Anna Godbersen: Splendor

“Carolina — you aren’t like the rest of them.”

Everyone on the second and third floors had concluded, several hours ago, that the hostess was a success. But now she saw that, for entirely different reasons, she was a success in the foyer, in a private scene that could not have been more perfect if she had scripted it herself in advance. Every inch of her skin radiated with the pleasure of Leland’s words. A confes sion played, briefly, on her tongue, and she considered telling her handsome neighbor exactly why she wasn’t like the rest of them. But then she didn’t want to ruin anything, and so went on beaming at him as the night lengthened and the party went on upstairs without them.

When a lady takes a less established girl under her wing, she always runs the risk that she will someday be outshone, which is why she must do so only sparingly and with the greatest care.

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

“THEY’VE ALL GROWN SO SMALL,” PENELOPE SCHOONMAKER announced, several hours after arriving at the party, but when no one had yet asked her to dance. She had always been said to have dramatic features, but her eyes were especially wide now, in disbelief. The feel of the flocked wallpaper at Miss Broad’s had become hatefully familiar to her; she had never been the kind of girl content to go unnoticed. Three months of convalescing were behind her and she was dying for a little fun, but she was finding that not so easy to come by as before. “Buck, don’t they look small?” she repeated insistently

“Not me,” replied her friend Isaac Phillips Buck with a little self-effacing laugh. His tone indicated he was joking, but what he had said was perfectly true, for Buck stood a full head taller than Penelope, and was several times her girth. Buck liked to give the impression of being from the august Buck clan, but this lineage was dubious at best, and his prestige was almost entirely based on his reputation for being indispens able when one was throwing a party. It was a reputation that had been fanned in no small part by the former Miss Hayes. But that he was not a small man was indeed true, although it was only one of the reasons his longtime patron found him irritating at that particular moment.

“They must be small-minded at least if they actually believe Carolina Broad is as fine as they pretend to think she is,” Penelope snapped. Fashion was vicious; it moved quickly, she knew, but she had not been in bed so long, and she was still better looking than any of them. She remembered when Carolina was just another disgruntled maid, let go by the Hollands — but that was before she had befriended the old bachelor Carey Lewis Longhorn and somehow or other persuaded him to leave her his vast fortune. She had been playing heiress at first, but now she really was one, and the evidence was above them in coffered ceilings as well as on the handsome façade that boasted her new address. It was stomach-turning how formal she had been with Penelope — who had done so much for her — and how quickly she had excused herself to chase after Leland Bouchard.

For Penelope, the agony of having stood so long in a room while being paid so little attention was far greater than any that could have resulted from a physical blow. She was dressed in eye-catching vermilion that enveloped her like plumage, and the lace that sheathed her arms and the suede that circled her waist revealed how dainty she had become since she last had been seen out. Her dark hair was up above her face like a cloud at midnight; her eyes looked acutely blue lined in black, as they were now.

“I never knew how unkind New York could be until today,” she concluded bitterly. For although it was not the kind of thing that was printed in society pages, the reason Penelope had been confined to her bedroom for so long was that she had lost what would have been her and Henry Schoonmaker’s first child. And to make it all the more pitiable, the whole unfortunate episode had occurred while her dashing husband was away at war.

Or not really at war, because Henry’s father, William, had arranged for him to be sent to Cuba, where the danger had mostly passed. And no baby had truly been lost, because she had never actually been with child. That had been a story she cooked up to bind Henry to her and punish the irritating girl he persisted in believing himself in love with. She could not really have been with child, because she and Henry did not really act like man and wife in that sense, except on one occasion, in Florida, when he had been very drunk. For a moment the muscles of Penelope’s face relaxed and her blood warmed at the thought of the summer when Henry and she had been intimate in every back corner of their families’ homes they could manage…but she stopped herself. She was in a room of people incapable of sympathy, but apparently quite capable of delighting in her downfall, and she could not afford to grow wistful.

“Look!” Buck was laboring for a cheerful tone.

After a stubborn pause, she did turn her gaze in the direction Buck had indicated. There, through the crowd of red-faced people shrieking in delight at whatever inanity, moving about the dance floor gracelessly — or, she supposed, with what had come to pass for grace in Mrs. Schoonmaker’s absence — stood a tall, broad fellow in shiny black garb with eyes almost as strikingly blue as her own. There was something wholesome, but also exotic, about his chestnut hair and the sparkle of his smile.

“At what exactly?” Penelope replied in the well-practiced voice that implied she was not impressed.

“It’s the prince of Bavaria.” Buck inclined himself toward his old friend and continued in a confidential tone: “He’s been touring the New World for some time. They say he is soon to be engaged to that little slip of a thing at his side — French, can’t be more than sixteen — but her mama, the countess, was made nervous by all his roving, and has followed along in his footsteps.”

Penelope had to press up on the toes of her satin heels, which were adorned with pearls, and crane her neck to glimpse this creature. Through the crush of evening garb and sweat ing faces she caught sight of not one Frenchwoman but two, neither particularly tall. The elder fanned herself indifferently, and the younger, who wore a pearl-and-diamond choker, gazed up at the fine shoulders of her escort in dewy adoration. There was something about her untouched skin and wide dark eyes that put Diana Holland back in Penelope’s head, along with a twist of rage.

“He was in Florida when we were there, but I never saw him.”

“You can tell how beautiful the countess once was.”

“Yes,” Penelope agreed, but only after privately noting that lady’s sunken cheeks and rather overdone makeup. The prince was smiling at some sycophant or other with an air of patient disdain, which Penelope recognized from her own repertoire of facial expressions. She felt a touch of sympathy toward him for being so obviously, so painfully superior to those around him, just as she always was. Then he glanced up so that his eyes settled on her and caught the light. She had become tough in the previous months, but she softened at the sight of a man who was clearly of her caliber.

“Oh…Mrs. Schoonmaker.”

Penelope turned, distracted, in the direction of her name, and saw Adelaide Newbold, whose maiden name had been Wetmore. The new bride smiled tightly as she passed, and then swept onward in an insignificant wave of mauve.

“What was that?” Penelope managed to keep her voice quiet, but was unable to wring it of the fury she felt. The ignominy of being cut by a girl who had married at a more advanced age than she, to a man of far less means than Penelope’s husband, was almost too outrageous to believe.