A year ago there were murmurs that Miss Penelope Hayes and Miss Elizabeth Holland were not so much best friends as rivals for the attention of Elizabeth’s fiancé, Henry Schoonmaker. Now the latter is Mrs. Snowden Cairns, and it seems that Penelope Schoonmaker’s rival may have been the younger Miss Holland all along.
— FROM THE SOCIETY PAGE OF THE NEW-YORK NEWS OF
THE WORLD GAZETTE, SUNDAY, JULY 22, 1900
DIANA UNDID HER HAT AND DROPPED IT ON THE piece of furniture by the front door, where a silver tray collected the cards of visitors and invitations to teas and musicales. There had been less traffic there since the death of old Schoonmaker, probably because of the rumors that had stemmed from Henry’s final words to the old man.
Diana did not look back through the glass to see if he had followed her. Perhaps he was still in the park, in that same posture, appearing vastly older and all of a sudden like the kind of specimen one could call a gentleman with a straight face. The skin of her face tingled with the impulse to hurry back outside, to see if she could catch him and tell him that she was his, forever, on any conditions. Instead she stood there, her brows tense. She glanced down at the dress she wore, a pink frock that she had picked thoughtlessly from the wardrobe in her room that morning, and which now seemed completely ill suited to the rest of her, like the costume of a little girl on a woman who commands a staff of twenty. Then she went upstairs.
What he had proposed was everything she had been dreaming of: to show Penelope and the world that Diana had been Henry’s true love all along, and then to go on proving it forever. And yet her heart had shrunk, and her spirit burrowed somewhere shadowy within her. The idea of proving Penelope wrong seemed lackluster to her now. She paused in the upstairs hall in front of the high, north-facing window, and glimpsed Henry striding to his coach on long, lean, dark-trousered legs. He hopped inside as though he had somewhere else very pressing to be.
“Mrs. Henry Schoonmaker.” She pronounced the phrase out loud and frowned. Neither the floorboards, nor any one else, moved at the sound of it. Then she returned to her little bedroom, which had been the sight of so many wild imaginings of all the places she would go, and all the people she would meet, and what the whole incredible arc of her life would look like once her biographer finally sat down to try and do it justice. Perhaps they would start here, in this place. There was the faded salmon-colored wallpaper, the narrow mahogany bed, the bearskin rug where she had made of her whole self a present for Henry, giving him everything. Important events had transpired between these four walls — but they were nothing compared to the stories she had told herself lying beneath that rather low ceiling.
She wished Claire still worked there — she would call for her, and the redheaded maid would help her undress, and they would discuss love and destiny and other topics they secretly suspected they knew nothing about. She did consider calling Gretchen, the new maid, because the buttons that ran from her tailbone to her neck were complicated and hard to reach. But everything was irrevocably altered now — she was more alone than ever — and in the end she undid the buttons herself and laid the garment across the chair by the carved vanity, where angels and lilies emerged from stained wood around an oval mirror. There was a silver case secreted amongst the perfumes and powders on the table, and she took a small cigarette from it now and lit it with a match. She lay down on the floor in her white cotton bloomers and bodice, which were decorated with pale blue ribbon, placing beside her the glass ashtray which she had taken as a souvenir from Señora Conrad’s. She rested her head against one palm, and inhaled and exhaled lazy, contemplative puffs in the direction of the plaster filigree on the ceiling.
Just to find Henry — to know him just a little better, to make herself his beloved — she had traveled a great distance. Now, with a few lucky strokes, he was all hers, and not just in some secret, insupportable way. He wanted to marry her. So why did her throat grow tight at the thought? She wondered if it wasn’t some malign element in her personality that sought out what was difficult and couldn’t help but take umbrage with anything that came easily. Maybe her dramatic streak was leading her to trouble, and making her suspicious of a great bounty.
She smoked another cigarette and then another until her mouth was dry and her chest hurt. When a small pile of burned tobacco and ash had collected in the glass tray, she stood up and went to the bed. She pulled out the case that was still ready for departure, and in which she kept a few items of clothing and a very magical bowler, and removed her journal. Sighing loudly, she flopped down on the white matelassé bedspread. For a moment she felt very juvenile, and a little silly, for spending her afternoon like this, when somewhere out in the city her wealthy lover was making monumental decisions that would later on affect the doings of hundreds, maybe thousands, of men. But once she began scribbling words she didn’t stop until she had filled pages. She began:
What kind of Mrs. Schoonmaker would she be? Vicious, frivolous, or too soon in the grave? Would she be vain, or happy, or quickly forgotten? Not by the gossips or the quick to judge, of course, for they have the longest memories, and they are the record keepers of our kind.