Anna Godbersen - Envy

Even now, sitting in front of the large, beveled mirrors in the ladies’ lounge, where on the evenings of grand balls scores of women crowded around, trying to look even half as beautiful as the hosts’ young daughter, she found it incomprehensible. For those were her slim shoulders and her unblemished forehead and her almost phosphorescent complexion. That was her exquisitely fitting pale pink chiffon dress, which was layered and tucked so that her décolletage might reflect the candlelight and her waist could just barely exist.

“Henry will stop being such a cad and pay more attention to you soon,” said Isabelle, who was sitting next to her in a dress of ivory overlaid with beige lace, as though she had been reading Penelope’s thoughts. Though her words seemed intended to reassure, her tone did nothing to enforce that sentiment.

“I’m not worried,” Penelope replied, sitting back against the little stool. She looked at herself in the mirror and willed her white neck to lengthen. She was a girl long adept at saying precisely the opposite of what she meant, and yet there was a little strain in the lie tonight. She wouldn’t have believed that Henry had the nerve to tell his father he wanted to leave his wife, but there had been some awful determination in the way he carried himself that afternoon in Isabelle’s drawing room. She was full of trepidation, wondering what he might do tonight, and she felt woefully devoid of any idea how she might fight back.

Grayson appeared just then in the doorframe and Isabelle stood up hopefully — a gesture that the younger matron could not help but regard with a little internal scoffing, for truly, Isabelle should have been over him by now. Though he had once paid her sweet attention, Mr. Hayes didn’t appear to so much as register her presence. It was clear that it was his sister he had come for.

Out in the hall, Penelope noticed Buck, his huge chest covered in a blinding white dress shirt. Penelope couldn’t be quite sure why, but she had lately found his presence insufferable. Perhaps it had something to do with how little he had been able to do for her during this, her time of need, or maybe it was because he knew how very much she wanted in this world and what a slight percentage of it she truly had. For too long a moment Isabelle waited for Grayson to turn around for her, and when he did not she allowed Buck to take her arm instead so that he might accompany her in to dinner.

Grayson put on a serious expression and offered his arm to his younger sister. “You look very lovely this evening,” he said as they stepped onto the black-and-white checked marble flooring of the halls. Buck and Isabelle were far enough that they wouldn’t be able to hear the Hayes siblings’ conversation, and the sound of all their custom-made heels rang out through the intervening yards. Penelope noted the seriousness of his tone, and wondered for a gleeful moment if perhaps he had already found a way to punish Diana. Then she’d have that to dangle in front of Henry, and perhaps all would not be lost.

“Thank you.”

Penelope walked at a relaxed gait, leaning against her brother’s arm. Isabelle was probably now longing to turn her head, which was heaped with blond curls, but propriety and pride made even a small gesture of that kind impossible.

“I will need to give you the money back.”

The tight grin that Penelope’s lips wore began to slacken. “The money?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t you need it anymore?”

“Yes.”

There was something new in his voice, almost like earnestness, which Penelope found both mysterious and painfully annoying. But she would have disliked what he said regardless of tone. “Well then, why, dear brother?”

They had reached the entryway to the parlor that adjoined the dining room, with its burgundy club chairs and gold vases filled with pampas grass. Inside that oak-paneled space were her family, and Henry’s, and the painter Lispenard Bradley and a few others, loitering on the camel-hair rug and fingering their drinks. The gentlemen were moving slowly to take up the ladies’ arms to escort them into the dining room. They appeared very stupid and useless to Penelope at that moment, and then she noticed something else.

“What is she doing here?”

Diana Holland could not possibly have heard her, but still she looked up from her place by the fire and her old aunt Edith, who was apparently the best she could do for a chaperone, and looked directly at Penelope. There was no smile on her face, and in her eyes a certain veiled challenge. She was wearing a pale green dress, the color of melon, which Penelope distinctly remembered her wearing on more than one occasion during the fall season.

“I invited her,” Grayson said.

“My God, why?”

“Because you asked me to—” He broke off and his eyes glazed dreamily. “And because I’m beginning to think I might be in love with her.”

When Penelope saw the expression on his face, and the puppy-dog look in his eyes, she felt the full crushing weight of his idiocy. What was it about that short creature with her wild hair and spurious air of purity, and why would anyone, much less two men, love her, and to such disastrous ends?

They could linger on the threshold no more, and she felt herself pulled by his arm, which was — even after this latest betrayal — still linked to hers at the crook of their elbows. If her mother hadn’t been there searching out compliments about their enormous house, or her father muttering into his drink, or the elder Schoonmaker looking judgmentally at all the objects in the room, she would have pointed out to Grayson that his was a desperate situation, or insisted that they had made a deal he could not back out of. But there was the low hum of people greeting each other in the evening, and Penelope reluctantly assumed the smile of a gracious daughter and new wife as she went forward into the room. She had never hated the word love quite so much as at that moment.

Now old Schoonmaker, who had just arrived, was saying something kind to Diana, and Henry, who had paused at the arm of Mrs. Hayes, had turned to stare. He was only there, Penelope knew in a glance, because of the intentions he’d declared that afternoon, and he was only waiting for the moment when he had his father to himself. His neck was twisted for a better view, and lamplight played against his clean-shaven throat. For once, there was nothing inscrutable about his black eyes. The way he was looking at her made Penelope want to shriek and throw something. She would have liked to charge across the room and pull the humble ribbons from Diana’s hair. She could have proclaimed to the whole room that these Hollands, with their superior poverty and their old-fashioned airs, were in fact two perverse girls — one of whom had given away all to another woman’s husband, while the other had quite possibly conceived a bastard. But just as the tide of fury was rising within, a perfect solution crested in her consciousness.

Grayson was moving like a man possessed through the exclusive gaggle of people, but Penelope was quick enough on her feet that she made her presence at his side appear very natural. She followed close behind him to the place where seemingly all eyes were focused. She followed him all the way to Diana.

“Miss Diana, I am so pleased you were able to attend,” he said.

“I am very glad to have been invited,” she returned. Penelope noted the tone, and deduced that there was a private joke between them, and then Diana turned her pointed chin and gave the older girl a jaunty smile that in private might have been an invitation to a slap. But Penelope’s idea was a good one. She felt no need for violence anymore, and instead smiled back at the little twit and waited until Rathmill, the butler, appeared from the dining room and announced that dinner was served.

“May I escort you?” Grayson asked Diana. She smiled and they moved together, Grayson in his black tails and Diana in her tiered dress, leaving behind the lady that he had entered the room with.

Penelope looked around affecting an expression of helplessness, knowing full well that everyone had already paired up. Then she met old Schoonmaker’s eyes. He was a large man, his face a bloated version of Henry’s, although the dark eyes and hard jaw were still intact. He offered his arm, and they took a step in pursuit of Grayson and Diana. Behind them came Henry and Isabelle, and then all the rest.

“Don’t they look handsome together?” Penelope whispered airily, gesturing with her chin at her traitorous brother and the petite tramp.

“I suppose,” William Schoonmaker, ever the discriminator, answered.

“Oh, you must agree, on a night like tonight, you could almost imagine such a couple on the altar.”

Schoonmaker made a vague grunting noise, of neither agreement nor disagreement.

“But don’t worry, Father,” she went on, her voice growing more delicate and feminine even as she added volume. She had never called him “Father” before, but it seemed to her like a nice touch. “I am not one of those women who, once wed, can think of nothing to do but make matches. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the pastime! Perhaps just a little less than other ladies. But the real reason is, I fear I will be not much in society this summer and fall, and after that I believe there will be a new addition to our family.”

Penelope phrased this with quiet care, and at the precise moment she knew those within earshot would understand her meaning, Old Schoonmaker’s face lit up as though she had just told him she’d found a cache of Standard Oil stock in his safe, and his response was so voluble that she knew there would be toasts. She would have loved to see Henry’s face then, but the thing to do was to keep controlled and go on facing her husband’s father with that aura of angelic magnificence.

The full genius of her coup was only just occurring to her — soon everyone would know how tightly bound she and Henry were — and she could not resist the satisfaction of glancing away once or twice, to observe how the younger Holland sister’s shoulders had jumped and locked together, and also the stricken expression she now wore. She had the look of a starving rabbit run out of her hole by a fox. That one hurt, Penelope knew, much more than anything Grayson could have engineered for her.

It is difficult for the once poor to ever play truly rich. But this is a city full of those who will try.

— MRS. L. A. M. BRECKINRIDGE, THE LAWS OF BEING IN WELL-MANNERED CIRCLES

DARKNESS FELL QUICKLY ALL OVER MANHATTAN, and those who could huddled near a fire. There were waifs in doorways who would not make it through the night, though Carolina was not like those unfortunates, and for plenty of reasons. She was wearing a coat of brindled otter fur, which she had borrowed temporarily from the divorcée Lucy Carr, and even as she stumbled through the anonymous and gloomy streets, she knew that she had been chosen for a destiny that had far better lighting.

This had not, however, been the opinion of Mrs. Portia Tilt. The western lady had imagined a more modest future for Carolina, one that involved remaining in the shadows whenever handsome or rich people, or those with fine names, were about. She had imparted this opinion to her former social secretary with particular vehemence and an articulateness that she had not heretofore exhibited, late on the previous evening when Carolina had returned from an hours-long cab ride without a destination. It was lucky that the Tilt staff was an unhappy one, and the head housekeeper had seen to it that the fired employee had a bed for the night. But in the morning there was nothing more they could do for her, and so Carolina had taken up her little suitcase and gone out into the city.