The Gilded Years (22 page)

“The dear doctor must have taken part in the Salem Witch Trials,” said Lottie, her legs kicking the couch rhythmically.

“Dr. Thelberg is two hundred years old?” asked Anita.

“She might have been reincarnated a few times since then, but she was there, I assure you. Only witches require seniors to starve. And tonight they’re serving lamb! I stopped by the carving room on the way back from the messenger room and it looked divine.” Lottie rolled over to face the wall and said carelessly, “Oh, the post arrived. You had a letter from Frederick. I think I put it on the card table. Or was it your desk?”

Anita looked, angry with herself for not getting to the mail first, and spotted the letter on her wooden desk, where her papers had been pushed aside to make it the focal point.
She turned the envelope over, put it in the pocket of her dress, and stood up. “I think I will visit Belle in the infirmary. Perhaps I can sneak in some food to her. Would you like to come?”

“Are you going to torture me by not opening your brother’s letter here and now,” said Lottie, pouting. “You know I still hold out hope for us.”

“Do you?” asked Anita, shocked. Could Lottie still be so fond of Frederick after what he had said to her in Boston? She knew that Lottie became easily fixated on things, on people, but her affection for Frederick had to have its limits. “I was sure that Joseph Southworth had replaced my unremarkable little brother in your eyes,” she said.

“Unremarkable! He is nothing of the sort. He is extremely dashing, your brother. But it is true, so is Joseph. I suppose I’m still choosing,” said Lottie with a dramatic wave of her hands.

“Ah,” said Anita, taking the letter out of her pocket to appease her friend. She picked up Lottie’s sterling silver letter opener from her desk and passed it through the fold of the envelope. She sat on the rocking chair from Uncle Fred and silently read the one-page letter.

Dear Anita,

I know everything. Lottie disclosed the details of Phil Day with me, from your dancing ten times with Porter Hamilton to your shameful behavior with him in your bedroom. End your relationship now and prove to me that you have, or I will tell mother and father about Porter. It is a terrible threat for me to have to make, but I know it is the only one that will prompt you to act as you should. I await your letter, but I won’t for very long.

Your brother Frederick

Anita looked up, unable to hide her emotion. So Lottie had revealed everything to Frederick. It must have been the day at the hotel when Anita had slipped off to the powder room, leaving the two of them alone. She wondered why he had not confronted her then, now remembering how angry he was. She guessed that part of him knew how much she needed to be with her family, to enjoy her time at home. Their mother must have told him of her tears on her first night back. But he was not holding back his words, or threats, now.

“Anita! What’s wrong?” Lottie demanded, jumping up and coming over to her. But Anita ripped the letter apart before her roommate could take it from her. “I hope it’s not about me,” Lottie said, and Anita shook her head firmly no.

“No, it’s about Porter,” she said, determined to say very little to her roommate. “Frederick doesn’t approve.”

Anita took the pieces of the letter and left the room. She rushed down the stairs to the empty senior parlor, dropped them in the roaring fire, and hurried out the door. She would visit Belle, she would shake off the horrible thoughts in her mind, and then she would go to the chapel and pray.

If she did not end her engagement with Porter now, her parents would force her to as soon as they learned the truth. They might even do it for her, go so far as to tell him the truth about her race. With her brother’s solution, she would lose Porter; with his threat, she would lose Porter, her secret, and perhaps Vassar as well.

When Anita returned to her room late that night, having skipped the lamb dinner, Lottie was still awake. Anita sat down on her friend’s bed, knowing no excuse was needed for her absence that evening.

“I didn’t tell your brother because I don’t love you,” Lottie said. “Or you and Porter together. I just wanted to
feel close to Frederick, to share something with him. And I wanted you to have his blessing. I was sure he would give it if I could explain how happy you were.”

“He did not,” said Anita, thinking about her swift kick to Lottie’s shin, which had made no impression except a physical one. She closed her eyes and let the tears stream. And because she didn’t have another shoulder to cry on, she cried on Lottie’s.

The following day, before the sun came up, Anita sat in the reading room of the library, her oil lamp so close to her face that she felt her skin prickle with the heat. She pulled out her finest paper and wrote a letter woven of lies.

My dear Porter,

My heavy hands and heavier heart have to do the most awful thing I can imagine: put an end to our engagement. I misled you. I must marry someone else. I am devastated, and I am sorry.

Anita

I
am awash with guilt, Anita,” said Lottie as the two were ice-skating on the steely gray Vassar lake, the gelid day silent around them. It was the depth of winter in New York. No bird streaked across the sky, no pine tree stirred, the natural world lay frozen. But Lottie’s personality had no such season: happy, exhausted, penitent, she overflowed with life.

She took her hands out of her fur muff, throwing it onto the stiff grass beside the pond, the better to work up speed on the ice.

“I feel such regret!” she shouted, coasting back to the center. “I shouldn’t have told Frederick; I can see that now. I simply had no idea he would react so. Who wouldn’t want his sister to be engaged to a Chicago Hamilton? They are one of the most renowned families in the Middle West. And Porter is handsome, brilliant, and scandal-free. I know Frederick is tucked away in remote Ithaca, but even he must know that’s a rare combination these days at Harvard. All those badly behaved heirs from chip-chop arriviste families. Porter is one of the only ones without rumors of this or that bubbling around them. Frederick should have been thrilled.”

“Yes, Frederick should have been, but that is not his way.
He thinks I handled myself very badly,” said Anita, her arms extended for balance. “In fact, he is sure I’ve embarrassed myself beyond repair.”

Lottie stopped, gouging the smooth ice with her sharp blades, and looked at her roommate, still a little unsteady on the ice after three years of skating. “I didn’t know your brother was such a traditionalist about women. How could I! Besides, it’s just not right. Even the most proper woman could not deny Porter Hamilton one little kiss.” She made a little moue of apology. “I was aware, by the application of your toe to my leg, that you did not want me to discuss Porter in front of you, but I was quite sure that if it were just Frederick and I, that I could make him understand. I thought I could be a help to you.”

Had Frederick told Lottie she had no hope of him after she had told him about Porter, or before? Anita would never know. And it was too late to try to deduce who had acted in retaliation; it was already a fait accompli. She looked down at the frozen lake and couldn’t help but think about Chicago—their lake, the elevated trains, the pulse of the city, the man no one wanted her to be with. She swallowed the pain that was feasting on her body and steadied by digging her toe in the ice, too.

“No, Frederick’s correct,” she replied. “I acted inappropriately. He is right to disapprove. But it
was
very hard to say no to Porter. I do . . . I did . . . have so much affection for him.”

“I should have had more foresight,” said Lottie, starting to loop around her friend to keep her close. Every Vassar student was required to complete three hours of exercise a week, but in winter, one of those hours could be spent on the frozen lake, and Anita and Lottie had made it a Friday tradition.

Anita licked her chapped lips, her skin raw from the January cold, and watched Lottie circling her like a child desperate to be loved again.

“You know me, Anita, I just can’t hold my tongue. It should really have been cut off years ago,” Lottie said, swaying winsomely from side to side on her blades. “I am truly sorry. I wasn’t using my head. Now, what can I do? Tell me, please, I beg of you. I miss my dear friend Anita Hemmings. She’s been replaced with an empty, dispirited impostor. I’ll do anything to have the old Anita back.”

“This is me we are speaking of?” said Anita, cutting away from Lottie when she circled behind her.

Anita had come to realize that ending her engagement with Porter was unavoidable if she was to save herself in the here and now, but she refused to think of the break as permanent. Somehow she would find a way to put things right again. And this time she wouldn’t make the mistake of announcing their relationship publicly. She had to send Porter another letter explaining everything, without revealing the real reasons behind her rash decision, and she had to accomplish it without Lottie intervening, an increasingly difficult task.

Lottie skated past Anita and planted herself in front of her, hands on hips, lips still in a pout. For the first time in the three days since she had written her heartbreaking letter to Porter, Anita gave in.

“Oh, Lottie,” she said, her anger trumped, at least for now, by the urge to confide in her friend. “I’m so grief-stricken about it all. I don’t know what to do. I know you weren’t telling Frederick about us maliciously, and if Frederick was of a more liberal bent when it came to women and morality, it might have been different. You could have been helping me. But Frederick is as old-fashioned as they
come, and if news about Porter and me had spread, you can imagine the scandal. It would have left me unmarriageable and caused a terrible scandal for the school. I could have been expelled.”

“But word of the romantic—yet unfortunate—incident will not spread, Anita,” said Lottie gliding over to retrieve her muff. She picked it up and sat on the white, frozen grass, pulling her wool skirt tight around her legs. “I’ll never breathe a word of it to anyone.”

“I believe you made that promise once before,” said Anita, sitting down next to her. She pulled her skirt tight, as Lottie had, her legs quite numb. There was a smell of snow in the air, and Anita hoped it would start falling while they were on the ice.

“But it was only to your brother!” Lottie protested. “I assumed you were planning to tell him about Porter before the winter holiday ended. Haven’t you told the rest of your family about the engagement? Your mother? If I were engaged to a Hamilton, my cries of excitement would have beaten me home.”

“Porter and I agreed to wait until after graduation,” said Anita. “I thought I had told you.”

“You did not,” said Lottie, accurately. “But you should have. I wish you had! Then we wouldn’t be in this awful position. I feel as if we’re pinned to a wall and we just can’t be ourselves because of this misunderstanding. The last few days have been miserable. I just can’t have you so cross with me. It’s our final year here, and there are too many wonderful things to do together. But you’ll see, Anita. We can make the world all right again.” Lottie stood up, skated to the middle of the pond, and started spinning so fast she grew dizzy.

“You’re going to fall!” said Anita, chasing out after her.

“And what if I do?”
said Lottie, slowing down and putting her hand on Anita’s shoulder for balance. She threw her head back, and Anita did, too, watching as two bright red northern cardinals flew across the sky, a rare sight on campus. Lottie pointed at them, then said, “People sometimes do.”

Anita shrugged off her roommate’s arm and watched as Lottie spun off like a falling snowflake in the other direction, then came back to lean on her again. Both girls, after a very tense beginning to their second term, were finally growing calmer.

“You never know which way the wind will blow when it comes to these sort of things,” said Lottie, rubbing her hands together for warmth. “Porter may not be lost to you forever, and even if he is, the world’s men do not begin and end with Porter Hamilton. I was crazy about Henry Silsbury, but I forgot him in a flash when he proved unworthy of my affection. Now I am wild about—”

“Do not say my brother Frederick, not after all this,” said Anita, looking out across the frozen campus. Anita had always loved the silence of winter. When she was at Northfield, colder even than Boston, she had loved the way the weather would blow through her skin. Here in Poughkeepsie in January, that familiar feeling of a frozen world was starting to sink in. Anita watched as three other girls, lowerclassmen, arrived at the lake in their skates and stepped tentatively onto it, as if it might suddenly crack and pull them under forever. Once reassured, they held hands and sped off across the ice, shouting with delight as they reveled in their first winter as college women.

“I wasn’t going to,” said Lottie. “Not after he turned you into this doleful creature. I was going to say Old Southpaw.”

“Oh, good,” said Anita, relieved. “I like Old Southpaw.”

“So do I,” said Lottie.
Still, Anita sensed that despite Joseph Southworth’s amiability, good looks, and deep pockets, Lottie was not yet convinced that he was worthier of her affection than Frederick.

“What did you once say about the borings?” Anita mused. “That you need someone dripping with charm, to cure them? Joseph is that. He’s bathed in charm. Every girl who had him on her card at Phil said as much.”

“Yes, he is. And very rich.
And
Japanese. I’m so taken with the fact that he might have been born to great scandal in the Orient. Do remind me to look into that story, won’t you? I like it too much for it to be made up.”

Anita nodded, closed her eyes, and let Lottie ramble on. Though she didn’t want it to, the veil of her sadness had started to slip a little.

Anita didn’t doubt that Lottie had meant her no harm when she told Frederick about her and Porter. And she had to admit she was happy she still had Lottie in her life. She thought of Alberta Scott at Radcliffe, and how Lilly had crossed the street to avoid her. She even thought of Gertrude and her own Bessie, living in a single room at Wellesley, set apart at the school from the beginning. But she, Anita, got to spend afternoons skating, holding her friend’s hand, with freshmen calling out to her by name and watching her with envy. She was lucky.