Anna Godbersen - Envy

Henry took a hoarse breath. There was a taunting quality in her voice, and it made him pity her somewhat less. He held her gaze, and pronounced his next statement with great care. “I’m going to tell him tonight.”

Only now did Penelope’s smile begin to falter, although she held it enough that her sharp cheekbones emerged against her skin to catch the last of the outside light.

“You wouldn’t.” Her voice had fallen to a hiss, and she stepped forward as though she might find a way to physically prevent him from altering her plans.

“Yes.” Now that he’d said this much aloud, he felt as though the conversation with his father was a foregone conclusion. Henry thought maybe a parade down Fifth Avenue should be planned to honor his bravery, and he was already almost experiencing the thrill of falling confetti. “I would.”

There were many more things he might have gone on to say — about how she deserved it, or that she was cold and venal, or how flimsy his interest in her had ever been — but he knew somehow that the right thing to do at that moment was to keep quiet. There was no need to prolong the war when his exit strategy was so perfectly clear.

He nodded a polite goodbye, turned on his heel, and left the room, his blood charging through his veins and his thoughts soaring to a triumphal tune.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there will always be a gentleman to dance with, except at just the moment when you require one most.

— MAEVE DE JONG, LOVE AND OTHER FOLLIES OF THE GREAT FAMILIES OF OLD NEW YORK

IT WAS THE DAY FOLLOWING ELIZABETH’S CONFESSION to her mother, and by afternoon she was struggling for her old composure. The guilt and fear were still tremblingly there, not to mention the nausea and fatigue, but she tried hard for some steadiness in her fingers as she did the row of tiny buttons that ran along her sleeve from her wrist to the inside of her elbow. She arranged her hair high above her forehead, the blond strands at the nape rising upward from her tall black collar. Already you could see where her small body was growing larger — but not dressed, not with the thick wine-colored skirt hugging her waist and falling down past her toes. There was some time yet, although the idea of how little made her feel sick all over again. Will had died two months ago now — her predicament would be visible quite soon.

“Claire,” she said as she descended the main stair into the foyer. The red-haired maid looked up at her tiredly from her work. She paused in the dark wood — paneled space, but did not release the broom from her hand as Elizabeth placed her foot on the final step. “I am going to call on an old friend.”

If Claire noted something unusual about this — for it had been months since Elizabeth had done anything of the kind — she did not show it on her face. She rested the broom against the wall, wiped her hands against each other, and went to the cloakroom, which was built under the stairs. As she waited, Elizabeth gazed out through the glass in the doorframe. She could see the slight movement of the trees in the park, but no passersby, and realized that it must be very cold outside. Over the past months, with the Holland household staff so reduced, Elizabeth had taken to fetching and putting on her own coats, but she resisted that impulse when Claire reemerged with the brown tartan cape. She waited to be helped into both arms and have the large cloth buttons done up in the chest. Then she met the maid’s eyes, but only for a moment, and only with the most cursory of smiles.

She had recently become conscious of the possibility that Claire was behind the revelation of Diana’s indiscretion with Henry Schoonmaker, and though she had always trusted the girl implicitly she found herself acting guarded around her now and pinning every stray piece of gossip one heard about the Hollands on her. She certainly didn’t want her to get wind of any brewing scandals.

“Tell Aunt Edith that I will be back for dinner, unless I am invited elsewhere,” she said as she came down the final step. She wasn’t sure quite what she meant by that statement, but she blinked as though it were perfectly obvious and moved forward toward the door. She wavered for a moment in front of the glass, wanting to give Claire a reassuring look, or perhaps to receive one. But then she remembered how dire her situation was — every time it occurred to her it was like a bath in ice — and she fortified herself. She had once had a deft hand for perfectly manipulating any social situation; she might yet have it again. But she could not vacillate or pause for niceties or succumb to the nervous energy within.

The city was very still at that hour, and if she had not known better she would have thought there was nothing doing. But she did know better. She knew that the end of tea was coming soon, and the ladies of New York were employing all their daintiest gestures while thinking of what sort of antics they would get up to at dinner. They were thinking of slights and how to make them and engagements and how to enter into them. She was on a mission herself, one for which she would be well advised to keep a cool head and her wits in regimental order — and yet, she was surprised to find a warm and pleasant anticipation fanning through her chest as they rode up Madison Avenue into the thirties.

She told the hansom not to wait and presented her card at the door.

“Is Mr. Cutting in?” she asked, and though she had planned to smile, the one that came was so natural, glistening on her face like a sunset on waves, that she was embarrassed by it. “Mr. Teddy Cutting.”

She could not see the Cuttings’ butler’s expression through his beard, but his initial silence made her wonder if she hadn’t been too forward or if her delight in saying the name aloud had not been too obvious. She knew that, for herself and according to her own standards, it had been inappropriate. “I will see, mademoiselle,” he said eventually, and then he led her to the drawing room.

A fire was going under the restrained marble mantel there, and the ferns overgrew their pedestals. The walls were covered in striped purple wallpaper and all the surfaces were populated by cut crystal, and on the ivory Turkish love seats sat Mrs. Cutting and two of her daughters, Alice and Julia. They were looking unusually dour — that was the first thing Elizabeth noticed. The second was that there were fewer people than she might have anticipated in a drawing room of this stature and at that hour.

“Miss Elizabeth Holland,” the butler said, and when the three women looked up she realized that they had all been crying. Elizabeth’s small mouth began to work, but she could not get hold of any appropriate words. The butler withdrew and she stepped forward into the warmth of the room.

“Oh, Elizabeth,” Alice wailed. She hurried across the room and threw her arms around her brother’s old friend’s neck. Like her mother and sister, she wore black, with a little American flag ribbon pinned to the chest. “If you only knew! If you only knew…”

“Whatever’s happened?” Elizabeth felt the tight clump of hope within her begin to dissolve. Something much darker was coming. For a moment she wondered if she wasn’t some kind of curse, and if a violence hadn’t been visited on Teddy just like the one that had taken Will. “Why so sad today?”

Alice drew her into the sitting area, and Julia poured her a cup of tea. She passed it to Elizabeth, who managed only to hold it politely. As she waited for the bad news, which she could already feel nipping at her toes, she sensed that even tepid liquid might scald her.

“It’s Teddy, of course.” Alice sat down beside their guest and rested her hands on the other girl’s knees. Her gray eyes were just the same shade as her brother’s, and she had the same broad and slightly horselike features. “He’s gone.”

Elizabeth’s eyelids squeezed shut, but only for just a second. “Gone where?” she asked, when they opened again. Her teacup had begun to clatter in her saucer, and she brought her other hand up to stop the shaking.

“Gone to war.” Julia, who was sitting beside their mother on the opposite love seat, looked at Elizabeth as though it might somehow be her fault. For all she knew, it was. “He said that he met some soldiers on the train who showed him what it meant to be a real American, and that even Elizabeth Holland had endured more hardship and fought back more bravely in her life than he ever had from anything….”

Elizabeth put down the tea and her hand moved involuntarily to her waist. She looked backward to the memory of her time with Teddy in Florida as though at a best friend standing onboard a ship moving inexorably out to sea. What had she said to him that made him want to go so far away? She couldn’t place it, and only wished that she’d let him know how very heroic he might have been to her, right there in New York. She would have traded a great deal just to have stayed a little longer on the dance floor with him the night he had tried to propose.

“So soon?” she said eventually, as though it were only the timing of this news that shocked her, and not the revelation of absence itself.

“Yes.” Mrs. Cutting’s voice broke over the word, and she brought a handkerchief to her face. Her fair hair was going gray and her whole soft body shook a little with the sorrow of it all. She had ever been a lady whose singular joy in life was the presence and success of her children; her only miseries, their pain. “He enlisted and already they’ve shipped him out to San Francisco! From there he goes to the Philippines.”

Elizabeth wondered at what point in that journey her old friend was at now, for after all, it was one she herself had made. But then, that did not make him any more reachable.

“You must be terribly proud of him,” she said sincerely.

The three Cutting ladies nodded wretchedly, and then went on to discuss all their greatest fears and nightmares, all their prayers for his safety, and what drastic measures they would take upon their own lives if anything should happen to him. Elizabeth knit her brow in sympathy and crooned in agreement, but her spirit had already left that parlor. That morning she had had a plan, and that afternoon she had felt a rising optimism, but by the end of tea she saw these things anew, for all their foolishness and futility.

The happy, rich Henry Schoonmakers are back from Florida and apparently cannot spend a moment apart. They will be attending a small, intimate dinner at the home of the bride’s family, the Hayeses, this evening, along with a few select guests. One can only conclude that for their happiness they depend very little on those outside their circle.

— FROM THE SOCIETY PAGE OF THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF THE WORLD GAZETTE, THURSDAY, MARCH 1, 1900

WHEN, UPON HER RETURN FROM THE SOUTHERN sojourn, Penelope had insisted that her mother throw a dinner for her family-in-law, she could not possibly have imagined that so little would have been accomplished in the intervening days, or that she would have been so incapable of improving upon her situation even to the slightest degree. While it was true that there had been very little in her favor on the return trip, still she would not have believed that so much time and so much of her own effort and beauty would not have turned things around.