The Second Mrs. Astor(90)

She covered her mouth with her hand, forced herself to lower it again. She shot a quick glance over her shoulder at the open doorway—still empty—then flexed her fingers, closed them into fists.

The silk crêpe of her gown glistened in the sunlight, every shade of ebony, of unforgiving loss.

“So, yes. I may be a terrible person, as you say. I may be selfish and terrible. But I loved him. I would have sacrificed my own life for his. I certainly would have sacrificed any of those other men’s lives.”

He said nothing. He looked carved from stone.

“I didn’t even know them,” she said, much quieter. “They were nothing to me. They were disappointments. Every time I helped haul them up into the boat, letting them crumple and bleed water along my feet, they were disappointments. I don’t care if that makes me a monster. I would have thrown any of them back for him. All of them. Feel free not to share that with the papers, and don’t you dare blab to anyone that I’ve been crying. Don’t you dare.”

He sat down heavily into the chair. He propped his elbows against the rosewood desk and dropped his head into his palms, his fingers speared through his hair.

“You don’t really mean that, do you?” he muttered to the desk. “That you would have killed another man to save him?”

“I swear to God. I’ll swear upon any god you like.”

He looked at her aslant. She wiped quickly at her eyes, then turned to the door.

“Wait,” he said. She turned back.

“Where will the ship—the ship with him. Where will she dock?”

“Halifax.”

“I want to be there.”

She hesitated, imagining him splintering apart in public, lashing out. What a feast the pressmen would make of that.

“There’ll be paperwork to fill out,” he said. “Legal matters. Forms to sign. I can do it instead of you. People will expect me to.”

“I’ve already decided to send Captain Roberts in my stead. The Noma will be quicker than the trains. You don’t have to go. He can do whatever needs to be done.”

“I want to go,” Vincent said. “Please.”

It was the only time he’d ever said please to her.

On the wall above his nightstand there loomed a large, empty space, a rectangle of aqua silk wallpaper just slightly brighter than that surrounding it.

His voice came rough, not quite pleading. “Madeleine.”

She hesitated a moment longer, then acquiesced with a nod, exiting the room.

*

John Jacob Astor IV, America’s richest man and newly minted hero, was to be given what amounted to two funeral services. His widow would have preferred only one, but the little church in Rhinebeck-on-the-Hudson, where Jack had been a warden, could not fit all the mourners who wanted to pay their respects, and in any case, the Astor family mausoleum was back in Manhattan.

So, two separate services, one in the church, one graveside, all in the same day, and then he would be interred in the mausoleum above his father. Beside his mother.

Other people made the arrangements. Secretaries, undersecretaries, even Vincent, emerged from his mania into a new, razor-edged composure that alarmed Madeleine some, because it seemed so waxen, so brittle. The complex machinery of the massive Astor estate had clicked into gear, grinding away, and at this juncture, there was no stopping it.

But she did not want to stop it. The truth was, planning the details of Jack’s entombment had turned out to be more than she could manage. As Vincent had grown stronger, she had veered the opposite direction, her mind and spirit drained to the point where even the simplest of decisions perplexed her.

They asked her about the flowers, and she had no answer.

They asked her about the eulogies, and she had no answer.

They asked her about the hymns, and she said any but “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” because by now everyone knew it was the song the orchestra had been playing as the liner went down. It was that final hymn she had heard from the lifeboat, thin and melancholy and ghostlike, undulating across the water.

He was likely still alive then. She couldn’t stop thinking about that. He had likely heard it too. Even ripped apart, they shared this one last bond, and it haunted her, imagining him on the boat deck, in the panic, hearing that hymn. And then her imagination would take her down dark, dark paths: had he tumbled from the deck as the ship split in two? Had he jumped into the ocean? Had he been one of those cartwheeling figures she’d seen? Had he struck his head, had he drowned at once, had he suffered, how terrible was his pain—

All she knew, likely knew, was that Jack had heard that hymn with her. And that, however differently they had ended up in the same place, they had still ended up in the same place: adrift beneath the shooting stars.

*

Ferncliff, that rambling, Italianate mess of a mansion, was where her husband had been born. And here was another odd thought that haunted her—she was surely sleeping now in the same master chamber where he had drawn his first breath.

It was a creaky, drafty room. In the winter, it was a beast to heat, as the stone chimney never seemed to draw well, no matter how often it was cleaned. But it was May now, and the days and nights had warmed into a humid temperance. She slept with two of the windows cracked so that she could smell the grass and trees and a beguiling hint of the Hudson River, flowing wide as the Nile nearby.