The Luxe (3 page)

All at once the room turned mute and violently bright. She closed her eyes and felt Percival Coddington’s hot breath on her ear asking if she felt all right. Her corset, which her maid, Lina, had practically sewed her into hours earlier, felt suddenly, horribly constricting. Her life, she realized, had all
the charm of a steel trap.

Then, as quickly as the panic had come, it went. Elizabeth opened her eyes. The sounds of joy and giddy indulgence came rushing back. She glanced up at the great domed ceiling glowing above them and reassured herself that it had not fallen.

“Yes, Mr. Coddington, thank you for asking,” Elizabeth finally responded. “I’m not sure what came over me.”

D
IANA HOLLAND SAW HER MOTHER ASCEND THE
twisting marble staircase on the far side of the ballroom, supported by some big older fellow whom she felt sure she knew. Their family friend and accountant, Stanley Brennan, trailed behind. Just before they moved out of view and toward some surely lavish second-story smoking room, Mrs. Holland looked back, caught Diana’s eye, and gave her an admonishing glance. Diana cursed herself for being spotted and then briefly considered staying in the great central ballroom to wait patiently for one of her cousins to ask her to dance. But patience was not in Diana Holland’s nature.

Besides, she had been so proud of her cunning in writing the little invitation during a freshening-up in the ladies’ dressing room earlier in the evening. She’d then slipped it to the architect Webster Youngham’s assistant, who was stationed near the arched entryway in order to explain the many architectural references that had been incorporated into the Hayes family’s new home. She had pushed her way through the crowd, curt
sied, clasped his hand, and palmed him the note. “You truly are an artist, Mr. Youngham,” she’d said, knowing full well that Mr. Youngham was already drunk on Madeira and lounging in one of the card rooms upstairs.

“But I’m not Mr. Youngham,” he told her, looking adorably confused. As soon as she saw that look, Diana knew she’d hooked him. “I’m James Haverton, his assistant.”

“Nevertheless.” She winked before disappearing back into the crowd. Haverton had broad shoulders and dreamy gray eyes, and even if he was just an assistant, he seemed like somebody who had gone places and done things. She hadn’t seen anyone nearly so nice-looking in the intervening hour.

So Diana picked up her skirt and moved quickly between the enormous planters and the wall. She looked behind her once before leaving the ballroom to make sure no one was watching and then slipped into the cloakroom. It was massive and overly ornamented, Diana thought, especially for a room that was chiefly occupied by coats. It didn’t matter to
them
that the room was Moorish-themed, with a colorful mosaic floor and antiquities displayed in the turret-shaped alcoves carved from the walls.

Diana looked around her, trying to locate her French lieutenant’s coat. She had come dressed as the heroine of her favorite novel,
Trilby
, who appears for the first time on a break from her job as an artist’s model in a petticoat and slippers and
a soldier’s coat. Diana had not been allowed to wear a petticoat without a skirt, but she felt the thrill of having gotten away with something just wearing the rest of the costume at all. Her mother had even had a shepherdess costume made for her so that she would match her older sister, Elizabeth, which would have been hideous in addition to humiliating. Instead, here she was in a satisfyingly bohemian red-and-white striped skirt and a simple cotton bodice that she had ripped in a few places on the sly. No one got it, of course—all the other girls Diana’s age were conformists at heart and seemed to have dressed up as themselves, only with more powder and artificially narrowed waists.

She was just beginning to wonder if one of the servants hadn’t mistaken her perfectly shabby gray coat for her own, when she was startled by one single clang from the clock in the corner. She gasped, surprised, and stepped backward—a little unsteadily after all the champagne she’d been sneaking—and when she did, she felt the chest of a man and a pair of hands on her hips. Her whole body flushed with adrenaline.

“Oh, hello.” She tried to make her voice flat and indifferent, even though this was by far the most exciting thing that had happened to her all evening.

“Hello.” Haverton’s mouth was very close to her ear.

Diana turned slowly and met his eyes. “I hope you brought cigarettes,” she said, trying not to smile too much.

Haverton had short, straight eyebrows set far apart, which made his eyes look open and earnest. “I didn’t think ladies of your class were allowed to smoke.”

Diana affected a pout. “So you didn’t bring ciggies?”

He paused, his eyes lingering on her in a way that made her feel not at all like a lady. “Oh no, I brought them. It’s just that I’m not sure whether I should give you one or not….” Diana noticed a little mischief shining in his eye, and concluded that it must be the glimmer of a kindred spirit.

“What do I have to do to convince you?” she asked, turning her head jauntily.

“This is serious, what you are asking me to do,” he replied with an air of put-on gravity. Then he laughed. Diana liked the sound of it. “You’re pretty,” he told her, smiling unabashedly now.

Diana and her sister could not have shared more physical characteristics and looked less alike. Like Elizabeth, she had the small features and round mouth of the Holland women, although she still had the softness of her baby fat. She liked to think that her dark hair added a certain mystery, although it was in truth a sort of medium brown, and untamable. Her eyes were always being described as
vivid
. And of course she and her sister had the same chin—their mother’s. She hated her chin. “Oh, I’m all right,” she answered him, glowing with false modesty.

“Much better than all right.” He continued to observe her as he pulled a cigarette case out of his breast pocket. He lit one and handed it to her.

Diana took a drag and tried not to cough. She loved smoking—or at least the idea of smoking—but it was hard to practice doing it right with her mother and the staff always watching her. She was pulling it off, though—at least she thought she was—exhaling little puffs into the air. It felt right, especially with all the metallic and turquoise detail in the room suggesting some hazy, far-off locale. She raised an eyebrow, wondering how Haverton was going to make his move. “So, if you’re an architect, does that make you an artist?”

“Depends whom you ask,” he replied lightly. “Some of us like to think that we make the most monumental and lasting kind of art.”

“That’s very nice,” Diana said blithely. “Because you see, I have been trying to find a real artist all night.”

“Whatever for?” he asked, leaning into the coats and putting his cigarette to his mouth.

“Well, to kiss, of course.” Diana drew her breath in after she spoke. Even she was occasionally surprised by the audacious things that came out of her mouth.

Haverton exhaled thoughtfully, the smoky sweet smell of tobacco surrounding them. For a moment, Diana felt like she could have been a million miles off in a tent hidden away
in some souk in Tunis or Marrakech, arranging for secret deals in magic powders.

“It occurs to me,” Haverton started, the hard edges of his American voice reminding her that she was still in New York, on a street as familiar as Fifth Avenue, no less, “that you are being a very naughty girl.”

“You think so?” Diana asked, dragging on her cigarette amusedly. She, too, sank into the soft wall of coats, moving a little closer to Haverton.

“Well, how often do young ladies of your class meet strange older men in oversize closets, with all of society a few heartbeats away?”

“What makes you think there is any comparison between me and the girls of
my class
?” Diana pronounced the last two words in disgust. The girls of her class were slaves to rules, going about life—if you could call it that—like bloodless mannequins. “I told you I was looking for an artist,” she went on impatiently. “So if you’re going to go on thinking conventionally and just like everybody else, I may as well leave.”

Haverton smiled and dropped his cigarette onto the black-and-white marble-tiled floor. He stepped on it before shooing it to the corner with his toe. He looked very old to Diana all of a sudden, even though he couldn’t have been more than twenty. Then he was moving toward her fast. As soon as their lips touched, she knew there wasn’t going to be
any magic. This was not the heart-stopping touch that she had been waiting for all evening, and it didn’t help especially that his style of kissing was akin to mashing one face against another. Her whole body went slack with the disappointment.

Diana kissed him back, just to make sure her instinct was correct, but she had been kissed before, and she knew what it felt like when it was good. Haverton ranked far below Amos Vreewold, whom she had kissed several times in Saratoga over the summer, and only slightly better than her first kiss, at age thirteen, which had been so acrid an affair that she had banished the boy’s identity from even her own memory. Diana was finally accepting the fact that James Haverton, architect’s assistant, was not the kind of artist she was looking for when the door creaked and a foot sounded at the threshold.

“Miss Diana—?” said a male voice, more hurt than shocked.

Diana felt Haverton’s grip tighten momentarily as they turned toward the door. Diana recognized Stanley Brennan’s long, tired face immediately. He was only twenty-six—he had taken over from his father as Mr. Holland’s accountant—but his constant anxiety gave him a prematurely aged appearance.

“Your mother. She sent me to check on you…” he said haltingly. “To make sure you weren’t getting into trouble.”

Haverton let go of Diana’s waist and stepped back. He didn’t look especially pleased by Brennan’s entrance, but he kept quiet. Diana felt freer almost instantly, rejoicing as she was in having Haverton’s rough chin off her face.

“Thank you, Brennan,” she said. “Would you like to accompany me back to the ballroom?”

Brennan stepped forward cautiously, reaching toward the rips that Diana had put in her costume. They had widened during the poor excuse for a tryst.

“Oh, stop, it’s fine.” She lifted her arm for him to take. Then she turned to Haverton. “Thank you for explaining the Islamic references in the Richmond Hayeses’ coatroom to me. I will remember it always.”

She looked back once, and imagined that the grimace on Haverton’s face was the beginning of his life as a lonely man broken by disappointments. It was her fate to leave such casualties in her wake, she thought as she and Brennan exited and walked in the direction of the main ballroom.

“I won’t tell your mother,” Brennan whispered as their shoes shuffled along the gleaming marble corridor. “Though I feel, as your late father’s friend, that I should remind you that that kind of behavior could be your ruin.”

“I’m not afraid,” Diana said gaily.

“You’re like my little sister almost, and it is my responsibility to look after you. Your mother thinks so, anyway.” He
stopped walking, as if to convey his seriousness. “If she found out what you had been up to and that I knew about it, that would be the end of both of us.”

“Well, that is very true.” Diana paused next to him. They could already hear the shouting and music from the ballroom, and in a moment they would be swept back under the bright lights. Diana turned the corners of her mouth down in a fake pout, even while her eyes shone with flirtation. “But would that really be so bad?”

Then she laughed, grabbed Brennan’s hand, and pulled him back into the center of things. She was searching for an inexpressible
something
, and she wasn’t about to let one sour little kiss slow her down.

“L
ITTLE BO PEEP. THAT’S TOO PERFECT FOR LIZ,”
Penelope Hayes said, as she said nearly everything, with a quarter ounce of venom.

“Well, at least she didn’t forget her humble American origins while she was swanning about with the Frenchies,” her friend Isaac Phillips Buck replied. “And at least she didn’t go bland marquis et marquise like everybody else,” he added with a sniff.

Penelope gave a careless shrug. If he wanted to praise Elizabeth Holland, whom she had long ago singled out as her principal rival and thus her only possible best friend, and who was now circling the polo-field-size dance floor with that toad Percival Coddington, it was fine with her. She was feeling entirely better now that she had seen how very impressed everyone was by her family’s new house and hosting style. And, of course, by her.

There had been a dark moment earlier, when the messenger arrived with the note. She had just returned from the
Hollands’, where she had gone to welcome Elizabeth back and chastise her for nearly missing the party. Her heart had clenched, reading the careless missive, and then she had flown into a rage that—she could admit this now—had not been especially fair to the maids attending to her before the party. It was not so much that she feared the writer of the note would not come to love her—how long could any boy hold out, really?—but that this particular boy might miss this particular party. After all, what better place for him to realize she was truly the center of the universe, and that keeping their relationship secret was a colossal waste?

Now, observing her family’s ballroom from the mezzanine, her torso cinched beneath her flamenco dancer’s red flounces to a perfect eighteen inches, she felt supremely confident that he would come. It was the evening of the Richmond Hayeses’ ball, the evening when they reached their apotheosis as a top-drawer family—there was simply no place else to be. She was certain he would arrive shortly. Well, almost certain. Penelope rested a confident hand on her hip even as she clenched and unclenched her fist around the note in her other hand.

“Would you look at Elizabeth, holding herself so high and mighty,” Penelope said. The dozens of delicate yellow-gold bangles lining her forearms jangled.

Isaac drew himself up to his full height and rested his
hands on his rotund belly, which went undisguised by his jester outfit. “I think she is trying to keep out of the way of Percival’s breath.”

Then they laughed, as they always laughed: mouths closed and through their noses. Penelope and Elizabeth hadn’t really become friends until they shared a French tutor in their early teens. (Later Penelope had overheard that this arrangement had been thought up by Mr. Holland to perturb Mrs. Holland, and had never forgotten the slight.) He had been an adorable and lanky fellow whom Elizabeth used to enjoy making blush by asking him, for instance, to explain the difference between
décolletage
and
décolleté
. It was comical what lengths Elizabeth seemed to go to these days to prove what a proper little miss she was. Penelope never worried so much over anything, especially not whether she was perceived as a lady.

Which was all well and good, since Penelope
was
something less than a lady, at least from the point of view of members of the old Dutch families like Elizabeth’s mother, who nonetheless had been enjoying the lavishness of the Hayeses’ ballroom all evening. A ballroom, Penelope couldn’t help but thinking, far more vast and sparkling than the Holland ballroom. The Hollands lived in an old and really rather plain sort of mansion in Gramercy Park with a staid brown face and the rooms all in neat rows. And that wasn’t even a fashionable part of town anymore.

Penelope might have felt bad for Liz that she still lived in such a backwater while the Hayes family had moved on to Fifth Avenue uptown, with its strip of grand new residences, except that she knew very well Liz’s mother was always talking about the Hayeses and how they were a made-up family. Which was a rather harsh way of looking at it. It was true that the Hayes fortune had begun when Penelope’s grandfather, Ogden Hazmat Jr., gave up his modest tailoring business in Maryland and began selling cotton blankets to the Union army for the price of wool. But ever since Granddad had moved to New York, changed his name, and bought a Washington Square town house from a bankrupt branch of the Rhinelander family, the Hayes clan had been entrenched in New York society.

Now they’d left Washington Square behind forever, and resituated themselves in the only private home in New York with three elevator banks and a basement swimming pool. They had arrived, and they had the mansion to prove it. Or a
palazzo
, as her mother consistently and irritatingly referred to it.

“Good work tonight, Buck,” Penelope said, her full lips breaking into a smile of enormous pride. In parlor chatter, Penelope’s beauty was occasionally derided as being all lips, but the jabbering hens who said so were certainly in error: Penelope’s lips were no more striking than her eyes, which
were wide and blue and capable of welling with innocence or scorn in equal measure.

“Only for you,” he replied in his nasally faux-British accent. Isaac had something of a case of Anglomania, and it had lately spread to his diction.

Since Isaac was only half-acknowledged by the Buck clan as one of their own, he was obliged to work for a living, and had made himself indispensable to hostesses like Mrs. Hayes. He always knew where to get the freshest flowers, and where to find handsome young men who were willing to dance and fun to dance with, even if they weren’t exactly marriageable. He knew how to shriek at the cooks so that the meats would come out just done enough. Isaac’s shriek was not pretty, but his parties always were.

“I have to say,” Isaac went on drolly, “everyone does look their best this evening. It wasn’t
all
in vain. I mean, the jewels alone. You could buy Manhattan with those jewels.”

“Yes,” Penelope agreed. “Though it never fails to shock me how people can dump a trainload of baubles over some piece of hide.”

“Oh, that’s just Agnes you’re talking about, and she barely has any baubles. Anyway, I think she’s supposed to be Annie Oakley, and I believe if you queried her dressmaker, he would say the getup was
suede
.”

“Hah. You know very well that Agnes doesn’t have a
dressmaker, Buckie.” Penelope smirked. “And Amos Vreewold as a matador? Please.” She turned to her friend, one dark eyebrow high.

“Now, now. It’s not every man who can look dignified in tights.”

“Oh, look—there’s Teddy Cutting!” Penelope interrupted the survey of costumes. Teddy, with his blond hair and sparkly blue eyes and inherited shipping fortune, was just the sort of boy Penelope had been flirting with at balls since she’d come into society two years ago. Teddy had a crush on Elizabeth Holland, which was the real reason Penelope always made a point of dancing with him. She watched as the young women, with their great starched skirts and puffed sleeves, flocked to Teddy, who bowed gallantly and went about kissing each of their gloved hands.

“Teddy looks yummy.” Isaac let one hand float up to his chin. “He chose French courtier like everybody else, but he did do it well.”

“Well enough,” Penelope replied nonchalantly, for wherever Teddy went, there was usually a certain someone even better just behind. She snapped her fingers at one of the passing waiters, balled up the note she had received earlier in the day, and dropped it into her empty champagne glass. She placed her glass on his tray without meeting his eyes and then helped herself to two more flutes.

That was when Henry Schoonmaker strode through the arched entryway at the far end of the ballroom and the whole world seemed to faint just a little bit. Penelope kept herself upright, even as her heart began to beat triumphantly and her face tingle in anticipation. Even among the dashing and rich, Henry Schoonmaker stood out for being so beautiful and so slippery at once. He came to his friend Teddy’s side, and Penelope rolled her eyes as he began kissing the flurry of gloved hands as well.

Henry always looked in good humor and good health—which was due in part to his penchant for outdoor sports and in part to the drink that was his constant accessory—and even from across the largest private ballroom in New York City, the tanned perfection of his skin was evident. He had the shoulders of a general and the cheekbones of a born aristocrat, and his mouth was most often fixed in an expression of mild mockery. Like Elizabeth Holland, Henry was the descendant of one of New York’s great families, but he was much, much less concerned with being
good
.

“Those girls are embarrassing themselves,” Penelope remarked of her cousins and friends below. She ran her fingers over her slick dark hair, which was parted sharply along the middle of her scalp and drawn down to the nape of her neck, framing the perfect oval of her face. Intricate silver filigreed combs fanned out behind her head. “I think I’m going to go
save our friend,” she added, as though the thought had just occurred to her.

Then she gathered up the yards of red crepe de chine covering her legs and began to glide toward the curving marble staircase.

“Buckie,” she called, a few steps down the stairway. She turned to meet his eyes with a look of particular intensity.

“That’s the man I’m going to marry.”

Isaac raised his champagne flute, and Penelope beamed with her declaration. How could she fail when she had somebody as wily as IPB on her side? Penelope turned back down the stairs and in a few moments she was standing on the main floor of her ballroom. A reverential hush settled on the room as the faces in the crowd turned toward her in a wave. Amongst all the white satin and powdered wigs, her red dress made her stand out even more than usual. She cut through the group of girls she had just pronounced fools and reached Henry Schoonmaker in a few breathless moments.

“Who let you in?” She greeted him without a smile. She placed her fist on her hip, causing the gold, gypsy-style bracelets to clatter down her wrist. “
You’re
not wearing a costume. And it said very clearly on your invitation that this was to be a costume ball.”

Henry turned to her with a face of casual amusement, not even bothering with a faux self-conscious examination of
his black tails and trousers. “Have I done wrong, Miss Hayes? See, I don’t have time to read my mail anymore, but a little bird told me you would be having a party tonight….”

It was whispered among the women of New York that Henry always had the band paid off in advance, because they frequently struck up a waltz just precisely when he needed to end a conversation. The band began playing now, and Henry gave a gentle nod in Penelope’s direction. She could not stop the corner of her mouth from twitching, smile-like, for a moment. He kept his intense gaze fixed on her as he began walking her backward into the room until they were waltzing.

For a moment the crowd just watched, dazzled by the lightness of the couple moving across the floor. But Penelope was very good at arousing jealousy, and her cousins and friends were not very good at standing still when they were jealous. Soon other, less bright couples began dancing, too, so that the gleaming pattern of the marble floor was blotted out by the bright swinging skirts of the girls and the nimble black feet of their partners.

There were plenty of eyes still on the flamenco dancer and the dandy in tails; Penelope knew how much she was watched, so she spoke quietly as they moved. “Why did you send me that note?” she asked, tilting her head slightly as they turned.

“I like teasing you,” he answered. “This way, I knew you’d be especially grateful to see me.”

Penelope considered this for a moment, but there was something in his lively, deep brown eyes that told her he was lying, just a little bit. “You were someplace else before you came here, weren’t you?”

“Now, what would make you think a thing like that?” he replied with unwavering amusement. “I’ve been looking forward to this precise moment all day.”

“You lie very well,” she told him. “But I knew you wouldn’t stay away.”

Henry stared at her carelessly and did not answer. He just pressed his hand into her skirt, somewhat lower than the small of her back, and kept moving her through the crowd. She felt in that moment as though they were a known item, and that all those lesser girls were already crying into their hankies at the thought of Henry William Schoonmaker being married. The music seemed to be playing triumphantly and just for her. She could have gone on like this forever. She might have, too, had not the large, whiskery figure of Henry’s father appeared over his shoulder and pulled him out of the dance.

“Pardon me, Miss Hayes,” the elder Mr. Schoonmaker said in a voice that was level but devoid of apology. The rest of the dancers kept moving, but Penelope found herself horribly stalled in the center of everything, her great performance
curtailed by this large, odious parental presence. She felt a fit coming on but somehow managed to contain it. The other dancers were pretending not to notice what was going on, but they were all terrible fakers. Penelope wondered if Elizabeth was out there watching. She had wanted to reveal her secret relationship to her friend with maximum drama, and this exchange wasn’t helping anything. “I am going to have to borrow Henry for the rest of the night. It’s quite urgent, and we must leave immediately, I’m afraid.”

Instinct made Penelope smile even through her misery, and she tipped her head. “Of course,” she answered. Then she watched, alone, from the middle of that epic room, as her future husband disappeared amongst all those ordinary bodies. Penelope knew, despite the still-dancing masses, that for her the party was over.