Anna Godbersen: Rumors

It has been a dreary few months in New York, given the death of Miss Elizabeth Holland — who was one of society’s favorites — and the blizzard that arrived in late November and left the city blanketed for days. But elegant New York has not given up hope for a fine winter season of evenings at the opera and gay cotillions. And our eye has more than once been caught by the newly ladylike comportment of Miss Penelope Hayes, who was the best friend of Miss Holland during her short life. Could Miss Hayes inherit her mantle of impeccable decorum and congeniality?

— FROM CITÉ CHATTER, FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15, 1899

“EXCUSE ME, MISS, BUT IS IT REALLY YOU?”

The day was clear and bracingly cold, and as Penelope Hayes turned slowly to her left, where the crowd had massed along the narrow cobblestone street, she exhaled a visible cloud of warm breath. She focused her large lake-blue eyes on the eager face of a girl who could not have been much older than fourteen. She must have emerged from one of those tenement buildings, which rose shoulder to shoulder, at imprecise angles, behind the masses of people. A jungle of black wires was strung from their rooftops, cutting ribbons out of the sky. The girl wore a black coat that had turned almost gray with wear, and her already pinkish complexion had gone patchy red in the cold. Penelope met her eyes and spread her plush lips into their warmest smile.

“Why, yes.” She drew herself up, willing the full effect of her slim frame, her elegantly ovular face, her incandescent skin. There had been a time when she was known as the pretty daughter of a nouveau riche, but she had recently taken to wearing the pastels and whites preferred by the demurest girls her age, mindful of their conjugal connotations — although today, given the state of the streets she was traversing, she had chosen a darker hue. She extended her gloved hand and said, “I am Miss Hayes.”

“I work at Weingarten the furriers’,” the girl went on shyly. “I’ve seen you once or twice from the backroom.”

“Oh, then I must thank you for your service,” Penelope replied graciously. She inclined her body forward in a gesture that might almost be called a bow, although the stiff Medici collar of her navy cloth coat with gold piping made it difficult to move her head in a truly humble manner. When she met the girl’s eyes again, she quickly added, “Would you like a turkey?”

Already the procession was moving along ahead of her. The marching band playing noels had crossed onto the next block, and she could hear the voice of Mr. William Schoonmaker through the megaphone moving along just behind the band. He was wishing the crowds who thronged the sidewalks a joyous season, and reminding them in as subtle a manner as he was able who had paid for their holiday parade. For the parade had been his idea, and he had financed the band and the traveling nativity scene and the holiday fowl, and he had arranged for various society matrons and debutantes of his acquaintance to pass them out to the poor. They were the real attraction, Penelope couldn’t stop herself from thinking, as she turned to her loyal friend Isaac Phillips Buck and reached into the large burlap sack he was carrying.

Even through her dogskin gloves and a layer of newspaper wrapping, she could feel the cold squishiness of the bird. It was heavy and awkward in her hands, and she tried not to show any signs of revulsion as she moved forward with the promised Christmas turkey. The girl looked at the package in a blank way and her smile faded.

“Here,” Penelope said, trying not to rush her words. She suddenly, desperately needed the girl to take the turkey from her. “For you, for your family. For Christmas. From the Schoonmakers…and from me.”

The moment lengthened in front of her, and then abruptly the girl’s smile returned. Her whole mouth hung open with joy. “Oh, Miss Hayes, thank you! From me…and…and…from my family!” Then she took the weighty bird from Penelope and turned back to her friends in the crowd. “Look!” she caroled. “This turkey was given to me especially by Miss Penelope Hayes!”

Her friends gasped at the prized bird and shot shy looks at the girl in the fitted coat. Already they felt they knew her from seeing her fantastical name so often in the society pages. She stood before them as the rightful heir to the place in the public’s heart once held by her best friend, Elizabeth Holland, before Elizabeth’s tragic drowning a few months before. Of course, Elizabeth had not drowned, and was in fact very much alive — a fact Penelope knew quite well, since she had helped the “virginal” Miss Holland disappear so that she might more easily be with that member of her family’s staff she’d apparently been enamored with. And so that, more importantly, Penelope could reclaim what was rightfully hers: the fiancé Elizabeth had left behind. Her ascension was so nearly complete that already society’s most exalted matrons, as well as its newspaper chroniclers, were whispering how very much more Elizabeth-like she seemed now.

This was not something Penelope would have previously found flattering — goodness being rather overrated, in her private opinion — but she had begun to see that it had its advantages.

Penelope repaid the warm embrace of the girl’s adulation by lingering a moment longer, her eyes beaming and her smile as broad as it had ever been. Then she turned to Buck, who was highly visible in his gray check suit and amber-colored dress shirt and a coat of beaver fur that covered the length of his generous body.

“You’ve just got to get me out of here,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen Henry all day, and I’m cold, and if I have to touch another—”

Buck stopped her with a knowing look. “I will take care of everything.”

His features were soft, muted by the fleshiness of his face, and his fair eyebrows were sculpted in a way that lent him the appearance of canniness. A few more ladies, in their wide hats and elaborately lapelled coats, passed by, followed by a marching band. Penelope looked back up the street in the direction of the elder Schoonmaker’s voice and knew that his son, Henry, with his dark eyes and his troublemaker’s lilt, must be crossing into new streets along with him. Her heart sank a little. Then she turned back to Buck, who had already formulated a plan.

Buck was over six feet tall and his body expanded outward imposingly, and he moved now, as he so often had before, to shield the girl who most benefited from his loyalty. He had not been born rich — though he claimed to be a relation of the famous Buck clan who these days mostly resided in grand old moldering mansions in the Hudson Valley — but was invaluable when it came time to host a party, and as such was often given fine things for free. Penelope pulled the veil of her hat down over her face and followed him into the crowd. Once they had made their way safely through the throng, Buck dropped his cumbersome bag of turkeys and helped Penelope into a waiting brougham.

While Buck said a few words to her driver, she settled into the plush black velvet seat and exhaled. Inside everything one might lean against had the softness of down, and everything one might touch was made of gold. Penelope felt a softening at her temples; the world was right again. She removed her gloves in one deft motion and then tossed them through the open carriage door. Buck glanced at the slushy puddle into which they fell, and then took a step up and into the seat beside Penelope. As the wheels began to crunch across the rough pavement, he leaned forward and pulled a polished wooden box from underneath the seat.

“Kidskin gloves?” he said. “Or would you prefer silk?”

Penelope examined the slender white fingers of her hands as she rubbed them against each other. Most girls like her, whose fathers were industrialists or bank presidents or heads of their own insurance empires, changed their gloves three or four times a day as they moved from teas to dinner parties to intimate little musicales. But Penelope thought her hands were superior, and so preferred to change gloves ten or eleven times. She never wore the same pair twice, though her recently discovered virtue had inspired her to donate them occasionally. “Kid. It isn’t warm outside, and you never know who you’ll meet on a drive.”