Anna Godbersen: The Luxe

The elder Schoonmaker shifted in his seat. His young bride yawned. “So tell me about you and Miss Hayes,” Henry’s father said abruptly.

Henry sniffed his drink and studied himself in the mirror over the bar. He had the smooth chin and slender features of a man of leisure, and his dark hair was pomaded to the right. “Penelope?” he repeated thoughtfully. Though he had little or no desire to discuss his romantic entanglements with his father, it was a subject mildly preferable to family wills.

“Yes,” his father urged him on.

“Everyone thinks she is one of the great beauties of her generation.” Henry thought of Penelope, with her gigantic eyes and dramatic red dress, which seemed calculated to frighten people as much as to seduce them. He knew from personal experience that Penelope was not frightening but then, he knew how to enjoy her. He wished he were back at the party, moving her exquisite body across the dance floor.

“And you?” his father went on. “What do you think?”

“I very much enjoy her company.” Henry took a sip of Scotch and savored the burning tingle against his lips.

“So you want to…marry her?” his father asked, leadingly.

Henry couldn’t help a little snort at that. He caught Isabelle staring at him, and he knew that she was now thinking not like a stepmother, but like all the other girls of New York, obsessing over how and when Henry Schoonmaker would marry. He lit a cigarette and shook his head. “I haven’t met a girl I could think about so seriously, sir. As you have often pointed out, I am not serious about much.”

“Then Penelope is not someone you could see as your wife,” his father confirmed, leveling his fierce eyes at Henry.

Henry shrugged, remembering last April when Penelope had been staying in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Her family had left their old house on Washington Square, and the new one wasn’t yet completed. Even though he hardly knew her, she’d invited him up to the suite she’d had all to herself and welcomed him in nothing more than stockings and a shirtwaist. “No, Dad. I don’t think so.”

“But the way you were dancing…” He paused. “Never mind. If you don’t want to marry her, that’s good. Very good.” He clapped, stood, and came around the table to tower over Henry. “Now, who do you think would make a good wife?”

“For me?” Henry asked, managing to keep his face straight.

“Yes, you good-for-nothing boulevardier,” his father spat out, his momentary good humor quickly evaporating. The famous Schoonmaker rage was one parental touch that Henry had not been deprived of in his childhood, and it had arisen at everything from broken toys to bad manners. William Schoonmaker sat down noisily in the baby-soft leather club chair next to Henry. “You don’t think I’m just idly curious about your paramours, do you?”

“No, sir,” Henry replied, blinking his dark lashes at his father. “I do not.”

“Then you’re smarter than I give you credit for.”

“Thank you, sir,” Henry said, meaning it. He wished his voice wouldn’t get so small at times like these.

“Henry, I find your louche lifestyle personally offensive.” His father stood again, pushing the club chair backward across the parquet floor, and began circling the table. “And I am not the only one.”

“I’m sorry for that, Dad, but it’s my lifestyle, not yours,” Henry replied. He had regained his voice and was forcing himself to keep his gaze steady in his father’s direction. “Or anybody else’s.”

“Possible, but doubtful,” his father went on, “since it is my money inherited, yes, but multiplied many times over by my hard work that has allowed your lifestyle.”

“Are you threatening me with poverty?” Henry asked, glancing at the will as he lit a new cigarette with the old one. He tried to look careless as he exhaled, but even saying the word poverty gave him an unpleasant feeling in his stomach. The word had a sick lilt to it, he had always thought. His first semester at Harvard he had shared a suite with a scholarship boy named Timothy Marfield his father’s idea of character-building, Henry later discovered. Timothy’s father clerked twelve-hour days at a Boston bank to pay his son’s tuition, and Henry liked Tim, who knew all the best watering holes in Cambridge. But it was the first time Henry had ever really thought about someone doing that soul-crushing thing called working, and the realization still haunted him.

“Not exactly. Poverty does not become a Schoonmaker,” his father finally answered. “I am here to suggest an alternative course. One I think you will find far more palatable than an empty bank account,” he went on, lowering his head and staring into his son’s eyes. “Marriage.”

“You want me to marry ?” Henry asked, fighting back a laugh. There was no one less marriageable in all of New York, and even those sycophantic, underpaid society columnists knew that. He tried to picture a girl with whom he would actually want to trip across the lawns of Newport or the decks of European luxury liners forever but his powers of imagination failed him. “You can’t be serious.”

“I certainly am.” His father glowered at him.

“Oh.” Henry shook his head slowly, hoping to appear to be considering his father’s proposal. “There would have to be a long search, of course, to find a girl worthy of becoming a Mrs. Schoonmaker…” he offered.

“Shut up, Henry.” His father wheeled back around the room and put his large hands on his young wife’s shoulders. She smiled uncomfortably. “You see, I already have someone in mind.”

“What?” Henry said, his cool beginning to evaporate.

“Someone with class and sophistication and good family breeding. Someone whom the press likes and will embrace as your bride. As a Mrs. Schoonmaker , Henry. Someone who will come across as a conduit of civility and culture. I am thinking of ”

“Why do you care?” Henry interrupted. He was fully mad now and standing. Isabelle made a little gasping noise when she saw the two Schoonmaker men facing each other down.

“Why do I care?” his father roared, pacing around the table.

“Why do I care? Because I have ambitions, Henry, unlike you. You don’t seem to understand that every move you make is reported in the society pages. And the people I care about read those pages however silly they are and they talk. You make us all look ridiculous, Henry. With your dropping out of college and running around town…Every time you open your mouth, you tarnish the family name.”

“Doesn’t answer my question,” Henry shot back. His father, with his explosive temper and famous love of money, would seem to have satisfied quite a few ambitions already. He had built a railroad company from scratch and made it hugely profitable, had treated the tenements built on his family’s ancestral lands like his own personal mint, and had married two society beauties and buried one. “I really don’t get it, Dad,” Henry said. “What do you want ?”

Isabelle’s small, pointed elbows came excitedly to the table. “William wants to run for office!” she blurted.

“What?” Henry’s face puckered. He was unable to disguise his incredulity. “What office?”

His father looked almost embarrassed by the revelation, and it quieted the tension in the room. “I’ve been talking to my friend from Albany, and he wagered me that…” Mr. Schoonmaker trailed off and then shrugged his shoulders. Henry knew that his father was a longtime friend and rival of Governor Roosevelt’s, and he nodded at him to continue. “I admire the man’s call to public service,” William enunciated, his voice growing warm and stately. “Who says the noble class should not be involved in politics? It is our noblesse oblige. Man is nothing if he cannot rule his world in his time and leave it better off when he departs for ”