald's face.

"Take that coat off."

Carolina involuntarily brought her hands up to her chest. She thought first of turning on her heel, and second of the rat that had run across her foot. Slowly, reluctantly, still protesting in her heart, Carolina removed the coat and hung it on the stand by the door. Then she brushed her hands across her lap and tried to steel herself for what was coming next. Madame Fitzgerald gestured through the rows of girls at worktables. There was both envy and animosity in the way they observed the former maid with the coat that would have cost any one of them a year's wages. Now that she was on the other side of the window, Carolina saw the shade under their eyes and the roughness of their fingertips, but still she wanted to be one of them. Just for a night.

She sat where Madame Fitzgerald pointed, and took a breath of hot, dry air. The proprietress brought a skirt made out of ivory material and dropped it in Carolina's lap. There was something terrible about the fabric, far worse than anything she would have imagined herself wearing, or even touching, again-it seemed to be sloughing off in rough bits all over her.

"Hem that."

"What?" Carolina's thoughts had been diverted for a moment to a very different dress of pale gold with a scalloped and embroidered hem that Longhorn had had made especially for her. She'd worn it that night at Sherry's, when being the inferior of a Portia Tilt had been so impossible to her....

"Hem it." Madame Fitzgerald leaned back and somehow managed to smile by turning down the corners of her mouth. "It's a test, sugarplum."

Carolina nodded. She removed her gloves, pushed back her sleeves, cleared her throat, and reached for the skirt. She brought it close up and ran her fingers across the rough, unfinished bottom. The skirt had been let out, just like her sister Claire's hand-me-downs used to be let out for her. She was too tall and grew out of things too quickly, always needing more length, more fabric, more everything. Carolina looked up briefly at the proprietress, as though to make sure that she was supposed to do what she thought she was supposed to do, and that using one of the machines would not be good enough, and then she took up a needle from the pincus.h.i.+on on the table and threaded it.

After a few careful st.i.tches, Madame Fitzgerald moved away. She peered over the shoulders of the other girls, but kept an eye on Carolina, too, who was trying to keep her head down as she tentatively pressed the needle through the fabric. This kind of work made her chest feel tight, and her shoulders grew tense with the idea of doing so much for so little.

She thought for some reason of Will-poor Will, who had suffered so, and who never even got to go to Sherry's, or the opera, or to wear clothing that had been made especially to fit his body. She thought about him and all the injustices of his life and of her own, all the foolish events that had brought her here, and she went on making st.i.tches, although with less care each time.

A little bell rang and Carolina glanced up from her work to see the door open again. A man had come inside, the high lapels of his coat obscuring his face but not his light brown hair, which he had grown overlong. She felt her lungs swell with air and her hands flutter with the thought that it might be Leland. That it was him. He had come back for her-he had found her against improbable odds. She smiled and her freckled skin stretched taut over the cheekbones. Then Madame Fitzgerald made a happy, guttural sound and went over to take his coat. She removed it, and then the young man turned his face to survey the room. Though he was tall and handsome and wore his hair in the same way, he was not Leland.

The proprietress kissed the man on the cheek, and it was clear that they were from the same stock-he had her face, the way a son or nephew might. Before Carolina's disappointment occurred to her, she began to feel the pain.

"Oh!" she said out loud.

Several of the girls turned to look at her, and then Madame Fitzgerald did, as well. Carolina looked down, and saw how she had jammed the needle into her thumb, just under the nail. For a minute there was only the stunned hurt, but now the blood had begun to flow, across the skin and onto the unfinished skirt.

"You stupid girl!" Madame Fitzgerald crossed to where she was and jerked the garment away from Carolina, who could only go on staring at her wounded finger. The older woman grabbed her hand and roughly pulled the needle from the skin where it was lodged. "Now look what you've done," she said, in an only slightly less angry tone.

Indeed, the skirt was now marked with her blood, and though Carolina would have liked to point out that the skirt wasn't really worth wearing anyway, she knew that that logic would be lost on present company. She stood up with what pride remained and pulled on her gloves, first one and then the other. The second began to soak up the blood. Then she crossed through the rows of rabid-eyed and underfed girls, slipped her coat over her shoulders, and gave a final look at the proprietress and the young man at her side. Their faces were full of contempt. When Carolina could look at them no more, she went out into the night.

She imagined how it might appear in print-CAROLINA BROAD WALKS THE DARKENED STREETS-although she no longer felt worthy of that name. It seemed to her that everything had gone numb, and that the sensations of her body were terribly remote. She'd lost feeling in her fingers, and soon she forgot about her toes. Then, later, when she sank into a doorframe, and huddled in her coat, and laid her ear against her shoulder, it was as though she were some other girl this was all happening to-perhaps Lina Broud-and that Carolina, whoever that was, could only watch from afar.

Forty.

Mothers write all the time to thank me, many of whom benefited from my wisdom before they were matrons. It is one of the great joys of my life. Still, some girls never learn, and I hear the stories of their mistakes with even greater chagrin as I grow older....

-MRS. HAMILTON W. BREEDFELT, COLLECTED COLUMNS ON RAISING YOUNG LADIES OF CHARACTER, 1899 F AR NORTH ON FIFTH AVENUE, ALMOST TO THE park, the rain had begun to fall. It came softly at first, blown at an angle by the wind, but it was soon a true downpour; Diana listened to it beat a tattoo against the walk. Inside the Hayes mansion another bottle of champagne had been opened, although nearly everyone within was already thoroughly sauced. Henry Schoonmaker was-he drooped on a couch while his new wife smiled at his side-and so was his father, who had initiated the baccha.n.a.l. He had been dancing with Edith Holland, who had had not a few drinks herself, and was reminding those with long memories of the girl she used to be, and of an episode from the seventies when certain members of society believed for the first time that there might be a Holland-Schoonmaker alliance in the works. Meanwhile, his second wife, Isabelle, spoke quietly to Abelard Gore, whose wife had attended some other engagement that night, and Prudie Schoonmaker went on chatting-it seemed that she had talked more that one evening than she had over her entire life-with the painter Lispenard Bradley, who kept glancing in Isabelle's direction. Edith's niece Diana was sitting on a divan in the corner, carelessly holding a champagne gla.s.s, and when the waiter came by with the bottle, she extended her arm to have it filled up.

Everyone in the room was drunk, but no matter what she did, Diana could not seem to join them. She wanted to feel anything but the seething hurt that Henry had dealt her, but champagne was of no use. It was as though she'd been taken captive by some mad scientist who was conducting an epic experiment to doc.u.ment the furthest, Antarctic reaches of pain. He had given Henry a knife, and told him to twist it deeper, and somewhere, behind one of these mirrors, he watched to see how the sensation played out on Diana's fragile face. Occasionally he would add mitigating factors, only to override them with more vicious experiments. Surely this-realizing what a colossal lie it had been that Henry didn't sleep with his wife, that in fact they would soon be a happy family of three-was the most pain he could cause her. Although, Diana reflected as she put the champagne flute to her mouth, she had thought exactly that several times before, and here she was again in uncharted waters of anguish.

"There are good paintings in the galleries, is that right?" she said to the man sitting beside her, Grayson Hayes, who she knew full well had been instructed by his sister to show her how charming he could be and whom she had tried to use to make Henry jealous and then to forget Henry, neither time with very effective results. Poor Grayson-the p.a.w.n in two losing games. She did not ask about the galleries in a flirtatious way or a suggestive way or a cagey way. She asked without guile, except in the sense that it was not so much a question as a request to be taken far from the smoking room, which was now so purple with joy.

"Yes," he replied, hearing her request clearly and rising to offer his hand.

She rested her palm just lightly on his, and allowed him to lead as they exited. The party had now reached such a pitch that no one noticed the absence of these two, and they strode through the halls of a house that could have fit ten of the Hollands' home inside of it. If Diana had thought that leaving the room where Henry and his wife were celebrating their happiness would soothe her, she was finding herself very wrong now. Her small frame was still trembling with the knowledge of what the Schoonmakers' life together was-what it must have always been, even while she'd imagined all the different ways that Henry might truly, secretly belong to her. He had taken advantage of her, or at least he had intended to. She tried to feel lucky that she had discovered the truth so soon, but her ability to see silver linings had been thoroughly damaged by this last shock.

"The paintings in this gallery are particularly nice."

They had entered a dimly lit room, and Grayson raised a candle, which he had acquired somewhere on their walk, although Diana found herself less than interested in examining the canvases.

"Miss Diana, I am glad we are alone. I've been wanting to tell you how often over the last week I have found myself thinking about you."

She turned to Grayson, and found that his face looked not only handsome, which of course it always did, but open and earnest. That was a surprise. "Is your interest in me sincere, or is it some scheme of your sister's?" she asked in a plain, quiet voice.

"My interest-and that word doesn't do it justice-is beyond sincere. Now. Please don't make me tell you how it began, but believe me when I say that doesn't matter anymore." Grayson reached forward to tuck a curl behind her ear, and his eyes stared into hers with an adoration that she could not possibly match. She saw that his aim was true, or that he was at least intent on making her believe that. But could she ever trust herself to know the difference?

"Tell me why." After Henry's treatment of her, she wasn't sure that men could honestly love women, but she wanted to believe it. She wanted to be told pretty things, and for the frightening clip of her heart to slow to something more reasonable.

"Well"-Grayson laughed softly-"because you are beautiful and curious and because you like to go places and feel life. Because I feel free with you, and unbound from all the stupid constraints of my dull self."

"Oh." Diana moved backward against the wall. She wondered if Henry had ever felt that way-maybe at the beginning, before he'd realized how easily she could be manipulated? But there was Henry again, invading her thoughts, twisting the knife, and she groaned a little without meaning to.

Grayson put a hand on her waist gently.

"Do you think you'll go on feeling those things?" she asked after a pause.

He took a breath. "I can't imagine stopping."

She opened her eyes, but did not meet his before blowing out the candle. Then she reached for him, placing her hands on his s.h.i.+rt and shoulders and pulling him nearer. The bra.s.s holder clattered to the ground. She could feel his breathing against her neck, and decided that she liked it. She had never imagined being touched by someone other than Henry, but she found in the event that close proximity to another's body made the knife wounds somewhat less excruciating. She opened her mouth and brought it up to Grayson's.

"I've never felt so much for a woman before," Grayson said, when, after a minute, he pulled back from her. "I find that I want to be with you always and-"

Diana was nodding along with him, but she didn't want to hear more. She wanted to be kissed again until the kissing subsumed all her other feelings. She put the crown of her head against the wallpaper, inviting him to kiss the skin of her throat. There was a hesitance at first, but then he did bend to put his lips there, before moving again to her mouth, where he kissed her lightly over and over. She wrapped her arms around his neck, spreading her fingers just below his hairline. She had nearly forgotten the hour, or the people they had left behind in the other room, when Grayson protested again.

"Do you think they will miss us?" He was panting a little.

Diana tried to catch her breath. "Not yet," she answered. Grayson blinked at her-perhaps he was trying to determine how well she knew her own desires. In the dark, he looked just like Henry, or close enough.

"Miss Di," he went on sweetly, "I don't want to seduce you into..."

He trailed off as Diana stared at him. She had been thinking of the way Henry used to be able to gaze at her from across the room and make her feel that he was at her side drawing his fingertips across her skin. Still the memory made her weak. At that moment, with the shouts of the Schoonmaker party still faintly audible off in the next wing, with the rain falling against the elaborate eaves and sleep still too far away, it seemed that only one thing might possibly make her stop thinking of what Henry had done to her. She raised her finger and pressed it across his lips, urging quiet.

"Please," she whispered.

Then he hoisted her up, so that she was rested against the top of the oak wainscoting. Her pale green skirt and white crinoline were all around them, like a wave breaking against a jetty, and she felt her whole self b.u.t.ter flying open. He bent to press his mouth to her shoulders, and she discovered that that felt nice. His arms were under her, holding her aloft, and she found she liked that, too. Then she pressed back against him, knowing full well that she would give him all, willing him to take her down into some abyss of forgetting.

She had lost all sense of herself, and turned away from Grayson so that he might more easily bury his lips against her neck, when she saw a figure in the umber halo of the doorframe. Was it Henry, or did she only imagine him everywhere? Then the figure was gone, and she knew she would never have anything quite so sweet and new and pure as what she'd had with Henry again.

Forty One Men's reaction to the news that they are to be first-time fathers is often inadequate, if only out of nervousness; if they are wise, they will look to their own fathers, who have had plenty of time to get used to the idea, for cues.

-MAEVE DE JONG, LOVE AND OTHER FOLLIES OF THE GREAT FAMILIES OF OLD NEW YORK "W HAT A JOY AN EXPANDING FAMILY IS," THE elder Mr. Schoonmaker declared as his heavy body sank back into his chair. He had, for the moment, grown tired of raising his gla.s.s in celebration of his son and daughter-in-law and their family manque. It was a lucky thing for Penelope, who must be weary-Henry could only a.s.sume-of trying so arduously to blush whenever his father referenced her condition. It was a lucky thing for him, too, as there was no expression he even knew to attempt. At the head of the table, Penelope's father stared, stultified, into his dessert wine. On the other end, her mother was beside herself with giggles, and winked at anyone who so much as glanced in her direction. The other guests went along, gamely enough, with the calls for more champagne and every time a greater need for congratulation and excitement.

"That was lovely," Richmond Hayes offered halfheartedly as the waiters descended on the oak-paneled dining room to remove the final course. The guests paused in their chatter and looked over at the man of the house, for even they knew there would be more. Henry wondered if they were as exhausted by it all as he was. But everyone likes a party, especially when it is already well under way, and their eyes were very bright.

"Mr. Hayes," said Mrs. Hayes, "shouldn't we invite our guests into the smoking room for digestifs?"

The men and women arranged along the long table murmured their approval, and then Richmond Hayes agreed, not altogether convincingly, that it was a good idea. Henry could not bring himself to glance at Diana, who sat across from him only partially obscured by the arrangements of pink begonias. Everyone was pus.h.i.+ng back their chairs and standing. The gentlemen were reaching for the arms of the ladies they had escorted in, somewhat less tipsily, several hours ago.

"Henry, sit by your wife," old Schoonmaker commanded once they had all, somewhat stumblingly, relocated.

Penelope turned to him, from her place on a settee, her eyes as large and trusting as a doe's. It was dizzying, he thought, all the different emotions she could feign. In her pale pink, expertly tailored dress she looked just the part of the young mother who cares for nothing so much as her children, although he could never believe again that she was even partially such a person. Not after the way she had used them long before they were so much as born. He walked around to her and sat at her side, but could not bring himself to meet her gaze.

Hours pa.s.sed like this. At first, Henry rejected the champagne that was poured for him. He'd been sober all week, and he still felt that he should keep himself strong and ready and brave. But then he began to wonder about the slight possibility that Penelope might be telling the truth, and the very notion caused him to demand a drink and down it in a hurry. Then he ordered another and another. When the sounds of the others' voices had grown giddy and loud enough to drown out what Henry had to say, he addressed his wife.

"You can't really be." His voice was hushed and a little slurred, but he managed to focus his black eyes carefully on her and remain hopeful.

"What do you mean, Mr. Schoonmaker?" she returned innocently.

Henry glanced across the room, where women were rearranging their skirts in order to appear to the best advantage of the chandelier light and the waiters were circling with full decanters that he would have liked to have gotten both of his hands on and absconded with to some dark corner. There was a huge, gilt-framed mirror over the fireplace, tipped slightly forward to give a view of the room as though from above. In the far corner of the scene Henry saw his own reflection, in his black slacks and tails, and beside him his wife, in her subtle and artistic dress. For a moment, he saw what they all saw: two perfectly matched, tall, dark, lithe people, too in love to join in the shrieking of all the others. He hated himself for having glimpsed that picture.

"It was only once, a week ago, two-I can't remember." Henry sighed and s.h.i.+fted his jaw. "I don't believe it."

"All right, then." Penelope let her white shoulders rise and fall in careless acknowledgment.

"You're not." For the first time that evening, Henry's dread ebbed.

She rolled back her eyes and let her mouth open slightly. "Well, I'm not completely positively sure that I am." Then she brought her gaze to his. "It's possible, of course."

Henry let out a sigh from the bottom of his chest and shook his head in relief. There was no baby, there was no family. He could leave her after all. It would only take a little longer, and the conversation with his father would be somewhat more awkward. But he could still do as he had planned.

"Oh, Henry, don't be cruel."

Her face had gotten all crumpled, and though he didn't know what she was about, he felt the fears creeping back from the base of his skull.

"I told you how it is," he said carefully.

"But now it's all different!"

"Penny, don't be stupid, you said yourself-"

Penelope looked down at her gloved hands, with their circles of rubies at the wrists, and began to squeeze them together. "I'd be careful whom you call stupid," she said quietly. "For instance, you haven't even considered how it will look when you leave your pregnant wife. It is awfully different now, don't you see?"

"I don't think that lie is leaving this room, my dear." Henry closed his eyes briefly and rubbed his forehead. "After all, what are you going to do in nine months, when there is no baby?"

Penelope moved closer to him, and her eyes drooped down sadly as though what she was about to say had already come to pa.s.s. "Wouldn't that be so much worse?" she went on in a whisper. "If you left your wife because she couldn't carry your first son to full term?"

Henry swallowed hard. He glanced around him, as though the walls and the furniture and even the guests were made of iron. They might as well have been. In a few seconds he realized that they all const.i.tuted a kind of prison. They looked back at him now, smiling, not knowing what their belief had changed them into. They beamed and watched the Henry Schoonmakers, thinking they were trading lovers' secrets. Penelope must have gleaned this too, because she moved forward and into the illusion, bringing her body less than an inch from his, pressing away from the soft cus.h.i.+ons.

"Anyway, I don't think you have much to leave me for," she whispered in his ear. "What do you think your little Di has been up to all this time?"

When she fell back against the armrest she giggled showily in a way that reminded him of the rest of the room, with its jovial din and witless pitch. The air around him had grown smoky and almost too thick to breathe. Everyone was talking at a level that made it impossible to hear any one conversation over another. Henry turned about in his seat, searching for Diana, but saw her nowhere. There was her chaperone-visibly drunk and dancing with his father. He saw the divan where Diana had last been, but it was empty now.

Up above the empty seat was a painting of a man, drawn to scale, in vaguely military dress, riding a horse that had reared up on its hind legs. The horse's hooves clawed the air and his eyes were full of fear and fire; meanwhile, his rider looked proudly, calmly, at some battle down below. Henry would have liked to believe that he was like the rider, but he knew he was now playing the other role. His gaze fell to Penelope, who winked knowingly.

"Don't you wonder where she's run off to?" She smirked, and placed her hands demurely in her lap. "Or they, rather. So do I, especially since my brother told me some very interesting information just before we came into dinner. He told me he loves her."

"Stop it!" Henry wanted to shout-to his wife, to everyone in the room. But he did not. He recalled all the things Grayson had said in the casino about Diana, and what a wild, desperate sort of man he was. Maybe he believed he loved her, and Diana was probably in such a state right now that she might actually believe he did too.

"Excuse me," Henry said.

His body felt dull, and it moved too slowly through the halls of his family-in-law's home. He used to know his way around there, for reasons he no longer liked to acknowledge. His heart beat and his feet carried him forward without any conscious control. All he knew was that he had to find Diana, which he did, eventually, but then he saw that it was too late.

He put his hand against the doorframe of that darkened room and witnessed for several horrific seconds the way Diana's body was entangled with Grayson's. He might have cried out, but he had no breath. It was he who had brought both of them here, to a point from which there was no returning, and it would only be foolish noise if he yelled at anyone but himself. There was nothing for him to do but stumble away with the full knowledge that all his planning and heroics were no more than half-formed thoughts dying in the mind.

Forty Two There is in this city, behind a brownstone facade like any other, a mistress of abominations who deals in powders for immoral girls, and who gives operations when those powders fail....

-REVEREND NEEDLE HOUSE, SERMONS FOR OUR TIMES E LIZABETH WENT LATE AT NIGHT, AS HER MOTHER had told her to do. She had memorized the address-respectable, off Was.h.i.+ngton Square, a town house like its neighbors, although the light over the high stoop burned somewhat brighter than at the buildings on either side. The rain had died down and she wore a dark, hooded cloak that covered her face, and she was careful not to be noticed on the street. It was for that reason that she paused so long in the shadows and, when she was sure there was no one peeking from a window or loitering on the corner, went quickly up the stairs. She carried with her the last of the money that Snowden had given her family, from their father's gold rush interest, and her mother's final words before she left the house.

"I always thought better of you," Mrs. Holland had said, before announcing that she was going to bed. Edith had already left to chaperone Diana, and so there was no one to see Elizabeth into the bracing night. She had been told to take a hansom cab, but she could not bear for even one person to be complicit in what she was going to do.

She was sick of the nervous fatigue, but still it took her too long to pound the knocker against the door. She closed her eyes and hesitated and then finally raised her slim wrist. After that it all happened very quickly. She was ushered into a second-floor parlor, lit with antique lamps and furnished with soft fabrics and animal skins. The richly dressed woman who had let her in disappeared behind a j.a.panese screen that obscured an entryway. It was just like any other parlor, except finer than many, went Elizabeth's thoughts as she waited.

There was the sound of feminine voices, very faint, from adjoining rooms. Elizabeth clutched her hands together, loosened them, and then tightened her grip. It was so strange that she should have ended up here-she who had been so admired for her dress and manner, and then later on, during nights she would have given anything to live again, so well loved. She didn't know what to make of it, of all the turns of fate, or the room she was sitting in, with its offensive finery and false air of normalcy. It would have been difficult for her to say with certainty who she was anymore.

Once upon a time, she had been a girl who lived for her family, and its own particular idea of what was correct and beautiful. She had failed at that but found a better ideal to pursue. And now that something better had been taken from her in a blast of gunpowder. Without Will, every footstep was tentative. Even the borders of her body felt somehow hazy and indistinct, and perhaps that was a blessing, because whatever was going to happen to her next was not something she wanted to feel. She sensed a gale of sorrow coming upon her, and she shut her eyes and willed it to pa.s.s. The skin of her forehead folded at the center and she prayed that Will was in heaven, looking down on her, and that he would help her not to cry.

What would he think of this room, with its neatly framed pictures of women wearing unsmiling faces and their staid best? How many girls, she wondered, had sat in that room before her, feeling somewhat calmed by the similarity of the environs to their own homes, wanting it all to be over so they could go to b.a.l.l.s again and be proposed to and have everyone see them as they always had-as good, pure girls who were born to marry well, in ceremonies that depicted them as blank slates. They were all hypocrites, every last one of them, she realized. The girls in their white dresses and the men who put them on pedestals but still brushed up against them when they danced. And not least her own mother, who had told Elizabeth she had "always thought better of her," but would have been pleased to do something as venal as marry off her child for money.

The only person Elizabeth had ever known who was not a hypocrite was Will. She felt the hard stone in her throat and brought her hand up to her belly. It was stunning that she should have to suffer this way for love, and that the punishment should be so bodily, so humiliating, so absolute.

"My dear," said a woman as she came around the screen.

The light was low, but the suddenness with which Elizabeth's eyes opened caused her to see spots. A little moisture had collected along her bottom lids. The woman was dressed in black velvet and was full in the chest and in the face, and she smiled at Elizabeth the way a person does before they demand payment. Perhaps, Elizabeth wondered for the first time, she was not being forced to suffer. Perhaps this wasn't another tragic twist of fate.

Suddenly it began to occur to her that what grew inside was the last thing Will had given her, and she could not possibly be ashamed of that. He had been her husband, she reminded herself.