Empire (41 page)

Mrs. Delacroix was small and thin, with a face whose lines resembled an intricate spider’s web, framed by silver-gray hair so elaborately curled and arranged—not to mention thick—that half Newport was convinced she wore a wig like her contemporary Mrs. Astor. But hair—and spider’s web—were all her own. When the old lady spoke, her
speech was swift with oddly clipped syllables, a reminder of her New Orleans origin. As Mrs. Delacroix approached Caroline, she held a parasol between pale skin and bright sun; she seemed, to Caroline, like some highly purposeful ghost; with truly bad news from the other side.

“Mr. Lispinard Stewart, our neighbor, has come to call. I said that I thought that you were indisposed. But of course if you are disposed …”

“I am entirely at
your
disposition.”

“They do teach you girls how to talk over there in Europe.” A footman in livery appeared from behind a hedge of lilac, and placed a chair behind Mrs. Delacroix, who sat in it without once looking to see if the chair was in place. “Mr. Lispinard Stewart owns the White Lodge down the road. He is very snobbish.”

“Like everyone else here. Or so I’ve been told,” Caroline added; she had vowed not to be critical, in conversation.

“Some of us have more occasion to be snobbish than others. Mr. Stewart is a bachelor whom everyone would like to marry. But I suspect he will remain in his current state of immaculate chastity, as the nuns used to say in my youth, until he is one day called to a higher station, as a bridegroom of Christ.”

Caroline could never tell when the old lady was being deliberately droll. In either case, she laughed. “It was my impression that Jesus contents himself only with brides.”

“We must not,” said Mrs. Delacroix serenely, “question the mysterious ways of the Almighty.” With the point of her parasol she was turning over the pile of newspapers on the lawn. “You’re the first young lady that I have ever known who reads the front part of the newspapers.”

“I am the first young lady you have ever known to
publish
a newspaper.”

“I would not,” said Mrs. Delacroix, “boast.”

“Boast? I had hoped to arouse your sympathy.”

“I have none.” Mrs. Delacroix looked quite pleased with herself.

“None at all—for anyone?”

“Not even for myself. We get what we deserve, Caroline.” From the first day, the old woman had addressed the young woman as both child and relative. “But what I most particularly deserve, you don’t have.” She abandoned turning over the newspapers; and frowned with disappointment. “It’s not here.”

“What were you looking for?”

“
Town Topics
. I read nothing else. It’s always wise to know what the servants think of us. The things that that paper prints!”

“It’s what they
don’t
print—the omissions—that I study it for.”

Mrs. Delacroix carefully readjusted her huge pastel yellow hat with its swept-back veil of lace. Gold ornaments clung haphazardly to her bust. “Surely those
not
mentioned are virtuous, and so of no concern to our servants.”

“Or they pay Colonel Mann large sums of money to keep their names out of his ‘Saunterings.’ ”

“Cynical!” Mrs. Delacroix’s voice tolled like the sea-bell on the sharp rocks beneath the house. “That’s what comes of reading newspapers! They soil one’s soul as surely as they soil white gloves.”

Caroline held up her gloves. They were indeed smudged with ink. “I must change again,” she said.

“Wait until we dress for lunch.” Caroline had been relieved to discover that Newport required no more than five changes of dress a day, assuming that one did not play tennis or go yachting or riding. In Paris, seven changes of costume was thought the fashionable minimum. As a result of this new dispensation, the asthmatic Marguerite was in Paradise: enraptured by the sea-air’s coolness, as well as by the thousand or so French maids employed along the ridge where Newport’s “cottages” were set apart from the old town whose year-round inhabitants had been dubbed by Harry Lehr, in a literal translation of Louis XIV, “our Footstools.” Although the Footstools loathed the fashionable Feet, they served them grimly during the eight-week season of July and August; after the last fête, Mrs. Fish’s Harvest Festival Ball, the huge palaces were then shut for the remaining ten months of the year and Newport was again the property of the Stools.

“Why must you quarrel with Blaise?” Suddenly, disconcertingly, Mrs. Delacroix resembled a withered version of her grandson.

“We only quarrel over money. Surely, that’s usual—and permissible.”

“One
disagrees
over money but one does not quarrel. You could be such a good influence on him.”

“Does he need a good influence? I thought,” Caroline was mischievous, “that Madame de Bieville now stood
in loco parentis
.”

With some effort, Mrs. Delacroix managed not to smile. “
I
am
in loco parentis
. The poor boy’s last blood relation—except for you, of course.”

“And I am so young, inexperienced, still a
jeune fille
, while Blaise is
a man of the world, with Madame to guide him—when you are not there, of course.”

“Now you make fun of me.” The dowager looked almost girlish. “But you seem more at ease in these parts than Blaise. You select your friends with care …”

“Girls never select. We are selected.”

“Well, you have, somehow, acquired the Hay family. Helen dotes on you. She’s arriving today, with Payne Whitney. Naturally, they go to different houses. We are not French, yet. But Blaise comes and goes and except for the delightful Madame de Bieville, he has no friends in Newport …”

“No friends? Why, there is Payne, and Del Hay, when he’s here, and all those Yale classmates …”

“He thinks only of Mr. Hearst and newspapers …”

“Like me. I sometimes think our wet-nurse must have fed us ink instead of milk.”

Mrs. Delacroix put her hands over her ears. “I did not hear that!” A footman arrived with a silver tray on which two near-transparent cups of bouillon were placed. “Drink up,” said the old woman. “You’ll need your strength. We have a formidable season prepared.”

“You are good to invite me.” Caroline looked at her hostess; and began to be fond of her. Although she had not expected to find anything but a dragon, breathing fire, the invitation (summons?) had proved to be a sign of belated—not quite affection but deep curiosity: of the two emotions always the more interesting one in Caroline’s view. But then she, too, was curious about Mrs. Delacroix for many reasons.

Thus far, there had been no talk of the past. A portrait of Denise Sanford hung in the drawing room; she looked very young, and rather startled; except for her expression, she looked like Blaise. There was no portrait of their father, William Sanford. “I must have put it away,” said Mrs. Delacroix. “Would you like to have it?”

“Yes, I would.”

“He is in uniform. In the war, he fought on the Yankee side.”

“Hardly fought,” Caroline could not resist.

“That is the best thing I have heard said of him. We continued to know one another only because of Blaise, who is my last living grandchild, my last relative, in fact, outside New Orleans, that is, where I am related to everyone.”

“What a burden!”

Mrs. Delacroix took Caroline’s arm and they walked, carefully, up
the lawn to the pink marble terrace. “Mamie Fish is giving us lunch. She’s very curious about you.”

“I am not,” Caroline said, “curious about her.”

“Do tell her! She will be shattered. She thinks herself the most interesting woman on earth, and now that old Mrs. Astor’s started to fade, Mamie means to take her place, or, rather, Harry Lehr means to install Mamie as our uncrowned queen.”

“Such excitement,” murmured Caroline, wondering if there might not be a story to be passed on, most anonymously, to the
Tribune
.

They entered the cool boisserie-lined study, where a marble bust of Marie Antoinette gazed, like a regal sheep, out the window at a lawn ready for munching. “When Mrs. Leiter was here, she asked me if Rodin had made that head.”

On principle, Caroline laughed at any mention of the wealthy Chicago lady who had launched, successfully, three splendid girls into the great world’s marriage market, of whom the most attractive married Lord Curzon, now viceroy of India, where the vice-reine was known as Leiter of India. “Naturally I told Mrs. Leiter that Rodin had sculpted the entire French royal family, starting with Charlemagne. She said that she was not surprised as he did only the best people. In fact,” Mrs. Delacroix suddenly inhaled, making a sound that could only have been described as a snort, “Mrs. Leiter said that I must see the
bust
that he has just done of her daughter’s hand.”

Then Mrs. Delacroix proposed that they drive to the Casino, a rustic shingle-and-wood building which provided marble Newport with a sort of village center, a Petit Trianon for would-be simple folk. Here tennis was played on grass courts, while in the Horse Shoe Piazza, Mullalay’s orchestra could be heard throughout the day as unenergetic ladies took the air, often together, while the energetic men were all at sea in sailboats and the unenergetic ones had withdrawn to the Casino’s Reading Room, where they were safe from ladies, cads and books.

But Caroline said that she had—she almost said the unsayable word “work” but quickly remembered the common phrase—“letters to write,” and clothes to be changed. Mrs. Delacroix let her go; and took to her carriage alone except for a poor relation called Miss Aspinall, who acted as companion during the high season. The rest of the year, Miss Aspinall rusticated at Monroe, Louisiana, where she could enjoy the quiet pleasures of a pastoral spinsterhood.

Marguerite had laid out an elaborate costume from Worth; perfection, except that it was three years old, a fact that the sharp eyes of
Newport’s ladies would be quick to notice. But Caroline’s reputation for eccentricity had its social uses. Also, was she not a Sanford? and had she not been taken in by Mrs. Delacroix, supposedly a mortal enemy of her mother, Emma?

Supposedly? Caroline sat in an armchair covered with worn Aubusson and looked out at the sea where sailboats tacked this way and that, and white spinnakers filled with wind; blasphemously, she found herself thinking of pregnant nuns; the influence, no doubt, of her hostess. What indeed did the old woman feel about her mother? What indeed did she feel about her mother’s daughter? and why the sudden peremptory invitation that had taken precedence over the annoyed Mrs. Jack? Yet they had come to enjoy each other’s company; also, there were, despite the high season, no other houseguests, something of an oddity. Vague references to Louisiana relatives who were too ill to travel suggested to Caroline that she might be a stopgap, a last-minute improvisation. If anything, the emptiness of the huge marble house was more to be revelled in than not. The servants were well-trained; that is, invisible when not needed; and a number were French, to Marguerite’s uninhibited joy. The great cool, sunlit rooms smelled of roses, lemon furniture-wax and, always, the iodine-scented sea-air.

There was a good deal to be said for idle luxury, thought Caroline, carefully placing side by side on the parquet floor the front pages of the nine newspapers that were her daily reading. By now, each newspaper was like an old acquaintance. She knew why one newspaper relentlessly played up—when the editors did not invent—every Boer victory in South Africa: the publisher’s wife and daughter had
not
been received at the Court of St. James’s; while another newspaper spoke only of British victories, a tribute to the managing editor’s long affair with a British lady whose husband owned an auction house in New York City. Caroline was now able to predict how any American newspaper would respond to almost any important event. Only Hearst occasionally baffled her, because he was, in his way, an artist; mercurial, unpredictable and devoted to invention.

Newport itself was featured inside two New York City papers; and not much elsewhere. Currently, Newport was in the news because William K. Vanderbilt, Jr., had driven a French motor car from Newport to Boston and back, some one hundred sixty miles, in three hours and fifty-seven minutes. She memorized the item. This would get her nicely through Mrs. Fish’s lunch, where Harry Lehr was now full-time major-domo. Old Mrs. Astor no longer entertained as much as she had;
she preferred to remain in her cottage, receiving only the faithful. Power was shifting—everyone said—to Mrs. Fish, though Mrs. Ogden Mills, born Livingston, was the ranking American archduchess at Newport, and when Mrs. Astor let the sceptre fall she should, by the very number of her democratic quarterings, succeed. When asked her views of the Four Hundred, Mrs. Mills had said coldly, “There are really only twenty families in New York.” Mrs. Mills did have one marvellous, even unique, gift: she could make absolutely anyone feel ill at ease in her presence. “A priceless gift,” Mrs. Delacroix had observed, mournfully, unaware of the permanently terrified expression of the spinster Aspinall, always at her side.

Other, lesser, candidates for the throne included the lively, clever Mrs. Oliver Belmont, “the first
lady
ever to marry a Vanderbilt,” she would say with some satisfaction, particularly if there was a descendant of the old tugboat commodore in the room, “and the first lady ever to get a divorce, on her own terms. I was also the first American lady to marry her daughter to a duke of Marlborough, for which I shall, doubtless, suffer in the afterlife. But I meant well. And, of course, I am the first lady ever to marry a Jew, my darling Oliver Belmont. Now,” she would say, with a formidable glare in the dark intelligent eyes that fascinated Caroline, “I shall be the first woman—
not
lady—to see to it that every American woman will one day have the vote. For women are the hope of this country. If you doubt this, then pray to God,” she had said when she first met Caroline, and tried to recruit her for women’s suffrage, “and
She
will help you.” Caroline revelled in Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, but no one else in the great world did. She was too shocking and too advanced to be popular; she was also too rich and too powerful to be ignored. But she was definitely not in the line of succession to Mrs. Astor; nor wanted to be, any longer. There had been a time when Alva had threatened to replace the Astor-Plantagenets with the Vanderbilt-Tudors. But divorce had intervened; and, more dismally, good works.