The Second Mrs. Astor(11)

The young man removed his hat. He stooped behind the camera and lifted a closed palm to them, his fingers opening one at a time to count one . . . two . . . three . . .

Madeleine would have many years to reflect upon this moment. She would study it, pick it apart in a dozen little ways and wonder how things might have turned out differently had she been daring enough to overrule her mother. To say, No, I’d rather he didn’t take our photograph, please. I’d rather we all just turn around and walk the other way.

Set a precedent, as it were.

In her darker musings, she would wonder why Jack himself hadn’t said something. Offered her a whispered warning about what it would mean, a sidelong glance, something. After all, he had to have known what would happen next. He had to have at least suspected. He’d asked her if it would be all right, and maybe that was all the warning he thought she needed.

But the Madeleine of that particular afternoon was scarcely a month past her seventeenth birthday; she was teenaged and untested and sweaty and bedazzled. She didn’t speak the subtle code of the magnificently rich, not then.

To be honest, it likely wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. In the space of just that single conversation—the sea light, the clouds, his gray eyes and his dog—she had already made her choice. She was already plummeting off that cliff, ready to soar.

And so the shutter had snapped, capturing them in their untidy, sunlit line, about to become the cynosure of the world’s avid attention.

*

When the grainy image showed up on the front page of the scandal sheet Town Topics three days later (COLONEL JOHN JACOB ASTOR, 46, AND MISS MADELEINE T. FORCE, 17, AND FAMILY, CELEBRATING AT THE SWIMMING CLUB, BAR HARBOR), it showed the dog yawning again and Mrs. Force beaming.



After that, she started to notice them: men—it was always men—lingering at the edges of events, their hats pulled low over their foreheads, sometimes toting cameras, sometimes not. There was something about the stalking, the staring, the incessant sprinkling of her name in gossip columns that unnerved her. When they noticed her noticing them, they’d touch their hats and nod, and Madeleine would turn away, because she didn’t want to look any of them in the eyes for too long. She didn’t want them to memorize her face.

She became better at the art of stillness; she had become the hunted, after all.

Two weeks went by, and she didn’t encounter the colonel again. The flowers still arrived every morning, and he still never called, and no one in the household now said a word about it, not even Madeleine herself. She began to spot the journalists less and less.

America’s richest man had apparently packed up and moved on, taking the ravenous appetite of the public with him. Which was fine with her; certainly it was fine; it was madness to think the brief attention he’d paid to her had been anything more than a superficial kindness—perhaps even a gentlemanly sort of pity—all this while. He’d sent her a single posy, and she’d thanked him, and now they were trapped in a loop, where he felt obligated to continue with the flowers because she’d been so grateful.

John Jacob Astor was reported to be in Newport aboard his yacht.

In Manhattan at his Fifth Avenue chateau.

Abroad in the West Indies with his son.

At his mansion in Rhinebeck.

Back in Newport.

But he wasn’t back in Newport. On that point, the tabloids were entirely wrong.

*

She was standing with her father against the railing of the Robin Hood Park Raceway one afternoon, waiting for the horses to thunder past. Katherine and Mother had decided to take luncheon at the Club instead, but Madeleine and William Force, both dedicated riders, appreciated the energy of the races, the earthy must of the track and clods of soil flying, and the rising excitement of the swaying, cheering crowd with every go-round. It was as raucous as it ever got among Bar Harbor’s society proper, and Madeleine enjoyed adding her small voice to the chorus.

Like many of the ladies in attendance, she wore a picture hat, tied in place by a scarf that wrapped around the crown and brim, tugging against her head with every burst of wind. The cream silk scarf was wide and opaque, and it was easy enough to knot it so snugly beneath her chin that it concealed half her face.

Perhaps that was why she didn’t see him at first, or perhaps she was just distracted. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next he was. As before, in the audience of Hamlet, he seemed to simply manifest between two beats of her heart.

“Miss Force. A pleasure to see you again.”

He was standing next to her on her left. As her hat gave another quick, hard tug, the long tails of the scarf lofting, she reached up to brush them back into place, and he bent his head to meet her eyes past the panels of silk framing her face.

“Colonel Astor! Forgive me! I didn’t realize you were there.” I thought you were in Newport, she almost said, but stopped herself in time.

He smiled broadly, removing his bowler. “Quite all right. I’ve been told I’m stealthy as a cat sometimes.”

She was flustered, and surprised at being flustered. She’d thought of him every single day since their last conversation—of course she had; he’d made certain that she would with the daily flowers. Newspaper reports or not, she’d searched the summer fashionables for him every time she ventured out. But here he was again, without warning, like a genie’s wish unexpectedly granted.