Newport, Rhode Island
July 1957
Lucky wished for a lot of things that Thursday morning—a cool breeze, a dozen extra pairs of hands, the world’s largest gin and tonic—but most of all she wished the damn ball were over already.
The stage for the orchestra was now finished. The carpenters had just left, sweating from the terrible heat, and it looked pretty good, all things considered, covered by a giant striped awning so as to keep the musicians dry in the likely event of a summer squall. Lucky lifted her bangs from her brow and stared down the lawn to the Chinese teahouse and the blue ocean beyond, hanging motionless under the hot sky. To her left, chairs and tables were spread in stacks across the stone terrace, to be set up on the lawn at the last minute Saturday. To her right, Prunella Potts stood beneath a parasol and criticized the carpenters’ work.
“In my day, tradesmen took pride in their craft. They certainly weren’t in and out in a single morning.” She paused to sniff the air like a beagle. “Is that pine?”
“It’s only a temporary stage, Mrs. Potts. They’re coming back to take it down on Sunday.”
“If it doesn’t tumble apart before then. And it’s so bare and ugly, so unsuited to an elegant occasion like this.”
“I couldn’t agree more, Mrs. Potts. In fact, since you feel so strongly about it, perhaps you can help me fasten on the decorations. See those piles of pink chiffon? They’re going in swags all around the edge of the stage, and then we can set the flower arrangements where the—”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand,” said Prunella. “Doesn’t Mrs. Prince have help to do that kind of thing?”
“They’re all busy getting the indoors spic-and-span.”
“Well! In my day we hired enough people to do the cleaning and the decorations. It’s really unseemly, the way these new matrons run their households. So devoid of style and taste. Really, as I’ve often said, if you can’t afford the upkeep, you shouldn’t buy the house to begin with.” Prunella lowered her parasol and cast a critical eye over the endless marble walls and columns, the windows upon windows, everything gleaming in the sunshine. “Mortgaged to the hilt, I’m sure.”
“I don’t think it’s a question of money, Mrs. Potts. People just don’t live that way anymore, like princes. My God, who wants to be a servant these days? When you can make a decent wage and live in your own place.”
Prunella turned to Lucky and stabbed her parasol into the air between them. “You see? That’s the trouble, right there. The lower classes think they’re too good for an honest day’s labor.”
Lucky sighed and made for one of the piles of pink chiffon. Her dress stuck to her back, her hair stuck to her face. “And when was the last time you did an honest day’s labor, Prunella Potts?” she muttered.
“What’s that? What did you say?”
“Nothing!” Lucky carried an armful of chiffon toward the stage and cast around for the tacks and the slender hammer she’d brought with her from Sprague Hall earlier that morning. A moment ago, the terrace had been practically swarming with members of the committee, chattering, brandishing their clipboards, sipping from tall, sweaty glasses of gin and tonic as they watched the men pound away with their hammers. Now everyone had scurried to the cool marble shelter indoors, leaving Lucky alone to tack up the pink chiffon bunting under the fierce sun.
She discovered the hammer under a pile of chiffon and the tacks in the pocket of her pink gingham sundress and started to work. A tune rose in her throat. That was the Italian in her, Stuy used to say—she’d grown up with music, her entire childhood had been set to a never-ending score of snatches of song. Actually, she didn’t mind the task so much. Something about the hammering, the repetitive movement, the neat, even, pretty swags of pink chiffon that draped from her fingers, all combined to settle her fractious nerves. Without realizing it, she sang louder. There was nobody to hear her, after all—no Stuy, no Nonna, no Joanie, no crummy Dudley Sprague from his crummy vindictive deathbed, no sharp-eared members of the committee in their pastel dresses, no—
A flattened demicircle of shade slipped over her shoulder. “That tune,” Prunella Potts said softly.
Lucky whirled and clapped her hand over her mouth, nearly bludgeoning herself with the hammer. “I’m sorry! I didn’t realize you were still there!”
The fringes of the parasol shimmered around Prunella’s head. A strange light flickered in her blue eyes, the color of Delft china. “I know that tune. Your grandmother used to sing it.”
“I guess so. She sang a lot of things.”
“No! I mean before you were born.” Prunella snapped the parasol shut and stabbed the terrace with it. “Here in Newport. The summer your grandparents met.”
“You were there? You knew them?”
“Of course I knew them. I knew everybody. I married a Schuyler, don’t you know?” Prunella cackled. “Everybody wanted me. Not that they don’t want me now, of course. But in those days, well. Nothing like this ramshackle society today. We had real money then. Real houses and real servants and the parties, oh! This is nothing.” Prunella waved her arm to the stage, the stacks of chairs and tables.
“Well, times have changed,” Lucky said. “They always do.”
Prunella’s voice turned almost dreamlike. “Did you know that at Alva Vanderbilt’s ball for the Duke of Marlborough, Hodgkins created this—this bronze fountain in the main hall of this very house, with lotuses and water lilies and what have you all floating inside. Hummingbirds. And that was just the centerpiece. Oh, I can still picture it. The floral arrangements . . .” Prunella snapped back to Lucky. “That was before Sprague Hall was even built, of course. When the Spragues were still nobodies, and no one thought to marry off poor Maybelle to some Italian prince.”
“As it happens,” said Lucky, who’d heard the stories about the Marlborough ball a thousand times, “they were very happy together.”
“Ha! That’s what you think. Her first choice was my cousin Frank.”
“Frank? Frank who?”
“Frank Pratt, of course! Oh, they were madly in love that summer. Everybody talked about it. Your grandfather was wildly jealous. He practically kidnapped poor Maybelle away. Ravished her, I’m sure. You know these Italians.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Lucky said. “They were in love.”
Prunella lifted her parasol and spread it out. A smirk turned the corners of her mouth. “I suppose she had no choice, being ravished by an Italian.”
Lucky tried to imagine her grandfather ravishing anybody and shuddered. “I really think you’re mistaken, Mrs. Potts. Nonna never mentioned anybody named Frank, and she certainly never loved anybody except my grandfather.”
“Didn’t she? She was supposed to elope with Frank that night, not the prince. Frank told me himself. Maybelle agreed to meet him at the boathouse and sail away together. I saw him before he left. He was so thrilled, so happy. So in love. And she jilted him.”
Lucky set the hammer carefully on the stage. “Did you say the boathouse? They were supposed to meet at the boathouse?”
“Yes. Frank was an expert sailor, you know. He would have done anything for her.” Prunella turned her head and stared out to sea. “Poor, poor Frank.”
Lucky stuck her hands in her pockets so Prunella wouldn’t see her fingers shaking. “Poor Frank? My goodness. What happened to him?”
Prunella looked back at her. Her blue eyes turned to ice. “Why don’t you ask your grandmother? Although I doubt she remembers such inconsequential details as her former lovers.”
Lucky was too astonished to speak. The venom in Prunella’s voice struck her dumb. My God, where did it come from? What had Lucky ever done to Prunella Potts, other than consider her a silly, vain, old-fashioned woman—a fact she always kept scrupulously to herself.
Even Prunella seemed to realize she’d overstepped. Her hard expression softened; her icy eyes melted back into their usual vacant blue. She gave her parasol a sharp little twirl.
“Dear me, the time. I must go speak to Mrs. Prince about the—”
“Lucky! There you are. I should’ve known you’d be outside doing all the work.”
Lucky turned in the direction of Teddy’s voice, which emerged through the French doors—along with Teddy himself—in a gust of cool air from the marble halls. She grinned in relief.
“Am I glad to see you.”
“Not half as glad as I am to see you. Say, you look like you could use a drink.” From behind his back, Teddy produced two tall, clear, bubbling glasses, each topped with a delicate slice of lime.
Lucky clapped her hands together. “You darling!”
“If you’ll excuse me,” said Prunella, sweeping past, “it seems I am de trop.”
Teddy craned his neck to watch her depart. “What was that about?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. Some ridiculous fantasy about a love affair between my grandmother and a cousin of hers, sixty years ago.” Lucky shrugged and clinked her glass against Teddy’s. “You really are a darling. I’ve been dreaming about one of these for the past hour. Oops, hold on.”
“What’s the matter?”
Carefully Lucky slid the eyeglasses from the bridge of his nose and wiped away the fog from the lenses with the handkerchief from his jacket pocket. “Does this always happen to you when it’s hot outside?”
“Only when I’m around you.”
“You’re awfully frisky today. Something in the air?” Lucky wriggled the glasses back on his face and lifted the drink to her lips. For some reason, her heart was hammering.
“You’re going to get a terrible sunburn, working out here alone,” Teddy said.
Lucky snapped her fingers. “All my committee members mysteriously vanished into thin air, as soon as the hammers came out.”
“You’re saying you could use a hand?”
“If it wouldn’t wound your male vanity to hang swags of pink chiffon.”
Teddy grinned his wolfish grin and set down his glass on the edge of the stage. “Hand me that hammer, will you? I guess my vanity can take a hit or two for a good cause.”
In less than an hour, the pink bunting hung in perfect swags all around the edge of the orchestra stage, and Lucky dripped with heat and exhaustion. Even Teddy wiped his brow with a linen handkerchief and folded it neatly back in his pocket. He looked at Lucky and lifted an eyebrow. “I could do with another cool drink.”
“Me too.”
“I’ll tell you what. You head on over to the teahouse and put up those lovely feet of yours in the shade and the sea breeze, and I’ll mix us something fresh to quench the flames. Have we got a deal?”
Lucky smiled at his damp, rosy face. “Deal.”
Teddy picked up the empty glasses and disappeared through the French doors into the house. Humming to herself, Lucky gathered the hammers and the remaining tacks and dumped them back in her canvas bag. It was now past noon, and the air had taken on that heavy, sticky stillness that promised thunderstorms. She glanced at the sky—hazy blue, no sign yet of the familiar cumulonimbus bruising the horizon to the west.
But that was the trouble with thunderstorms. You never saw them coming.
Lucky slung the bag over her shoulder and crossed the lawn to the teahouse. She’d only once been inside it, when the Princes held a garden party the previous year. Or was it the year before? Socializing in Newport was such a blur, the same old parties summer after summer, the same faces, the same conversations. At least this ball would be different. Bigger, brighter, dazzling. They’d talk about this for years, wouldn’t they, and every last chitchat would lead to it somehow—It was the same summer as the Tiffany Ball, or That was a couple of years after the Tiffany Ball. And as much as Lucky grumbled about the committee ladies and the endless logistics and the hammering of pink chiffon under a hot sun, it wasn’t so bad to be part of something like this, was it? Not so bad to spend a few hours a day immersed in something other than her poisonous in-laws, her broken marriage, her Nonna slipping away bit by bit.
She hurried up the steps and under the shelter of the tiled roof with its snarling dragons. Inside, the air was blissfully cool. What slight breeze came off the ocean today seemed to channel through the open doors and windows and wash everything clean. Lucky drew in a deep breath and listened for voices. Only the faint crash of the ocean interrupted the stillness around her. She gazed out to sea for a moment, enjoying the peace, the anticipation of Teddy’s arrival with a pair of gin and tonics. Maybe her stomach fluttered a little, who knew. She set down the bag on the dark wooden floor and sat on one of the benches set against the walls. Well. She only meant to sit, but as soon as she’d eased herself down, she couldn’t help but swing up her legs and settle herself back, hands knit across her belly. The ocean whispered in her ear, the breeze whispered across her skin. Her eyelids fell.
“Working hard, I see?”
Lucky bolted upright. “Stuy! What are you doing here?”
Her husband stood right where the empty breeze had flown an instant ago—or was it a moment? Had she fallen asleep? Tall and glowering and puffy, his hair lank and tousled, his arms crossed over his chest. Because of the light streaming behind him, she couldn’t see his face, but she felt his anger like a gust of hot wind.
“I was going to ask the same of you!” he snapped. “Woke up this morning to the house in uproar, Louise and Reggie complaining about some goddamn thing, breakfast gone cold or something, Joanie’s screaming in my ear about Nonna. And that’s another thing, that damn grandmother of yours, I’ve had it—”
Lucky stood. “Don’t you say a word about Nonna—”
“You’ve got to face facts, Lucky—”
“We are not having this conversation!”
“She went down to the damn boathouse again, singing and muttering like a lunatic! It’s time, Lucky, I can’t take it anymore—”
“We are not putting Nonna in some institution! It would kill her!”
He threw out a fist against the thick wooden column. “Then you had damn well better stop lazing the day away in a damn pagoda and come back to your house and take care of her! And your daughter, and your houseguests. And while you’re at it, you might think about taking care of your husband once in a while!”
“Take care of you? All I ever do is take care of you and Joanie! And whoever else drives in and sets up under our roof!”
“Are you talking about my sister? Your own sister-in-law?”
“She doesn’t lift a finger while she’s here, you know she doesn’t, just moans and complains and makes work for poor Angela—”
“All the more reason you should come home and take charge of things.”
“You might take charge of things yourself once in a while, you know! It’s not like you have some big important job to do!”
“What does that mean? What are you saying? You’re saying I’m some kind of bum?”
“I’m just saying you’re not helpless without me. You don’t need me taking care of you every single minute—”
“Well, if you’re sick of it, just say so! Believe me, I don’t want to hang around where I’m not wanted.”
“Of course you’re wanted. Of course I—oh, damn it, Stuy.” Lucky ran a hand through her damp hair. “I’ve been working all morning in this awful heat, all alone—the committee members left on me—I’m hot and exhausted. I just took a single minute to lie down and cool off—”
But Stuy wasn’t looking at her. He was looking over her shoulder, toward the entrance. Face slack with shock.
Lucky turned. Teddy stood in the doorway, holding a pair of tall glasses, topped with lime. He cleared his throat. “Stuy. Nice to see you. I was just bringing your wife a cool drink.”
“So I see.”
“It’s a scorcher, all right. We’ve been working on the decorations—”
“Funny,” said Stuy. “My wife told me she’d been working all alone.”
“Well, she was working all alone, until I stumbled on her a little while ago. Helped her finish up before she wilted.” Teddy held out one of the glasses. “Gin and tonic?”
“No, thanks.” Stuy looked at Lucky, and the expression on his face struck her like a blow. “I’ll just leave you two to get on with the decorating.”
Lucky reached for his arm. “Stuy—”
“Don’t bother.” He shrugged her off. “What’s good for the goose, right? Believe me, I’m not going to cry alone into a glass of milk.”
“Stuy, wait—”
“When you’re done in here, Lucky, you might want to go check on your nonna. Make sure she hasn’t snuck off to the boathouse again and drowned herself.”
“Damn it, Stuy!”
But he was already out the door, striding up the cliff path back toward Sprague Hall. Lucky stood there helplessly, watching him appear and disappear through the succession of doorways and windows, until he was gone.
“You should go after him,” Teddy said quietly.
“Maybe I should.”
Behind her came a deep sigh. “I’m sorry, Lucky. I’m a heel. Go after him, talk to him—”
“I don’t want to go after him. I don’t want to talk to him.” Lucky turned. “I’ve gone after him enough. I’ve talked myself hoarse.”
“He’s your husband, and I’m in the way. It’s not fair, what I’m doing.”
“What are you doing, Teddy? Tell me. What are you doing with me?”
Teddy rubbed his thumb into the skin above his right elbow. The condensation from the glass rolled down the back of his hand. He looked out to sea and back again to Lucky.
“I’m in love with you, Lucky. You know that. I’ve been in love with you for years. Making excuses to see you, talk to you. Pretending what I feel—what I say, what I dream—telling myself it’s all just innocent, just some harmless neighborly flirtation. But you know and I know . . . oh God. If you only knew, Lucky. If you only knew what a hairsbreadth keeps me from—”
Lucky covered the ground between them so quickly, he didn’t have time to set down the drinks. They crashed to the floor when his arms closed around her, when her mouth landed on his. She kissed him as hard as she could, ferocious as a tiger, and when she pulled back, he gasped for air.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
For a second or two, Teddy stared down at her, and for the life of her she couldn’t tell what he was thinking. What he meant to do. His eyes were sharp and blue behind his glasses, his lips were pink from the pressure of her kiss. His skin was flushed, too, but maybe that was just the heat.
“You’re right,” he said at last. “You shouldn’t have done that. And I shouldn’t do this, either.”
Teddy gathered her up and kissed her back, more ferocious than she’d kissed him, and at that precise moment a crash of thunder split apart the sky, and the first raindrops drummed against the tiles above them.
Within seconds, the deluge had begun.