Villa America Page 4

  She felt sick. Round and round, round and round, the room glistening indecently from the gold dust, champagne tipping onto the floor. The band quickened its tempo. She forced her eyes to adjust. The guests themselves had taken on a freakish quality, their rouged lips smacking, arms jerking up and down like puppets’. Even Diana, in a corner of the room, laughing and goading her suitors into betting on her in the race.

  “Nothing like a ball at the Ritz…” her partner was saying.

  She could see one of his front teeth was slightly discolored.

  “I said that just the other day to Frank…you know Frank Wallis, don’t you, Miss Wiborg? Solid chap.”

  Sara had the most sudden and furious desire to see the room consumed in a great fire, one that would sweep down upon them and swallow up the vegetables and the livery and the awful people-puppets in one cleansing scourge. Burn it all down.

  Sweat broke out on her upper lip and she was sure the same damp was staining her green silk dress. She had to leave the ballroom right that instant or she would die.

  “Excuse me,” she said to her partner. “I…”

  “You’re not ill, are you, Miss Wiborg?”

  “No. Yes. I just feel slightly faint. I think I should sit down.”

  “Oh, by all means.” He escorted her to the edge of the dance floor, where Sara fled his solicitous inquiries.

  As she squeezed past yards of chiffon and satin and feathers, pressing on her, suffocating her, she saw Hoytie making her exit with a young woman in a yellow tiered gown, a hunter-green silk flower pinned to the bosom. She hurried to catch up with them.

  “Hoytie,” she called when she’d made it to the ballroom’s antechamber, her pulse throbbing.

  Her sister turned, her dark eyebrows curving only slightly, more in curiosity than recognition.

  “I can’t stand it anymore,” Sara said when she reached them. Yet as the words left her lips, she realized that she actually felt nothing of what had come over her only moments before. As if unseen fingers had pinched the wick of that emotion and extinguished it as quickly as it had been lit. She was left only with the emptiness of knowing that she couldn’t even sustain her own despair.

  Wearily, she greeted Hoytie’s young friend with the flower: “Hello,” she said.

  The woman didn’t meet her eyes but answered, “Oh, hello.”

  “This is Irma,” Hoytie said, waving her hand as if that wasn’t really the point. “Anyway, why are you so undone?”

  “I…” What could she say? I wanted everyone to die in a fire, but now, actually, I feel extremely sanguine about the whole thing. Just a little numb, really…

  “Well, not to worry. You can just have a nap if you’re bored. Seeing as you can just pass out anywhere.” Her sister gave Sara her most insincere smile.

  “Yes, yes,” Sara said, tired of the joke already. “Well, I thought I’d just escape to the ladies’ sitting room.”

  “How funny,” Hoytie said tightly. “That’s where we’re going as well.”

  “I can’t read your mind, Hoytie,” Sara snapped. “I’m not following you, for heaven’s sakes.”

  The mirrored room, with its lingering odor of powder, glowed in the lamplight. Once they were ensconced—Sara lounging in one chaise, while Hoytie and Irma shared the one across—Sara’s sister produced a cigarette and fit it neatly into an ivory-and-gold holder. She leaned back and gave her lighter to Irma. The girl, after fumbling a little with her glove, lit the cigarette and then stared wide-eyed at Hoytie.

  Sara knew Hoytie smoked in secret. Adeline did not approve; she thought it stank and that it polluted the girls’ hair. Lately, however, Hoytie had become less and less secretive about it. Sara had even found her smoking on the terrace in East Hampton.

  “Those vegetables,” Hoytie said, exhaling.

  Sara smiled. “I never knew Mother harbored ambitions to run a plantation.”

  Hoytie snorted. “Well, after all her talk about lords really just being farmers, I suppose she thought a vegetable ball might suit them.”

  “Yes,” Sara said. “I’m not sure they got the joke, though. Diana was going to run in that potato-sack travesty.”

  “No.”

  “Mmm.”

  “And Olga with that prince,” Hoytie said. “I hope he knows Mother wouldn’t let him get within ten miles of her with a minister.”

  “I don’t think he’s interested. Father’s pockets aren’t deep enough to cover his debts.”

  “No, you’re probably right. Men. All their buying and selling. It’s disgusting.” Hoytie turned her head and looked at Irma. She reached out a long-fingered hand and began playing with the girl’s green silk rose. “Don’t you think, Irma?”

  “Yes,” the girl said in an almost-whisper.

  “There’s always Gerald Murphy,” Hoytie said, laughing. “He doesn’t seem to go a day without writing to us.” She snorted. “A Catholic. As if Father and Mother would even dream of letting Olga go to a papist.”

  “Sweet Gerald,” Sara said.

  A friend from childhood, a little brother of sorts. His father had a house in Southampton not far from their own in East Hampton, and they’d come to know him the way children come to know one another in a summer place. He’d been fourteen when he’d first visited them at the Dunes, for a party—all awkward limbs and big, deep eyes. He’d grown into his body, even if the eyes remained the same. He was often paired off with Olga for dances and the like, but there was no romance between those two, just a closeness in age and geography.

  Sitting there now, she could still picture his sad face in the crush of people on the quay in New York seeing them off when they set sail for Europe in March. And the last letter she’d had from him had been full of melancholy. He was looking after his brother, Fred, who had fallen ill while the rest of the family was away on the Continent.

  It seems Gerald had even called on her father in East Hampton, although he’d written that without the girls there, he’d felt like he was haunting the house.

  Sara watched as Hoytie moved her hand from the rose on Irma’s bust up to the girl’s collarbone and neck and pulled a wisp of hair free; she coiled it around one finger.

  Sara put her head back against the chaise and closed her eyes. She could feel the rustle of silk against the upholstery under her. Could smell the talcum in her nostrils. She thought of the opium dens she’d read about in the newspapers and wondered if this was the “dangerous indolence” they spoke of.

  “Dangerous indolence,” she murmured as the sounds of the room around her mingled with the thoughts in her head.

  It was so, so quiet. There was only Irma’s shallow breathing as Hoytie ignited some unseen passion in the girl. What did Sara care?

  “Good night, Sara,” she heard Hoytie say softly. Sara felt the wreath slipping from her head and, from far away, heard the small tish as it hit the floor.

  The following evening, Sara found herself descending from a motor cab into a crush of tails and top hats and beaded gowns all gathered outside the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane.

  As she picked her way across the damp pavement through the crowd and into the marble lobby, her sisters and mother following in her wake, she heard someone call: “Hello, Sara, darling,” and looked up to see Stella Campbell waving at her.

  They’d met the English actress last year on the Mauretania on their way to London for the season. Mrs. Pat, as she insisted on being called, had smoked and drunk her way through the voyage, at once scandalizing and amusing her fellow passengers.

  “Hello, dear Mrs. Pat,” Sara said when they all reached her. As she leaned in for a kiss, she felt the older woman’s thick, dark mane brush her cheekbone and had a strange desire to bury her face in it.

  “Adeline, your girls are a marvel, really,” Mrs. Pat said. “So inviting.” She gave Sara a wink. “What do you think, Sara? Does this dress walk? Or does it make me look like a cigar?”

  Sara could see what had made her one of the most popula
r leading ladies of her time; she wasn’t beautiful, but she had a shape that dominated (curved, almost indecent arms) and a face supple enough to run the gamut from soulfulness to irony. Sara laughed. “Oh, it walks.”

  “And, Hoytie, dearest, how are you?” Mrs. Pat turned to her sister.

  “I’m bored,” Hoytie said.

  “You can’t be bored,” Olga said. “Nothing’s even happened yet.”

  “Yes, Olga,” Hoytie said tightly, “that’s why I’m bored.”

  “Stop differing, girls,” Adeline said.

  “Bickering?” Olga said, taking their mother’s arm.

  “No, Hoytie,” Mrs. Pat said. “This is thrilling. Stravinsky’s scandalous Rite of Spring. We’re hoping for a riot, darling, just like in Paris.”

  “Well, I’m not,” Hoytie said.

  Sara looked at the crowd milling about the lobby: women in delicate lace and draped bodices; men, stiff-spined, nodding. The image of flames licking at the Ritz ballroom returned. She said, “I think I’d quite like a riot.”

  By the time the duchess and Lady Diana arrived, the five of them, including Mrs. Pat, were already in the Grand Saloon. They were seated at a table next to a Doric column, drinking sherry out of small, green glasses like little luminous thimbles, while the gaslit chandeliers hissed overhead.

  Sara was concentrating on not letting any of the golden liquid drop onto her white evening gloves when she heard Diana whisper in her ear: “Careful, or you’ll get a reputation.”

  “A reputation for what?” Sara asked, wondering fleetingly if she cared.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Diana smiled and absently touched her pink silk headband. “Anything, nothing. Drinking, keeping company with a fallen woman. Anything worth doing, really.”

  At this, Sara saw that Mrs. Pat had risen and was collecting her opera glasses and the fan with the large lapis S carved into its handle.

  “Well, darlings, I must be off. I absolutely hate to be late for the conductor.” As she squeezed past the approaching figure of the duchess, Mrs. Pat said: “Violet.”

  The duchess, with her sad, round blue eyes and high cheekbones, nodded her head: “Stella.” Sara thought she caught just a glimpse of a smile pushing itself onto the Duchess of Rutland’s lips.

  “Oh,” Diana said, taking Mrs. Pat’s vacated seat, “it really is too awful that Mrs. Pat can’t join us.”

  “Yes,” the duchess said, “but there it is. Until Cornwallis-West gets his mess cleared up, well…” She trailed off as Olga stood to give the duchess her chair.

  “I don’t know what they’re all fighting over, really,” Diana said.

  “Oh,” Sara’s mother said. “I don’t know if I really want to know.”

  “I do,” Olga said eagerly.

  “Oh, you must know that Mrs. Pat has been having an amour with George Cornwallis-West. Didn’t you all? Oh, really,” Diana said. “But of course, he’s married to Jennie, née Jerome, more recently Lady Randolph Churchill. It’s been going on forever. Since you met her on that boat…which one was it?”

  “The Mauretania,” Sara said.

  “An amour?” Adeline said vaguely.

  “An affair,” Hoytie said, casting an impatient eye at their mother.

  “Yes, well, since you met her. And now the Cornwallis-Wests are separated, but divorce…that’s proving more complicated,” Diana said. She rubbed her thumb and index finger together.

  “Why would anyone want to be married twice?” Adeline’s hand rose to clutch her mauve evening bag. (Sara hated that bag, a relic of the 1890s; it reminded her of cold drawing rooms and mutton.)

  “My feelings exactly,” the duchess said. “Once is most certainly enough.”

  If Sara liked Mrs. Pat, she was in awe of Violet Manners. She had never known a woman like her. She could remember the first time she’d met the duchess, at a weekend party at Belvoir Castle: she had descended the staircase in a midnight-blue gown, a string of the most glorious pearls Sara had ever seen twined about her neck and fastened, curiously, with diamond earrings, one at each shoulder. That small touch, that tiny, frivolous fragment of creativity, had moved Sara. (Why? Why? Who cared about earrings? It was just that, Sara reasoned; they were supposed to be earrings, not clasps, not epaulettes, not rings, not chairs…but by reinventing them, she’d given them importance somehow.)

  The duchess had been an artist when she was younger and part of a bohemian set called the Souls. It was said, and not that quietly either, that she’d had a number of lovers throughout her marriage, and some of the more persistent gossipmongers suggested that neither Diana nor her elder sister was actually the natural child of the duke.

  Sara thought there was something grotesque about affairs or amours or whatever one wanted to call them, as if romantic love and family were not compatible, as if logic and just plain good taste demanded they be separated. She wasn’t naive enough to think that great matches were made for love, but she wondered about the worth of great matches at all.

  She had only a nebulous notion of what she wanted her future to look like, but it was nothing like any of the society drawing rooms she’d seen. Still, once ensconced in Belvoir Castle, she couldn’t help admiring the way the duchess and her daughters lived their lives. There was an artistry to everything they touched, discussions not just of gossip but of painters and musicians, of politics and writers, that she had rarely experienced at home or anywhere else. And she had added that to her indistinct dream, filling in a small part of the bigger picture. “Oh, I do hope there’ll be some sort of scandal,” Diana said as the box conductor led them around the grand circle to their seats.

  “I wish everyone would stop talking about riots and scandals,” Adeline said.

  When Stravinsky debuted his Rite of Spring in Paris the month before, the music, along with the famous dancer Nijinsky’s choreography, had caused an out-and-out brawl to erupt in the theater. Women had thrown themselves at men on the other side of the aisles, beating them with their fans and, in one report, a shoe. Men had fallen to slapping each other across the face with their programs and calling for duels.

  Sara, however, was expecting a tempest in a teacup and the possibility of a nice long nap. She was slightly disappointed to find herself seated at the front of the box rather than the back, where it was darker and more discreet.

  As the lights went down, Diana was still scanning the room with her opera glasses, and Sara could hear Hoytie sighing behind her. The duchess let off just the faintest rustle of satin and Narcisse Noir.

  The introduction began with the melancholy notes of the bassoon, all at once sliced viciously by a set of flutes. They trilled, stopped, and started, like the rev of a motorcar engine. The woodwinds played so high and so sharp that Sara winced and the duchess dramatically placed a gloved hand over her right ear.

  Then the curtain went up. A group of dancers clad in furs and small pointy hats, all pagan and hideous, began stamping up and down on the stage in time to the horns and strings.

  “Oh my,” Diana whispered.

  An old cronelike figure, her face painted entirely white, like a death mask, stood in the foreground, bent at the waist, clutching her stomach. Then she too began jumping up and down and throwing herself around, falling on her back with her legs sticking up in the air.

  Sara straightened her spine.

  This was not ballet. Gone were the delicate, airy costumes, the movements fluid as water, toes pointed to follow the muscular line of a dancer’s calf. Here, feet stuck out at right angles, dancers rounded their backs when they dipped to the floor, ordinary and inelegant as anyone picking up a scrap of paper, their arms angular as they pumped angry raised fists.

  She understood what had made the Parisian audience so angry. To have one’s own love of comfort and beauty thrown back in one’s face in such a public way. It made the audience feel small, shallow.

  But there was something else Sara recognized here that they must have seen too: a kind of rage. Sara’s pulse flic
ked at her temple like a horse crop, and her palms began to sweat.

  Drums accompanied the pounding of feet, sending up vibrations so violent they scaled the orchestra and made the floorboards tremble. More primitive costumes filled the stage as the dancers began to clap.

  “Are they actually clapping?” the duchess mused from her seat to no one in particular.

  Sara heard her mother say something, but it was drowned out by the noise and the humming in her own head. When an elder was brought onto the stage, the whole group threw themselves down again and again. She could hear their bodies hitting the floor, flesh and blood connecting with the dusty boards, the crush of joints and ligaments.

  She wanted to be down on the stage with the dancers, feel her rib cage meet the planks, feel the sickly ache of having her breath knocked out. She was reminded of the first time she’d tasted blood in her mouth (a skating accident), the surprise that it tasted good, rich, tangy on her tongue, the even more startling revelation that she wanted to taste it again.

  The maiden chosen for sacrifice now stood alone in a pool of light on the stage, motionless and knock-kneed, as the score dropped to a hush. Sara held her breath until it was almost unbearable.

  She was dizzy by the time the girl began to dance, a death spiral, full of helplessness, compulsion. Running from pillar to post in a desire to escape her fate, to be let out of the circle. Jumping and turning herself in a frenzy.

  Sara could almost smell the soil, hardened, awaiting spring. She was vibrating with the lack of oxygen, the warmth of the theater, and the strangeness of the music. Then the maiden, exhausted, shivered and stamped. And fell down dead.

  Sara realized the lights had gone up only when her mother pressed her hand, a look of alarm in her eyes.

  “Are you quite well?” she whispered.

  Sara could only shake her head.