Anna Godbersen - Envy

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.

“Of course, when I travel, but only if I have to,” that lady returned. She pressed her voluptuous lips together and gave her new friend a certain look. “For instance, when I am in Newport, my family takes a cottage for the season, and when I am in Paris, I stay in our apartment on the Champs. But I am looking forward to one upcoming stay in a hotel—”

“Mrs. Schoonmaker, are you taking a trip?” Mrs. Holland asked. Her daughter, who knew each of the lady’s tones, detected a strained politeness in the question, although the guests at the neighboring tables would have heard only warm curiosity.

“Yes, Henry and I are taking a trip to Palm Beach.” A proud and involuntary smile sprang to her lips as she said “Henry and I.” “He and Teddy are going to fish, and I’ve been dying for some warm weather, and of course the Royal Poinciana is said to be a very grand establishment. A good wife always oversees her husband’s travel, when she can.”

Elizabeth set her water glass down at this, and her eyes darted to Diana, at a nearby table with their aunt Edith and the Misses Wetmore. If she was affected by the sound of Henry’s name she didn’t show it, for she went on animatedly asking Eleanor Wetmore about which beaux she particularly had her eye on that season. It was Elizabeth’s belief that her sister had experienced something very true with Henry, and she also believed that his feelings for her were equally pure. She had seen it in his eyes when she glimpsed him from across a busy street, on the morning when she had thought herself to be leaving New York forever. He had been rumpled and a little devastated to see Diana go away from him. She’d recognized that same look on his face an hour ago, when she’d caught him loitering at the door, and she’d hoped that he finally got to communicate to Diana a little of what those letters she’d so impetuously burned had contained.

“I’ve never been to Florida,” Lina said.

Of course you haven’t, Elizabeth thought, a little cruelly, to herself.

Something unspoken passed between the faces of Lina and Penelope, and then Penelope said, “You should come of course, Carolina. I will need someone to keep me company while the men are playing. You should come too, Elizabeth.” Penelope paused and looked into Elizabeth’s eyes, the whites growing around those intense blue irises. It was a look that made Elizabeth grateful for her lack of appetite, for if she had eaten anything she surely would not have been able to keep it down after witnessing such blatant falsity. “We haven’t been able to enjoy each other’s company like we used to since…When was it? October?”

For a moment, Elizabeth was overcome by a wave of hateful feeling, but it washed over her quickly and was gone. She knew that she could forgive Penelope, for all the cruelty she had dealt Elizabeth had resulted in one good thing — it had allowed her to live with Will for some months without all the secrecy and guilt that had shadowed their love in New York. And if Penelope had taken from Diana the thing she most wanted, well, she had only been pursuing what she herself desired with characteristic ruthlessness.

Elizabeth’s mouth had gone dry as she stared back at her old friend. Across the room, ladies whose lace collars were clasped by buttons of pearl sat at tables in groups of four and went on exclaiming over antiques and Paris fashions and the hunting on Long Island, but at the table nearest the fireplace everyone had grown quiet. Their gazes held steady in Elizabeth’s direction.

“October,” she confirmed after a minute.

“Just think,” Penelope went on, undeterred, her delicate elbow coming to rest on the white tablecloth. “We can swim in the ocean and walk by the seashore, and we will be very far away from all the gossip and silliness.”

The idea of sunshine and palm trees and parasols and bathing costumes made Elizabeth’s stomach turn. Already all the women they knew, and everyone at that table, were professionally frivolous. The idea of traveling a long distance at great expense to do all the same things with better lighting was repugnant to her. But before she could communicate this, her mother cut in:

“How generous of you, Penelope.” Elizabeth looked across the table, with its piles of brown bread and its little china butter dish and all the other dainty china pieces that a midday luncheon was an excuse to display. One could detect, in every slight twitch of the older lady’s face, a sternness that could not be denied. “Of course Elizabeth would love to go.”

Elizabeth’s eyes grew round with bewilderment. She couldn’t go — all of her insides were in revolt at the very idea. He mother’s small obsidian eyes were settled on her daughter, her crow’s feet spreading confidently as she waited for Elizabeth to enunciate the appropriate response. Penelope’s smile, meanwhile, had transformed to a smirk. Elizabeth turned her fair head just slightly and glanced at her sister for help.

Diana was sitting at the adjacent table, and she propped her left elbow on the wooden back of her chair and leaned over when she realized she was being silently called upon. Her large, soft brown eyes blinked once, and for a moment Elizabeth believed her sister might come to the rescue. Then Diana called, over the voices of the Misses Wetmore, “Florida? That would be such a very good time!”

Elizabeth’s gaze darted back to her mother, and she realized that Diana’s comment had elicited an uncharacteristic smile in the old lady. “But it’s so far away,” she mumbled.

“I will go with you, if you fear the distance.” Diana’s tone was jovial, and in another moment Elizabeth realized what she was about. “I am hardier than you and would see that you were comfortable.”

Penelope removed her elbow from the table, as though she were confused, and rearranged the shiny black pleats on her lap. When she had regained her smile she turned to Elizabeth. “How wonderful. It will be a party!”

Elizabeth opened her eyes and looked from her insistent mother to that supremely false face, realizing as she did that her instinct to stay far away from Penelope was based not only on the new Mrs. Schoonmaker’s past deeds, but what she was capable of in the future. Penelope’s ambitions no longer made any sense to Elizabeth, but it began to dawn on her, as she observed that painfully ingratiating expression, that hiding was a useless and futile way to spend her time, and that it wouldn’t keep any of them safe in the least.

“You’re sure you have room for Diana too?” Elizabeth noted, in the far corner of her vision, that Diana’s breathing had grown a little dramatic and that she was following everything at the table closest to the fire with vigilant eyes. Her face was nakedly hopeful. “It’s only that I’m not quite myself again, and I would need the company of my sister to feel at ease on so long a trip.”

“Of course!” gushed Penelope. “Although,” she went on a little more loudly, so that all the nearby tables might hear, “I think of you as a sister and believe we could comfort each other very well. But your sister is my sister”—here she paused to flash her eyes at Diana—“and haven’t I always said the more the merrier?”

“It will be very lovely for both my girls,” Mrs. Holland said with uncharacteristic deference. “Thank you, Mrs. Schoonmaker.”

“What fun we’ll have,” Penelope concluded with terrible emphasis.

As a slightly younger debutante, Elizabeth had been an expert practitioner of small equivocations and white lies — always in the service of propriety and politeness, of course. She had never liked big lies, as she had not liked anything that might fall in that dreaded category of “too much.” But looking at Penelope, at her large, fine, attention-getting features, at the rabidity in her giant eyes, Elizabeth began to see that putting on a false front, on a truly grand scale, was the only way to protect herself and her sister. She thought of Henry and Diana on the stoop, gazing at each other with the confusion and sadness of two puppies who have just stumbled into their first puddle and not yet come to understand what has happened to them, and found that she wanted to lie extravagantly. She brought herself up, allowing air into her delicate lungs, meeting Penelope’s gaze.