Anna Godbersen - Envy

“I suppose you are here to meet your wife,” she quipped, almost just to distract herself from the line of his jaw. “She’s here.”

“No…” Henry stopped shaking his head. A moment later he let his gaze — so tentative, so full of desire — meet Diana’s. “No.”

“No what?” She relaxed her grip on the door and let it open just a few inches wider. The park was quiet behind them, the naked branches of trees reaching up hungrily toward the white sky. All of the coachmen kept their noses in their newspapers and studiously ignored the two people on the stoop.

“No, I didn’t come to see my wife.” He paused and pressed his fingers to the place on his forehead just between his brows. “I wasn’t going to come at all. But then, the idea of being in the same room as you — I’m sorry. I sound like an ass. I hadn’t anticipated that I would actually be able to talk to you, like this, so close. You will probably leave any moment now and I won’t have said any of what I want to say to you and…Oh, God.”

Her heart, the damned thing, had begun to race, and she only hoped that the rapid inflation and deflation of her chest wasn’t visible beneath her fitted bodice. She knew that she should do what Henry expected her to do and walk away. Then he could ring the bell, and Claire could show him in more formally. But instead she stepped out onto the stoop and let the door close partially behind her. “What did you want to say?”

Henry took off his hat and held it pensively between his hands. “Well, it’s like I said in my letters….” His sentences were broken, as though he were having trouble drawing breath. “Didn’t you read my letters?”

For a moment, all of Diana’s emotions had been under siege, but that was now replaced by a simple, simmering irritation. “No,” she said. She began to notice the chill air. “I burned them.”

Henry let out a breath and a sound approximately like “Oh.” He looked at Diana for a long time, and while she recognized some great emotion in his face, she couldn’t be certain if it was sympathy for what he had done to her, or self-pity for what he himself had lost.

“Henry,” she said after a while. She was trying to sound tough and impatient, but she knew that vulnerable desire to be wooed was still brimming in her tone. “They’ll be wondering where I am.”

Henry glanced to his left, where the windows of the parlor were, and took a step closer to make sure that he was out of view. She noticed the apparatus of his throat working beneath the soft skin, which his valet had no doubt shaved an hour or two ago. “If I could just have one more minute of your time, Miss Diana.”

She looked behind her, as though a whole crowd of snoops had gathered, but there was no one in the foyer. “All right,” she said.

“I don’t love Penelope, I never did.” For the first time during their interaction, his body was completely still. Not even his eyelids flickered. “There was never a time I really thought I would marry her, and when I did it was all to protect you.”

Diana’s arms moved involuntarily over her chest. The cold was at her ears now, but she had never seen Henry’s face so sincere — she felt a little warm noting that.

“She found out about that night…in your room…and what occurred between you and me. She told me that if I didn’t marry her she would expose you. I tried to explain it all to you….” He trailed off, perhaps realizing that none of that mattered now. “You were all I thought of the whole ceremony, and ever since. Protecting you and your good name.”

Diana’s good name had never seemed so useless to her. She pressed her fingertips into the rough door, and wondered if he wanted her to thank him. Many things had changed in her over a matter of minutes, but she had not begun to feel grateful.

“My letters were to explain all that to you, and to tell you how sorry I am that this is what has happened.” Henry turned his hat in his hands but went on looking at Diana in a way that made her want to crawl into his arms and stay there forever. She was surprised at herself, and a little angry, for still having feelings like that. “I don’t love her, Di.”

She closed her eyes and rumpled her brow. “You certainly have all New York fooled,” she said, rather unconvincingly.

“I don’t even go to bed with her.”

She opened her eyes then, the thick lashes fluttering back from her rich brown irises. “Never?” she whispered.

Henry shook his head and watched her. “How could I, when you’re the one I want?”

It was as though she had been pushed forward, through the breeze, on a child’s swing. Her lips parted, and a thousand thoughts clamored for articulation on her tongue. She wondered if maybe Henry would kiss her, quickly enough that nobody would notice, but then the moment broke.

“Diana?” a voice called from the foyer.

Her mind rushed with fear and she swallowed hard before turning to see her sister just beyond the door. “Oh, Liz. I was only…” Her eyes flickered between the man in the black frock coat and Elizabeth’s tired eyes. “Mr. Schoonmaker is here.”

“Well.” Elizabeth’s pale, heart-shaped face was framed by the cracked door. “We are all waiting for you. Have him come in, and take his coat, for goodness’ sake.”

She gave Henry a serious look, and then turned away, leaving her sister alone with him once more. A silence followed, and eventually Diana asked, “Are you coming in?”

“No…” Henry’s dark brows drew up and closer together. “I don’t think I could stand it.”

She nodded.

“I am leaving Tuesday. Teddy and I are going to do some fishing. Tell them I was called away to get my luggage and plans in order, if they saw me. And if they didn’t, don’t mention my coming here at all.” He paused and put his hat back on his head. “Penelope invited herself along, of course, and now she plans to invite Elizabeth. I think she wants to create the illusion that they are still friends.” Henry was babbling now, saying words that implied his departure even while he stayed put. He went down a few steps, looked at his shiny dress shoes, and then back up at Diana. “Would you come?”

“Where?”

“To Florida.”

She looked nervously over her shoulder. “But how would I…?”

Then he grinned at her, and for a moment the bad weather broke. She felt that old giddy lightness, as though she were capable of anything — it was the sensation he used to give her, just by being in her general vicinity. “You are very clever, and I’m sure you will find a way.”

He lifted and then lowered the brim of his hat, before turning and walking briskly to his waiting carriage. She brushed the curls away from her face and tried to feel a little calm, but all her cool distance had left her. When she finally returned to her family’s gathering, her whole body was at an entirely different temperature.

A young lady’s most natural ally is her sister, although sometimes our own relatives are as inscrutable to us as an antipodean.

— MAEVE DE JONG, LOVE AND OTHER FOLLIES OF THE GREAT FAMILIES OF OLD NEW YORK

THE PLATES BEARING HALF-EATEN TIMBALES OF chicken were being removed from the right-hand side of the Holland family’s guests, to be replaced — Elizabeth knew very well, for she had overseen the menu — by filet of beef with asparagus. She had also arranged the silver loving cups with brightly colored winter branches, carefully inscribed their guests’ names on place cards, and helped Claire with the steaming of the old damask table linens. The money that Snowden had given them — it was their father’s share of a claim they had jointly owned in the Klondike, or so he had insisted — had enabled them to hire a new cook for the occasion. Elizabeth had worn the dress of her mother’s choosing, an iridescent navy with tiny buttons drawing the fabric close to emphasize the thinness of her neck and wrists, but not her torso or arms, and she had managed to meet their guests with something like the welcoming mien expected of one of the old Dutch families’ eldest daughters.

But she had made a fatal mistake. It was the kind of mistake that the girl she used to be — the one people thought of when they uttered those names, “Elizabeth” and “Holland,” sequentially — never would have made. She had let an ugly emotion (anger, tinged with unquenchable sadness) rise in her in public. She had revealed too much to an ungrateful girl who hated her, and who in any event already knew enough to hang her. Elizabeth smiled weakly in Lina’s direction, hoping that Lina was not as unreasonable and vengeful as she sometimes seemed, and asked if she was enjoying the food.

“Why, yes.”

Lina smiled with shameless pleasure at the girl she had served since childhood. A small amount of grease was smudged against her lip, which she had not bothered to blot with her napkin, and it glinted in the afternoon light. Across the room, their guests were chatting in polite tones and enjoying Holland hospitality without being so gauche as to note what a rare commodity it had been of late. The lesser parlor looked very well — it had once been the room where they displayed their dowdier paintings, but all of those had been removed along with the cobwebs that had accumulated on the high picture moldings. It was also the room Elizabeth had been married in.

At the hostess’s table, Penelope carried on as though she had been a weekly visitor in the house for all of recent memory. Mrs. Holland occupied the chair across from her daughter, and listened to her guests with studied acceptance. She had apparently forgotten that she had once selected Penelope’s husband as the groom for her own child, and — perhaps more strangely — failed to recognize Miss Broad as her former employee.

“What a good thing it is to have a home-cooked meal after so many months eating hotel food,” Lina was saying. She paused and turned to Mrs. Holland brazenly. “I live in the New Netherland, you know.”

“I did not know.” Mrs. Holland took a sip of Apollinaris water and assessed the newcomer. Maybe she did wonder why, in a room of thirty-six highborn people, this girl from out west, possessed of an unstoried fortune, should be sitting at her table, but she did not betray any such thoughts. At least not in an overt way. “I remember when it went up, and how garish we all thought it was. And now lovely girls like you live there! It does show you how precious little we all knew then.”

“How odious I found hotel life,” Penelope sighed.

Elizabeth looked at her old friend and let her eyelids flick back and forth a few times. They had been exceptionally close during the year and a half that Penelope had lived in the Waldorf, and even after Elizabeth had departed for a finishing season in Paris she had received letters overstuffed with accounts of all the marvelous things to be seen and touched and tasted there. Elizabeth distinctly remembered feeling embarrassed by those guilelessly exuberant descriptions. It was during that period, Elizabeth later realized, that Penelope had fixed her ambitions on Henry Schoonmaker, which was among the reasons that she eventually ran afoul of her friend.

“The service is much better in one’s own house, where one can control things,” she added.

“Do you never stay in hotels anymore?” Lina asked. Her voice was flat and earnest, and Elizabeth realized that she was asking out of true curiosity and perhaps as a cue to her own future behavior. It made Elizabeth pity her a little, despite the earlier scene, because she was obviously trying so hard to appear fine and rare, and yet she was somehow or other under the wing of Penelope, whose money was still considered rather new.