The Luxe (8 page)

“Elizabeth, thank God I can depend on you,” Mrs. Holland was saying, exasperated, behind her. “The salvation of this family lies with you and you alone.”

Diana heard these words as she reached the doorway, and for the first time realized what it was her mother was asking of Elizabeth. Do not marry for money, Mrs. Holland had often said in happier times, just marry where money
is
. She’d said it lightly before, but Diana knew that her mother’s intentions were different now.

She could not help a glance back, as she passed into the hall, to see her sister sitting silent and frozen, as though she were part of a still-life painting. Diana’s throat choked in rage at the sight of Elizabeth, so passive and seemingly made of stone. It was difficult to imagine that they were sisters at all.

E
LIZABETH TRIED TO STOP HERSELF FROM PLAYING
with the engraved white-gold bracelet her father had given her as a coming-out present. It dawned on her that she was going to have to snap out of it and start acting more…
Elizabeth-like
. She was fidgety and vacant and her thoughts roamed from her father to her mother to Will and then back again. Nothing seemed real to her at this hour.
She
did not even feel real. Particularly unreal was the figure of Henry Schoonmaker preparing to enter the Holland parlor, which she vaguely recognized upon raising her eyes to the open pocket doors.

“Mrs. Holland, Miss Holland.” He nodded in the direction of the card table.

“Mr. Schoonmaker,” they replied. Mrs. Holland beamed. Elizabeth realized, looking at him, that though he was so very talked about, and though their families were linked by history and class, she had not actually spoken with Henry in years. He was a catch—everyone said so—but that
was just an abstraction. She hadn’t thought of him as an actual person until he entered the door.

“Miss Elizabeth,” he said. She managed to stand and smile at her mother and then at Henry Schoonmaker, who was holding his bowler very properly. She wouldn’t have thought a person like him would hold his hat that way, which was perhaps why she kept staring at it vacantly even when he began to twist it nervously back and forth. She had just discerned that Henry was the sort of person to have his initials,
HWS
, embroidered in gold on the pale blue ribbon that lined the inside brim of his hat, when Claire took it from his hands and announced that she would be putting it in the cloakroom for safekeeping.

His eyes ranged about the room and then fell on her. Elizabeth felt embarrassment at his very look and tried to convince herself that the famous Henry Schoonmaker, whom Agnes lusted for, whom Penelope had danced with, whose father owned some sizable percentage of Manhattan, did not know her secret. Her
secrets
: that her family was poor, that she was in love with a servant, and that she was a selfish girl likely to ruin her family even more than they were already ruined. “That is a very becoming dress,” he said in Elizabeth’s direction.

“Thank you, Mr. Schoonmaker,” she replied, meeting his eyes and then looking quickly away. Here was the bachelor all the debutantes of New York desired, and she supposed she
should have been thrilled he had come to visit with her. He was indeed handsome and crisply dressed, which was everything she was supposed to want. She was surprised at herself for being so little drawn to it now. All she could think was that, if she and her family were sent to debtors’ prison, he would probably laugh—he seemed like the kind to find comedy in others’ misfortune.

“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Schoonmaker?” Edith said with an amused expression on her face.

Henry sat on the edge of the chair that his friend Teddy had recently been sitting on. Light fell through the tall parlor windows into the lush, quiet room, which Elizabeth felt suddenly, surprisingly, proud of. It felt like the signature of her family—these neat pieces arranged so perfectly and thoughtfully for company. The embossed leather panels over the mahogany wainscoting, which her father had chosen himself when he inherited the house from his parents. The exuberant curves of the old-fashioned gasoliers. The wall crammed with picture frames. Everything so soft and perfectly aged and rich. She looked over at the card table and noticed her aunt Edith tipping her head to her mother.

“What a sullen little pair,” she whispered. Elizabeth realized with an unpleasant jolt of humiliation what her aunt was mumbling about, and that her words were audible from across the room.

Elizabeth turned to Henry, her heart thumping with embarrassment, but he hadn’t seemed to have heard. He was examining his cuff links, which were also gold and also engraved with his initials. She might have thought about what a negative sign of his character this was, but she was too busy looking back at her aunt and trying to determine whether she was going to keep on muttering mortifying things. Elizabeth decided she couldn’t take the chance and stood.

“Mr. Schoonmaker, it looks like a lovely day and I confess I haven’t been out all morning. Would you like to take a walk around the park?” Elizabeth saw Claire blushing out of the corner of her eye and realized she was supposed to have waited to be asked. Her thoughts were so scattered that her manners were failing her, but that of course was not a thing she could explain to Henry. “I meant, if you…”

But Henry had already stood and extended his arm to her. “All right, then.”

Outside, the day was bright and cooler than she had imagined. A fall-like breeze swept up from the East River and cleansed the air. Elizabeth felt her shoulders relax a little as she took in the leafy smell and the rich blue of the sky. Gramercy was a wonderful repose just off a noisy, dirty stretch of Broadway, hush with the gentility protected for generations by the Holland family and their ilk. Elizabeth tried to tell herself that that age wasn’t lost, that it had not been replaced by
an era of craven excess to which she did not belong. Inside the vast iron gates of the park, nannies were chasing children still wearing patent leather shoes and bows from church. Carriages circled the square, the horses’ hooves clicking against the street. Her grandparents had bought one of the lots around the park when there was nothing built up this far north on Manhattan, and her father had grown up in No. 17. This was the Hollands’ little corner of the world; it was unbearable to her that it might not always be.

But that was just more selfishness, she reminded herself. She looked at the elegant wrought iron, those stately brown town houses facing one another across the park, all that healthful shade, and her heart began to drop as she imagined her poor mother brought low. A whole future spread out in her mind, of small, dirty rooms haunted by the mocking laughter of her former peers. The family legacy would be dashed, of course, and here she was, helpless to stop any of it, keeping her posture straight and exchanging platitudes with a well-brought-up boy who would no doubt prefer to be out chasing the skirts of her more
giving
European counterparts.

Still, she walked along with Henry, saying one or two things about the quality of air and sunshine that particular day. She repeated her tale of the rough transatlantic crossing, which did not seem to interest him. They moved at a slow, indifferent pace around the park. They strolled along the west
side, past No. 4, the house built by James Harper, the well-known publisher. There were two iron mayor’s lamps in front, which had been installed there when, during a second career in politics, he had held that office. They turned onto the north side, and then Henry stopped and turned to her. “My father has planned a dinner party.”

“Oh? How lovely,” Elizabeth replied. Henry began walking again, his arm linked with Elizabeth’s. She realized that she was holding her elbow tensed against Henry’s so that they barely touched.

“Yes, I’m sure Mrs. Schoonmaker will see that it is.”

“I hear that Mrs. Schoonmaker always throws lovely dinner parties,” Elizabeth said, even though Mrs. Schoonmaker was a girl barely older than Elizabeth herself, with half the talent for domestic oversight. “They always get such nice write-ups, at any rate. I wish I could attend, but I’m sure it is a very exclusive list,” she added.

Henry emitted a mirthless chuckle and gave the wrought-iron fence a knock with his fist as they glided by it. Elizabeth waited for him to say something more, and when he didn’t, she felt herself growing angry. If he had come to visit her, why was he being so cruelly silent? And of course he had no way of knowing that her family was in crisis, but it
was
, and really, hadn’t the thought entered his mind that she had better things to do than walk around silently with a boy who clearly wanted
to be elsewhere? She was reminded of some vague impression from her childhood, of the Schoonmaker boy who was two years older than she and always smirking and who didn’t seem to care about anything.

“I guess you know what the dinner is for,” Henry said, giving Elizabeth a cold stare.

She shook her head petulantly. It occurred to her that Henry might be drunk. She glanced around her, as though for a familiar face to agree that all of this was very strange, and very rude. But there were only children and nannies calling to one another. Everybody she knew was hidden behind closed doors, and whatever happened next, she would have to deal with it herself. “No, I don’t know what the dinner party is for.”

“The dinner party,” he said, pronouncing the words with derision, and rolling his dark eyes at the sky, “is for our
engagement
.”

“You mean…the engagement of you to…
me
?”

“Yes,” Henry replied with moderate sarcasm. “The muchlauded engagement of Miss Elizabeth Holland to Mr. Henry Schoonmaker.”

And then she felt like the ground beneath her was crumbling away. She was hit by the nausea and light-headedness of looking down from a very great height. As she tried to keep herself upright, she couldn’t help but picture Will kneeling,
so loving and hopeful, in the simple, mote-filled morning light. What a contrast he was to cold, stiff Henry, whose flatly handsome face was staring at her now.

“Oh,” Elizabeth said—slowly, and stupidly, it seemed to her. “I…had no idea that was what the party was for.”

“Yes, well, it is, and so I suppose I should tell you that I would be very honored if you would be my wife.” Henry’s lips curled around the word
wife
, as though he were unsure of the pronunciation.

“Oh,” Elizabeth said again. She tried to regain her breath—she wondered, briefly, if she would ever be able to speak again. She saw a whole other life laid out for her, every day more alien than the next. There would be a ceremony. She would have to promise things before God. There would be sleeping in the same bed as Henry Schoonmaker, and waking up with him. And someday, she supposed, though she found it hard to imagine, there would be little children that were half her and half Schoonmaker.

Only that morning Elizabeth had fantasized about marrying Will. Will, whom she knew and loved. She tried to think what it would mean to Will, but the image she could not banish from her mind was that of her mother’s face when she delivered the news that she would not be able to marry one of the wealthiest young men in Manhattan, because she was in love with the coachman.

Elizabeth closed her eyes for a brief moment, imagining the consequences of accepting Henry’s proposal—if she could call it that. She was shocked by what she saw: her life as a Schoonmaker looked quite…
grand
. She pictured her mother’s face, which had as of late been so scrunched with worry and gray with sleeplessness, uncreased and glowing with pride. Diana’s cheeks flushed as always and free of grime. She saw herself doing what was easy and natural to her—being gracious and admired and well dressed. In this future, her family was wearing clothes no one could laugh at. Elizabeth looked down, surprised by the sudden, peculiar feeling growing from the pit of her stomach and spreading across her breastbone. It wasn’t happiness, but it was something like relief.

“How very…” Elizabeth stumbled over her words, not knowing what form they might take until they came tumbling out of her lips. “How very…very, very kind of you, Mr. Schoonmaker.” She forced her face to contort into something resembling a smile. It became easier as the seconds passed, for out of all her warring emotions, a sense of gratitude seemed to be winning the match. “Thank you.”

Then Henry, taking that as a yes, which it was, picked up Elizabeth’s arm and walked her back to the house. For a minute she thought she saw Will, crossing in front of the house, and nearly panicked. She remembered how carelessly she had declared Henry Schoonmaker a cad the night before, and felt
ashamed of having her arm linked with his now, while their relationship progressed recklessly from one minute to the next. Then she realized it was just one of the Parker Fishes’ coachmen out on an errand, and was thankful for the first time in her life not to catch an unexpected glimpse of the man she loved. Of course she would have to tell him, but not now. Not yet.

“Mr. Schoonmaker,” she said, as they crossed Twentieth Street. “Do you think we could keep this a secret…until the dinner party I mean? Just so everything doesn’t go topsy-turvy at once?”

He nodded in agreement, as though he liked the idea, and then they proceeded up the stairs. She tried to let as little of her body touch his as possible, and promised herself she would tell Will soon. Tomorrow.

“And you can call me Henry,” he said flatly as they paused on the iron porte cochere. “We
are
engaged.”

She was unable to smile at this. She was too busy wondering if Will might still love her when she was a Mrs. Schoonmaker.