There are those old-fashioned mothers who believe that windows should be always closed to prevent corrupting agents from entering their daughters’ bedrooms. We take a more modern approach: fresh air in moderation is healthful for young girls, and on seasonal nights the windows of their bedrooms may be left open.
— VAN KAMP’S GUIDE TO HOUSEKEEPING FOR LADIES OF HIGH SOCIETY, 1899 EDITION
THE FIREWORKS WERE STILL ECHOING OFF THE brick façades of New York, although it seemed to Diana that the loud merrymaking had finally taken itself somewhere farther downtown. She looked at her own reflection and saw the round, black pupils and dark, generous lashes of a girl whose mind was full of deliciously wrong thoughts. Diana could not have felt any more adored if he had actually been there with her. Henry’s failure to attend his public debut with Elizabeth felt like a long, charged glance from across a room full of people, or a dangerously delivered secret love letter. And of course, she’d already experienced both.
Diana pulled the little plush footstool that she was sitting on closer to the full-length mirror with the gilt edges, and brushed those few, determined curls back from her forehead where they belonged. It had been at least an hour since Claire had helped her off with her dress, washed and rubbed her feet, and put her hair up for the night. But Diana wasn’t tired. She felt energetic and a little silly. She liked the sight of herself in the long white chemise, which was loose and a little see-through around her small, round breasts. She gave herself a pout and examined the skin of her neck. “It’s really not a crazy thing at all,” she whispered to her own reflection, “that you can’t stop thinking about me, Henry Schoonmaker.”
“I can’t say I disagree with you.”
Diana nearly fell off her stool, scrambling upward and instinctively putting her arms across her chest. She was speechless with embarrassment. She turned slowly to the window, which faced the gardens behind all the houses on their block, and saw a slightly disheveled version of the man she had been thinking about all night.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered, taking a step toward the long double windows, which she had left open just a crack to let some of the cool night air in. He was standing outside, on the narrow wrought-iron balcony, wearing blue trousers that were rolled above the ankle and a white dress shirt that was crumpled and a little dirty. He was looking at her with amusement and a little something else, which Diana would have liked to think was desire. The big, elegant line of his jaw was turned at a three-quarter angle, and contained evidence of a smile being barely suppressed. “I mean, how did you even get here?” she went on, when it seemed that he might go on staring and never say anything in reply.
“I took an alley off of Nineteenth Street, hopped the Van Dorans’ fence, and then hopped yours. From there it was a quick climb up the trellis.” Henry gave a little flourish with his hand and bent in her direction. “And here I am.”
Diana bit her lip, feeling self-conscious about the appearance of her bedroom for the first time ever. The light pink silk that covered the headboard of her square little bed, the piles of books on the worktable, the old bearskin rug that covered the floorboards near the fireplace it all seemed very old-fashioned and very girly at once.
“I was thinking about you all night,” she told him shyly. Henry was wedged between the wood and glass of the window and the iron railing of the balcony. She realized that his face had been browned by the sun.
“I wish I could say the same.” She opened her mouth but then Henry winked, before she could misunderstand his words. “I was drunk from two till ten, at least. But once I got some good black coffee, I can safely say that the only thing I could think of was you.”
“Truly?” Diana’s mouth spread upward into a full, guileless smile, and her cheeks warmed with color.
“Yes, I ”
“Di?” came a muffled voice from the other side of the bedroom door.
Henry instinctively ducked. Diana thought first of her mother, and then of Claire, standing in the hall. Her heart raced. She looked at Henry, her eyebrows moving together in fear and disappointment. She ached to touch him. She wanted to pop the buttons off his white shirt one by one and then drag him down onto the rug. Henry bent his head and looked at the door, and then back at her. He was trying to ask her something with his eyes.
“Di?” the voice said again. “Can I come in? I ”
Henry lifted his hands up, asking her what he should do, and she raised her arms above her head, waving them at him ridiculously. Go! she mouthed. He turned quickly, still with the gentle smile on his face, and prepared to do as she’d told him to. She heard an ominous creaking from the trellis, and then something like wood beginning to splinter, but she didn’t dare go to look. The door from the bedroom was being pushed open.
“Di?” Elizabeth said timidly as she peeked her head around the door.
“Oh!” Diana gasped, turning to look at her sister, whose dress was torn and wet, and whose hair was falling down as though she had been caught in a gale.
“Is that all you’re wearing? You’ll catch cold; you should close the window ” They both turned in the direction of the backyard when they heard a crashing noise, a rustling, and something like a cry of pain. “What in the world?”
“Just the people from the parade, I’m sure,” Diana said quickly and assuredly, moving to close and lock the windows before her sister did. She tried but failed to see what Henry was doing down below. “Are you all right? Your dress ” She pointed to her sister’s enormous pink skirts, which looked like they had recently been used to clean the kitchen floor.
“Oh, I…I tripped going down the stairs. I was going to get some water, and my skirt must have snagged, and ”
“Have you been crying?” Diana interrupted. Her sister’s eyes were puffy and angry-looking.
“No. I mean, maybe a little.” Elizabeth looked almost shyly at her sister. “It’s just that…” she trailed off, but she kept looking at Diana in an almost vulnerable way.
Diana stared back, unsure what exactly Elizabeth was trying to say. After all, she had seemed so content to be abandoned by Henry earlier. Evidently, the embarrassment had set in. And so the anxiety of being caught with Henry faded, and even Diana’s annoyance at having the precious moment interrupted. She was almost concerned about her sister. She was almost sorry for what she wanted.
“Yes, it’s only that…” Elizabeth sighed, as though she couldn’t find the words to match what she was feeling, and let her shoulders drop. She put her hands over her face like she might start crying again. “Do you remember that Vermeer painting that father gave me?”
Diana rolled her eyes. “He gave the Vermeer to me.” She remembered the story of the painting very clearly. Her father had bought it from a Paris art dealer while Mrs. Holland was pregnant for the second time, and he had always intended for it to hang in his second child’s room. But then Elizabeth had impressed everyone with her understanding of its composition, and so Father decided that the painting would hang in Elizabeth’s room until Diana was sixteen. But by the time she turned sixteen, her father was dead and no one was willing to discuss the placement of pictures. “But then you insisted on having it in your room,” she added, with a touch of bitterness.
“Oh,” Elizabeth said, in an off-key voice that assured her younger sister that she didn’t remember it that way at all. Diana shrugged she hardly needed to win fights like this one when there were handsome men engaged to her sister making late-night visits to her window. Elizabeth took a big, teary breath. “I guess it doesn’t matter now. But I just wanted to…I mean, if it would be all right…” Elizabeth’s shoulders sank and she put her hands over her face.
“You can sleep in here if you want.” Diana went to her sister. She wrapped her arms around Elizabeth and pressed her close.
As she helped Elizabeth out of her dress, she tried not to think about Henry and those few, brilliant moments when he’d stood at her window. She knew she should just be glad that they hadn’t been discovered, especially now that she saw how clearly distraught her sister was by everything.
But even as they lay down to sleep side by side for the first time since they were children, Diana couldn’t help but hope for another little glimpse of the one bachelor in all of New York she could not have.