The Second Mrs. Astor(9)

Through it all, she listened for the singular baritone of that older man, that king of the Knickerbockers, who had sent her purple flowers, and had escorted her to her table, and who’d told her not to doubt.

And she was out of breath.





CHAPTER 3


Pansies.

Cosmos.

Delphiniums.

Asters.

Snapdragons.

Bellflowers.

Tulips.

Forget-me-nots.



Upon reflection, it strikes me as somewhat macabre that the joining of my life with your father’s began with flowers. It ended with flowers, as well. To be clear—it ended on that frigid, starry morning atop the skin of the Atlantic. But as I sit here at my desk, all I can smell is lilies: thousands of lilies, ornamenting his casket, lining the church, crushed beneath the wheels of the undertaker’s wagon, the hooves of the black horses, as somber-faced strangers standing alongside the roads watched and tossed ever more flowers at the procession passing by.

Even on the train that carried his body from Rhinebeck to Manhattan: lilies.

That stench. That overwhelming, sickly sweet stench.

I don’t think I can bear to be around lilies ever again.




July 1910

Bar Harbor



The handle of the racquet bit into her palm, the leather strap wrapped around it digging rough into her skin. But it was a good kind of rough, necessary, and as Madeleine swung her arm and the catgut strings connected with the ball, the force of that connection bounced back through her, powerful and jarring, through muscle and bone, lungs and heart, all the way to her feet.

Her momentum kept her leaping forward, great huge strides that she checked by twisting sideways, a swift and dangerous dance in long skirts, ignoring the pain of her corset biting into her.

The ball streaked low across the net. Her opponent lunged and swung and missed.

“Game and set,” called out the chair umpire, “to Miss Force!”

A mustering of applause lifted up to the overcast sky.

Madeleine bent her head to wipe the sweat from her eyes, then turned and sketched a quick curtsy to the Swimming Club spectators, arranged in pastels and parasols in the lawn chairs lining the length of the tennis court. As she crossed to the net, she swapped her racquet to her left hand to shake with her right.

Her palm smacked into the other girl’s.

“Well done,” Stella Mitchell puffed, still breathless from her final sprint.

“And you.”

Stella was the sort of girl Madeleine always privately envied, because she was the sort of girl that Madeleine feared she would never be: refined and chic and creamy cool, no matter the circumstances. She looked like a Gibson portrait of a girl, a poet’s idea of a girl, one who would be perfectly content to pass the span of her days reading upon a chaise lounge, or embroidering samplers, or contemplating the number of tumbling, adorable children she would someday produce. And perhaps she was those things—Madeleine had known her since Miss Ely’s, and heaven knew they’d both embroidered enough samplers—but in tennis, Stella became ruthless. Beating her today was the figurative feather in Madeleine’s cap. It hardly ever happened.

“I was lucky this time,” Madeleine said, stepping back.

“Perhaps it was that your lucky charm lingered nearby,” Stella said, with a significant look past Madeleine’s shoulder.

Madeleine wiped her eyes again, hoping that her face didn’t look too red, that the pins in her hair had held and that her armpits weren’t showing their damp through her shirtwaist. Because, yes—there he was, standing at the end of the row of chairs, a walking stick slanted to the ground in one hand; in the other, the end of a leash connected to a large, tan dog.

Their eyes met. She nodded, and the colonel nodded, and the dog looked at her and furrowed its brow.

It had been over a week since she’d seen him last, and even then it had only been in passing, as they rode in opposite directions past the Mount Desert Reading Room. Yet the daily arrival of flowers had not ceased, each one accompanied by a card bearing simply his initials.

Even though he hadn’t come to call in person, every morning Mother practically hummed with anticipation.

“They’re just flowers,” Madeleine had said at breakfast three days ago.

“Colonel Astor is neither blind nor imbecilic,” Mother had responded, examining the fresh arrangement of mums he’d sent with something close to hunger. She kept each new delivery beside her plate—as though they were for her, instead of her daughter—and throughout the meal she would gaze at them as raptly as if they whispered the answer to a puzzle that had long perplexed her.

Madeleine said, “I just don’t think we should get our hopes up. That’s all.”

Mother looked up. “Maddy, my love. Do you mean your hopes, or mine?”

Madeleine shrugged, uncomfortable.

“Because in this instance,” Mother went on, “your hopes are the only ones that matter. I trust you know that.”

“I have an idea,” Katherine had said. “Why don’t we just go and call on him?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mother had sighed.

“Well, why not? It’s the twentieth century now, after all. I don’t see why we can’t at least drop by and leave our cards. Ask him what he means by sending all these silly flowers every single day. One would think he might have moved on to chocolates and jewelry by now.”