on her forehead, trying her best not to think too much. The region behind her eyes was not at all right.
“Again?” said Father. “You’d think there were no other young women in New York.”
“None who have survived a shipwreck and are about to be married!” Mother replied with probably more volume than the situation warranted (though it was entirely possible that was just Vida’s impression, on account of the dull ache behind her eyes). “Anyway, she’s our Vida—doesn’t it please you to see her every utterance lauded in print?”
“Of course it does, dear,” Father said, lifting his own paper as though to shield himself from his wife’s vociferous defense. He used the opportunity to wink theatrically at his daughter, and add: “But I reserve the right to tease her about it.”
“Oh Daddy, stop,” Vida replied, and pressed the heels of her palms into her eye sockets.
“Anyway, she writes that you quite impressed that grand Mrs. Vanderbilt with your stories of building thatched roofs on the desert island.”
“But not the story of how I hunted wild boar,” Vida muttered, rolling onto her side and becoming quite intent upon the raised arabesque pattern of the yellow silk chaise.
“What’s wrong with her?” Mother drolly sipped her tea.
And Father—Vida supposed—made a gesture that implied she’d been too free with the passing trays of champagne last night.
“Didn’t you have fun?” Mother persisted.
It was getting a little silly, she knew—a little unbecoming of a girl who would be a wife by New Year—to be lying on a couch with her back to her parents, pouting over nothing. She mulled her mother’s question seriously and said after a few silent moments: “I did . . . just not as much as I thought I’d have.”
Her father, bless him, didn’t laugh, but there was mockery in his voice when he replied, “The horror. Whatever shall we do?”
“Go shopping, probably.”
“Yes, good idea, and put it on the Farrar account.”
“You’re terrible,” said Mother, but in an adoring way, so that Vida knew she rather liked the idea.
Vida swung her legs to the floor and gave her silly parents as earnest a face as she could manage and clasped her hands together like she did when she was a little girl. “I always thought I was too big for our little world. That I belonged in ballrooms like last night. You know, the most storied ones. Do you think it’s strange that I felt disappointed by that? That I feel disappointed by the whole thing?”
Before, her father had been directing his private asides her way, but now they were addressed to his wife. “What does she mean by ‘the whole thing’?”
“Do you think she means what I think she means?”
“Yes—yes, I think she does.”
“Vida, darling, Fitzhugh is the perfect match. If you’re disappointed by him, I’m afraid you’re in the wrong way of life.”
Vida had not seen her parents’ faces so alarmed since they’d been on board the Vida, in those surreal hours where she remembered what a hot bath and an iced drink were like. They hadn’t yet trusted their own eyes about their daughter’s survival, and she had had to persuade them to let her go off on her own for even a quarter hour at a time. She had hoped in that quarter hour to somehow run into Sal, to see if he was feeling what she was feeling. But that had proved impossible, and meanwhile the machinery of engagement had moved on—it seemed a wedding planner had been hired by wireless, and she couldn’t even remember saying yes. “But what if he’s not?”
“Oh Vida, you were always like this, even when you were a little girl.” Mother sighed from the depths of her being and took the grave step of folding and setting aside The Daily Chimera. “You always wanted so much. Too much. You will have to learn to be satisfied by someone, or something, and soon, or your life will be aimless, and you won’t be anybody at all.”
Well. That did sound bad. Vida, chastened, averted her gaze.
She might have taken this very sage-sounding advice as the gospel truth had the genteel little bell not dinged just then, and one of the head concierge’s liveried minions appeared. “Pardon me,” he said, tilting himself into the room.
“That’s quite all right,” Vida said, waving away his apologetic tone. “We are a small family of three—we welcome any distractions.”
“Very good, mademoiselle. This came for you.”
Vida glanced at the small box in the servant’s hands, and experienced a strange