Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,82
no,” Nora replied easily, and went about busying herself with the strand of freshwater pearls that she had wound around Vida’s coiffure to disguise that there wasn’t especially much coif. This was Nora at her most irksome: not willing at all to engage Vida’s fantasies, her attention set upon the mission at hand. “Here we are. What else can you say? Fitz’s man sent up a note twenty minutes ago. I don’t think you can keep him waiting any longer.”
Vida entered the famous ballroom of Alva Vanderbilt, at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-second, on the arm of the young man she’d campaigned for and who was now hers. The place was a chateau on the outside. Inside it was alive with flowered vines and potted palms; the floors were of black and white marble, and the fireplace was supported by caryatids, and the roof was of carved oak, and all the staircases were massive and curving and may as well have led all the way to the sky. Vida wasn’t such a student of interiors—none of the grandeur impressed her particularly. It was always what happened in fancy rooms that interested her. The house went on and on, room after room, each a little different but mostly just gleaming with golden accents and astoundingly high ceilings. This was the sort of victorious entrance that girls of social ambition dream about, and Vida—never unambitious herself—should have been giddy with her success. But she was consumed with the thought that everything looked just as she had imagined it would; that this famous place held no surprises.
The only moment when something did not look just as she had known it would was when she saw Alva Vanderbilt herself. She was sitting on a chaise surrounded by sycophants, and Vida realized in an instant that the grand dame was no longer the young woman of twenty who once hosted a fancy dress ball to open her house and prove to New York’s high society that she was one of them. She was a dowager now, dressed impressively, but not at all in the latest style.
“She’s so old-fashioned,” said Vida.
“Oh, well, what does she have to prove?” Fitzhugh said, as though her indifference to the changing times was admirable.
But there was something mummified in her that frightened Vida, made it seem that she believed she could win against nature. Like the women on the island who had clung to their modesty, their propriety, their high-necked dresses and their rigid etiquette in the face of the unstoppable weather and the pull and push of the tide. Vida wanted to explain this to Fitz, and knew she couldn’t. That she couldn’t made her feel alone, even at the center of the swirl.
They advanced beyond this scene and through picture galleries and salons that smelled of cigar smoke—the sound of string music always reaching them faintly from just one room over—and Vida did as she knew she ought, and smiled without showing her teeth or seeming too eager. Vida tried to enjoy the appreciative glances in the direction of her dress—which really were very flattering—and the ripple of interest that followed wherever she went.
At the edge of the ballroom, they came across a couple that Fitzhugh seemed to know well. “This is Adele Jones,” Fitz said of the woman, who was festooned in heaps of pale red chiffon. “We’ve summered together in Newport since we were children.”
The men stepped a little away, and bent their polished heads together to confer over something important-seeming in private.
“Pleased to meet you,” Vida said, and offered her hand in greeting.
Adele Jones appeared irritated to have been thus abandoned by her companion but she said, “I’m just charmed.”
“I’d love to see Newport,” Vida went on, undeterred by this minor cut.
“Oh, I’m sure you will. Though our rugged little coast is I’m sure nothing compared to what you’ve seen with your own eyes.”
“How could it be? The island was a beautiful place. I was frightened often, and glad to be found, but you should have seen the view from the summit. The world went on and on, as though there were no people in it.”
Adele’s face puckered. “Is that a good thing?”
“I wouldn’t have thought so.” Vida could see that she had gone wrong somewhere. She had been guileless when she should have been alert to the layer beneath what was said aloud, and also the layer below that, and the layer below that again. She had forgotten how rivalrous women could be with each