Chapter Five, part two

September 1914, two years earlier
New York City

Mother was trying on hats. She set first one, then another, on her artfully upswept hair, running the hatpin through with precision. With each new hat, she turned her head in front of the mirror, tipping her chin up and down. Violet and Sadie, who were rarely allowed in her dressing room, lolled against the walls, watching the show.

“Which do you like best?” Mother asked after she’d removed the last one, a Panama hat with a rolled brim and ecru ostrich feathers.

“The black,” Sadie answered quickly. One of Sadie’s strengths was having firm opinions. Skirts, shoes, belts—her likes and dislikes were clear.

Mother nodded. “And you, Violet? Which do you like?”

“It depends,” Violet began, pushing herself off the wall. “What are you wearing it with? Are you hoping to be dramatic? Sophisticated? Avant-garde?”

“Yes.” Mother laughed. “Yes, to all three.” She spun on her stool, hands on her knees, elbow almost jostling the gin fizz on her dressing table. She wore a champagne-colored silk peignoir, the bell-shaped sleeves drooping toward the floor. “Girls, I have a proposition for you.”

Sadie straightened, already eager. Violet leaned back.

“I wonder,” she said, her blue eyes beaming, “how much you would like to skip school this year and run off with Papa and me to Paris.”

“Paris?” Sadie’s face glowed.

“Paris! We could shop the new fashions, throw wild parties, see all the sights.”

“The whole year? Miss school for the entire year?” Violet knew her voice sounded tinny, and she fought to take the whine out of it. “But this is my final year at Smith. And Sadie would be a year behind at Emma Willard. How would we make it up?”

Mother shrugged and turned back for her drink. “You wouldn’t. What do girls need with secondary schooling and college anyway? I expect you’ve learned all there is to know.”

Every part of Violet gaped: eyes, mouth, the cavernous insides that hollowed themselves, horrified by her mother’s words. She was working toward a degree—didn’t Mother understand that? How could she say—how could anyone say—that they’d learned all there was to know? Sadie had mostly studied dancing and pastels!

“No!” she cried at the same moment that Sadie said, “Yes!”

Mother smirked. She sipped the gin fizz. “Well, you two talk it over. I need you both to agree if we’re going to do it. We haven’t got enough money to do Paris properly and pay for school, even for one of you.” She shot a cold glare at the door of her dressing room, somewhere beyond which sat their father, the source, her look implied, of their “not enough money.”

Violet’s skin prickled. Mother was raising all of this casually, as if it was a game, but she knew the false merriment of Mother’s laugh. She recognized the circles under her eyes. This was serious. Someone was going to have to fight for their schooling, and that someone would be Violet.

She fought the urge to reach for Sadie, to push her to safety behind her back. When they were small, she’d always stood between her parents and her sister. When their parents fought, when their father stormed out, that time Mother broke the vase and cut her hand, bleeding on the rug—Violet had always shielded Sadie. Her sister’s thin shoulders used to quake under her nightgown. Violet had been scared in these moments, too, but she’d made herself into a straw-stuffed cushion, soft but unrelenting.

Only now Sadie was on the other side of Mother’s chair, too far away to push behind her back.

“You want to use our school tuition to fund your shopping trip to Paris?” Shock made Violet’s neck turn rigid. “Our schooling’s paid for by grandfather. You’re going to take what he sends and run off to Paris with it?”

Mother made a face. “Don’t be Miss Prim about it. It’s not like it’s a crime. And he never has to know, does he? Besides, who wants to go to dreary old school when they could be on a beach in Monte Carlo? Skiing in the Alps?”

Violet dug her nails into her palms. Beside her, Sadie swayed toward their mother, already sold on the fantasy Mother was painting a picture of endless summers and family sports. Violet knew better. Their parents would never take them skiing. Or to the beach. They would shop and throw parties, yes. But Paris would turn out the way everything did, sloshing with gin and nasty fights. Disgust would edge its way into their voices. Papa would lose money at cards and then—after a snarling fight—Mother would hit the tables and lose even more.

Her heart broke for Sadie who knew this pattern perfectly well, but longed for things to be different. Violet longed for it, too, but she accepted the way things were. She’d found her relief at school, first at Emma Willard, then at Smith. School was the sanctuary. At college, everything was predictable. Substance beat out flash. Work was praised, not sneered at. The other women were serious scholars, and they respected conviction and determination. They treasured the same things Violet did.

A landslide of boulders pummeled her stomach as she pushed a hand against the wall. “I don’t want to go to Paris.” Her voice shook. “I’m sorry, Mother. I want to finish my year at Smith. I want my diploma.”

Even if I have to work my way through, she thought, and take two years to pay my tuition, I’m not going to Paris.

Mother’s eyes darkened to slits. “Well, you are hateful.” Sticky drips of revulsion dribbled out of the word. Violet pressed her lips together, afraid of what her mother might do. Ban her from college out of spite? Throw a perfume bottle at her head? Steal Sadie away to Paris? It was all possible. Violet stood very still, every sense on alert, waiting for what would come at her.

--

The main floor loggia, like the one on the second floor, was one of Charlie’s favorite places. He could sit there, in the shade, and listen to the wind tickle the grass without venturing outside. To him, the loggia sounded close enough to the shore for the waves to roll right onto his feet, but people had told him a hundred-yard lawn separated the two.

Most of his days followed the same routine. He woke and did battle with the panic that choked him when he realized there would be no turning on of the lights. Having quelled the panic, he did his best to dress. When he’d returned home from France, his mother had suggested buying him suits of all the same color, and he’d brushed it off as a silly extravagance. Here at the Breakers, however, he understood her point. Was he wearing a blue tie with a black suit? Brown trousers with a gray jacket? That would be embarrassing, but it was nothing to the mess he probably made of his hair.

He did his best. After an early conference with Mr. Daniels, the butler, one of the footmen had been sent up to sort Charlie’s suits by color. As long as he was careful, he could avoid the worst blunders. He knotted his tie and felt it over. Then he left his room, turned right, walked nineteen steps to the top of the stairs, descended fourteen steps to the landing, six more (to the left), then left again for twenty more. That got him to the great hall (twenty-two steps by seventeen). From there, all rooms could be accessed if one had the patience.

Often, if he stood still, thinking, for long enough, one of the staff would happen by and offer to guide him to a seat somewhere. They were very kind, the staff. Far kinder in this way than the other guests. So far, he knew the two parlor maids, Mary and Anna, who were often in the main part of the house, Ethel who worked upstairs, Henry from the garage, and Mr. Daniels, who governed them all. Jacob, the same footman who’d helped sort his suits, arrived every afternoon to help Charlie shave. He could tell them each by voice—though he sometimes confused Ethel with Anna—and he liked to loiter near the kitchen just to hear their comfortable chatter. Mary and Anna kindly kept the gin coming.

The rest of the hours in the day were a tightrope walk between boredom and becoming so drunk he couldn’t walk up the stairs at the end of the night. Staying on that tightrope was something to think about, at least. And there were always the other guests to listen to, though their talk mainly circled the same flagpoles.

The difference, of course, had been her. Violet. The darkness he lived in had brightened a full shade during their talk on the loggia. This afternoon, in between searches for the elusive Mrs. Voldore, he’d practiced every ragtime tune he knew in hopes that the duets she’d mentioned would really happen. Every time he finished a piece, he lectured himself to not put too much stock in it. People were flighty. Who could blame them for not wanting to spend time with someone who couldn’t comb his hair properly? She would probably forget all about the duets. Or be sucked up into a card game or scavenger hunt or….one of the million other things he couldn’t do.