Was this her forever? Riding the machinery of the Farrar Company, being carried from one place to another, thoughts of what might have been never far behind.
Twenty-Seven
“I can’t wait for it to be over,” Vida said in the direction of the three-part mirror, but really to Nora, who was just finishing with the little pearl buttons that went up the back of Vida’s lilac satin gown. The neckline revealed a lot of neck and shoulder, the sleeves were airy poufs, the skirt was a mermaid’s tail, and Vida had to acknowledge that neither she nor Nora had lost their touch in these matters.
Nora observed her in the mirror. “What part of it?”
From a suite in the Waldorf-Astoria, Vidalia Marin Hazzard, who had been famous in the picturesque backwater of a city where she had been born, had set about making herself a young woman to pay attention to in the hothouse of New York. This was a role she’d been born for. Now that she was on stage she found it was almost too easy. New Yorkers were very impressed by themselves and their city. But to her eyes it was much the same as anywhere—just bigger.
In short order she had become a regular at certain restaurants, tearooms, and dressmakers’ shops. She learned to seem to watch a play or an opera while in fact noting from the corners of her eyes who was sitting with whom, and what they were wearing, and whether the particular set of their expression indicated that they felt on good terms with, or excluded by, fine society. She learned the system of streets—grid-like, except where they went all screwy and were laid down at curious, crooked angles—and how to argue with the driver of a hansom cab if he seemed likely to take advantage of her apparent newness. They could not all know that she was soon to be Mrs. Fitzhugh Farrar, of the shipping fortune Farrars, who lived in a Fifth Avenue palazzo that was staffed, on an uneventful day, by fifty-five (on the day of a function, twice that). Vida had come to know this house, too, which would be her house someday. Everything in that house was strenuously formal—the servants wore gloves, and so did the guests, who were announced by the second butler, even if it was just a little tea or something. Vida quickly discerned that a person could live there and, without any special effort, avoid other people who lived there, too. This was, as she admitted to herself and to Nora but to no one else, a relief. Mrs. William Farrar, mother of Fitz and the late Carlton, was a formidable woman, fearsome with her staff, unsmiling with her friends, a woman who traded favors, and whose favor was everywhere sought and rarely to be had. She was a legend, and Vida—who had always thought of herself as the sort of girl who would one day be a legendary hostess herself—should have liked her. But try as she might she could not persuade herself that she did.
This was unkind, she knew—Mrs. Farrar had lost her oldest child, and then learned that she would lose her second son in a different way. That she would lose him to a girl nobody had ever heard of. Winning her approval was the sort of campaign Vida used to enjoy. What a delight it was to be underestimated, and then to see the surprise in a person’s face when they realized what you were really made of! But, at the end of November, when Vida had been a New Yorker of ten days (all of them absolutely snow-smothered and toe-numbing), she found herself in her fancy hotel dressing room being tied into her evening’s finery by Nora and afflicted by a malady that she had been heretofore free of: boredom.
“What part are you hoping to be over soon?” Nora asked again.
That was perplexing, and Vida had to turn the question over for a moment or two. “The wedding, I guess.”
“Well, it’s only another week, you shall have your wish. But I feel I should at least mention that a wedding is usually only the beginning.”
“Oh.” This sounded true, but it also unsettled her stomach, so Vida babbled in another direction. “Do you remember that night I said, ‘What’s all this about another boat; I want to go to the party and laugh at all these people who are so easily impressed’? Can you believe that foolish whim got us here?”
“Yes and