Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,1
only the lady’s stockings but also her underskirts. It must be admitted that the heir to the shipping fortune drank more than his older brother thought proper. It was a true “scene,” as we say, though nothing compared with what I expect shall come next.
For Vidalia Marin Hazzard—that is the peculiar name this rogue of a girl’s parents gave her—has just been added to the passenger list of the Princess, having taken a very fine suite on the promenade deck. I wondered, as any reasonable person might, if there was a story in this sudden thirst for travel. . . .
One
For Vidalia Marin Hazzard—age seventeen years and four months, height five feet one, with eyes a color as shifting as fool’s gold—the ocean possessed no special romance. To be certain, the silver, shining sea was a perfectly beautiful backdrop to a picnic in the Presidio, or an evening’s entertainment at the Cliff House, but she was a girl with feet firmly planted on the earth and had never thought anything much of the vast waterway that was her own backyard. But now, in the hustle of the Embarcadero, seeing the gleaming side of the ship that rose from the gray-green surface of the San Francisco Bay like a monument, like a towering city unto itself, she felt her breath snatched and her spine tingling and she had to admit that maybe it was impressive enough to merit so much frenzied anticipation.
“Vida!” cried one of the scrum of reporters gathered at the waterfront to document an event that had been the talk of the town for some months already. He had to shout to be heard over the brass band and the confetti shooter and the ubiquitous exclamations of wonderment. “Miss Hazzard!”
His shouting cut into the fog that resided somewhere between her forehead and the backs of her eyes, and she remembered what a hideous quantity of champagne she had drunk the night before. But a headache was no excuse not to leave a winning final impression on the people of her hometown. She turned in her artful way and by the time she met the young man’s eye her mouth had assumed a magnificent smile. She clutched a fistful of her opulently tiered ivory skirt (White for sailing, she had decided that morning, after her parents had told her to board the famous ship or settle quickly on a local boy to marry before she ruined her reputation once and for all) and placed her other hand on the narrow of her waist. A camera’s flash went poof. “Yes?” she said to no member of the assembled in particular.
“What do you make of it?”
“It’s a little small, don’t you think?” The young man laughed and she shrugged and went on in a confessional tone: “Oh well, I guess it is a little wonderful after all.”
“Not more wonderful than you.”
“You know very well that I would never say any such thing—I am never immodest,” she replied, and winked. For it was one of her charms that she knew who she was, and never tried to hide that she wasn’t really very modest at all. The reporter, who had been with the Chronicle almost a year now, and whose favor she had bought with little favors like opera tickets and baskets of big ripe strawberries from the Salinas Valley, knew it, too. He had been crucial in keeping certain stories about her out of the press, and getting others into print—which was one of the reasons it had taken until this morning for her parents to become fully aware what a wild kind of life she had managed to live right under their noses.
Her immodesty had nothing whatsoever to do with beauty, however. She was not a beauty, as she was quite aware. Her chin was an imprecise proposition and her nose was broad and she was too short to stand out in a crowd. But she had a gift for putting herself together so as to bring attention to her best features. That, and how to let the light of her spirit shine through the pale skin of her face so that everyone who met her came away with the impression that she was the loveliest girl in all of California.
Why try to stand out in a crowd, when you could rise above like a shining star?
That was Vida Hazzard’s personal philosophy, and on a fine, late-October day, which had dawned bright and a little misty and was now absolutely blue,