The Second Mrs. Astor(26)
*
It had been weeks since that al fresco dinner party in Beau Desert’s ripe garden; Madeleine and Jack no longer sat tables apart. He had placed her on his right, within easy distance for conversation and lingering looks. Despite the fire popping in the hearth and the gas chandelier quietly hissing above their heads, the walls loomed dark and the light spread thin, and it felt something like dining in a chilled, stylish cave.
Madeleine cut the side of her fork into her lobster rissole. The pastry flaked apart, paper-thin slivers falling pale against the plate.
She took a breath, prepared to tell the first, the smallest of white lies, which surely did no real harm to anyone, did it, but which might actually accomplish some greater good.
“Mother is talking about going back to New York in the next week or so,” she said, not loud, and brought the fork to her lips, tasting butter and marjoram and cream.
Jack looked at her, arrested, then recovered. He sliced into his own rissole, severing off a sizable chunk.
“Then let’s go back,” he said.
CHAPTER 8
December brought my debut.
Officially it happened one gray frosted afternoon, at the coming-out reception my mother hosted for members of our circle at our Manhattan home. I wore white, of course. We had tea and punch and sandwiches and éclairs, and all my friends attended, along with their various minders attached. In the span of just a few weeks, there was a flurry of receptions for the Junior League, and it seemed we chased each other from house to house to house to fit them all in. Inevitably we’d arrive shaking the weather from our hems, smoothing the snow or the sleet or bitter drops of rain from our meticulously managed coiffures.
Each new gathering, each new luncheon or dinner held in our honor was conducted in rigid ceremony. Our mothers and grandmothers seemed to be warning us, Yes, once and for all, your childhood is over. Womanhood means you must not ever laugh or burp or break wind again. This is how you will marry well.
I could not wait for the formalities to end.
And then came the Christmas Ball at the Murray Hill Hotel. It took place a few days later and was my first real appearance as a young woman deemed Acceptable for Marriage by the beau monde.
That spangled, icy night. Alabaster satin, ostrich feathers, a narrow bracelet of diamonds sparkling against one wrist. That morning, Jack had sent over an entire box of pink roses, their color so creamy and delicate the petals might have been carved from the inside of a seashell. Nestled in with the roses was a cable of pearls of the precise same tint, heavy and long enough that I wore it like a bandolier of bullets around my body.
I danced for hours.
In a small, empty antechamber off the ballroom, your father and I shared our first kiss.
The papers would later call me a Christmas present for all of New York society. I don’t know about that; I think really they meant for themselves. Young Miss Force, freely and openly presented to the world, fodder for the tabloids, her face (soft and demure and in profile; Mother had paid a small fortune to the photographer and that damned docile image followed me everywhere) published as often as they could find an excuse to use it.
I was now officially fair game.
February 1911
Manhattan, New York
The air in Manhattan had a different tang to it than that of Brooklyn, although Madeleine couldn’t define exactly how. It smelled less stale, perhaps; less sour, since most of the streets snaking around and across Fifth Avenue were no longer hard-packed macadam. The air here was scented more of stone than tar, and (in the summer) more of trees than grass. Since the clouds above the city had bubbled into their thick, slaty-blue gloom and the snow had only just begun slanting down, Manhattan was now also blanketed in the particular odor of burning coal and damp iron and, for Madeleine, the pungent miasma that was the exhaust rising from the back of the family’s chauffeured limousine.
Whenever the auto stopped or paused along the streets, fumes seemed to seep through the very seams of the chassis, coating her skin and the back of her throat.
It was making her nauseated. Madeleine began to pry open the window beside her.
“Maddy!” Katherine slapped her hand away, leaning over her to shut the window again. “You’re wearing brocade. Do you want the reporters to see you all spotty?”
“No,” Madeleine said, chastened and queasy. “Of course.”
The motorcar bounced along a mudhole and passed a wagon; the staccato strike of horseshoes against cobbles rang in her ears. She set her jaw, closed her eyes.
“Madeleine.” It was Mother, seated on the other side of Katherine, soft-voiced, thinly urgent. “Chin up. We’re nearly there, and you look so peaked.”
Madeleine opened her eyes. She wondered if she might vomit, and if she did, if any of the cameramen lying in wait for her would capture it for all of humanity to relish.
Absolutely they would. Without question, they would.
Katherine put her mouth to Madeleine’s ear. She smelled of orange blossoms, spicy sweet.
“Think of the colonel,” she whispered. “Think of his face. Think of his smile the instant he first sees you. How it brightens him. Illumes him. Think of how that smile is for no one else but you.”
Illumes. “You should be a poet,” Madeleine muttered past her teeth.
“Maybe I will,” Katherine responded, cheery. “No doubt all the gentlemen would swoon over my verses.”