Thirty Five
The trains that arrive daily now from out west bring not only those who have been revived by their sojourns on the frontier states but also the broken spirits of those who have lost fortunes in the so-called boomtowns. Their hawked things come back too, by the crateful, to be repolished and set by New York’s jewelers and sold at handsome profit to the newest millionaire trying to buy his wife class. No doubt many a Christmas gift with an untoward past will be given in our fine city tomorrow.
—FROM THE EDITORIAL PAGE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES, DECEMBER 24, 1899
THE MANHATTAN THAT ELIZABETH STEPPED BACK into could not have been more opposite of the city she’d left nearly three months ago. There was no bluster or busyness. There was barely a person on the street. All around her was a kind of deathly quiet, and for a long moment she wondered if she hadn’t truly died and the afterlife wasn’t somehow a New York stripped of its population. There was a new-fallen snow, not yet riven by carriage wheels, and here and there the warm light from inside a window reflected onto a white bank. She would never know for sure, but she thought that this must have been what the city looked like half a century ago: dark, silent, and still. Will kept his arm firmly around her shoulder as they walked, although she wasn’t sure if it was to steady her or to keep her warm.
“You’re cold,” he observed.
She nodded but couldn’t respond further. She was too full of nerves at the prospect of seeing her family, or what she would say to her mother and aunt as a way of explanation. The only thing keeping her quiet and steady was Will’s presence at her side. They had the ring money—had, in fact—gotten quite a good price for it—and Will had wanted to take a hansom from the station. But Elizabeth had insisted that walking a circuitous route home under cover of darkness was the safest thing to do. Having seen Grayson Hayes on the train was enough of a shock to make her homecoming a very circumspect one, and she reasoned that returning slowly and on her own two feet might also bring a trace of calm.
“We’re almost there,” he added reassuringly, although he knew perfectly well that they were now close enough to Gramercy that she could have found the house blindfolded.
“It’s not the cold,” she said.
“I know that.” His voice was so gentle it was almost like he was holding her. “But being inside will help anyway.”
When they came to it, they stood for a long moment in front of No. 17 Gramercy. Although the brownstone façade stared back at her with the same placid composition of windows and doors as ever, the view through the plate glass was darkened. She had expected some sign of life, and the lack of it gave her a small terror. It was only at Will’s urging that she walked up to the door and, taking the key from its hiding place, unlocked it.
The foyer was unlit, but as her eyes adjusted she saw that the old piece of furniture where visitors used to leave their cards was gone. A darkened parlor was visible through the wide door frame, and she could tell by the smell that there had been a fire there recently. She clung to Will’s hand as she went up the stairs, and as she did, she saw that the walls were decorated with pictures in frames that were not the pictures she remembered hanging there before. The sound her feet made as they touched the stairs surprised her until she realized that the Persian runner, which used to flow from the second-floor hallway down to the door, was gone.
She soon found that her own room was missing much of the bric-a-brac that had once made it so light and lived-in, although the robin’s egg blue wallpaper was the same, and the great mahogany sleigh bed on the risen platform was made up the same way as it had been made every day for years. She was not nearly as shocked to be back in this room where so many of her days had ended, as she was by the fact that Will was there with her. She had followed him into the unknown, and yet he had never seen her bedroom. It was still her bedroom.
“Will,” she said, turning around to look at him, “I’m glad you came with me.”
He looked down on her with those large, sweet eyes. Strands of hair were out of place, falling over his forehead and around his ears. His brows separated just slightly, and there was movement in his full lower lip. “I know. I am too.”
She moved toward him and he let her in, folding her up in his taut arms. She propped her chin on his chest, lengthening her neck, and looked up. “I hope I didn’t ruin anything.”
“I don’t think you ruined anything.” A smile had crept onto Will’s face. Then he bent and brought his mouth to hers, their lips touching again and again so lightly the touches could just barely be called kisses. She began to feel warm again for the first time since they’d left the train. When he stopped, she lowered her chin and put her forehead into his chest.
“Do you think she’s…” Elizabeth caught her breath, not wanting to say alive. She certainly didn’t want to say dead. That would be letting her thoughts rush to the worst, and Will had warned her that that wouldn’t help. “All right?”
“Yes.” Will’s hand moved over her forehead and over her hair. His fingers rested on the tendrils at the nape of her neck. “Yes, but you should go to her.”
Elizabeth pressed her eyelids together. “I’ll go now,” she said, although it took her several moments more to lift her forehead from its solid resting place and look up at Will with a wan smile. He was looking back at her with those same eyes, full of pure intent, which had always affected her so. They were looking through her. They were a reminder that she knew what was right and good.
She found candles in the closet and lit them, although as she left Will in the room he was already lying down on the bed. He had not slept well on the train the night before as they approached New York. She imagined that by the time she reached the end of the hall he would already be asleep.
The door to her mother’s bedroom, on the east side of the house and facing the street, seemed as fearsome to her as when she lived there. It was perhaps for this reason that she went there first, and not to Diana or her aunt Edith. She pushed back the door with the same trembling approach as when she was a child, needing to face what frightened her the most, and went in. There was no light in the room, but long before her eyes adjusted, she recognized the sound of her mother’s breath. Her mother was breathing. The shore-like sound of her inhalations and exhalations was as natural a thing as Elizabeth had heard, and for a moment she was again a little girl.
“Mother,” she whispered, reaching out for the hand resting nearest her on the bedspread. It was cold but familiar, those long nimble fingers, so useful in the writing of all those notes of thanks and condolence and gossip and spite. Elizabeth could make things out now from what light came through the windows, and when she repeated the word mother, she saw a pair of dark eyes slowly open. There was no recognition in them yet, although they gazed stolidly in Elizabeth’s direction.
“Are you all right?”
There were more shadows in the room than light, but still she could see that the grooves under her mother’s eyes were turned a dark purple.
“Do you recognize me?”
It took some time, but her mother, without breaking the blank stare, gradually brought herself up on her elbows. She blinked and watched the younger woman. Elizabeth wasn’t sure if she was holding back her fury and disbelief, or even if she saw her at all. A few moments passed before her mother said, in a voice that clearly had not been used as much as it was accustomed to: “Is it Christmas?”
“No,” Elizabeth whispered. “Not yet. Not until tomorrow.” She wanted to cry and stopped herself by saying: “Tomorrow is Christmas.”
“Today is Christmas Eve?” Her mother’s eyes had grown so wide they could not possibly have been taking in what was real.
Tears were now streaming down Elizabeth’s cheeks and, fearing audible sobs, she simply nodded. She was crying for all the things she used to want and all the things she’d given up and all the people that she was going to have to leave behind again. She was crying for Will’s perfect vision, which he had included her in, only for
her to muck it up with all her old responsibilities.
“Today is Christmas Eve and you’re an angel come back to me in the form of Elizabeth?”
Elizabeth forced her small, rounded lips together and held on to her mother’s hand. “No,” she said when she was able. “I am Elizabeth. It’s Christmas Eve and I’m Elizabeth and I’m not dead—that was all a kind of mistake. I’ve come back from—”
“My Elizabeth is an angel.” The elder Holland woman’s eyes shut and she fell back on the pillow, her dark hair forming a puddle around her white face. “She’s an angel and she came back to me.”
For a long time Elizabeth stood by the bed wondering what she had done to her mother and how she would ever make it better. When she had left, she saw clearly enough now, she had taken the last of what her mother lived for.
Eventually she climbed up on the bed and rested her head on the pillow beside her mother’s and began to wonder, instead, how she was going to tell Will that they couldn’t go back to California until she’d somehow managed to make her mother well again.
Thirty Six
Social observers cannot have helped but notice the recent alliance between Mrs. William Schoonmaker and young Penelope Hayes, and those of us of the analytical persuasion have wondered if the former lady isn’t being so friendly to the latter on behalf of her stepson. Could young Schoonmaker be in love again?
—FROM THE SOCIETY PAGE OF THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF THE WORLD GAZETTE, SUNDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1899
BY MIDNIGHT ON CHRISTMAS EVE HENRY WAS entirely sick of the two goons who were now his constant companions. If there had been some absurd humor to these shadows early on, he could no longer see it. They had monitored his champagne intake, though not as carefully as they had his movements—he had had several glasses, and his tie was now a little off-kilter, and the strands of his shiny dark hair no longer fit so neatly together. That wild urgency to escape had faded, if just slightly, into a wincing, futile need. He knew Diana was in the room, and he felt desperate to catch whatever glimpses of her he could. He had, over the last hour, become obsessed with the idea that she dance with no one else.
And—it wasn’t his first thought—the realization was beginning to dawn that, wherever she was among the crowd that filled his family ballroom, she probably could have used a reassuring look or two. She had risked everything for him—this was something he was just grasping, the self-recrimination rising in his throat—and he couldn’t even ask her to dance. It was not his finest moment. He knew that she was out there, along the wall somewhere, surrounded by all those social harpies with their expectations and narrow definitions, with their fans and cutting remarks, with their meager hearts. She would be looking about her with a certain trembling innocence. She would sigh in that way that moved her whole body.
When he saw her next, she was leaving. The man she had come with—it must have been the old business associate of her father’s she’d told him about—offered his arm to escort her out, and she managed only one glance across the ballroom in Henry’s direction. He stepped forward, from the place in the arched doorway where he and his father’s men had been loitering silently. There was the dew of evening in her wide eyes and a gloss on her lips. Before she left the room, his view was blocked by another woman whose hair was done up in festive green. Penelope Hayes was walking toward him. Directly behind her was his stepmother.
He tilted himself, trying to see around her, and then tried to pretend the movement had been a kind of bow in Penelope’s direction. She was holding two champagne flutes.
“Mr. Schoonmaker says that you fellows can have a ten-minute break if you like,” Isabelle said, as she swept toward him with all the metallic shimmer of a vault full of bullion. She paused, a blond curl bouncing against her cheek, and straightened his tie. When the two large men had taken up her offer and headed for the door, she squeezed Penelope’s wrist and winked at Henry before taking up the arm of some passing matron with exclamations of her finery and slipping back into the main room.
Henry leaned against the oak frame that separated the main ballroom from the series of little galleries. He looked back into the room, with all its light and noise and shimmering headpieces, wishing that Diana were there but knowing she was already gone. “I can’t play any games with you right now.”
“No games,” Penelope replied lightly. She raised one glass up, gesturing that he should follow if he wanted it. Then she walked, as fluidly as she was able, given the restrictions of her red dress, which buckled in on her from all points, into the galleries. For reasons that he did not fully comprehend—though he hoped it was not for champagne alone—Henry followed. There was some terrible purpose in her posture, which he knew he could not afford to ignore. “Anyway, you should know by now that it was never a game for me, Henry.”
They moved from one gallery to the next, past old Dutch paintings of gleaming black grapes, skulls, and half-filled wine jugs. He looked back, where all the movement was, hoping nobody had noticed them slip away. He made himself look at Penelope and then saw her eyes, fevered, over the rim of her glass as she sipped. “It was for me,” he said. If she flinched, it passed quickly.
“It was a fun game, for a while, and then all the fun went out of it. I haven’t been playing for a long time, Penny.”
Penelope’s lacy shoulders rose slightly and fell, and then she drained her glass. She tossed it over her shoulder, and when it shattered against the oak wainscoting, it jolted something in Henry, although he tried to keep the reaction out of his face. There was so little reaction in Penelope that it might as well have been rose petals falling against snow.
“I thought you might want to play again.” Her voice was low but decidedly not quiet, and there was something in it that made Henry’s stomach turn.
“I’m pretty certain not,” he answered definitively.
She gave a little laugh from the back of her throat and then stopped walking. She tilted her head in a number of directions; she was looking at her hands now, but that wasn’t what amused her. “Oh, Henry, don’t you know by now that when it’s me you ought to pause a minute and try to see what you’re missing?”
He was tired suddenly. He had never been so tired. He wanted to be anywhere but where he was. He could scarcely put the words together. “What am I missing?”
She put space between her words and let each one fall with purpose. “I should have known it wasn’t Elizabeth you cared for.”
Henry looked at Penelope, but her lids were low and her gaze evasive. The room they were in had deep blue walls above the wainscoting and was full of paintings his father knew he was supposed to admire but in fact found too glum to look at very often. They both moved, away from the far-off view of the ballroom, colluding for a moment in a measure of privacy. “Pardon?”
“I should have known, as the whole town knows by now, that with you it’s always a brunette.”
Henry’s instinct was to reply with a joke, although he could not for the life of him have sounded amused at that moment. “I do have a type.”
“Yes, and a plan of attack.”
“If you’re suggesting that I—”
“Oh, suggesting. I’m not suggesting. I wouldn’t waste either of our time with suggesting.”
Penelope did now meet his gaze. She was looking at him with eyes a little rabid and very proud. There was a terrible defiance in them.
“I know about you and Diana Holland, Henry.”
“I have no idea—”
“The maid saw you, Henry, in the morning, in Diana’s bedroom. Rather compromising, isn’t it? You’ve gotten sloppy, Henry. You were never that sloppy with me.”
Henry could not nod at the veracity of this statement. He clung to his champagne glass, as he might have at any socially awkward moment, waiting for what would come next.
“The maid is in my pocket, you see. She’s a good girl and she doesn’t want to say anything, but everybody has a price and it’s a piece of information that some people would pay very
highly for. Some people who put out papers.”
“They wouldn’t publish—”
“Oh, maybe they wouldn’t publish it. Maybe they would. But once they knew it, they wouldn’t be able to stop themselves from talking about it. And talking is just as bad. Then, Henry, my friend, the fun really would be over for you. And for a little girl we both adore…” Penelope left off speaking and ended her threat with a subtle roll of her shoulders.
“You can’t do that, Penny.” Lines had emerged in Henry’s forehead where they had never been before. He was taken by the desire to find Diana, wherever she was, and hide her. “It would ruin her.”
Laughter came next. It was high and throaty and not very different from the laugh he used to hear when Penelope had seemed his ideal match and was more often in his days. “Oh, Henry, for someone who’s known me so well, you understand me very little. The ruination of Diana Holland! That would be fun.” Penelope clasped her hands. “Finally, a little entertainment. But I think you’ve already done the hard part. It would really just mean letting everyone else in on your handiwork.”
“It’s my fault, Penelope, my doing.” He was as alert as one only becomes after full days of sleeplessness. He could see now, plainly, that this was his chance to do something gallant. He had Penelope here, and her secret hadn’t gone anywhere yet. He knew her, he reminded himself—he could figure out how to stop her. “It’s me you want to punish, anyway. Punish me.”
“Of course I want to punish both of you,” she replied with a blithe wave of her hand. “But I’m not a bad person, Henry. I know it’s your fault. I’ll let you be a man and take care of it.”
Henry’s whole body was taut with fury, and he had to close his eyes to hide all his violent feelings. It took him a few seconds before he even managed to nod.