Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,2
her way of doing things was on display to a rather dizzying degree. Her late-night adventures had appeared in the early edition of the paper, and her parents had fretted and paced, and she had lain on a chaise longue with a cold compress on her forehead wishing very much that they would shut up. It was hard enough, without their pacing and fretting, to decide if it was better to marry the most malleable boy she knew (and carry on as she had been, albeit with a new ring and a new name) or leave town and try to save her reputation that way.
In the end it hadn’t really been much of a choice. She wasn’t interested in the ocean, but she was interested in all the places she had not yet seen. The world was big—so she had been told—and she had never been content to sit still long.
Leave town it was.
The papers had been calling the Princess the “Millionaire’s Ship of the West,” to rival the White Star Line’s grand floating worlds that moved every sort of person and package between Boston and New York and the ports of the Mediterranean and the British Isles. The people her parents socialized with had talked of little else all summer, which had stoked her contrariness. She had taken every opportunity to insist that this going on about a boat was enough hot air to fly a balloon. The notion became quite fixed with her, and she insisted to her parents—who were perfectly nice in their way, but were prone to put too much stock in the general prattle—that she would never set foot on such a grand lie. Yet she had a weakness for parties—the party she could not resist. She insisted they go to the party for the Princess’s inaugural passengers at the Palace Hotel, the night before the ship sailed, just to see all their acquaintances who’d been taken in by this Farrar Line racket behaving like suckers.
“All right,” her father had agreed. This was yesterday afternoon. He told his butler to go steam his white tie and tails. Her father didn’t follow the news unless it pertained to his business, but he, like his daughter, enjoyed a party. “Where, by the way, does this ship of fools go?”
Yesterday it hadn’t mattered, and Vida had told him so. Today it did.
Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Hazzard—whose family holdings originated with bitumen, but were now comprised of all sorts of industry—had purchased the tickets that morning. They had been in a high tizzy over the swirling stories of what a scene their daughter had made the night before. “She’s ruined, she’s ruined,” her mother had wailed into her cocoa, and her father had patted his wife’s shoulder and told her that all could be solved by a swift engagement. They sent cards to several friends to say they planned to only go so far as Hawaii, where they did have a few business interests to see to. But they told Vida to pack for a longer trip—if everything went according to plan, she would be engaged by Honolulu, and it would be only logical for all three Hazzards to travel on to Australia with her intended.
If Vida became engaged to Fitzhugh Farrar, they reasoned, the stories of her wildness the night before would soon be forgotten. If she did not become engaged soon, however, she risked dying an old maid. The whole brouhaha seemed rather humorous to Vida, but if it assuaged her parents’ anxieties she would go along with it, and have a little adventure in the name of getting respectable.
“Will you remember me on your voyage?”
Vida had almost forgotten the young man from the Chronicle, so digressive and flighty were her thoughts. It really had been a very late night. “You know I will,” she said. “Don’t you go forgetting me, either.”
“Come back soon. It will be a boring town without you.”
She didn’t want to agree too readily and so gave him an oblique little smile and a lazy wink, and let her gaze roam over the gathered crowd, many of whom she knew from the early days of her much-remarked-upon social career. There, with elbows on the rail of the promenade, was Theodore Grass—the first boy to propose marriage to her. His father was a newspaper publisher, and Theodore had been educated back East, but he possessed an unwavering love for his hometown, and though he was as adoring of Vida as a girl