“Edith, you’ve returned to us! We thought we’d lost you to the gardens of France.”
As Edith offered her cheek to her hostess, Alice Vanderbilt, she tried to think if there was anything she would less rather do than dine at the Vanderbilt mansion on One West Fifty-Seventh Street. Walk on broken glass—stark naked? Reread The Wings of the Dove? She shivered. Alice and her late husband, Cornelius II, had built this 137-room monstrosity to outshine her sister-in-law Alva Vanderbilt’s château on 660 Fifth Avenue. The vast stone entry hall offered all the warmth and comfort of a mausoleum.
Tiny, imperious Alice Vanderbilt was dressed as she had been for the last twelve years: in black velvet and ropes of pearls that reached to her knees. The former Sunday school teacher had spent her life battling women bolder in their enjoyment of wealth and privilege than she. Now sixty-five, she did not often entertain on a grand scale, but when she did, you were expected.
Alice tilted her head to address Edith’s husband. “Teddy. You must stop Edith whipping you all over the globe like this.”
“So I keep telling her!” said Teddy, who could still play the part of a bluff old soul when required. Earlier that evening, as he dressed, Edith had seen from the set of his jaw, the way he moved fitfully from one room to the next, growing fretful over a missing handkerchief—he did not want the one in Irish linen, the linen was too rough; cotton from Turnbull & Asser, that was the one he needed. A mood was coming on. She could only hope they would survive the evening without incident.
She said, “Actually, Teddy is off on a world tour soon. I’m wildly envious.” Then, to distract from Teddy’s glower, she cried, “These flowers, Alice, I’m ravished!”
As she proceeded into the crowded salon, nodding here, smiling there, Edith understood that Alice’s question to Teddy had been more than a pleasantry; it was an inquiry: Why did he not have control of his wife? Had the Vanderbilt matriarch heard the gossip? Recently, Town Topics had made a sly reference to Walter’s visit to The Mount, Edith’s home in Lenox: “Edith Wharton and Walter Berry are the most devoted of friends. Selden, the hero in The House of Mirth, is said to be an accurate picture of him.” Alice would certainly hear the sneer behind devoted.
Which was why Edith had felt it necessary that she and Teddy make a public appearance. Now she imagined her reception if she had arrived alone. No longer Mrs. Edith Wharton, but the woman who left poor Teddy flat. The things people would say—never to her face, of course. The hostesses who would tut before striking her from the list. In every room she entered, the hum of surprise and slither of whispers—My dear, you invited her? The greetings seemingly the same, pressed hands, the brush of cheek on cheek. But then the escape, planned well in advance. Must have a word with … we’ll talk later. Over and over until she stood alone, smiling reassuringly at all those who longed to talk to her but somehow couldn’t get free.
Everyone knew: She had suffered. Everyone also knew: The blame was not Teddy’s alone. Well, it must be said, she imagined them saying, she is a selfish woman.
Imperious, cold, demanding—the adjectives would flow, washing away Teddy’s every fault until people wondered how on earth he had put up with her all these years.
As a couple, she and Teddy were often invited by the Vanderbilts as specimens of old New York or else “bohemians,” to show the host had a dash of culture. Somehow, it always ended in disaster. She would never forget the night Cornelius had banged on the door of her guest room at the old Breakers in Newport to say there was a “small” fire. An hour later, they were standing in the snow, watching flames leap from the Newport cottage until it collapsed to charred wood and ash. Then there was the summer when she had been a lunch guest of Alva’s when that gorgon was trying to ensnare the Duke of Marlborough for her hapless daughter, Consuelo—a union so ill-omened, Edith felt she had witnessed an event every bit as catastrophic as the Breakers fire. Once, in Newport, Alice’s useless son Reginald had taken her and Teddy for a spin in his new Renault, and someone had thrown a rock at them. “Some of them,” drawled Reggie, “don’t like us round here.”
But now she was pleased to see one of her favorite Vanderbilts, George, examining the atrocious family portraits that lined the wall. Taking her husband by the arm, she called, “George—will they never finish renovating poor Grand Central Station? Your brother must be beside himself.”
Slender with large, heavy-lidded eyes and a resplendent dark mustache, George was one of the more handsome members of the family. Amused, he said, “I don’t know how much running of the railroad Willie does these days. It might interfere with the Grand Prix or America’s Cup. The poor fellow barely has time to tell the newspapers that money doesn’t make you happy.”
He nodded to a vivacious redhead who was chattering away to a tall, stone-faced young man. “But tonight you witness a miracle. Alice has permitted her much loathed daughter-in-law into her home.”
Years ago, Alice and Cornelius had furiously opposed the match between their son Neily and the socially ambitious Grace, formerly of the “marrying Wilsons.” Their presence here tonight was, indeed, miraculous, and Edith was about to say so when she was interrupted by a man speaking quite loudly to alert people to his presence. Edith examined him with distaste. There was no hair on his smooth, gleaming dome, but the snow-white mutton chops were resplendent. His keen blue eyes were topped with brows that resembled eagle’s wings.
He seemed vaguely familiar, and she said so to George. “That’s our senator, Chauncey Depew,” he told her. “You met him at Biltmore that Christmas years ago. Shall I reacquaint you?”
Edith’s first instinct was to say no. She remembered the gathering fondly enough; it had been 1905, her year of triumph with The House of Mirth. But she remembered the senator as the sort who squeezed one’s hands too hard and looked over one’s shoulder as he spoke to you.
Then she saw that Teddy was gazing at the ceiling as if wondering what it was doing all the way up there.
“That would be delightful. Teddy?”
As they approached, Alice said, “Ah, here are the Whartons returned from their travels.”
“How do you find the city, after so long away?” the senator demanded of Teddy.
“Much changed,” said Edith smoothly. “But I suppose New York is too young a city to settle.”
“Too young,” he boomed, snatching the subject of the city and its evolution from her. “Too vital. Too dynamic! No, you mustn’t ever expect to leave New York and find it the same when you return.”
“Mrs. Wharton writes novels,” said Alice to explain Edith’s strange propensity for opinions.
George said to the senator, “On the subject of change, I understand from the newspapers that you are considering retirement.”
Edith saw the slightest crack in the bright veneer before the senator answered, “Yes, like an old gladiator, I shall quit the arena someday.”
Alice put a fond hand on the old retainer’s arm. “We shan’t let you.”
Eyes twinkling on cue, the senator said, “Well, we shall see. The workings of politics can be strange indeed. Especially in Albany!”
Then he indicated the ungainly dark-haired gentleman who had been held captive by Grace. “May I present my son, Chauncey Depew Jr.”
The junior Depew sidled over. He had his father’s bushy brows, but none of his panache. His height gave him a sad Gulliver look, making him seem a monstrosity among the normally sized. He seemed to know it, standing with his shoulders hunched, his head lowered as if he hoped to take up less space.
“Fine fellow,” said the senator. “In my dotage, I rely on him more and more.” He clapped his progeny on the shoulder. The young man cringed.
A butler, in powdered wig and maroon velvet knee breeches, announced that dinner was served. As they followed Alice and the senator in, Edith whispered to George, “Do you know this new scent? Hair oil and halitosis, they call it l’air Depew.” He laughed.
The dining room had been changed since she was last here. The stained glass ceiling had been removed, and the room was now smaller. Edith vividly remembered an endless dinner of seven courses where she and Walter sought to identify the most egregiously awful picture in the room. Edith had given the prize to a painting of a leering cow, while Walter argued in favor of a tree that looked like nothing in nature. Over dessert of flambéed peaches, they had proposed a Bad Art Show, for which Alice would be asked to loan much of her collection.
Now she noticed that Alice had placed Teddy close to her at the head of the table, whereas she, Edith, was much lower down with the morose younger Depew and Reggie, who was regaling guests with stories of his latest racing triumph. When the footman set consommé en tasse before her, Edith thought the little cup of broth might be her most diverting companion of the evening.
Then she rallied. Perhaps she had been put with the dullards to spice up the conversation. When the footman whisked away the first course, replacing it with filet de boeuf jardinier, she took a small bite, then said to the glowering Depew Jr., “The beef is very good, don’t you think? They haven’t overdone it. I find that so often these days, beef is overcooked.”
This got a grunt. The beef gambit having failed, Edith tried a different approach.
Neatly slicing up her asparagus, she said, “I met such an irritating man this afternoon. A writer. The prophet type. Harangue, harangue. Apparently, he sells well, but if his work is anything like his conversation…”
She sighed merrily, inviting young Depew to join in her dislike of writers with faddy politics. He gazed at her, unmoved.
“David Graham Phillips,” she tried. “Very black hair, intense eyes that bore into you. I felt like a sinner in the front pew of some hideously strict church.”
A flicker of something in the eye. “David Graham Phillips,” he repeated. “The writer.”
“Yes!” Relieved to have some reaction, she said, “Apparently, he’s about to publish some huge novel. Been working on it for ages. Explosive, explosive! Will expose the hypocrisy and evils of … well, everything, I suppose, those novels usually do.”
Clutching her knife in her fist, she pronounced, “He means to tell the truth!”
“Are you making a joke?”
If he were smiling, it would be a return of conversational serve. But he was not smiling.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said: Are you making a joke?”
It was not a question, she realized, but a sort of … threat. As she tried to figure out why on earth this awkward person she had known for half an hour would threaten her, she became aware of the tinkling sound of a glass being tapped; a toast was underway. Distracted, she looked up the length of the table. The senator was speaking—how ironic, she thought, to be relieved by that. But the private joke didn’t help. Unnerved, she kept her eyes firmly fixed on the senior Depew, determined not to face the younger man again.
When the senator had finished, she heard Reggie ask the young Depew if it were true that it cost $100,000 to join the state legislature and half a million to become a senator. There was no malice in Reggie’s slack walrus face; he hadn’t the wit to know his question might offend. Edith waited. Would Depew demand to know if he was making a joke, in that monotonous voice?
But no. He had turned in his chair and was now stammering his way through an answer. Politicians were not bought, he explained, but public service cost money. Reggie, he assured his host, would be astonished by the expenses: travel, mail, staff. And that was only a few of the difficulties. Even for someone as admired as his father, there were always … unforeseen obstacles to be dealt with.
As he spoke, the younger Depew’s manner was earnest, even humble, and Edith realized: He was not particularly terrifying. Just an awkward man caught in the hell of dinner conversation. He was an oaf, she decided. That was all. Oafs were always unnerving.
It was also possible he had heard her joke about his name. And not found it funny. Which was fair enough.
Turning to Grace Vanderbilt, she asked which brand of cigarettes her guests favored and could she recommend a florist—the suite at Belmont was desperately dreary. Then she looked at the clock and thought, Dear God, how much longer?