The Second Mrs. Astor(96)
“We know we can never really repay you—” Madeleine began, but her voice caught in her throat, and she couldn’t finish.
Captain Rostron touched a finger to the cover of the watch, where his initials had been emblazoned in dark blue enamel, then looked up at her.
“There, now,” he said quietly. “It was only my duty, and my honor. Knowing you’re safe at home again is thanks enough for me.”
*
June came, and her birthday. She had at last turned nineteen, which seemed only a step away from something better than all the years before, something more mature and stable and less prone to heartache.
Vincent left for Europe with his mother and sister, and the Fifth Avenue residence seemed to take on an even keener echo. Madeleine retreated to Beechwood for a while, the home she liked best. She would eat her meals outside when she could, watching the shifting blue waters of the cove. Sometimes she would entertain Katherine or Mother or Father, or any of her girlhood friends who dared to trickle by. But mostly she remained alone, because that usually felt better than not.
She wondered if the locals would end up spinning morbid legends about her, the solitary young widow always in black, walking through the salt wind with her hair streaking madly behind her. After she died, they could whisper about her ghost still stalking the grounds, eternally searching Sheep Point Cove for her lost love.
As her time grew more near, however, Madeleine realized she needed to return to the city. Mother was especially adamant that the baby be born in Manhattan, closer to hospitals and competent care.
(Carrie, who overheard that particular remark, said nothing, only narrowed her eyes.)
So Madeleine gave in. One amethyst twilight, she paced a last loop along the expanse of Beechwood’s rear lawn with her hair entirely loose—why not give the legend an extra little kick?—then went back inside and did not come out again except to motor away.
But the Manhattan chateau had not surrendered its emptiness. Even after it began to fill with doctors, with nurses, with Mother and Katherine, everyone at the ready for the moment Jack Astor’s baby decided to arrive . . . the house was empty.
Like Madeleine, its heart—whatever heart it might have once possessed, beneath its stylish public shell—had been felled.
She began to steal out the servants’ door once a day to be chauffeured around the park, around a maze of random streets. Away from everyone else, she would lean her head out the open window and let the smoke and fumes of the city flow over her, clinging to her hair and clothing and skin. She imagined herself an ordinary girl then, no one special, just a girl going out somewhere. Maybe meeting friends for an ice cream soda, or going to a concert uptown.
Maybe driving away, far, far away, never turning back.
The limousine always turned back.
One early gray dawn in the middle of August, she awoke to find her nightgown soaked hot between her legs, and for a confused moment thought her courses had come, finally, at last. But then the pain rolled through her, a great tidal wave of pain, and, gasping, she rang for Carrie, who gathered up the doctor and the other nurses like a bossy hen rounding up her errant chicks. Mother arrived in her dressing robe to hover near the headboard, telling Madeleine how brave she was, how brave her daughter was, but Madeleine really only wished that no one would talk to her at all, because the pain was a volcano now, a continent, the entire world, and it was all she could do not to scream, and she was afraid of what she might scream if she opened her mouth.
Jack’s name, a curse, a plea. She didn’t know. They were all there inside of her, violently pushing to come out.
Their son entered the world with a final cresting rush of agony and, after a few seconds, an indignant bawl.
They cleaned him up and placed him in the cradle of her arms, against her sweaty skin, her heaving chest. He felt heavy and foreign, like nothing that could have actually just come from inside her own body.
How awful that was, she thought, exhausted, remote. How wonderful. How awful and wonderful to feel him like this, above my heart, just where his father used to rest his head.
She didn’t look at him at first, that tiny, weighted thing. She was still trying to align her senses, to hold back words or tears or anything else she didn’t want to share with this roomful of people, in this fresh crack of morning with its bright warming light.
With his head against her collarbone, her baby made a questioning noise, a cross between a whimper and a cry. Madeleine lifted her hand to his face. She stroked his perfect new skin, smooth beneath his sticky heat; the creases of his eyes and mouth; the delicate seashell shape of his ear.
She brushed a kiss to his forehead, then dropped back to her pillows. They breathed together, chest to chest. Through the resonance of flesh and bone, she imagined she felt his heartbeat, a faint hammering simultaneously fragile yet certain, so desperately swift it might belong to a hummingbird darting across the sky.
EPILOGUE
I would not attempt to guess at the nature of true love, except to say that when I was immersed in it—swimming through it, breathing it in, holding that breath, exhaling—in those short, extraordinary days and nights I shared with your father, true love was absolutely clear to me.
Jack was clear to me. Jack was me, and I was him, and you, sweet child, are now us both.
Such crystalline perspective, and gained at such a price. It is Survival’s gift to me, I must assume. It is the gift I will cling to, holding my breath to keep it safe and alive inside me.