The Second Mrs. Astor(27)
“All but one,” said their mother.
“All but one,” Katherine agreed. “But with so many laudable gentlemen to choose from, I can afford the loss of just this one.”
Madeleine had a brief and wholly convincing vision of Katherine stepping from the motorcar as they pulled up to Jack’s French Renaissance mansion; Katherine lifting her gloved hand to him, accepting his short, elegant bow, magnesium bursts flaring; Katherine sailing onward and upward into the life of the new Mrs. John Jacob Astor IV, trailing gemstones and velvet and tears in her wake.
“Madeleine,” said their mother again, in an even more urgent tone.
“I’m fine. I’ll be fine.”
And she would be. It was only the stupid newspapers making her so nervous, that was all it was. Not even the newspapers that would come out tomorrow, columns and columns that would be, no doubt, dedicated to tonight’s upcoming, phenomenal gala. No, she was disquieted over the papers that had already been printed, that had taken care to mention her name alongside Jack’s with a sort of vicious delight, that had underscored the fact that she wasn’t going to be his hostess tonight, that she wasn’t the only young socialite of looks and means invited (which made sense, as there were over five hundred of New York’s finest invited, but anyway) and that there was still no ring at all to be seen on Miss Force’s left hand, not even a speck of one, after seven months of trying.
Implied, if not yet directly printed: What a dear girl she was; what a solid, faithful girl, the kind that one might suppose may be always counted upon to be waiting in the wings. How very different this girl was from Mrs. Ava Astor, so divinely gifted and charming, who’d never had any problem obtaining whatever she desired, even a divorce.
The colonel’s dinner party and cotillion tonight was predicted to be the spectacle of the season. Or perhaps, Madeleine mused, she was going to be the spectacle, the Girl Who Clung to Hope.
The auto smacked into another pothole. She swallowed hard, wishing for water—no, wishing for wine, for whiskey (which she’d only ever tried once, on a dare in school; it had been like drinking fire), because even false courage was courage of some sort.
She had been seen at Jack’s side for all this while, all these months, over and over. Restaurants, theaters. His box at the Metropolitan Opera House, number seven (Lucky number seven, she’d said, and he’d smiled and replied, It seems so now) in the famed golden horseshoe. The Christmas Ball.
The word was out—according to these anonymous writers, penning their poison columns from their grimy little desks, in their grimy little newspaper offices—that tonight would surely be the night that Colonel Astor would announce his engagement to the adolescent Miss Force. That it had to be tonight or never, because how cruel would it be otherwise, as he was having over two hundred for dinner and another three hundred more for the dancing to follow, and every lion of society would surely turn up to hear the news?
Except, of course, as both Madeleine and Jack (and definitely Mother) knew, there would be no announcement of their engagement, since there had been no proposal. Not yet.
She didn’t want to care so much about it. It was foolish to care so much. Why did it matter what a bunch of muckrakers printed?
But oh, the idea that he was only toying with her, that he might not ever ask . . .
She’d constructed sandcastles of reveries around him, his lucid eyes and his lined face and his tanned, competent charm. She dreamed of him: the hook of his nose; the way his hair gleamed honey in the open sunlight and his irises took on a cast of faraway blue, but his moustache always stayed the same brown; how when he walked, he squared his shoulders and jabbed the ground with his stick, as if the tap-tap of his pace should be heard and marked by all, men and beasts and even the tiny insects sleeping beneath the sidewalks.
She’d let him kiss her practically in public and had felt herself floating like a lark in his arms.
Color and shade rippled past the motorcar. As they ventured farther up Fifth Avenue, the mansions grew taller, more stately, sketched in bold layers of snow. Row after row of gabled and copper-roofed palaces sprouted from the plain pavements and dirt, blotting out the sun, the moon, the sky.
At the age of eight, Madeleine had voyaged to France for the first time with her family. After a week submerged in the delirium of Paris—and over her mother’s protests—they’d removed to a vineyard so ancient and idyllic that the ground had melted up all around it, submerging the river-rock base of the crush house, the thick weedy bottoms of the vines, their stalks and stakes. The rich black soil was soft and sucking with Madeleine’s every step, pulling at the soles of her boots. All the wild trees leaned, branches akimbo, toward that living dark earth. Everywhere she roamed that summer, the vineyard had seemed to whisper, I am older than ages. You are a spark of nothing compared to me.
Manhattan’s Millionaires’ Row was man’s rebuttal to that vineyard’s earthen grace. Warlike, glorious, every inch of the chiseled marble and limestone and wrought iron was hard and unyielding. The soil here would never rise. Nature would never regain the ground it had conceded.
“One more block,” Katherine said, and Madeleine took a steadying breath.
“Do I look all right?”
Katherine smiled, lifting a hand to adjust one of the diamond-and-topaz clips nestled in her sister’s hair. There were three of them, two smalls and a medium, fashioned as shooting stars. Her Christmas present from Jack.