The Luxe (9 page)

T
HE HOUSE HAD GROWN SILENT. THERE SEEMED TO
be nothing happening—not even in the kitchen, where dinner should certainly have been being prepared. Diana moved through the house on light feet, humming a tune in ragtime to herself, listening for some sign of life. It occurred to her that perhaps Mrs. Faber, having got wind of the disastrous state of the Holland finances, might’ve packed up the staff and run off—to join the circus, maybe, or to open a brothel in San Francisco. It seemed inconceivable that, set free in this way, the housekeeper would still want the company of dull old Mr. Faber. Diana crept through the back servants’ hall without meeting a soul and into the cloakroom, which was at the end of a long foyer. She felt like she was seeing everything anew. She was poor; she had nothing, and thus, she realized with delight, she had nothing to lose.

She looked at the fur coats and velvet evening wraps hanging along the walls and realized they would have to go. She glanced behind the door for her French lieutenant’s
coat—
that
she would find a way to save—but instead saw a foreign hat. She plucked it from the wall and placed it on her head. It would have been far too large for her except for the fact of her curls, which added enough volume that it fit almost perfectly. Diana turned to the cloakroom mirror and decided that she looked sort of bohemian when she put on the right accessories. Then she peeked out of the cloakroom door and into the long hallway and saw the figure of a man in a black coat, his back turned toward her.

Diana slipped silently down the hall in his direction. When she was a few feet from him, he must have heard her because he turned. His features were set with a look of exasperation. It took her a moment to fit the man’s name and face together, though she knew them both. The face was aristocratic and stretched with an air of entitlement, the shifting of a pronounced jaw, the roving of worldly dark eyes.

“Oh…I know you,” she said, and then smiled, because she was surprised at herself for thinking that he was actually delicious-looking even though everyone else thought so, too.

“You’re Henry Schoonmaker.”

“Yes,” he said, glancing at her head, and then meeting her eyes again.

“Do you like my hat?” she asked, touching the brim and watching him. She had heard all about the wild young Schoonmaker while she was in Saratoga. Even Aunt Edith
had gossiped about him. Apparently, he raced those dangerous four-in-hand carriages and drove motorcars and moved restlessly from place to place and girl to girl. It had sounded to Diana like he lived the sort of far-ranging life she would lead if only the world would let her.

“I do like the hat, although I would question your use of the word
my
,” Henry said sharply. Then he winked, which made Diana even more aware of her heart’s rapid tempo.

“What are you going to do?” she asked, putting a hand on her hip and lifting her chin proudly. “Call the police on me for trying on your hat?”

Henry’s mouth opened with a rejoinder, but he was cut off by the sound of approaching footsteps within the parlor, which reminded Diana that despite the quiet, there were still people all over the house, listening and breathing and thinking in rules. And according to the rules, she was not at all where she was supposed to be.

Diana was about to slip quickly away when she looked at Henry and decided that she wasn’t done with him. She grabbed his hand and pulled him into the parlor on the east side of the house. The lesser parlor, her mother called it, because it was where they kept the lesser art. It used to be the ballroom, back when their father was alive and they still gave entertainments that involved dancing, but it had been rechristened sometime last spring. All the nice things had been moved to the parlor
where they received guests, leaving this room with a vaguely shabby appearance. Diana took a mental note of the fade on the upholstery so that she could give her nightly diary entry a touch of ambience. When they were on the other side of the oak door, she reluctantly let go of his hand. She looked up at the great canvases above, with their dark, roiling seas. They seemed to Diana like an approximation of her own feelings at the moment.

“What are you doing in my house, Henry Schoonmaker?” she whispered. Diana could hear her sister in the hall. She was using her stuck-up, authoritative voice, asking Claire how she could possibly have misplaced Mr. Schoonmaker’s hat.

“I’m not entirely sure that’s your business,” Henry told her.

She frowned at his answer. It was possible, though unlikely, that he had come to see Elizabeth. Perhaps he had taken that bit about her beauty in the papers for the advertisement it was. Or, Diana wondered, perhaps he had caught a glimpse of the younger Holland sister over the summer and his curiosity had been building ever since.
That
would be something. And then it occurred to her that he was likely here, and looking so serious, because her family owed his family money, which was dreary, but—she had to admit—more realistic. Noting again the worn cushions, Diana realized that she was now in a rather vulnerable position facing someone as wealthy as a
Schoonmaker. Then she realized something else: He was admiring her with his eyes.

“The famous Henry Schoonmaker,” she said, bravely holding his gaze. “The one who can’t sit still and breaks hearts all over the place. Well, that’s what they say, isn’t it?”

“Why do you girls always love gossip so much?” he asked in reply. She was close enough to smell him. He smelled like hair pomade and cigarettes and just slightly of women’s perfume, or so it seemed at that moment. She looked up at his amused face, and he whispered, “Do you think all the stories about me are true?”

“If the stories are true, then you are a very interesting person.” She smiled, tucking her lower lip under her teeth.

“Well, I deny them all categorically.” He shrugged before continuing: “Except the one about me liking pretty girls, which is more or less true. But how old are you, anyway? You can’t have been out in society very long at all. Look at you, you’ve probably never even been kissed, and you’re—”

“I have too been kissed,” she interrupted, the way a child would. She felt her cheeks flush, but was too thrilled at being right where she was to really mind.

“Not very well, I’d bet,” Henry replied with an arch of his eyebrow.

Out in the hall, Claire was reporting to Elizabeth that Mr. Schoonmaker’s hat was indeed quite gone, and then Eliz
abeth was expressing her displeasure at the poor quality of service in the household.

Diana looked around at the taxidermy buck heads on the wall and the old heavy furniture. There was a great tin vase full of cabbage roses that were wilting with neglect, their petals browning and falling to the floor. The curtains were drawn, which seemed somehow appropriate. She returned her eyes to the lank figure of Henry Schoonmaker, very real before her, and felt a lovely kind of pain shoot through her chest. There were so many things he knew that she didn’t. She could tell by the way he stood that he was older than she was and he had done things she could never do. She wanted to take him upstairs and lock the door and make him tell her everything.

“Truly kissed?” he asked, lowering his eyebrow, which somehow implied even greater skepticism. He leaned closer, his breath warm on her ear as he reached for the hat. For a moment, everything was still. His body was so close to hers that she felt they were already touching. And then, as he gently took the hat from her curls, he turned his face just enough to brush his lips across hers. Her chest rose and fell. The touch of his mouth had been electric.

He was looking intently into her eyes, the corner of his mouth resisting a full smile, and then he leaned in again, bringing his mouth flush against hers. That was it, Diana thought. That was how this was supposed to feel. It was supposed to
go all the way down to your toes and make them dance, just a little bit.

Henry drew his lips away and winked at her, his eyes lively and knowing. Then he put his hat back on his head and stepped into the hall without another word.

“Sweet ladies, it seems I got lost on the way from the cloakroom to the door,” Diana heard him say. There was laughter in his voice and she knew that even though he was speaking to Claire and Elizabeth, he was sharing a secret joke with her. “Good afternoon.”

“Good afternoon,” Diana heard a miffed Elizabeth say. Then the door sounded and he must have been gone. Diana, still listening from inside the lesser parlor, was consumed by the thought of what she had just done.
I just kissed Henry Schoonmaker,
she thought, repeating it over and over in her head.
I just kissed Henry Schoonmaker.

It was later, after Diana had successfully tiptoed back to her room undetected, that the mysterious package arrived. Claire stood there demanding to know what it was, and Diana had been tempted to open it immediately. She and her maid had often whispered secrets about boys, and traded fantasies to each other that involved ocean liners and heirs to the thrones
of small European countries. But something about this was too real to share, so she apologized to Claire and hugged her and asked to be alone.

She listened for Claire’s footsteps away from the door and then shimmied the round gold-embossed box top open. Nestled inside the charcoal-colored velvet lining was a very familiar hat, and a note:

She read his note maybe two hundred times trying to make sense of it.
The thought of the context in which I shall have to get to know you better?
What could that possibly
mean
? Then she put the hat on her head and felt dangerously in love with someone she hardly knew.

D
IANA DID NOT TAKE THE HAT OFF UNTIL SEVERAL
hours later, when she heard a soft knock on the door. Then she scrambled up from her idle writing position, pulled the hat from her head, and dropped the card inside it, quickly shoving both items under the bed and out of sight. The anemic
rat-tat-tat
on her door repeated itself, and she tucked her diary—whose pages recalled the secret meeting that was inspiring all those dramatic bursts of color—beneath her pillow.

“Who’s there?” she hollered, not bothering to disguise the annoyance in her voice.

The face of her older sister, with its pristine complexion, nudged beyond the door. Her eyes were as wide and blank as when Diana had last seen her in the parlor. The sisters hadn’t spoken since, but that was no surprise. They hadn’t really spoken—at least about anything important—in years.

“May I come in?” she asked gently.

“I suppose,” Diana replied, rolling back to the posi
tion she had happily assumed before the interruption, belly down and face toward her pillow. Her diary had been propped against it so that she could write, and now the same pillow was covering that precious compendium of her thoughts. She felt the need to shield it physically from any potential prying on her sister’s part, especially since her sister seemed like such a stranger these days.

Over the past two years, Diana had become used to sisterly betrayals. She had watched Elizabeth grow ever more proper and remote, and where once there had been closeness, now there was a low-lying resentment. The interruption of her sacred diary-writing time felt like a mild affront amongst a host of other, more serious offenses.

“I have something important to tell you,” Elizabeth said, her voice timid. The balance of the bed shifted as she perched herself on the far corner of the white chenille bedspread.

“Oh?” Diana rolled her eyes in the direction of the pillow, for what was important to her sister these days was most often irrelevant to her. And anyway, her thoughts had already turned back to whether Henry Schoonmaker had had many lovers and what exactly his chest would look like with Diana’s head rested against it. She was thinking that it was perhaps fortuitous that her family had chosen just this moment to become poor. Maybe that was the thing that would make her stand out from all the other girls who whispered about him,
causing her to glow with a certain compromised luster. She had almost ceased listening to Elizabeth, so enchanting were her musings about Henry, when she thought she heard her sister say his name.

“What?” Diana said, pushing herself up on her elbow and turning to look at Elizabeth.

“Henry, Henry Schoonmaker? He came by this afternoon to propose marriage to me, and now we are engaged. I am to be married, Di—the family is going to be all right.”

Diana squinted her eyes and choked back a laugh. She was about to ask Elizabeth to repeat herself—for surely she had misheard, and mixed up the man in her thoughts with this boring engagement story—when her sister took her hand.

“I know it is all very sudden, but you see they have more money than practically anybody, and Henry is the oldest—the only—son,” Elizabeth explained, sounding as though she were trying to convince herself as much as her sister.

“He asked…
you
?” Diana said. Her lower lip dropped and her eyes widened in shock. She instinctively pulled her hand back to her chest. Elizabeth looked down, and Diana paused for a few moments to absorb this rancid information. The delicious memory of Henry Schoonmaker teasing her in the dark and dusty unused parlor had been snatched away from her. She wanted it back. “But you don’t even
like
him,” she went on.

“Perhaps in time…” Elizabeth kept her eyes down on her hands, where she was fidgeting with her cuticles. “He is very handsome, and, well, you know everybody says what a catch he is.”

Diana let out an indignant noise and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. The injustice was searing. It was so like the world to handle her this way, when
something
was finally about to happen. But her anger was growing, and she was now prepared to turn some of it on the man who was, apparently, her sister’s fiancé.

“Diana, why are you being sullen? This is good news.”

“Because you don’t love him,” Diana replied bitterly.
And he doesn’t love you,
she added in her thoughts. She might have gone on to say the man Elizabeth was planning on marrying was the worst sort of weasel, and that he had kissed the little sister of his betrothed what must have been mere moments after his proposal, but she did not. With all the novels Diana read, she should have known that villains often come with pretty faces. She had made a classic romantic’s error, mistaking that one beautiful moment when Henry’s lips touched her own for love, but she was going to keep that ugly secret to herself. She had earned it; it was her own. She closed her eyes and said, “Well…congratulations, then.”

Elizabeth smiled blankly and clasped her hands together. Diana had always found this a stupid gesture, and she found
it particularly stupid now. “The Schoonmaker family has a very good reputation, and Henry is awfully polite and…” Elizabeth trailed off as if she could not think of a single other nice thing to say about him. She bit her lip then, and Diana thought she saw the glistening of tears in her eyes. “Oh…” she said as she covered her face with her hands.

It seemed pathetic that Elizabeth would be overjoyed to the point of tears by the sudden appearance of a fiancé with means, especially since she clearly didn’t think much of him either. Diana responded with a mocking guttural noise and then went back to looking at her pillow.

“Anyway.” Elizabeth recovered herself, brushing away the moisture from her eyes. “It will be good for mother, and for everyone really, to have a wedding. Flowers and dresses and everything fine and good. Everything new and custom-made…”

Diana sneaked a look back at her sister, and saw that her fair eyebrows had floated upward as she went on about all the pure, ivory, wedding-related things she was going to have. It was as though she’d spent the afternoon trapped in some underground sewer and had only now emerged, starving for any sign of cleanliness. In fact, she had spent the afternoon in the Hollands’ sumptuous parlor, and upon learning of their family’s financial decline had gone straight out and gotten herself engaged to the first wealthy man she could find. Diana
couldn’t believe Elizabeth’s idiocy, imagining a white wedding with that slippery bastard Henry Schoonmaker, who had apparently entered their home that afternoon with the intention of finding himself a wife
and
a mistress. How very convenient for him. Diana wondered if he hadn’t come to repossess some of their furniture as well.

“And Di?” Elizabeth asked, but went on without waiting for Diana to respond. “Penelope and I made a promise to each other, when we were thirteen, that we would be each other’s maids of honor. I hope you understand. But you’ll be one of my bridesmaids, won’t you?”

A mirthless smile crept across Diana’s face. She couldn’t help but appreciate, in a cynical sort of way, this ironic twist—being asked to participate in the ceremony for a union she felt completely disdainful of.

“Fine,” Diana replied in a resigned, world-weary tone. Once her sister was gone, she could begin the diary writing again, and this time in more maudlin hues. Elizabeth emitted a small humming sound of pleasure, and then Diana felt herself being taken up in her sister’s weak embrace.

“Oh, and Diana, don’t tell anybody, all right?
Promise
you won’t tell anybody.”

“I promise.” Diana shrugged. Her sister’s doings didn’t seem like a very interesting topic, and she hardly knew whom she’d tell, anyway.

“Good.” Elizabeth lowered her eyes. “I just don’t want this all to start happening too soon….”

Nor would that wolfish Henry Schoonmaker, thought Diana. He could doubtless use the extra few months to kiss all the Holland cousins and perhaps one or two of their maids as well.

“Of course,” Diana finally answered her sister. “Your secret affair is safe with me.”

And though she had been searching for words that might cut her sister, just a little bit, Diana couldn’t help but be surprised by the look of shock that crossed her sister’s face. It was just a joke—why couldn’t her sister take even the littlest joke?