Anna Godbersen - Envy

It was warmer inside than she had imagined, and the air was thick with floating fibers. The machines whirred and there was also the sound of fabric swooshing, although the girls themselves were very quiet. When the door swung shut behind Carolina, the older woman turned to stare. She had a face as broad and unyielding as a man’s, and though it seemed for a moment that she might say something welcoming, it soon became clear that she had no intention of speaking first.

“May I talk to Madame Fitzgerald?”

Now several of the girls did glance up to see what was happening, although their hands kept moving over their projects, and their feet never let up on the pedals.

“You’re looking at her,” replied the woman.

“Oh, I—” Carolina found herself blushing furiously. “Hello.”

The older woman sighed in exasperation and put a fist on her hip.

“I was just passing by and your shop seemed so nice and I thought — I wondered if — I hoped that—”

“You hoped what?” the woman prodded. Her voice came down hard through her sinuses.

“That you might have a job for me.”

The woman’s painted red brows soared at that. “Oh-ho? And why would I give you that?”

The muscles of Carolina’s face loosened in surprise. She had imagined that the difficult part would be bringing herself to ask for the job — that actually acquiring it should demand more from her was quite a shock. “This is a business, isn’t it?” Carolina asked lamely.

“Yes, it is,” Madame Fitzgerald snapped back. She let her eyes go all the way up and down Carolina’s fine fur coat. “Not a shelter for high-and-mighty types who’ve bit off more than they can chew. What would you do anyway? Sit in the window?”

“No, I…I…can sew.” She took a faltering step forward. She clutched at her coat, but suddenly wanted to show her old self, too. “This coat was a gift from a friend of mine, but it doesn’t mean anything. I was for many years a lady’s maid for the”—here Carolina’s throat dried up, but she forced herself to say the name—“Holland family.”

“Were you, now?” Madame Fitzgerald’s earlier irritation subsided as she savored this amusing revelation.

“Yes.” Carolina marched on through her humiliation. “Until this last fall.”

“Well”—the woman shrugged, coming around a table and toward the door—“show me how you work, then.”

“All right.” Carolina tried to put on an eager smile, and placed her suitcase on the floor. She stepped forward, but was stopped by the expression on Madame Fitzgerald’s face.

“Take that coat off.”

Carolina involuntarily brought her hands up to her chest. She thought first of turning on her heel, and second of the rat that had run across her foot. Slowly, reluctantly, still protesting in her heart, Carolina removed the coat and hung it on the stand by the door. Then she brushed her hands across her lap and tried to steel herself for what was coming next. Madame Fitzgerald gestured through the rows of girls at worktables. There was both envy and animosity in the way they observed the former maid with the coat that would have cost any one of them a year’s wages. Now that she was on the other side of the window, Carolina saw the shade under their eyes and the roughness of their fingertips, but still she wanted to be one of them. Just for a night.

She sat where Madame Fitzgerald pointed, and took a breath of hot, dry air. The proprietress brought a skirt made out of ivory material and dropped it in Carolina’s lap. There was something terrible about the fabric, far worse than anything she would have imagined herself wearing, or even touching, again — it seemed to be sloughing off in rough bits all over her.

“Hem that.”

“What?” Carolina’s thoughts had been diverted for a moment to a very different dress of pale gold with a scalloped and embroidered hem that Longhorn had had made especially for her. She’d worn it that night at Sherry’s, when being the inferior of a Portia Tilt had been so impossible to her….

“Hem it.” Madame Fitzgerald leaned back and somehow managed to smile by turning down the corners of her mouth. “It’s a test, sugarplum.”

Carolina nodded. She removed her gloves, pushed back her sleeves, cleared her throat, and reached for the skirt. She brought it close up and ran her fingers across the rough, unfinished bottom. The skirt had been let out, just like her sister Claire’s hand-me-downs used to be let out for her. She was too tall and grew out of things too quickly, always needing more length, more fabric, more everything. Carolina looked up briefly at the proprietress, as though to make sure that she was supposed to do what she thought she was supposed to do, and that using one of the machines would not be good enough, and then she took up a needle from the pincushion on the table and threaded it.

After a few careful stitches, Madame Fitzgerald moved away. She peered over the shoulders of the other girls, but kept an eye on Carolina, too, who was trying to keep her head down as she tentatively pressed the needle through the fabric. This kind of work made her chest feel tight, and her shoulders grew tense with the idea of doing so much for so little.

She thought for some reason of Will — poor Will, who had suffered so, and who never even got to go to Sherry’s, or the opera, or to wear clothing that had been made especially to fit his body. She thought about him and all the injustices of his life and of her own, all the foolish events that had brought her here, and she went on making stitches, although with less care each time.

A little bell rang and Carolina glanced up from her work to see the door open again. A man had come inside, the high lapels of his coat obscuring his face but not his light brown hair, which he had grown overlong. She felt her lungs swell with air and her hands flutter with the thought that it might be Leland. That it was him. He had come back for her — he had found her against improbable odds. She smiled and her freckled skin stretched taut over the cheekbones. Then Madame Fitzgerald made a happy, guttural sound and went over to take his coat. She removed it, and then the young man turned his face to survey the room. Though he was tall and handsome and wore his hair in the same way, he was not Leland.

The proprietress kissed the man on the cheek, and it was clear that they were from the same stock — he had her face, the way a son or nephew might. Before Carolina’s disappointment occurred to her, she began to feel the pain.

“Oh!” she said out loud.

Several of the girls turned to look at her, and then Madame Fitzgerald did, as well. Carolina looked down, and saw how she had jammed the needle into her thumb, just under the nail. For a minute there was only the stunned hurt, but now the blood had begun to flow, across the skin and onto the unfinished skirt.

“You stupid girl!” Madame Fitzgerald crossed to where she was and jerked the garment away from Carolina, who could only go on staring at her wounded finger. The older woman grabbed her hand and roughly pulled the needle from the skin where it was lodged. “Now look what you’ve done,” she said, in an only slightly less angry tone.

Indeed, the skirt was now marked with her blood, and though Carolina would have liked to point out that the skirt wasn’t really worth wearing anyway, she knew that that logic would be lost on present company. She stood up with what pride remained and pulled on her gloves, first one and then the other. The second began to soak up the blood. Then she crossed through the rows of rabid-eyed and underfed girls, slipped her coat over her shoulders, and gave a final look at the proprietress and the young man at her side. Their faces were full of contempt. When Carolina could look at them no more, she went out into the night.

She imagined how it might appear in print — CAROLINA BROAD WALKS THE DARKENED STREETS — although she no longer felt worthy of that name. It seemed to her that everything had gone numb, and that the sensations of her body were terribly remote. She’d lost feeling in her fingers, and soon she forgot about her toes. Then, later, when she sank into a doorframe, and huddled in her coat, and laid her ear against her shoulder, it was as though she were some other girl this was all happening to — perhaps Lina Broud — and that Carolina, whoever that was, could only watch from afar.

Mothers write all the time to thank me, many of whom benefited from my wisdom before they were matrons. It is one of the great joys of my life. Still, some girls never learn, and I hear the stories of their mistakes with even greater chagrin as I grow older….

— MRS. HAMILTON W. BREEDFELT, COLLECTED COLUMNS ON RAISING YOUNG LADIES OF CHARACTER, 1899

FAR NORTH ON FIFTH AVENUE, ALMOST TO THE park, the rain had begun to fall. It came softly at first, blown at an angle by the wind, but it was soon a true downpour; Diana listened to it beat a tattoo against the walk. Inside the Hayes mansion another bottle of champagne had been opened, although nearly everyone within was already thoroughly sauced. Henry Schoonmaker was — he drooped on a couch while his new wife smiled at his side — and so was his father, who had initiated the bacchanal. He had been dancing with Edith Holland, who had had not a few drinks herself, and was reminding those with long memories of the girl she used to be, and of an episode from the seventies when certain members of society believed for the first time that there might be a Holland-Schoonmaker alliance in the works. Meanwhile, his second wife, Isabelle, spoke quietly to Abelard Gore, whose wife had attended some other engagement that night, and Prudie Schoonmaker went on chatting — it seemed that she had talked more that one evening than she had over her entire life — with the painter Lispenard Bradley, who kept glancing in Isabelle’s direction. Edith’s niece Diana was sitting on a divan in the corner, carelessly holding a champagne glass, and when the waiter came by with the bottle, she extended her arm to have it filled up.

Everyone in the room was drunk, but no matter what she did, Diana could not seem to join them. She wanted to feel anything but the seething hurt that Henry had dealt her, but champagne was of no use. It was as though she’d been taken captive by some mad scientist who was conducting an epic experiment to document the furthest, Antarctic reaches of pain. He had given Henry a knife, and told him to twist it deeper, and somewhere, behind one of these mirrors, he watched to see how the sensation played out on Diana’s fragile face. Occasionally he would add mitigating factors, only to override them with more vicious experiments. Surely this — realizing what a colossal lie it had been that Henry didn’t sleep with his wife, that in fact they would soon be a happy family of three — was the most pain he could cause her. Although, Diana reflected as she put the champagne flute to her mouth, she had thought exactly that several times before, and here she was again in uncharted waters of anguish.

“There are good paintings in the galleries, is that right?” she said to the man sitting beside her, Grayson Hayes, who she knew full well had been instructed by his sister to show her how charming he could be and whom she had tried to use to make Henry jealous and then to forget Henry, neither time with very effective results. Poor Grayson — the pawn in two losing games. She did not ask about the galleries in a flirtatious way or a suggestive way or a cagey way. She asked without guile, except in the sense that it was not so much a question as a request to be taken far from the smoking room, which was now so purple with joy.