Anna Godbersen: The Luxe

“What are you thinking about?” Will whispered, propping himself up on his elbow.

“I hate that question,” she said, because she was again thinking about her mother’s warning, and how waking up in the warm crook of Will’s arm was the opposite of heeding her. She sat up and looked out the window onto the vegetable garden in the back. “I should go.” She could hear the lack of conviction in her own voice.

“Why?” Will slid his hand inside her kimono and rested it above her heart. The touch made her conscious of how quickly it was beating, and that every moment she spent there made her more nervous about the goings-on in the house. Lina, despite her strange absence the night before, would likely be arriving soon with hot chocolate and ice water to find an empty bed. Elizabeth forced herself to give Will a quick kiss on his soft lips and then push herself out of his grasp.

“You know why.” She stood, wrapping her robe around her. Elizabeth looked down at the horses stirring in their stables below and tried to look like she was doing what she thought was right. “If my mother found out that I come here if anyone found out it would be the end.”

“But if we moved out to Montana…or California…nobody would care what we did. We could lie in bed all morning,” he said, his voice growing warm and persuasive. “And then, when we did get up, we could go for horse rides, or whatever we wanted, and…”

Elizabeth had heard all this before, but she could tell that he’d thought about it much more in her absence. She liked it when he talked this way. He was the only boy she knew who looked into the future and tried to imagine how it would be better than the present. Will was the most frightening and beautiful and exacting person she had ever known. Being somewhere far away from New York, where they could be just any boy and any girl, was the prettiest idea she could think of. There would be no more hurtful misunderstandings, because she wouldn’t have to sneak around and visit him only when she knew the rest of the house was too exhausted to notice.

She turned back, half-ready to entertain the fantasy, but she was silenced by what she saw: Will, wearing only his faded black long johns, his chest slender and strong and naked with a few errant hairs, raising himself up from the bed and onto one knee. Elizabeth had seen this position before. She knew what it meant.

“Maybe you should be thinking about a new kind of life…” he said softly, and then reached for her hand. Elizabeth snatched it away instinctively as her heartbeat regained its rapid, nervous pace. She looked down at her palm and wished that her sense of propriety didn’t make her do things like that.

“I’ll be back when I can, all right?” She forced herself not to look into Will’s face, which she knew would be twisted with confusion. If she did, she might realize how afraid she was of losing him. She might become neglectful of all the things a good girl like her must do.

She climbed the familiar wooden steps into the kitchen, readying herself to scale the servant’s stairs to her bedroom, where she could do what the rest of the girls of her set were doing: sleeping off the first ball of the season, content in the knowledge that they could doze into the afternoon, dreaming all the while of the dresses they would wear and the boys they would dance with in the coming months.

“Morning, Miss Holland.”

Elizabeth turned to see Lina, sitting in her constant black dress at the heavy, uneven table in the kitchen where the cook took her breaks. While Elizabeth was in Paris, her maid had grown longer and skinnier, and the freckles splattered across her nose had increased in number. The sight of her, looking plain and a little sullen in the early morning, caused Elizabeth to gasp. She could feel sweat collecting in the small of her back, and closed her robe around her to disguise the flush that was spreading to her throat. Elizabeth was surely beginning to panic, so she was shocked by the calmness in her voice: “I have been looking for you everywhere. I am ready for my bowl of chocolate now. And bring water also. I have been all night without it.”

Then Elizabeth turned for the stair. “Where were you last night, anyway?” she added as she hurried out of the kitchen. She tried to tell herself that she had pulled it off Lina was too sulky a girl to pay attention to Elizabeth’s doings. And anyway, how long could she really have been sitting there?

At the Richmond Hayeses’ ball, on the evening of September the sixteenth, the young lady of the house was seen dancing quite amorously with a certain young man whom we shall refer to by the initials HS. They were a pair so obviously pleased by each other’s company that members of society are whispering that an engagement is not far off, though an announcement had yet to be made by press time….

— FROM THE SOCIETY PAGE OF THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF THE WORLD GAZETTE , SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 1899

“THE PAPERS WERE JUST FANTASTIC,” ISAAC PHILLIPS Buck put in, extending his pinkie as he sipped from his porcelain teacup. “Most fun I’ve had since Remington Astor was caught kissing one of the kitchen boys. That was a good scandal.”

“Oh, they were ridiculous.” Penelope drew her long, ringed fingers over the head of her Boston terrier, Robber, and smiled absently. She wore a dress of black faille with a low, square neck, tight waist, and tiered skirt and was looking especially slight next to Buck, who was sweating in the late summer heat. They were the only people in the large parlor room, with its twenty-five-foot ceilings and many pieces of French furniture upholstered in matching blue-and-white striped silk. “I don’t know why you bring them to me,” she added with a yawn. She had been resting all day, and her body still had that pleasant, lazy feeling she associated with the day’s first waking moments.

“Oh, what’s that old adage…heart-stopping envy is the sincerest form of flattery? You should learn to view the papers as I do.”

“I do try , Buck, but all of this God-this, God-that, God disapproves of your mansion…” Penelope tried to seem more dismissive than amused, but she couldn’t help a little giggle. There was so much bombast out there. “I mean really, the man must have something better to do with his time.”

“He does have all eternity to use it up.” Buck laughed, and Penelope rolled her eyes. “Well, at least the papers seem to agree with you about a certain Schoonmaker. They’re predicting you and Henry will be engaged by the end of the season,” Buck told her, his eyes bulging with this news coup. “They even brought in an astrologer to confirm it.”

Penelope felt a delirious surge of confidence in her chest, but restrained herself from actually clapping in triumph.

“But really, they could have saved the astrologer and just asked the Misses Wetmore,” Buck went on. “They looked like they’d been slapped when they saw you on the floor with him last night. They knew instantly.”

“Adelaide Wetmore needs to be slapped,” Penelope said quickly, before she became visibly giddy. The thought of her and Henry being linked in the papers was positively thrilling. He was so careful to always keep them a secret, but now all of New York would be obsessing over whether it was true or not. Soon even Elizabeth would have to acknowledge that the only perfect boy in New York belonged to Penelope. She forced away her smile. “All the same. It’s so pompous, all this spilled ink over a little party. Next time you shouldn’t let them come.”

She couldn’t complain, though. Not really. Some of the coverage was Bible-thumping about exposed shoulders, but the vast majority were long and faithful renderings of the extravagant evening. And Buck was right: There was no pleasure like being envied on a mass scale. Not to mention the paper’s assistance in pushing her affair along. It had now been confirmed by the press and by the stars: Henry was going to be hers, really and truly, for all to see.