Anna Godbersen: The Luxe

For years Lina had existed quietly, and practically alone, despite attending to Elizabeth all day and night and sharing sleeping quarters with her sister and the other young women on the Holland staff. She’d been too shy to maintain her childhood friendship with Will without the buffer of Elizabeth. So she had watched him grow taller and finer looking from afar. There had been dark years for him, too she had heard stories of his drinking and fighting from the housekeeper, Mrs. Faber, and had wondered what dissatisfaction lived in his heart. It was only that summer when, with Elizabeth gone, she was temporarily and gloriously freed from her regular duties that she and Will had become friends again. They shared cigarettes after his long days were done and jokes at the expense of Mrs. Faber. They imagined aloud what their lives would be like if they were free to do as they wished. Before, she always wondered where he used to disappear to. Now she knew that he wasn’t dangerous at all, that he spent nearly every moment he wasn’t working with a book. Books about the excesses of the leisure class, and the theory of democracy, about politics and literature, but most of all about the West and how anybody with drive could make his way there. Now the summer was almost over, and she still hadn’t found a way to tell him that she wanted to go out West, too. With him. That she was in love with him.

Lina was brought back from her thoughts of Will by the actual sight of him. One of the Hollands’ broughams came to a stop in front of the house, and Will leaped down from his perch to hush the horses and open the door for the ladies. She looked at his back, wide at the shoulders and long at the torso, with the poignant X of black suspenders across it. Elizabeth came first, holding up her arm for Diana, who, for all her big talk, was looking rather fatigued. And then Will put his arm up for Mrs. Holland, whose small black figure came quickly to the ground. Then the women walked one after the other through the still night and up to the door. Lina could hear Claire welcoming them as Will walked the horses around to the carriage house.

She knew Elizabeth would soon be advancing up the main stairs, and she felt a rebellious instinct rise up in her. Once she arrived, Lina would have to undress her young mistress, and wouldn’t be in bed herself until after morning’s light. Just imagining the very task she had performed thousands of times, but escaped for months, caused her body to flush with resentment. She pushed herself up from the sill and shuffled hurriedly out of Elizabeth’s room and down the long carpeted hall. She reached the back servants’ stairs in a few moments, and then hustled down two steps at a time.

As Lina moved toward the kitchen, she could hear the Holland women on the main stairs, going up. She paused and considered whether she would be punished, and how, for abandoning her duties on Miss Holland’s first night back in New York. But she wanted to tell Will about all the French airs her mistress had acquired. She wanted to see him laugh and know she had caused it. And maybe…maybe she would find a way to tell him how she felt. So she gave herself a little nod and dashed through the kitchen and out the rear pantry door, which Elizabeth had installed last fall to facilitate deliveries from the grocer.

Then she stepped lightly onto the hay-covered ground of the carriage house. Will had been removing the equipment from the horses. It lay there on the ground in neat rows so that he could clean it before putting it away. The threadbare cotton of his blue collared shirt clung to his skin from working with those gleaming black animals. His sleeves were rolled above his elbows, and his hair was damp where it hung beneath his ears.

He took a step forward and met her eyes, then stopped as though he had realized something.

“Hey,” he greeted her quietly. He looked over her shoulder, toward the door, and then smiled tightly as he refocused his eyes on her. “Shouldn’t you be upstairs, helping the Misses Holland?”

Lina stood still near the door and smiled uncontrollably. She hugged herself and waited for him to invite her in like usual, but then he turned his gaze away and spoke in a very different tone from the one she had grown used to over the summer. “You know you’re testing your luck, sneaking around at night. Now that Miss Liz…I mean, Miss Elizabeth is back. You shouldn’t. You…can’t.”

Lina’s heart was startled in her chest, and time stretched slowly in front of her. She was so confused by the way he was acting. It was as though all the closeness that had grown between them over the summer had disappeared in an instant, or had only ever existed in her imagination. She blinked, wishing that he would just look at her for a moment.

Then he did finally bring his gaze to meet hers. His face was frozen and his mouth was set and his eyes were blank. The horse nearest him shifted, prancing in place and shaking its head. A moment passed, and then Will reached up and quieted the large animal.

“Will,” she said, her voice rising with an unpleasant pleading quality that she could not control. She desperately wanted him to say something familiar and encouraging, to make some joke that would eclipse the awkwardness she was feeling now. “Why can’t I visit with you like usual? The ladies do it during the day, with tea, but because we’re who we are, we have to do it at odd hours and in ”

“Lina,” Will interrupted. She was jarred by the name, which he rarely used. Over the summer he had always used her childhood nickname, Liney, to address her. He looked to the ground and sighed. Then, without meeting her eyes, he moved toward her. He gently took both of her hands, and for a second Lina thought her heart might stop. But then he pushed her back toward the kitchen. “I’m sorry, Lina,” he said softly as he moved her up those four wooden steps and into the house. “Not tonight. You can’t be here tonight.”

“But why not?” she whispered.

Will stared at her. His brow was tensed and his eyes seemed very blue and very serious. He just shook his head, like whatever he was thinking was something she wouldn’t understand. “Just not tonight, all right?”

And then she was in the kitchen and the door had closed in her face. Lina reached out for a wall in the darkness. She slid down to the floor, which smelled of cooked onions and dirt, and there she remained. She sat like that for a long time, feeling lonelier than perhaps ever. Outside, the sky began to turn from black to the darkest purple.

She was still there when the door to the servants’ stairs opened, and a figure in a white silk wrap hurried across the floor. The girl was as darting and iridescent as a ghost, and she kept her head down as she moved.

She had already pushed through the door to the carriage house when Lina realized that the girl was Miss Elizabeth Holland.

Paris, August 1899

The summer is almost over, and I now understand my role more clearly what it is to be a young lady of the Holl and family, and all that is expected of me. I must not always be so indulgent and careless although I find it difficult to regret anything I have done.

— FROM THE DIARY OF ELIZABETH HOLLAND

ELIZABETH, WRAPPED IN THE WHITE SILK KIMONO her father had bought on a trip to Japan and given to her for her sixteenth birthday, hurried through the kitchen and out the back door. She was moving with the trembling determination of a desire that had been building in her all night. She kept her head down as she stepped onto the first of four steps made of old pliant wood and then onto the stable floor.

She stood there on the soft ground, the air all around her heavy with late-summer heat and motes of hay. She listened to the sounds of horses gently shifting in their stables and felt fully awake for the first time all night. These things the sound of the animals, the crisp and quiet night, the sweetness of the hay they were everything she had tried so hard not to think about while she was gone. She stepped lightly in her satin slippers, trying to keep her kimono from catching any incriminating bits of hay.