The Wedding Veil(92)

“Susan Dresser D’Osmoy!” Aunt Alice exclaimed, butchering her last name, I felt certain.

“SLD?” I asked questioningly.

We were all silent for a moment.

“Well, that would be Edith’s mother, right?” Mom picked up. “Her married last name would have been Dresser?”

I grinned at Babs, a shiver of excitement running through me. This was, in fact, the missing Vanderbilt veil!

“All right,” she said. “You don’t have to gloat so openly. Fine. We have the Vanderbilt veil.”

“Now what?” Alice asked.

“Lunch!” Babs said. “I am positively starving.”

Suddenly I was too. “You guys, we are in possession of a real piece of American history.”

Mom scrunched her nose. “It probably doesn’t belong under a bed in a storage box, huh?”

“Hmmm…” Aunt Alice added.

Babs crossed her arms.

I looked over at her. “It’s up to you, Babs. Your veil, your rules.”

She stood up. “I can’t possibly make a decision like this on an empty stomach.”

As we reached the entrance hall, Aunt Alice stopped. “Wait,” she said. “Mom, did you say the woman who gave Gran the veil was Russian?”

Babs nodded.

“Was her name by any chance Nilcha?”

I watched as a wave of recognition passed over Babs’s face. I didn’t know why that was significant, but even if it wasn’t, I was confident that we had solved the mystery of the wedding veil. And now we had to figure out what to do about it.





CORNELIA The Feminine Divine

March 30, 1934





On the train from Asheville to New York, Cornelia knew she looked positively mad holding her wedding veil on her lap. Her life-path number, twenty-two, indicated that insanity was likely a part of her journey. So maybe this was insane. Fleeing her home for England with one trunk and one suitcase of personal belongings? It did give her pause.

But perhaps fleeing wasn’t the right word for it. Judge Adams had—much to her chagrin—come along to help her get the boys settled in school. As if I need his help, she’d fumed. But when choosing between Jack, her mother, and the judge, he seemed the easiest, least emotional choice. And it was nice that he had taken the boys to meet the conductor to show them the inner workings of the train. She missed them already. But luckily, she had the long boat journey from New York to London with them.

Even still, sending her off with a chaperone as though she wasn’t a proper mother was just one more piece of proof that Jack didn’t understand her anymore. He didn’t understand why she needed to eat pink grapefruit every morning because it was her cleansing food. He didn’t understand that she needed to dance nude in the rain to regenerate her positive aura. He didn’t understand that she had to dye her hair pink to balance her hormones, reset her internal clock, and get some sleep. Oh, dear sleep. Yes, she needed some of that.

Cornelia sighed, leaning her head back on the seat as the train stopped. Yes. It had been a hard few years, as Jack had said. But what he didn’t understand was that this was her life. Everywhere she went, people knew her, the press followed her. Asheville had been her only safe place. But now, all the speculation about why they had opened the house to the public, whether she’d lost all her money—whether it had been immoral to have so much to begin with—and, worst of all, whether her father’s dream was destroyed, was more than she could take. George Vanderbilt is dead. The dream is dust and ashes. Damn that Kansas City Star.

“Cornelia, why would you do that to me?” Jack had asked after her mother and Judge Adams left, the day she’d announced her decision to take the boys to England. He rarely called her by her full name, so she knew he was upset. “That was a conversation we should have had alone, something we should have decided together.”

She obviously knew that. But she felt that he was less likely to make a scene in front of the others and, thus, she’d have a better chance of getting what she wanted.

“You’re the one who wanted the boys to go off to school!” she protested, knowing in her heart that Jack wasn’t disagreeing with that part of the plan.

“Yes, fine. Great,” he said. “But my wife moving to England was never quite a part of it.”

“But won’t it make you feel better if I’m close to them? If I can get to them at a moment’s notice?”

Jack looked dubious.

“I just need to disappear for a while,” she continued.

“Disappear?” he asked.

She nodded. “I need to be somewhere where the press doesn’t know me, where I can be alone.”

“There’s a lot to do here,” he said. “But I can make a trip happen. I can go with you.”

This was the hard part. How could she make him understand that she was on a personal spiritual journey and the road she was walking she had to walk alone? Well, maybe he had been understanding of that. He had been understanding when she had fallen apart after every editor she heard back from told her her book wasn’t fit for publication. And he had been understanding when she had said she needed to study art again, to find a way to express her emotions in a way that wasn’t writing. Writing was so… constricting. She was free with her brush in her hand.