Anna Godbersen: The Luxe

“You don’t have to give me the speech,” Henry interrupted, rolling his eyes. He was infuriated by this stroke of bad luck. “What office do you want, anyway?”

“Mayor first, and then ” his father started.

“And then who knows!” Isabelle broke in. “If he becomes president, I will be the first lady.”

“Well, congratulations, sir.” Henry sat back down dejectedly.

“So there will be no embarrassing me anymore. No more tales of your wildness in the papers. No more bad publicity,” the elder Schoonmaker pronounced. “Now you see why you must marry a lady. Not a Penelope. A girl with morals, whom the voters like. A girl who will make you look respectable. A girl…” Henry watched as his father leaned a hip against the table and pretended to have an idea. He raised his eyebrows at Isabelle. “A girl like Elizabeth Holland, say.”

“What?” Henry snapped. He knew the older Holland girl, of course, although he hadn’t had a conversation with her since before he went to Harvard, and she had been very young and gangly then. She was impeccably beautiful, it was true, with her ash blond hair and small, rounded mouth, but she was so obviously one of them . She was a rule-follower, a tea-sipper, a sender of embossed thank-you cards. “Elizabeth Holland is all manners.”

“Exactly.” His father pounded his fist on the table, which caused the golden liquid in Henry’s snifter to slosh back and forth.

Henry couldn’t speak, but he knew his face was twisted with outrage and disbelief. His father could not have suggested a poorer match. What he had prescribed for his son was nothing short of a prison sentence. He could feel the life of quiet gentility already rolling out before him, like the endless manicured lawns on which so many narcoleptic garden parties had been held by the matrons of his class, in Tuxedo Park and Newport, Rhode Island, and all those other places.

“Henry,” his father said warningly. He snatched up the piece of paper and waved it in the air. “I know what you’re thinking, and you should stop it. Now. I want you married and respectable. You will have to do away with Penelope. I am giving you an opportunity here, Henry.” He paused. “But God help me, if you cross me, I’ll see that every damn picture frame goes to Isabelle. I will throw you out and it will be very swift, and very, very public.”

The thought of a brown future of threadbare clothing and rotting teeth made Henry feel suddenly, horribly sober, and his eyes drifted to the bottles crowded together on the sideboard. For a moment, he wished he could go back to Harvard all the readings and lectures had seemed so pointless when he was there, but he saw now how college might have been a way for him to carve his own path, to guard against these threats of pennilessness. It was too late for that now.

His bad behavior and pathetic marks ensured that, without his father’s intervention, he would never have a place there again. Henry stared into the silent amber bottles and knew that the only route to independence left to him was through the quiet, deathlike boredom of a life with Elizabeth Holland.

The ideal ladies’ maid will be awake before her mistress, with warm water for washing the face, and will not go to sleep until she has undressed her mistress for bed. She may require a nap during the day, when her mistress does not need her.

— VAN KAMP’S GUIDE TO HOUSEKEEPING FOR LADIES OF HIGH SOCIETY, 1899 EDITION

LINA BROUD REARRANGED HER ELBOWS ON THE SILL and stared out into the tranquil darkness surrounding Gramercy Park. She had been sitting this way for many hours, in the bedroom where she had dressed the elder of the Misses Holland in layers of chemise, poplin, whalebone, and steel earlier that evening. Miss Holland no longer Lizzie, as she had been called in childhood, or Liz, as she let her sister call her, but Miss Holland, the junior lady of the house. Lina was not looking forward to her return. Elizabeth had been away for so many months that her personal maid had almost forgotten what it felt like to serve. But from the very moment that morning when Elizabeth had reentered the house, she had gone about reminding Lina precisely what was expected of her.

She scrunched up her shoulders and sighed as she dropped them. She was not like her older sister, Claire, an altogether softer person, content to read the latest Cité Chatter in the narrow attic bedroom that they shared, gazing at drawings of the Worth gowns she herself would never wear. Claire was twenty-one, only four years older than her sister, but acted as though she were Lina’s mother. Since their real mother had been dead for years, in many ways she was. But Claire was also childlike in her gratitude for every little trinket the Hollands bestowed upon her. Lina could not bring herself to feel the same way.

She shifted in her simple black linen dress, with its boat neck and low, dowdy waist, taking in the luxury of Elizabeth’s bedroom: the robin’s-egg-blue wallpaper, the wide mahogany sleigh bed, the shiny silver bathtub with heated water piped through the walls, the perfume of peonies erupting from porcelain pitchers. Since Elizabeth had come out, she had begun to fancy herself an expert on the decoration of interiors, and if asked, she likely would have said that the Holland rooms were really rather modest. Well, compared with the ridiculous mansions of Fifth Avenue millionaires, perhaps they were. It seemed to Lina, sitting under the small Dutch painting of the quaint domestic scene in the big gold frame, that Elizabeth had become blind to her own extraordinary privilege.

But Lina did not hate Elizabeth. Could not hate her, no matter how much she distanced herself with elaborate clothing and fine manners. Elizabeth had always been Lina’s model for how to act and be, a glimmer of hope that she would not always live a life so simple and plain. And it was Elizabeth who had convinced her, one night ten years ago, that they must go downstairs all the way to the carriage house to find out who was wailing in the middle of the night. Lina had been scared, but Elizabeth had insisted. That was when Lina had first come to love Will Keller, who was beautiful even then.

Will had been orphaned at the age of eight by one of those fires that blew through the tenements like they were kindling, trapping men and babies in dark closets. Will, who had been taken in by his father’s former employers with the understanding that he would serve, even at that tender age, had wailed when he dreamed of fires. Though it didn’t matter very long after that, because he stopped dreaming of those things when Lina and Elizabeth became his friends.

There was a difference between them even then, of course, but they were all children and as such equally banned from the Hollands’ grown-up world of dinner parties and card games. During the day they were all under the care of Lina’s mother, Marie Broud, who had been the Holland girls’ nurse, and she never made any distinction among her charges. She had often scolded Will and Elizabeth equally for their many schemes. Claire was too timid to join in these pranks, and Diana too young. But Lina had always hurried along with them, desperate to play a part. At night they would crawl about the darkened house, giggling at those great portraits of Elizabeth’s forefathers, sneaking sugar from the kitchen and silver buttons from the morning room. They stole old Mr. Holland’s playing cards with the pictures of ladies in undergarments on the backs and wrinkled their noses at them. They really were friends back then, before Elizabeth’s sense of self-importance swelled and she stopped having time for her old playmates.

Lina wasn’t sure when things changed. Maybe around the time that her mother died and Elizabeth began her lessons with Mrs. Bertrand, the finishing governess. Lina had been almost eleven then, awkward of body and eager to find fault in everything. She didn’t often like to think back on those years. Elizabeth, a little less than a year older than she, had become suddenly absorbed in her lessons in civility, in how to hold a teacup and when the proper time to return a call from a married female acquaintance was. Her every gesture seemed intended to convey to Lina that they were not of the same cloth, that they were no longer friends. And now Elizabeth was the sort of girl Claire read about in her magazines.