THIRTY-FIVE
BEATRICE
New York City
November 1916
America might still be neutral, but New York City decidedly was not. After the explosion, no one with a modicum of good sense was willing to repeat President Wilson’s inane mantra that America was too proud to fight. And even without an elephant, I was able to lure more than fifteen thousand people to the Allied Ball.
From the hoity-toity of Manhattan to jazz musicians from Harlem, everyone turned out, and I encouraged the audience’s applause for the uniformed Gurkhas and sepoys. It was a world war, after all. Men from India fought alongside the French, Belgian, English, Scottish, Irish, Canadian, Russian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and more. They all deserved our praise. And I hoped the roar of the crowd could be heard all the way from Madison Square Garden to the White House.
After the pageantry followed an evening of dancing, and I awarded an automobile to the lady with the best costume. (I took my dazzling ensemble of Indian sari silk out of the running, because who could compete with me?) I’d raised piles of money, and now my dressing room was filled with bouquets. Bitter-scented marigolds from the reporter Mitzi Miller . . . well, now this was war. I’d be forced to retaliate by penning an ebullient handwritten note of thanks accompanied by a bone-dry fruitcake.
The red roses were from Willie.
I threw them in the trash.
I hadn’t returned his calls since the car accident. I had, in fact, spent the better part of the past two months avoiding him.
You’re all right, sweetheart, you’re all right, it’s just a little glass . . .
I closed my eyes, forcing away the memories of the summer, the screams, the crash. Had it all been a terrifying rush that way for Victor before his plane hit the ground? Killed instantly, they said, but now I wondered. Perhaps that’s what Willie had been wondering, just before he drove us into that tree.
I shook my head, pulling jeweled combs from my hair. As long as I kept busy, I could keep bad memories at bay. Fortunately, I had plenty to keep me occupied. I’d moved out of the hotel. My new doll shop on Madison Avenue was doing brisk business as Christmas shoppers readied for the holidays, and I was sending the proceeds overseas for Emily, Clara, and Marie-Louise to use for the benefit of refugee children. I’d also recently received formal thanks from French generals on the front lines, to whom we’d sent more than seventy thousand more Lafayette kits. With the success of the Allied Ball, I’d be sending more.
I certainly had more important things to do than listen to Willie fail to apologize for the hundredth time. Yet when I returned to my town house that night, I found him there, just where I least wanted him to be. Somehow he’d managed, with his crutches, to get to the top of the stairs. Now he sat waiting for me by the fire. “The boys are asleep,” he said.
“I should hope so, given the hour.”
Willie cleared his throat.
You’re just a little banged up, darling, nothing serious . . .
I closed my eyes, reminding myself that though the car was damaged, and Ashley’s toy plane was smashed to pieces, the boys had come away from the crash with nary a scrape. My cuts were minor too. And by some miracle, my husband hadn’t been hurt at all.
I’d have to be an ogre to wish more pain upon the man, which is why I hadn’t told him that it wasn’t just cuts that bled after the accident . . . I’d awakened to cramping, spotting, and a devastating sadness. The doctor later told me that it was impossible to know if I’d been pregnant, but he doubted it very much due to my age, and that in any case, it might be better to avoid pregnancy given my declining health. Thyroid and cardiovascular abnormalities, he said. Something about how unusual such a condition was in a woman of my wealth and status—such ailments sometimes being the product of childhood starvation.
Well, I wasn’t shocked.
He insisted that I get rest or my life might be cut short. But I could sleep when I was dead. As Victor said, We have so short a time to make our lives mean anything. Besides, when you grow up as I did, you don’t expect to live long. Still, something struck me about the diagnosis.
Cardiovascular abnormalities?
Well, I did have a broken heart. I found myself wondering if another child would have brought Willie and me closer together. He was hard on our boys, but a little girl with my blue eyes might have melted him. Now we’d never know. And I couldn’t even bring myself to share with him the pain of it.
Tonight he was clean-shaven, tie neat. His smart appearance was meant to prove he wasn’t drunk. “You’re looking well, Bea,” he said, reaching for my hand as if to examine it for lingering bruises.
I could’ve told him there weren’t any. None of the physical variety. “It’s late, Willie.” My voice was frosty. I didn’t like to be this way. And I didn’t feel like I had a right to be. Yes, he’d crashed the car, but he’d been drunk. What was my excuse? I got into that car with him. I let my children get in that car. Looking at Willie now reminded me of every bad decision I’d ever made in my life—every opportunity I’d wasted or taken for granted.
“I know it’s late . . .” Willie said quietly. “If I could wait until morning to say what I’ve come to say, I would.”
My heart seized as I realized that he might have bad news. “My God, is it Emily?”
“It’s Lafayette’s birthplace. I’m going to buy it for you.”
Having braced for horror, I was entirely unprepared for joy. “What?”
“It’s a castle in the mountains of Auvergne—”
“The castle at Chavaniac is for sale?”
Willie nodded. “I’ve made inquiries. With the war, the descendants can’t maintain it. They’re reluctant to sell to someone outside the family, but they’re looking for a reason to part with it. They’re aware of your work at the Lafayette Fund and—”
“You want to buy me a castle,” I said. “Lafayette’s castle.”
Willie stared at his hands. “It’s no more than you deserve. I know how you grew up. How it left you feeling like you were on the wrong side of the gate, clamoring to get in. When we married, I really did want to fix that for you . . .” He risked a glance at me. “I still do.”
My heart filled with more emotions than I could name. He wasn’t the sort of man who knew how to apologize, but he was making a grand gesture. This was his way. And as far as grand gestures went . . . this was the grandest.
I was an illegitimate child of a bog Irish mother who started with nothing. And though Willie was American royalty, he hadn’t cared about that. He’d given me a new start. He’d helped me support my mother and half brothers—the ones I scarcely knew. He’d given me everything. And now he wanted to make me the fairy-tale princess of a castle.
Not just any castle either. The legacy of the Lafayettes had come to mean a great deal to me, and he wanted to give me a real, tangible connection to it. It was a terribly foolish, expensive, and impractical idea that could not have been better calculated to soften my heart! But what would I do with an old French chateau in the midst of a war? I couldn’t accept.
How to break it to him gently? “Willie, do you mean for us to live at Chavaniac? Because otherwise, it’d seem somehow disrespectful to transform it into just another place to throw parties.”
He leaned back like a man rejected. “Make it into a museum, for all I care.”
A museum? That too seemed like an impractical thing to think about during a war, but maybe if people had learned the lessons of the past, the war wouldn’t have come about in the first place. I knew monuments to kings and conquerors veritably littered the French countryside, but I was aware of only a few memorials for Lafayette—the hero who set the French on a path to becoming the republic they were now dying in trenches to defend.
I gripped Willie’s arm. “A museum is a marvelous idea.”
My husband’s expression warred between confusion, irritation, and surprise. He hadn’t made the suggestion with any seriousness, but seemed happy that I was happy. “A museum?”
“Yes!” I felt something growing in the hollow place inside me—a new creation we might conceive together. Something other than our children that might outlive us both. “It could be a museum to the alliance of democracies. Even if France, Britain, and America don’t always agree, we share a history of ideals worth fighting for.”
And perhaps it wasn’t the only alliance that could be reinvigorated . . .
Willie squinted, and I could almost think his thoughts. It was one thing to buy me real estate. An investment. Something he could sell if times got hard. I was suggesting the wholesale donation to charity, which made it all the more touching that he didn’t dismiss the idea out of hand. Just to please me, he was actually considering the monumental folly of buying this chateau with his own money only to turn it into a public museum. So I let him off the hook. “We’ll start an international subscription. Create a foundation. Recruit contributors. No need to bankrupt our children.”
My husband exhaled in relief before his sense of competitiveness kicked in. “We’ll have to move swiftly and bargain in person before someone buys it out from under us. I’ll go to France to arrange it before the winter makes a crossing even more dangerous than it already is.”
This was a rare and important opportunity that might never come again—too exciting for me to quibble about any ulterior motives. It was worth the risk, which is why I said, “I’m going with you.”
On a cold blustery day, as our trunks were being loaded into our ship bound for France, our son Billy asked, “Why c-can’t we come with you to see Lafayette’s castle?”
“It’s not safe,” my husband barked, unsteady with his crutch. I shot him a warning look, for we’d been quarreling about this for days, but he was too drunk to heed me. “The sea is riddled with mines, not to mention submarines waiting to torpedo ships, and yet your mother insists on risking her life.”
Until recently, Willie had somehow convinced himself that I didn’t really mean to go. For the past few weeks, we’d worked together to raise, almost overnight, a veritable fortune to buy Lafayette’s birthplace. We’d thrown ourselves into the venture, enjoying every minute of it. It had been quite like the old days—a reminder that we could move mountains together if we tried. But when Willie learned I’d booked passage with him to France, he’d lapsed into drunken fury, telling me it was a mother’s place to stay with her children.
I might’ve excused his behavior as romantic chivalry if only he’d refrained from mentioning mines and torpedoes in front of the boys. Now he’d frightened our children, and I felt consumed by a fury of my own. “Oh, you mustn’t worry about us,” I hastened to reassure the boys. “We’ll be gone only a few weeks, and by then you’ll be back at your boarding school with all your friends, having too much fun to miss us. In the meantime, the governess will spoil you with every sort of candy, and I shall not be any the wiser!”
Unfortunately, my boys were both too old now to be distracted this way. They knew Mr. Vanderbilt had died making this same crossing, which is why we now owned the hotel. The dangers of war had become painfully real when their cousin Victor had been shot down. Now Ashley quietly sobbed against my side, and Billy pleaded with us not to go.
Since there was no way to convince my sons there was no danger, I decided it was wrong to try. Like Minnie, they would have to face, sooner or later, that life was full of partings, and that none of us was ever truly safe. “You must be very brave, my darlings. Your father and I are doing something important that we hope you may one day be quite proud of.”
I didn’t want to teach my children that safety was more important than duty or honor, so we left our boys on that dock, my heart breaking to see them wiping away tears. Only once we were under way did I whirl on Willie. “You frightened them. Worse, I suspect you did it on purpose.” My husband had never made me so angry. “You’re drunk, but that doesn’t excuse you from terrifying our children just to try to force me to stay behind.”
Willie punched a frustrated fist against the crutch that reminded him of his incapacity. “I’d have locked you in a bloody closet if I could have. A father has a right to want to prevent his children from becoming orphans.”
The loss of his parents shaped his life—just as being fatherless had shaped mine. That pain once drew us together, and remembering it should’ve softened me, but I was too angry. “Then maybe you should’ve stayed behind.”
After all, since the amputation of his leg, I was now the more physically capable, though I wasn’t cruel enough to point it out.
“The boys can do without me,” he said. “They can’t do without a mother. Even one so reckless as you.”
“Willie, when we quarrel like this, you make me wonder if our loss at sea would be no great loss at all to our boys or to the world. And you nearly make me wish for oblivion.”
He grimaced, then positioned his crutch on the stairway to the upper deck. “I’m going up to see Forts Hamilton and Lafayette. Good view from up top.”
He’s going to fall, I thought, half wishing it in spite. I didn’t want to be around to pick him up, so I went belowdecks where, like worms, Willie’s words wriggled themselves into my mind and made me feel rotten. Maybe my presence in France wasn’t necessary, but I couldn’t be satisfied at the sidelines anymore, longing for Emily and trying not to pine for Maxime Furlaud. Especially knowing there was something wrong with my ticker, and that there might be fewer years left to me than anyone supposed. Resentful that my husband had made me face this unattractive inner truth, I kept away from him the first dark days of our voyage. Eventually, I found Willie in his stateroom, bathed in sweat and vomiting into a trash bin. “It’s nothing but seasickness,” he rasped.
“Seasickness? That’s rich.” The man who ran gunboats and took our yacht into a storm on our honeymoon had never been seasick a day in his life. Suspicious, I poured a glass of brandy. He refused it, which was the proof I was looking for. I knew things were bad between Willie and the bottle, but a perilous sea voyage was scarcely the time to go sober, and I told him so.
But with Willie, it was all or nothing. “I shouldn’t have frightened the boys. I didn’t mean to. So for you and for them, I’m giving up my life of drink and dissipation. I shall not touch a drop for a year.”
It should’ve made me happy, but I knew why he’d started drinking so heavily in the first place. What else could he take for the pain? “This journey is going to be difficult even without the well-meaning bravado of sobriety . . .”
“Damn you, woman, won’t you let me do anything to prove your happiness means more to me than my own?”
He spit this loving sentiment in my face with such cantankerousness that I didn’t know whether to press a pillow to his face or a kiss to his brow. “Oh, Willie,” I said, laughing at the absurdity of it all. And in that moment, I loved him, hated him, and everything in between.
I didn’t think he’d keep to his resolution not to drink, but for the rest of the trip, his force of will was something to behold. By the time we approached port, he emerged from his stateroom sober but limp as a noodle. “France at last,” I said, hardly believing it possible. It was painful to think that Victor would not be here. That he was forever young and gallant . . . and gone.
“We got past the Boche anyway,” Willie said with grim satisfaction.
“Don’t tempt fate.” The Lusitania, after all, had been sunk within sight of shore.
As it happened, our luck held with regard to submarines. In the matter of hats, I wasn’t so fortunate. “I’m sure they’re here somewhere,” I said, forcing the porters to search every nook and cranny of the steamer for my missing hatbox. I needed my ostrich cartwheel, my peacock tricorne, and my lacy sleeping caps! Surely it was bad luck to go ashore without them. How could I possibly entreat with the descendants of Lafayette to sell me Chavaniac while wearing a pedestrian straw peach basket?
Willie didn’t want to wait. “If we don’t get through customs quickly, we’ll miss the last train to Paris tonight. I’ll pay someone to keep looking for your hats. In the meantime, I imagine you’re eager to see your friends, and I’m rather anxious to meet them myself.”
He’d never been much interested in my friends before; to the contrary, he tended to be jealous of my relationship with any person of truly interesting character, male or female. So this was a campaign, I realized. The chateau, the sobriety, the bonhomie. Willie was trying to win me back the way he’d once won a seat in Congress: by sheer force of will.
And I was willing to let him try.
Emily was out of her head with joy to see me in Paris. She embraced me so tightly that I felt her baby kick, and I scolded her distended belly, “Is that any way to greet your aunt Beatrice?”
Inside Emily’s well-furnished flat, Marie-Louise LeVerrier was pouring tea, and Clara Simon lit a cigarette with a sigh of exhaustion. She didn’t look well; none of them did. Especially not Emily, who ought to have been glowing with the fullness of motherhood, but while I’d been fishing in Bar Harbor, she’d been up to her elbows in blood nursing soldiers, and worrying about her husband’s fantastically dangerous night flying missions. I felt keenly guilty for not being here with her.
“The war has taken a toll,” Marie-Louise said, explaining they’d already used the proceeds from my toy store. “Widows and spinsters and lost children all are in desperate straits. We do our best for one, then ten more appear.”
I hadn’t done enough in New York. Maybe I never could do enough . . . still, I was determined to try.
Emily said, “I made up the guest room. Please promise you’ll stay with me until the baby is born. I hope my child has good sense enough to wait on his father. The baron is trying to get leave for the holidays. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if he could be home for the birth of his son? At least I hope it will be a boy.”
Clara rolled her eyes. “There are reasons to be happy for a girl too . . .”
I agreed, but I wouldn’t have said so while blowing a contemptuous ring of smoke. Yet that was Clara’s way. With a disagreeable harrumph, Emily stirred her tea. “I should hate to be so American that I disregard my husband’s desire for a boy to inherit his title.” The baron seemed modern enough to welcome a healthy child, whatever its sex, but one never knew when it came to the French. “Besides, Clara, aren’t you always saying French wives will do anything to please their men?”
Clara smirked. “I never said it was a good thing!”
Marie-Louise asked about my plans to buy Lafayette’s birthplace, which I explained in great detail, holding them in my thrall. “The current marquis de Lafayette—or at least, the man who styles himself so—descends from the female line. He’s heard of the Lafayette Fund and is interested in selling the castle, but doesn’t want to sell over the objections of the rest of the family—most especially the Chambruns, one of whom is serving now at the front as a commandant in the artillery.”
“I know him,” said Clara.
“Well, I need to convince him. I don’t suppose you could help?”
Clara shook her head, then reminded me, “But you know someone else who can . . .”
Which is why, despite all my better judgment, I sent a cable to the front lines, for the eyes of Maxime Furlaud.