The Second Mrs. Astor(91)
Her family was scattered throughout this house, pampering her, preparing her for what was to come. Vincent had wired from Halifax; he and Roberts and the Noma would be here this afternoon, and Jack’s body would be here, and then, in two days, the service at the church, followed by the one in the city.
She told herself the first service wasn’t even going to be a real goodbye, because then they had to go back to Manhattan to do it all again, so she shouldn’t . . . break here. She must not break. Not yet.
*
She walked alone along a dirt trail that wove through the woods, listening to the robins calling from the branches above her. Every now and then, a liquid flash of light would reach her through the trunks and sun-flecked shadows, but from here the river was mostly obscured. The forest was only green grass, green ferns and shrubbery. Thick, green, mossy trees. Even the air tasted green, leafy and dense.
Beneath a hemlock gnarled and bent with time, a long-ago someone had constructed a crude stone bench to face a meadow. Madeleine sat there, listening to the robins, taking in the sloping view. A squirrel chittered at her from two oaks away, its tail twitching. A cluster of wildflowers, she didn’t know what kind, swayed near her feet, dainty pink and violet bells on long thready stems.
She’d walked here with him a few times—not often, because it was some distance from the house, but enough for her to remember this particular meadow shaded with a different season, with golden autumn instead of green spring. Wrapped in a shawl, holding his hand. Sitting on this bench together, a bit chilled but not too bad, her head on his shoulder as he told her about the trees, how their leaves soaked in the sun and transformed it into life, how all the rabbits and mice and squirrels would burrow in the winter, curled up and warm beneath the white snow. She’d never mentioned to him that she knew these things already, these facts about trees and snow and woodland creatures; she was spellbound by the molasses of his voice, the cadence of his sentences. Sitting there with him, with the leaves changing and the river flashing, Madeleine could have listened to him forever.
But it was spring now, not autumn. The sky was azure, the world was alive.
She closed her eyes, thinking only of that.
“Ah-ha,” said her sister, coming up on soft feet. “I’ve found you at last.”
“It’s a good hiding spot,” Madeleine said, not opening her eyes. “Although not too good, I guess.”
“One of the policemen on the patrol told me which way you went. I lost the path a few times. But what an idyllic place to become lost.”
Katherine dusted the debris of old leaves from the stone slab, eased down beside her.
With the breeze bumping up against them, they sat without speaking, and at last even the squirrel gave up its scold. Far away, as far as the river perhaps, geese began to honk, a brief, harsh fluster of noise that quickly faded.
Katherine said, “Mr. Dobbyn and his associates asked me to tell you that the arrangements for the private train have been completed. It will leave Manhattan Saturday morning with the mourners for the service in town here, and take us all back to the city for the service at the cemetery in the afternoon. No one has to come here, to the house, unless you wish them to.”
Madeleine opened her eyes. “All right.”
“But . . . we could have a buffet or something prepared, if you like. Just in case. If you do want to pause a while to have people over. It’s a lovely old house.”
“It’s a rickety old firetrap,” she said. “We’ll go straight to the train station from the church. That’s all there’ll be time for, in any case. How many limousines will there be?”
“Twenty.”
“That should be enough, I think. Isn’t it?”
“Yes, I think so.”
The belled flowers swayed in place, left, right. Katherine had plucked an acorn from the grass at their feet and was slowly rolling it between her index finger and thumb.
“It’s a rickety old firetrap,” Madeleine said again, “but it’s one I thought I would be sharing with him for the rest of our lives.”
Her sister threw the acorn across the meadow, a hard, clean arc that scored the sky and ended in a patch of brambles.
“I know, Maddy. I know.”
CHAPTER 31
The first time I met your half-sister was the morning of the funeral in Rhinebeck. Isn’t that peculiar, that I’d never seen your father’s daughter before? She endured the entire ordeal swaddled in mounds of black taffeta and ruffles, one elfin hand emerging from the folds of her dress to clutch the hand of her governess. Ava herself had not bothered to attend.
(They’d arrived from England a few days earlier on a German liner. When a reporter sent a note to Ava’s cabin asking for an interview, she sent it back, writing on the reverse of it that she had nothing to say and signing it Mrs. John Astor, which burns at me still.) To this day, I have not met her. I expect I never will.
Alice was ten. Vincent sat beside her throughout the service, once or twice murmuring something into her ear; I suspect he was telling her to stop swinging her feet. She wore a constant pout. Her brother’s face, as ever, remained inscrutable.
So many people. So many of the Four Hundred and the locals pouring into that pretty country church, overflowing it, offering their words of comfort. For the sake of tradition, I’d come in my widow’s weeds and installed myself in the front pew, ready to be seen. Mourners pressed my hands in theirs and went on and on about God’s will and redemption and fate and whenever that happened I honestly don’t know how I managed to hold my tongue.