Envy - Anna Godbersen

It was with this winsome fantasy that she stepped forward into Sherry’s main room, ready for an evening that she was convinced would come to herald so many new beginnings. She would have crossed straight to Longhorn, and gone on to the front entrance without any need for discussion, but she was stalled by the whisper of fingers on her back. She half turned, with an indifferent semi-smile on her face; when she recognized the person who had touched her, all her pleasant thoughts faded.

“Miss Broad!”

The voice was jocular, but when she returned its owner’s greeting, she found she could not match his tone.

“Oh.” Her gaze shifted over the full tables to Longhorn, who had not yet noticed her there in the shadows. “Hello, Tristan.”

Tristan Wrigley was tall, with wispy light hair and hazel eyes the color of a sunset reflected in muddy waters. Although their acquaintance was still new, he had already hurt and helped her in many ways. He was a department store salesman and a con artist, and he was the first and only man who had ever kissed her. She had been avoiding him, but if this rankled him he did not show it. He was smiling, and a bosomy woman, who wore a garish amount of rouge and foot-high feathers in her hair, was hanging off his arm and grinning entirely too much for the setting.

“This is Mrs. Portia Tilt,” he went on, fixing a steady and intense gaze on Carolina. “She and her husband have just moved from out west. Carolina is from out west, too. She is the heir to a copper-smelting fortune, you know, and she—”

“I’m sure your friend doesn’t require my entire autobiography,” Carolina interrupted coldly. In a moment, she had surmised the whole situation. Mrs. Tilt, having more money than class, had believed Tristan’s implication that he might assist her with getting into society, and he, thus assured of her gullibility, had pressed on for money and trinkets and free meals of all kinds. Mrs. Tilt would learn in time — though she did not look particularly swift at the moment — that one does not get into society by walking arm in arm with a Lord & Taylor salesman around one of the best restaurants in Manhattan; Carolina was not such a fool, and she did not intend to make the same mistake. “Goodbye,” she concluded, with a bright smile but without explanation.

“Goodbye,” Mrs. Tilt answered gaily, too thick-witted to realize she had been cut, and then pushed forward. Tristan — still attached to her by the crook of his arm — was pulled along, but he had time to look back and fix Carolina with such a concentrated look that she felt it down into her toes. It was lucky that Mrs. Tilt began guffawing loudly after that, and all eyes turned in the direction she was heading, which allowed Carolina to return to her seat without anybody taking notice.

“Ah, there you are, my dear.” Longhorn smiled at her appreciatively, the way one smiles at a favorite grandchild who has eaten all of the candy one has given her and shortly thereafter requested more. Then she felt the weight of her wrap on her shoulders and allowed herself to be escorted through the many rooms to the front entrance.

Out in the deep purple night it was still, and the lamplight fell in yellowy pools. It was cold, too cold to move, and the coachmen who loitered at the curb were bent, immobile, over their cups of hot cider. The horses were covered in thick blankets, and the breath streaming from their nostrils was visible in the frigid air. Carolina had regained herself after her encounter with Tristan, and she turned to Longhorn now with a look of gratitude. Longhorn knew what she was, but he didn’t know about her shameful involvement with the salesman, or that it had been Tristan’s idea for her to get close to the old bachelor for both their gain. He thought of her as more guileless than all that, and had given her no opportunity to correct the impression. It was a kindness that she felt acutely at that moment.

Since Tristan’s initial suggestion, she had grown truly fond of the older man. She enjoyed his saltiness and carefully observed the confidence and indifference to others’ opinion with which he approached the wider world. And he liked what he termed her “candidness”—in truth, this was nothing more than a lack of knowledge and a dumb willingness to admit that she had much to learn. But they made a good pair, and their time together was always of a high quality.

“What a lovely evening this is turning out to be,” she said sweetly, tucking her bottom lip under her teeth. Her heavy cape was lined with white fur, which framed her face, and embroidered with gold threads along its full sweeping length.

Longhorn smiled at her, and a twinkle — or maybe the light from the restaurant behind them — passed in his eye. Then Robert reappeared, leading the horses that pulled the coach along behind him. He opened the door to the coach and helped Carolina up. He paused to spread a wool blanket over her lap, and then stepped down to the street. He and Longhorn exchanged a few words, and then Longhorn came inside and took the seat beside her, the small door closing with a click behind him.

“It has been a lovely evening.” The horses jerked into motion, and Carolina felt her body drawn forward as Longhorn’s words evaporated into the air. There was something about his tone that she disliked. “Lovely. But I am afraid I had a bit too much of that heavy sauce, and that I have been staying out too late too often with you, my dear. You won’t mind just this once if we go home early? We can have a glass of Madeira in my suite….”

Carolina’s heart puttered and began to sink. Suddenly Leland Bouchard’s house on East Sixty-third — she had passed the address several times, claiming that she wanted to admire the architecture on that block — seemed the only place in the whole city that contained life. Her friend Penelope Schoonmaker was there, no doubt being admired by all the young men, even as she had eyes only for her dashing husband, the bubbles rising in the champagne, the witty phrases too frequent for the laughter ever to cease for very long.

Carolina felt desperate, and wanted to grasp at any possibility, but she couldn’t muster the will to say anything contrary. The coachman had already been given his instructions, and he was pulling them inexorably to the same hotel where, it suddenly seemed to her, they would spend all their nights in an uninterrupted cycle of Madeira and monotony. Her bottom lip trembled with regret, but her companion, whose eyes had already drifted shut, was too fatigued to mark it.

Three

A young woman, newly wed, may find herself in the delightful position of wanting to do nothing without the company of her darling husband. She may indeed discover that she spends all her waking hours with her fellow to the exclusion of every other friend or family member. This is understandable, but wholly unacceptable, to society.

— MRS. HAMILTON W. BREEDFELT, COLLECTED COLUMNS ON RAISING YOUNG LADIES OF CHARACTER, 1899

MRS. HENRY SCHOONMAKER, NÉE PENELOPE Hayes, had come far in her eighteen years. As she swept past Leland Bouchard’s vestibule, where a gleaming black motorcar was displayed, she couldn’t help but muse how she, like the horseless carriage, was a waxy emblem of the future. Ever since she was a little girl she had told herself that she wouldn’t meet the other side of twenty without a deeply gaudy wedding band on her finger, and here she had beat her own goal by two years and in the process joined one of New York’s most well-regarded families. There were those who still remembered how her maiden name had been hastily salvaged from the odious surname Hazmat several decades ago, but neither appeared on her card these days. Now, moving up the glistening curve of marble stairs toward the sound of a party already in full swing, she could not help but anticipate the joy of entering a room on the arm of her very handsome husband.

It was one of the great pleasures of her life, for Henry was tall and lean and possessed of a chieftain’s cheekbones and a rakish mien that made all eyes turn to him. As a debutante, Penelope had grown accustomed to being looked at, but the envious intensity of the stares she encountered upon entering the second-floor music room, which was full of old money and good connections on that Thursday evening, was superior even to what she was used to. She wore a haughty smile, her plush lips twisted up to the right no more than was necessary, and a dress of cardinal-colored silk that a thousand elegant darts brought in close to her lean frame. Her dark hair was collected in an elaborate bun, and a line of short bangs divided her high, proud forehead.

Penelope cast an appraising gaze at the paneled murals, done by one of the leading talents of Europe, and the polished mantel that had been transported in pieces from Florence. She knew this and much more about Leland Bouchard’s home because she wanted Henry to build a town house for them and had collected newspaper clippings on this one and others like it. He had not yet given her any indication that he would do so, but, like everything Penelope wanted, it was only a matter of time and perhaps a little of her own rough brand of persuasion before it was hers.

Above the gentle din of decorous voices and clinking glasses, Penelope heard her name being pronounced with all its most recent and glorious trappings. “Mrs. Henry Schoonmaker!” went the beautiful sound, and Penelope turned. As she did, the fishtail of her skirt swept across the Versailles parquet. She immediately noted the approach of Adelaide Wetmore, who wore a dress of pewter faille. Her eyes were moist with self-regard, for her engagement to Reginald Newbold had only just been announced, and she was looking pleasantly weak with all the congratulations. She might have been pretty, Penelope reflected charitably, if not for her disproportionate mouth, and the way it garishly showcased her broad teeth.

“Why, Adelaide.” Penelope extended her white-gloved hand so that the diamond bracelet she wore fell down her wrist and caught the light. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” the other girl gushed. She took Penelope’s hand and made a dipping motion, almost as though she were going to curtsy. “We were all so inspired by your wedding,” she added with painful sycophancy. “What a celebration of love it was.”

Penelope communicated her gratitude with a few bats of her black eyelashes, and deduced from the way Adelaide was looking at the couple whose love she claimed to be inspired by that Henry’s gaze had wandered, and that he was exerting exactly no energy in trying to seem interested in the matrimonial doings of their peers. Penelope smiled her goodbye, and then she and her husband — who she was now realizing smelled of musk but even more strongly of cognac — pushed farther into the room. That was when Henry stumbled almost imperceptibly, catching himself on her arm, and Penelope felt her self-assurance flag a little over the sudden fear that someone might notice Henry’s drunkenness and begin to draw their own conclusions.

As she moved through the crowd, under the high polish of the vaulted ceiling, she tried to secure her grip on Henry. It wasn’t easy — but then, of course, it never had been. She gave knowing little nods of her head in the direction of some of the younger Mrs. Vanderbilts, assembled near the vast central palm in the middle of the room, and didn’t dare look in the direction of the man she was almost forcibly pulling along with her. She had believed him to be hers, time and again, but still she could not stay the feeling that he might at any moment slip through her fingers.