Anna Godbersen - Splendor

Working made her arms weary, but it was a kind of fatigue that she’d grown to like. It wasn’t that she needed the money so much anymore — she had saved what she’d earned on the luxury liner, not to mention what she made selling pieces of gossip about the top-drawer people on board to Barnard back in New York, as well as a few little local color sketches, which he had complimented excessively. She was beginning to see that stories were not only to be overheard on the plush settees of drawing rooms at teatime, but might also be observed when one is out, at night, where people congregate.

“What’s a pretty American like you doing in a place like this?” called a man with a wide bushy mustache as she pushed a full glass in his direction. Diana, who was used to such questions, and the rather forward flattery that followed, took his money with an evasive smile. At first it had surprised her how differently men behaved toward her here, uttering phrases or asking favors as they never would have dared in New York. But she quickly came to see that they were a long way from home, and from the women and children they were bound to there, and that distance as well as drink had a way of lowering men’s inhibitions.

A fresh-faced soldier appeared behind the mustachioed man, who was still leering at Diana with rummy eyes, and called out for a beer in a timid voice. He seemed as young as she was, and apparently all his politeness had not yet been rubbed off by his colleagues, because he could scarcely look her in the eye. She gave the boy an appreciative wink before turning to fetch a bottle from the icebox. Winking had become a kind of flirtatious compulsion with her, and as she reached into the cool darkness, she decided she was going to have to cure herself of it before she found Henry. When she turned back around, the boy was gone — as far as she was concerned, anyway. He had become as invisible to her as the rest of the bar.

Diana’s mouth dropped open and a wild energy played in her chest. She had forgotten all the tasks that constituted her job, or how to perform them. The only man in the entire bar that she could now make out was darker than when she’d last seen him, and his skin looked especially tawny against the collar of his white linen shirt. The bridge of his nose was a color that suggested he had been out in the sun that day, and the expression disappearing from his face indicated that moments ago he had been having a careless good time.

“Hello, soldier,” she managed at last, with what she could gather of her breath.

“Diana?” Henry said, as though the sound of her name might confirm her unlikely presence in front of him. “How—” he stammered, “how did you come here?”

“I was looking for you.” All the sentences she’d imagined saying to him since that day at the end of February, when he’d entered a doorway and seen her wrapped up in another man, had escaped her. The only sentence she could think of was the one she’d just uttered, and it seemed to her, at that moment, to contain the only relevant information.

“You were?”

“Yes.”

“I mean — you got my letter?”

Diana nodded. She had received it indeed. The pages were sewn into her suitcase; she had read them a hundred times.

“You don’t hate me?”

There was no gesture that could have communicated how far her feelings were from hatred, but she shook her head in a kind of attempt anyway. Whatever emotion she was experiencing — was it shyness, or trepidation? — was new for her, and she was a little surprised at herself for being unsure in front of Henry after everything that had happened between them, and all she had done to bring this moment about. He was staring at her with those inscrutable black eyes. Her heart had begun to tick with the fear that their meeting was almost over, that her quest would end here with both of them tongue-tied. After all, he was older than she, and more experienced, and perhaps now that he was a soldier, and not just a rich playboy with nothing else to do, he no longer had time for little girls.

The touch of Señora Conrad’s thick fingertips on her shoulder shocked Diana back to the present. The room was still full of people, noisily talking up the working girls or clambering toward the bar and banging their glasses against its worn surface. She glanced at them, at the row of faces red with joy, and then back at Diana. A surprised and knowing light shone in Señora Conrad’s eyes, and after a watchful pause she drew her young employee away from her post by the elbow.

“Come.” The lady gestured to Henry. Then she led them to the rear of her establishment, opened the door to the storeroom, and pushed one and then the other inside.

The room was lined with crates, and the closed door protected Diana and Henry, if just barely, from the racket of an advancing evening. Both were bathed in the honeyed light of a single bulb muted with paper. Diana turned her chin up toward Henry, expecting a kiss, but for a while he could only manage a few disbelieving blinks. Relief, along with a kind of euphoria, had begun to seep into her chest, although Henry’s presence had not yet begun to seem real. He stepped forward, and she parted her lips, but he did not put his mouth to hers. Instead his arms went around her torso, and he lifted her up above him, squeezing her tight. A deeply buried instinct told her to rest her face against his shoulder.

Sometime before the dawn they would begin talking and be unable to stop, and then their hands would roam all over each other. But for right then there was nothing she wanted but to hang like that, her feet suspended a foot from the ground, breathing in the smell that for her had ceased to be like anything but Henry. Not even her most fervent imaginings could have rendered him as good as this.

Those of us who thought that Elizabeth Holland — a girl most artfully groomed to be a bride — took a social step down in marrying her father’s former business partner, Snowden Trapp Cairns, must now admit that she did not, in any event, grow poorer in the exchange, for she was spotted over the weekend directing new furniture to be carried into a very handsome Madison Avenue brownstone….

— FROM THE SOCIETY PAGE OF THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF THE WORLD GAZETTE, SATURDAY, JULY 7, 1900

BY FOUR O’CLOCK ELIZABETH WAS FEELING RATHER fatigued, for she had risen at dawn to oversee the arrangement of antique sofas in her parlor, and the lighting of fires in her kitchen, so that something approximating an acceptable tea could be served to a few ladies who stopped by to wish her well at her new address. Among her guests were Agnes Jones, who turned over all the china to see if the stamps were authentic, and Penelope Schoonmaker, with whom she maintained a delicate façade of friendship in public, and who dropped by on her way to the department stores. It had been a lovely afternoon, but Elizabeth was glad when they were gone. The baby was restless inside of her, and there was still so much to do.

The house was arranged not unlike No. 17 Gramercy Park, where she had spent her first eighteen years. On one side of the main entrance was a large parlor with floor-to-ceiling windows that faced the street, and on the other a dining room of similar proportions. There was a more private drawing room in the back of the house, along with the kitchen and other quarters that only the servants used. The foyer was large enough to properly greet visitors, but it did not pretend to be the antechamber of a royal court, as in some of the ostentatious new constructions. A handsome flight of stairs was built against the north-facing wall, which turned onto a second-floor landing that offered a fine vantage of the bedrooms as well as the two social areas downstairs, when their pocket doors were drawn open. The house gave her tremendous satisfaction; just walking through its spaces made her feel that she was finally going to do right by her child and, by extension, her Will.