She Walks in Beauty (13 page)

“You haven’t?”

“No. I can’t dance.”

A lighter shade of pale swept her features. “You never, not once in your seventeen years, attended dancing school?”

I shook my head.

“Never?”

“No.”

“You can’t dance! What did Miss Miller teach you?”

“She taught me to sing.”

“Yes. Good. But you should have been taught to sing
and
dance.” Her cheeks flushed a furious shade of red. “You’ve been educated by halves! Why didn’t you say something? Before now?”

I began to shrug, but thought better of it.

“Didn’t you know you ought to have had lessons?”

I could not lie. Not under the scorching heat of Aunt’s glare. “I guess … I mean … Lizzie was always telling me about her dance lessons . . .”

“And why didn’t you realize you ought to be taking them as well? Why didn’t you say something?”

Say something? And have to take lessons myself! “I thought … I just … I thought it was providential.”

“Then you can thank providence that you’ll have to learn in one week what you should have been learning over the past two years. I should have left those Stuarts long ago!”

Aunt discussed my plight with Father over dinner and it was agreed that Mr. Drake himself, of Drake’s Dance Academy, would be hired to tutor me at home because, as Aunt argued, “We can’t send her to him and admit that she knows nothing at all. Not at her age.”

At my reception I had only had to greet people and bid them good-bye. But at the ball I would be expected to converse. And flirt. And dance. This private ball could be my ruin.

Two days later, Aunt sat in the parlor watching me dance with Mr. Drake as she wrung her hands. “I don’t know how you shall accomplish any of it.”

I had just attempted a waltz with the instructor. It had not gone well.

“You learned the lancers and the schottische and the polka with perfect ease. What is wrong with you? The waltz is the easiest dance among them!”

The lancers had set figures. It was danced with several couples, in a square. The movements consisted of clasping and unclasping hands, stepping into the center and then stepping out, forming a chain to pass about the circle, and other simple patterns.

The polka had just several movements: the slide, change, leap, and hop. Depending upon the particular polka, they were performed in different arrangements. All I had to do was memorize the order. After having studied Latin and Italian and mathematics, memorizing a set of patterns posed no difficulty. And the schottische contained all the polka movements, though they were combined in different ways and set to different music. If I could commit the order of the sets to memory, and I believed I had, I could perform them as well as anyone.

But the waltz was different. The waltz had no predetermined pattern. Certainly, it was made up of very simple steps, but there was no predicting when the dance master would turn or reverse the course of the dance. “I just—I can’t—he always goes right when I think he should go left.” And he always seemed to vary the length of his step. It was impossible to foresee what he might do.

“Then stop thinking! It is not for you to anticipate; it is for the man to act.”

“If the young miss would just allow me to lead, madam … and if she would dance up through her toes, then perhaps—”

“Clara! When one dances, one is to be as light on one’s feet as a feather. You are not stuck to the floor with great blucher boots. You are, at any second, expecting to soar into the air on angel’s wings. If your feet touch the earth, it is only for an instant.” She waved a bejeweled hand at me to get me to come near.

At my approach, she reached out her hand and pulled on my own in an effort to rise. “I shall show you what I mean. A waltz, Mr. Drake.”

The dance master took up Aunt’s hand in his own. Aunt extended her other hand to his shoulder, and his free hand went to the back of her waist.

Aunt turned her head slightly to the left as they waited for the music. Once the assistant began playing the piano and they circled about the room, a miracle occurred: Aunt’s age fell away and she became that graceful angel of which she had spoken. And then the dance came to an end, and I helped Aunt back into her chair. “There. Now do what I have done.”

I approached the dance master with some trepidation, but I took up his hand and tried once more. At least I meant to try. But I stomped on his foot at the first opportunity.

Poor man. He looked as if he could not decide whether to slap me or leave the room.

“Clara! If you cannot pretend with your eyes open, then pretend with them closed.”

Closed? But how could I dance if I could not see where I was going?

“Now! Close them
now
.”

I closed them. After a moment I felt the dance master take up my hand in his. The music began and I panicked. How could I dance if I could not see? But I did not dare to open my eyes. I didn’t want to be reprimanded. Not more than I already had been. Neither did I want to step on the dance master’s toes.

A pressure at my back caused me to turn to the right. Another slight movement at our hands caused me to turn to the left. A faint squeeze of my hand suggested that I lift my arm. And so I did. Around the room we went. And by the end of it I was smiling.

And so was Aunt.

At least I think she was.

“Again. Only this time roll from your heels up to your toes.”

12

MY HEART CLATTERED within my chest like a trinket rolling around inside a box. This was it. Tonight, at the opening of the opera, I would officially start my season. No matter what happened, no matter whether I would be a great success or a great failure, I could not undo this night; I could not step back from this moment. I would either end the season engaged to be married or … the alternative did not bear thinking about.

I must end the season engaged.

And the engagement must be to the De Vries heir.

The sooner done, the sooner accomplished. I had to succeed. There was no other option. My family depended upon it.

Our carriage became entangled in a line of carriages waiting to deposit occupants in front of the opera. At last we were allowed to exit at the portico on Broadway. Father helped Aunt down and then he offered his hand to me. I took it and followed them into the Met.

From the first, I was overwhelmed by the crowds of people milling about in spaces not calibrated to their number. It seemed as though there ought to be some large foyer or some grand entrance. Some sign to indicate that here, through this way, lay the opera hall.

But there was nothing. Just an abundance of burgundy-colored walls accented with mirrors and gilded fixtures.

I followed Father and Aunt up a flight of stairs. There, on the second floor, was a crowd even more elaborately coiffed and costumed than the crowds below.

Father excused himself. Aunt frowned at his rapidly disappearing back, but then she nodded toward another flight of stairs.

Before I could respond I became transfixed by a group of women coming toward us. They wore tiaras, all of them, the bright stones glittering and gleaming like stars through their clouds of hair. Necklaces by the dozens were looped about their necks, and so many bracelets had been fastened about their wrists that they reached nearly to the elbows. One of them was kicking at a large stone. It dangled from a pearl necklace that had been looped about her waist.

The other women around her were laughing at her antics. Their voices were so loud and boisterous that I worried Aunt might be tempted to reproach them.

But she only clutched at my arm and pulled me out of the woman’s path. And good thing! She was so busy kicking at the stone that she did not appear to notice where she was going.

“Mad. All of them! All that money and no good sense. It’s truly … terribly … annoying!”

We pressed ourselves to the wall as the woman stumbled by. The thing she was kicking appeared to be an enormous ruby. But though she was laughing and though she appeared to be enormously amused, the look she shot at me as she passed was one of ennui.

Across the foyer from us stood another woman. A grave and formidable woman, dressed in so many jewels that she sparkled like a … well … a diamond. A large, human-shaped diamond. She, too, was watching the ruby-kicking woman.

Aunt saw me staring at the second woman. And then she pulled me from the wall and we continued on our way toward the stair. “That was Mrs. Jacob Astor. The Astors own New York City … even more, they own society. And you can bet she doesn’t approve of such antics! Not from a Vanderbilt.”

Once we had settled ourselves in a box on the third tier, I saw Lizzie and her family sitting in a box across from us. As I watched, she picked up a pair of opera glasses and trained them upon me.

I picked up my own and trained them upon her.

She was dressed in white, just as I was, and she wore a collar of pearls about her neck. Her hair had been caught up into a puff of white ostrich feathers. Sitting there in the box, her dress glowing in the dim light, her fair hair shimmering, she looked like nothing so much as a contented kitten. She lifted a hand and waved. And then she dropped her glasses and crossed her eyes at me.

I burst into laughter before I could check myself.

“Whatever are you laughing about? No good can come from braying like a donkey. The opera is no laughing matter! The sound you hear about you is the sound of money. Fortunes are gained on the suggestion of a look. And destinies are forfeited on the failure of a gown to please. You will never again experience anything so fraught with danger as the opening of the opera season.”

“Unless I marry the De Vries heir.”

“What’s that?”

“Unless I marry him. Then I will experience it every season.”

Aunt looked at me as if she suspected some untoward levity. But I was not teasing. Were I to marry Mr. De Vries, then I could see my life unfolding vividly before me, one social season, one gown after another, as long as I lived.

Lizzie would have exulted at such a thought; I was rendered morose.

“Look there: We are surrounded by Schermerhorns and Goelets and Astors.”

I was looking. The boxes beneath us, across the auditorium, glinted with the jewels of their occupants. The curving length of the box tiers made the room look as if it were encompassed by a diamond horseshoe.

“Get up—show yourself.”

“But I just now took my seat.”

“And so did Lizzie Barnes over there across from us, but look at her now!”

The whole of the opera was looking at Lizzie. She had pulled the blooms from her bouquet and was tossing them down into the masses below.

“Do something!”

“Like what? All I have are my glasses. And I’m not about to throw those.” They had been Mama’s glasses. Slim and elegant, they were sheathed with mother-of-pearl. I firmly pushed myself back into my seat just in case Aunt decided to insist.

She harrumphed around for a few minutes and then Father returned, smelling of cigars and liquor. He was almost too handsome, too suave to be someone’s father. To be my father. His steel gray hair swept away from his forehead, falling longer than was fashionable, to his collar. His skin had a pleasant ruddiness that his trimmed beard only served to accentuate. I wasn’t quite sure why he hadn’t married again, after Mama died. I had assumed that, like me, he was heartbroken. But watching him watch the women in the other boxes, I began to wonder.