Doppelgänger (4 page)

She tried to scream. She
wanted
to scream. But no air left her lungs; instead it sucked itself in, like screaming in reverse. When the horrible scene passed she found herself sitting up in bed, gasping and huffing in the darkness, clawing at the bosom of her nightgown as if warding away the blade of the knife and Ola Bergenhjelm's jealous wrath.

Chapter Three

In the Pool of Sharks

Anine Gyldenhorn was a very delicate beauty, but then most aristocratic young women in Swedish society were. She was five foot three inches tall, had hair so fair it appeared bright yellow in strong sunlight and unusually sharp features that made her face seem slightly birdlike though it did not detract from her comeliness. The Gyldenhorn family was unintroduced nobility—they were of Danish extraction, having lived in Sweden for only a century—but Anine's father, a noted jurist in Stockholm, had always hoped the family could eventually become
introduced
nobility. The only entrée into the exclusive club of families with titles recognized by the Swedish crown was through marriage. Achieving this trajectory would be the central purpose of Anine's life, and she knew it from an early age. If she ever happened to forget it, her mother could be counted upon to remind her.

This purpose seemed at first to be fulfilled almost too easily. Ola Bergenhjelm paid a call to the Gyldenhorns' summer home the day after Anine's sixteenth birthday, and he respectfully asked her father's permission to court her. Gustav enthusiastically agreed. Anine knew Ola slightly; he was occasionally invited to the family's parties or receptions back in Stockholm. He was the son of a shipping magnate. Most importantly, the Bergenhjelms were introduced, though among the patriarchs of the family only Ola's eldest uncle was entitled to call himself Count Bergenhjelm. This was close enough for Anine's parents. After a grand total of three private conversations with Ola, two of which were about the evolution of fish into land animals, she found herself betrothed to him, and the long two-year fuse of their engagement began to burn slowly toward marriage.

“A dull husband is one of those things that must be endured in life,” Solveig Gyldenhorn told her daughter six months later, after Anine had grown thoroughly bored of Ola Bergenhjelm and completely stupefied at the thought of spending the rest of her life with him. “Fortunately, the duller they are, the more diverting is the exercise of spending their money.” Anine was too meek to argue and too proper to dream of taking a lover. Fortunately for her virtue all the men she encountered in Stockholm society were as dull and colorless as the one to whom she would soon be married.

That changed at the Christmas reception of 1877. That evening the Count had included among his guests two unusual personages: Cornelius Atherton, a portly American with immense mutton-chop sideburns and a penchant for colorful waistcoats, and his son Julian, an awkward but attractive boy. The elder Atherton had been awarded the post of Ambassador to Sweden as a plum for some political favor he'd done for the new American president, and he'd brought along his son, who had graduated from Harvard nearly a year early, to teach him the virtue of a gentleman's career in public service.

Anine had never met an American before. Julian's boyish good looks and fiery red hair intrigued her. “I confess you look more like an Irishman than a Yankee,” she told him, her first-ever words to him, moments after they were introduced.

“In many parts of New York,” he replied, in passable Swedish, “there is no distinction between the two.”

Julian Atherton was completely ignorant of the mores of Swedish aristocratic society. Anine thought if he did know them he simply wouldn't have cared. For instance he didn't know it was unseemly to call upon her in the afternoons sometimes, and this habit persisted even after Solveig wrote a respectful letter to Cornelius asking him to remind his son that Anine was engaged to be married. Yet Solveig did not decline to receive Julian Atherton in her house. The American ambassador had quickly become a close friend of Count Bergenhjelm, and Anine's mother didn't want to cause a row with the Bergenhjelm family by snubbing Cornelius's son. Thus he continued to call.

Anine loved his visits. Above all she was enraptured by Julian's descriptions of America. He had once crossed the continent by rail. Hearing his accounts of dusty mining towns, encounters with cowboys and the wild saloons of San Francisco was more thrilling than the most engrossing novel. She had spoken a little English before but she endeavored to become fluent mainly so she could converse with him. She was only passively aware that she was falling in love with him. Yet he remained a complete gentleman, never even touching her except to kiss her hand or help her down from a carriage.

She began to dream about something happening to Ola, or at least to their engagement. She began to use these words in her mind—
something happening
—as an entrée to an entire class of pleasant fantasies, but she never wished harm upon Ola. She imagined that perhaps a woman might come forward claiming to be his lover and Anine could act indignant and break off the engagement, or that maybe the Bergenhjelm family would suddenly fall out of favor with the king and Solveig would decide that marrying her daughter into their clan was inappropriate. From her observation of Ola's passion for science Anine daydreamed that some great naturalist, a doddering fellow who made his living cataloguing insects or something like that, might offer Ola a spot on a multi-year scientific voyage to the Galapagos Islands that he would be unable to resist accepting. Then after he was gone a few months Anine could write him a weepy letter claiming she could no longer waste her youth waiting for him. The families would understand that. She would then be free. These were the fantasies she spun in her mind. While Ola was away at university she never saw him, he seldom wrote and it was increasingly easy to think of him in the abstract. Her engagement seemed theoretical. Julian, by contrast, was real.

But when Ola was killed Anine was wracked with guilt, for she felt instinctively that her wishing had somehow caused the accident. “Please, God, I didn't mean it,” she whispered while kneeling against her bed in the upstairs room she seldom left in the weeks after the terrible event. “Forgive me, Lord. I never meant for
that
to happen. I should never have thought of another man. I know my duty now.” She repeated this prayer daily but for a long time it felt as if God had not accepted her entreaty.
Is He going to punish me forever?
Is that the price of my penance—being an old maid, a spinster, for daring to commit adultery in my mind against my fiancé?

She thought spinsterhood was an increasingly likely fate. At age eighteen she was already outfitted in widow's weeds, doomed to the customary year of mourning. She remembered little of this period; it passed for her in a sort of haze, like looking at her own life through a frosted-over window.

When Julian came to Vänersborg and proposed to her in July she decided firmly that she could not accept. She sent him away that afternoon without a firm answer, but the only doubt in her mind was how to turn him down gently and in such a manner as to make sure her mother never found out about the proposal. In her upstairs room she began drafting letters to Julian, some in Swedish, some in English, explaining why she couldn't sentence her family to the scandal that would ensue if she decided to marry him. She tore up each successive draft and threw it in the fireplace. She now no longer believed she'd caused Ola's accident, but she recognized that that fear sprang from the guilt she felt at never having really loved him in the first place. He had projected himself to her from the grave to say goodbye to her and tell her that he loved her, and she'd never reciprocated that feeling.
That
was the pain she was running from.

But a week after Julian's proposal visit a package he'd sent from Stockholm arrived in the post at the Vänersborg cottage. It contained a book he'd promised her: the collected writings of Thomas Jefferson, an American that Julian particularly admired and had told her much of. She was struck by something Jefferson wrote:
“The earth belongs to the living, not the dead.”
While walking by the lake the next day Anine decided that nothing would be gained by denying her own happiness to serve as some sort of redemption for not loving Ola as much as everyone assumed she had. She visited Ola's grave at Norra Begravningsplatsen—the first and only time she ever did so—and then went to the American embassy, where in a parlor decorated with a painting of Thomas Jefferson she happily accepted Julian's proposal.

To minimize the scandal they decided to wait to announce their engagement until a year had passed since Ola Bergenhjelm's death. As it turned out their discretion didn't do much good. The Gyldenhorn family had already been quickly expelled from the Bergenhjelms' orbit, and when Anine began to attend receptions at the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm at Cornelius Atherton's invitation, the malicious whispers spread even further. It was at such a diplomatic dinner—one day after the anniversary of Ola's death, and the first time in a year in which Anine appeared in public outside of mourning dress—that Julian Atherton rang a glass and announced that Anine Gyldenhorn had agreed to become not only his wife but an American. The applause and toasts that went around the table were decidedly reserved, and Anine realized that the cords binding her to the country of her birth had suddenly and violently been severed.

Even independently of its substantive content the dinner announcement was a major
faux pas
. The Swedish ambassador in Washington, when informed of the event, was reportedly so offended by Julian's behavior that he wrote a letter to President Hayes respectfully requesting that he recall Cornelius Atherton back to the United States. Hayes declined, but Cornelius was obliged to cashier his son as his official diplomatic secretary. From then until their wedding at Grace Church in Manhattan in April, Anine and her new betrothed saw each other very seldom.

Leaving Sweden for the last time was like being released from prison. Anine could scarcely believe that she'd managed to escape it. After Grace Church they spent a lavish honeymoon in Europe—six weeks in London, four in Paris, and the balance touring the continent by rail and steamer—and although Anine felt no more American she thought she might be starting to feel a little less Swedish. Only midway through the honeymoon did she wonder if she might not fit in New York either. But she guessed it didn't matter if she did not. The decision had been made. She was an American now, and she wasn't going back. She would have to hope things would fall into place.

Newport, Rhode Island, September 1880

“Well, I for one welcome you with open arms, Mrs. Atherton,” said Mrs. Belgravia Norton, picking up her china teacup with her fat-fingered, ring-bejeweled hand. “New York society could desperately use an infusion of new blood. Without it we'll become positively ossified—much as Boston has been for the past century.”

Anine smiled politely, but she was still trying to divine the level of Mrs. Norton's sincerity. She
had
invited Anine and Julian to brunch in the glowing atrium of her cottage—one of the more ostentatious mansions lining the Newport waterfront—but that might merely have been a perfunctory nod to form. “Thank you,” she said politely. “I hope the rest of society feels as you do.”

“Anine is so self-conscious of being a foreigner,” said Julian. “She forgets that New York is populated by foreigners. The Hanlyns are of English stock, the Rocheforts are French and old Grantham van Schuyler's second wife is from Dublin. Why should they look down upon a Swede? I mean, it's not like you're a
Jew
.”

Everyone laughed, but Anine's chuckle was contrived. She glanced across the table at Rachael, Mrs. Norton's eldest daughter, who also seemed less amused by the joke than her mother. Raven-haired with dark brown eyes and a full figure, Rachael had a touch of the exotic about her, and in part for that reason Anine had been drawn to her almost immediately after meeting her. She seemed somehow different than the stuffy Newport people. Anine hoped that difference was real, and neither imagined nor pretended. One thing she'd learned from her week and a half (thus far) in America was that few people turned out to be who they seemed at first glance.

“I think when we get back to New York we'll give a reception,” said Mrs. Norton. “You should be properly introduced to society, and I've been looking for an excuse to use my new Sèvres china. Won't you allow us to throw a reception for you, Mrs. Atherton? What do you think, Rachael?”

“I think that's a capital idea,” Rachael replied.

A reception. So maybe she is sincere
. Anine felt slightly more at ease. “Thank you. That's most gracious of you.”

“You see, my dear?” said Julian, grinning across the table. “You've already insinuated yourself into Mrs. Norton's heavily-guarded parlor. New York will be eating out of your hand before the season is over.”

“You should do some entertaining yourself,” Rachael suggested boldly. “Put your best foot forward and show no fear. Invite everybody, even the Schermerhorns. They'll be so taken aback by your audacity that they'll accept the invitation just to see what sort of creature possesses such a measure of courage.”

Another round of polite laughter followed this advice.
Schermerhorns? Who are they?
Anine knew so little about the vagaries of New York society that she felt she'd been thrown into a pool of sharks utterly blindfolded. Nevertheless she pretended as if she knew all about them. “I'm not sure the Schermerhorns would dare to be seen at our address. After all, it's not Fifth Avenue.”

“It's not
quite
Fifth Avenue,” Julian spoke up, just before taking a sip of tea.

“Where is it located?” Mrs. Norton asked.

“West 38th Street. A block off Fifth.”

“Well, that's a perfectly respectable address!” Mrs. Norton faked pleasant surprise, but she did it badly. “My my, Julian, you
are
coming up in the world. A block off Fifth! The Kuypers tried to buy a brownstone in that same neighborhood and found themselves priced out of the market.”