Anna Godbersen: Envy

“Henry!”

For a moment, Henry’s addled brain couldn’t distinguish what was dream and what was reality, although he held out a poignant hope that the scene with the verdant hills, the racing horses, and the youngest Holland was the one that would soon come into sharper focus. He dragged his face down, away from the harsh voice of his father, and felt again the scratchiness of the pillow against his smooth, golden skin. The feel of those imported Turkish fibers was undeniably more acute than the moist countryside air, which was in any event fading quickly, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“Henry.”

Henry now twisted the entirety of his long body so that he was sitting up, and then committed the first mistake of that morning: He opened his eyes, an act that caused him great pain when the flooding morning light met his weary retinas.

“Oh,” he said feebly.

“Yes, it hurts, I know,” his father replied, sitting on the couch next to his son. William Sackhouse Schoonmaker was a man of considerable size, broad-shouldered and full in every way, but whether his body or the sarcasm of his tone weighed more heavily on those soft black leather cushions was open for debate. He wore a suit of dark brown that shone almost purple where the light caught it, and his hair was a deep and artificial black. His face was a study in blunt features and popped blood vessels, but you could see under all that the bone structure that he had bequeathed his son. He had the appearance, now as ever, of being a very rich man. “But what are you doing here?”

“Here?” Henry’s tone was dull, he knew, but he lacked the energy to change it. Unlike his father he was still lithe, his features still strong and clean as though they had been carved from marble, but his insides were feeling decidedly crumbly. The room they occupied was adjacent to his bedroom, in the second-floor wing that had always been largely his own. When he was a child his governess had slept here, and when he had dropped out of Harvard last spring it had been converted into a study of sorts for him — he had claimed, halfheartedly, that he might resume his studies at Columbia, where his friend Teddy Cutting had then been a senior. The floor was highly varnished parquet, and on the ceiling was a mural depicting a happy luncheon on the grass in big, loose brushstrokes. His gaze lingered there for a moment, and he was overtaken by a very childish thought: that he could jump in there and amble away.

His father, intuiting the gist of his fantasy, cut in. “Stop thinking like a little boy, Henry,” he said.

“All right.” Henry, who still could not manage any tone beyond a passive acquiescence, closed his eyes after he spoke. His tongue felt like some swollen fish dying on a rock. Then came the recollection of the drinks that had filled the previous evening and made it blurry and tolerable. Before all that — or at least before the peak of his intoxication — there had been Diana, to whom he had tried to be near over and again since his wedding, without the slightest success. It had only been a glimpse of her, for as soon as he had entered the music room at Leland Bouchard’s, she had exited. She’d looked as healthy and rosy as any sixteen-year-old, but with that sharp pride of a woman who has been scorned and then drawn herself up, ever more glorious, from the humiliation.

“Now, what are you doing here?”

Henry’s hands went to his chest. His memory of how he had arrived on this couch this particular morning was incomplete, and he had gotten in the habit on mornings like these (there had been many) of patting himself down to make sure he was all in one piece. He seemed to be. He also seemed to be wearing a rumpled white dress shirt of Italian linen — the same one, as far as he could determine, that he had worn the night before — and black dress pants. His feet were covered in black socks, and his shoes were lying next to his white silk waistcoat on the floor. His tie was nowhere to be seen.

“Sleeping?”

“Evidently.”

Henry stood. “It was a long night,” he replied, sounding — with exactly no effort — like he could sleep for another hundred years. He bent to pick up his waistcoat, and regretted it instantly. The swift movement had caused a kind of stabbing agony around his forehead. He brought himself up quickly, and drew on what energy he had to remain upright.

The elder Schoonmaker stood, cleared his throat, and softened his tone. “Henry…” He looked at his son, and for a moment his thoughts seemed to have gone to some place in the distant past. They stood awkwardly there, in that paneled and ornamented room, shifting in their places. “There’s been a promising development in my quest for the mayoralty.”

Henry, who a moment before had hoped he might escape his father’s wrath, now felt a twitch of dread. W. S. Schoonmaker was a ruthless businessman, and he had inherited and made several fortunes already, but he’d recently decided that he wanted his earthly name to ascend a new level of fame and glory, and it was for this reason that he longed to enter the fray of politics. He believed he should be mayor, which caused him to fear and rail against his son’s profligacy as never before and to curtail his son’s sprees whenever possible. His new ambition made him fond of threatening disinheritance, and it had transformed him into a formidable pusher of Henry Schoonmaker, the married man.

“Oh?” There were very few things that Henry liked discussing less than his father’s political ambitions.

“Yes. The Family Progress Party needs a candidate for their mayoral ticket, and it seems we believe in many of the same things.”

“What kind of things?” Henry asked ironically. He did not have the courage, or the mental strength, to point out the obvious absurdity of this prospect. For many of the people who voted for the Family Progress Party also had the misfortune of living in tenements that were owned by the Schoonmakers’ holding company, where they surely had requested services like heat and hot water and been turned down flat.

“Well, in science and innovation,” his father replied impatiently. “In the progress of society, and in humankind’s mission to improve the world as they found it. And of course, on the fundamental joy of family as the raison d’être of all men.”

Henry smothered his laugh with his fist and turned toward the windows. He had not disguised his opinion about his father’s words well enough, however — he could tell by the way the old man loomed behind him.

“I suppose you doubt my dedication to family.” His father’s tone had changed quite suddenly and was now full of ire. “Well, you know nothing.”

“I do know…” Henry began, but faltered. He wasn’t even sure what it was he had wanted to say.

“Shut up, Henry. It doesn’t matter, anyway, what you think of me or what I think of you. It matters what the people of this great city see in both of us. Do they see a family of louche, careless individuals, or purposeful businessmen with wives and children to nurture?”

“I have no children,” Henry said. This seemed to him, in the moment, like a true stroke of luck. His physical discomfort was coming in waves now, and for a moment the tide seemed to ebb as he thought of that one crucial way in which he was still free.

“No.” His father laughed cruelly. “And you’re not going to get them by sleeping on the couch. I’ve queried the staff, and they say you wake up here every morning. Can it be that you haven’t—?”

“No.” Henry glanced at his father, and saw a horrid concoction of amusement, rage, and disbelief on his face. The two men stared at each other for a long moment, whole monologues going unsaid across their features.

“Well,” the elder Schoonmaker went on, more peacefully than his tone of a few seconds before might have implied, “you’ll have to stop behaving like silly children. I want a grandchild by the election. That’ll be November of 1901, Henry, so you have plenty of time. A boy would be nice. A big healthy boy, to hold aloft over the crowds. Try for that.”