Envy - Anna Godbersen

“Oh,” she said, more softly this time, when he drew back.

His lips were still parted, and the moon was reflected like white disks in his eyes.

Her mouth fell open a little wider. She felt the expectation of another kiss, the way one feels the rain just before it begins to fall. But moments passed, their exhalations mingling in the sea air, and none came.

Henry stepped back. “We’ll be missed.”

“What?” There was anger in her voice, but the disappointment was stronger.

“Your sister, Penelope — they’ll be wondering where we are.”

Beyond Henry’s shoulder the lights of the hotel twinkled and the palms made grand silhouettes against a purple sky. There were some long clouds moving across it — they would overtake the moon and make it blurry soon. “So you’d prefer to have me a few minutes at a time? In back rooms and corridors of trains? That was what you hoped for when you told me to find a way to come to Florida?”

Henry shook his head, but she knew that what she had said was true. She tried to make her body cold.

“You imagined I would become your mistress.”

“No—”

“Good night.” Diana summoned all the dignity that she could manage in her bedraggled state and began to move back up the beach. Her dress was soaked and her stockings dotted with sand and her heart couldn’t possibly withstand any more. She did want to look back, but she felt that to do so would somehow forgive all of Henry’s sins against her.

“Diana!” he cried. His voice had been full of anguish, but then it was gone, and for a moment all she heard was the soft lapping of the waves against the shore. “Diana, I need you”—and from the way his voice broke over her name, she believed he did. But she shut her eyes and kept on toward the hotel, over in the distance, where the lights were bright and the music played faintly.

“Diana,” he went on in the same desperate voice as he chased her up the beach, “Diana, I’ll leave her.”

That gave her pause — she stopped and looked. Henry’s face had ever been the clean-shaven and well-constructed face of civilization, but he was looking at her now with something more akin to animal urgency.

“You will?” she whispered.

“I can’t be without you.”

“You can’t?” Diana knew she was in grave danger of being a fool again, but hope bloomed in her heart.

Henry took a few strides and then he looked down on her with new conviction. He brushed the curls away from her face, his hand lingering over her eyes, his thumb pressing against her full lower lip.

“Come, you had better get yourself cleaned up,” he said as he put his arm around her shoulder.

For a while they walked like that toward the great, lit-up dollhouse across the lawn, until it was too close. Then they separated so that she could return to her room, and he could go back to play his role for just a little longer. She kept the image of his face in her mind even after they’d parted. Like all his promises, it was now burnished with renewed and wondrous value.

Twenty Three

The recently affianced couple, Reginald Newbold and Adelaide Wetmore, were seen last night at a little musical evening at Mr. Newbold’s home on Madison Avenue. His sister, Gemma, was there as well, who was said to be expecting a proposal from Teddy Cutting. Did she look so sad because Mr. Cutting is away in Florida, and should we take his prolonged absence to mean there will be no June wedding?

— FROM THE SOCIETY PAGE OF THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF THE WORLD GAZETTE, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1900

“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?”

Elizabeth opened her eyes slowly, and then the ballroom of the Poinciana came back into focus: the bodies swaying across the parquet floor, the white latticework of the ceiling, the string music soft from behind a screen. She realized that she had rested her head on Teddy’s shoulder during the dance, but she answered truthfully when she said, “I am.”

“You’ll let me know if you would like to sit, won’t you?” She had never before noticed the worry lines that sometimes emerged on her old friend’s forehead. His skin was otherwise so soft and unblemished, and she wondered when and how he’d come by those marks.

Like the other women in the room, Elizabeth wore light, evening-appropriate colors — her ivory dress was embellished with embroidery of pale pink — but in the hours since dinner she had lost track of everyone else. She knew that the kind of people she had always been comfortable amongst populated the room — they were the people her mother wanted her to be seen mingling with, and she was grateful to feel safe and light enough to do so now. Her neck, as gracious and slender as a swan’s, was bedecked with her grandmother’s jewels, which her mother had carefully packed for the trip, and her pale hair was arranged in piles above her head. The cooler evening breeze came through the open windows, and for a moment she felt quite perfectly at ease.

“Do I look tired?” her small, plump lips parted, and she let her eyes flutter between open and closed.

“No.” Teddy smiled from one corner of his mouth, and moved her, in smooth glides, away from the center of the room. “You look lovely.”

She smiled faintly and nodded.

“I’ve so enjoyed getting to spend time with you these last days,” he went on.

“I have as well.”

“They are such lovely hours, the ones I get to spend with you. They’re something I feared I’d never experience again….”

Out of the corner of her eye, Elizabeth noticed Henry coming in from the lawn. He approached Mrs. Schoonmaker, whose hair was arranged in shiny curls with feathers on top of her head, and whose polka-dot chiffon dress gathered in a low V-neck over her chest. Penelope glanced at his feet and then back to his face, and her eyes widened. Elizabeth knew that look well — she had seen her old friend angry, with servant girls and members of her family and — on one especially notable occasion — with Elizabeth herself.

The Schoonmakers were across the room and there was no way to know what words passed between them, but at the end of their brief conversation Henry removed Penelope’s hand, which was sheathed in an elbow-length black satin glove, from his shoulder and left the room. For a reason that she couldn’t place, the scene filled Elizabeth with foreboding, and she looked to Teddy to ask him what he thought it was all about.

“Elizabeth?” he said before she could question him.

She nodded that he should speak, but he exhaled self-consciously and had to look away. They waltzed in a few circles before he began again.

“I only wanted to tell you that when I proposed to you, so many years ago now, it seems—”

“Less than two, the last time.” A whisper of a smile appeared on Elizabeth’s face, even though the memory this conjured was a sad one. It had been in Newport, where she had stayed for a whole month and grown dizzy and lovesick over her distance from Will. He had managed to send her letters — she couldn’t remember anymore how they’d gotten away with it — which had been full of his fear that she would lose interest in him while she was away. Her eyelashes sank down.

“Yes, that’s right, it was not even two years ago. When you were a guest of the Hayeses.”

Elizabeth couldn’t yet bear to open her eyes, but she knew from his breathless tone how nervous and in earnest Teddy must be.

“Anyway, what I meant to say, what I want to say, is that I was sincere then, and my offer still stands.” She had never heard his voice so shaky. “I would still—”

“Oh, Teddy,” was all Elizabeth could manage. She was afraid that if she didn’t stop him she would begin to cry on the dance floor and then there would be no stopping all the feeling, or holding in any of the secrets. But perhaps he misread her sadness for another emotion, because he went on.

“Do you think you could love me? Perhaps marry me? I mean, not now, necessarily, but maybe in time—”

Elizabeth came to a sudden halt on the dance floor. She thought of Will on their wedding day in a brown suit that he had bought for the occasion, and shook her head instinctively. He had still been wearing that suit when she had rushed away from him, and it was that suit that had soaked up his blood on the platform in Grand Central Station.

“Perhaps in time, Teddy,” she said, even though the idea of frothy white flowers and trousseaus and groomsmen in a row filled her with revulsion. She met his gray eyes, which were watching her so sweetly and attentively. She’d known, even that summer when she was still so naïve, that if she had never known a man like Will, then Teddy might have given her a very happy life.

“In time,” she repeated. Her voice sounded mechanical, but she meant it as a confirmation. In time, there would be nothing so sweet to her as words like those. She tried to smile, but she knew the effect was no good, for all the color had drained from her lips. “You know, if it hadn’t been for my experiences last fall and before—” she began, wanting to give him some kind of an explanation. But she stopped herself, realizing this was neither the time nor the place. “Just now I find I am very tired after all. Won’t you excuse me?”

Her skirts and jewels, her gloves and laces, the pins that held up her hair and the strings that held in her ribs, all felt very heavy then. She didn’t know if she would even be able to carry them across the room. But she could not be out, among the throng, in all that adornment any longer. She wasn’t able to look at Teddy as they parted, and so she had no idea whether he had understood her at all.

Twenty Four

Resort dress is always lavish, but my spies in Palm Beach report that Miss Carolina Broad seems to have arrived with an all-new wardrobe, and that she appears always spangled, sparkling, and encrusted with diamonds. I hope that Mr. Carey Lewis Longhorn is at least receiving reports of all his money has made possible.

— FROM THE “GAMESOME GALLANT” COLUMN IN THE NEW YORK IMPERIAL, SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1900

THERE WERE MANY WOMEN IN POSSESSION OF youth and beauty gliding across the dance floor of the Royal Poinciana that Saturday evening, which was covered by an arched white wood ceiling but remained open to the elements via its large, thrown-open windows. Carolina felt she must be the loveliest of them all. Her brown hair was divided into two sections so that it both rose above her forehead in a high pouf and curled down her neck in a ribboned tail. Around her throat rested a double strand of pearls and garnets that brought out the green in her eyes, and her arms were sheathed in flutes of antique lace. She knew that the skin of her broad forehead very nearly glowed under the varicolored lights, and that in the South her smattering of freckles indicated a kind of thoroughbred tawniness. The only element out of place was her partner, Percival Coddington, whose breath was fragrant with the chicken fricassee he had eaten for dinner.

“What a pleasure it is to dance with you,” Percival said. Carolina knew what it was to be uncomfortable in this world, and she understood the meaning of the sheen of sweat on his forehead. He was nervous, poor thing, and she did feel a little bad for him. Still, she knew she was wasting whole minutes of her promising new life, of her late-blooming loveliness, on him. His cavernous nostrils were just at her eye level, and his damp hands were in far too familiar a position as they swayed to the music of Bailey’s Orchestra, which played behind a screen painted with underwater creatures. Hundreds of guests were amassed along the edges of the room, and the dance floor was crowded with young couples. There were far brighter, far richer, far better-dressed people in the rosy shadows, blotted out by the army of waiters, and here she was with a moderately moneyed nobody who had not yet learned to breathe with his mouth shut.