Villa America (3 page)

That night he would dream of
Flora,
of flying in the air, of rising. He would dream of sticky fabric and men with large rectangular mustaches the color of spruce. Owen would dream of all the things he didn’t know, all the things he might.

T
hey had been in London since the beginning of June, Sara, her two sisters, and her mother. The “Three Wiborg Girls,” as the sisters were tiresomely known in the columns. Sara was “the chic one,” Hoytie “dark and refined,” while the youngest sister, Olga, was “the delicate beauty.” These words felt like intricately made corsets, squeezing them into arranged shapes, pinching at the sides where they met resistance.

Sara pressed her finger to her eye, seeking out the soft spot on the lid that had been leaking infection on and off since their arrival in Europe in March. A maid, fitting the gown Sara planned to wear that evening, stuck a pin into the light green silk, and it pricked her right beneath her armpit. Sara felt the pain like a tiny streak of lightning. She remained still. A stray drop of rain hit the pane of the large window overlooking Hyde Park.

Tonight would be her mother’s final victory in the long march through the European season. The Vegetable Ball at the Ritz. The cream of society had lobbied Adeline Wiborg for invitations to the event, first politely, then a little less politely. Sara’s mother received bribes daily in the form of invitations to
dîners
or offers of a place in someone’s box at the opera, each one causing Adeline to smile and hum to herself.

Sara looked at the wreath of carrots, tomato vines, and sprigs of mint lying on the chaise longue next to her. It was absurd, decorative, useless.
Like me.
She felt very tired.

She consoled herself with the thought that this evening, at least, she wouldn’t be expected to participate in any tableaux vivants or sing with her sisters—both staples in her mother’s arsenal. They had been doing these performances for years at their houses in Ohio, New York, and East Hampton and at drawing rooms all over the East Coast and Europe. Last night, they had done their rendition of the Rhine Maidens’ lament from
Das Rheingold
for guests of the Duchess of Rutland. This particular act stood on the fine line between decorum and titillation, but her mother had said: “This is London, after all. Tastes are generally more piquant.”

The lights had been dimmed, the room thrown into near darkness. Then gasps from the audience when the lamps were slowly turned up and their eyes adjusted to the sight of Sara and her sisters standing bare-shouldered and motionless behind a gauze curtain. Ever so slowly, the three Wiborg girls began to undulate their arms, the backlight catching their exposed skin like pale water and throwing rippling imitations of their figures across the translucent fabric. They started to sing the song of the nymphs, a lament of loss and reproach, their torsos swaying gently from the waist, forward and back. It wasn’t exactly shocking, but it had a languid sensuality that was unexpected and obviously slightly thrilling. Which is exactly what their mother had counted on.

But something had happened last night: Sara had let her mind wander, just a little, then a little more, until there was only the gently flowing curtain, her sisters’ familiar voices, a remembered scene from the nursery, the gaslight warm on her back. For some reason she couldn’t fathom even now, Sara had tipped her head onto Hoytie’s shoulder, breathing in her sister’s perfume. And then Sara was gone, back to her childhood home in Clifton, Ohio, and it was spring and she was comforted by all the small things she knew: the place in the hedge where the rabbit with the missing ear lived; the dark patch under the yew tree where the ferns were shyly uncurling themselves, green and fuzzy and new; the spot next to the cellar door that smelled like violets.

Then, all at once, Hoytie was elbowing her, pointy and cruel, and she was brought back to the drawing room and the smell of moldy carpets and half-eaten beef on the sideboard, and Sara realized she had fallen into a deep sleep. Only for a few moments, just a few, insignificant moments.

Yet, if they were so insignificant, why was she still thinking about them now, as she watched the maid reach for a bit of cloth to wipe the blood from her side?

She was twenty-nine years old and most of her friends were already married, setting up their own households, running their own lives. For a while, on the cusp of womanhood—and for some time afterward—Sara had felt like she was living in a state of suspended animation, waiting for life to really begin. Waiting for the pivotal moment when, like the fairy tale, a kiss would awaken her and she would stir her frozen limbs and everything would be set in motion. Eventually, however, it had dawned on her that this
was
life, what was happening right now. And with that revelation, she had just gone back to sleep. No, not sleep, exactly. It was more precise than that; it was the kind of dozing where you think you’ve been awake the whole time only to realize that hours have passed and that, after all, you must have been asleep.

But things—well, she—had gotten worse over the past year. It had started last summer. She found it harder and harder to get out of bed, and sometimes she didn’t bother at all, instead spending the mornings staring out the bay window of her bedroom in the beach house in East Hampton. She would squint her eyes to blur the line between the lawn and the ocean beyond. Squint, release, squint, release. Until blue became green and green, blue.

In the fall, she’d gone to see the Whistlers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sara could remember those paintings,
Mother of Pearl and Silver: The Andalusian,
that dark swath of hair, her swirl of silver skirt brushing the floor, the sliver of face turned towards the viewer. But it was the
Nocturne: Blue and Gold—Southampton Water
that had made Sara’s breath catch in her chest. The smudgy, luminous harbor seen only by the light of an orange moon (or was it a setting sun?). The painting was obscured, melting, light drowning at the edges.

Sara felt like the light in that painting, always sinking, never rising. Her feelings had not escaped her mother.

“This oppression of yours, Sara. It’s unbecoming and it’s straining my nerves,” her mother had told her one day over breakfast. “And when I say
unbecoming,
I mean
untoward.
”

“
Indecorous?”
Sara had helpfully offered.

“I mean stop it,” her mother had said.

Only Olga had been kind. On the days when Sara didn’t come downstairs, the youngest sister would come up and sit on Sara’s sleigh bed and plait and unplait her hair for hours, the two of them watching the waves outside the bay window. “You have such lovely hair,” Olga would say. “So heavy.”

“I think that’s it, miss,” the maid said to Sara, bringing her back to the hotel room, the London rain, her throbbing eyelid.

“Yes,” Sara murmured.

She walked over to the glass and looked at herself. Staring back was a youngish woman in a cucumber-green dress with heavy hair and sleepy eyes. Decorative. At least that.

The ball was a success. Sara saw that almost instantly, having learned over the years to judge her mother’s hits and misses by the telltale signs. In the case of a failure, there would be whispers, and the whispers could grow so loud that the whole room hummed like a grist of bees caught in a glass box.

With the Vegetable Ball, though, her mother had outdone herself. The main ballroom was swathed in vines with squashes, miniature eggplants, or zucchini sprouting from their tangled arms. The enormous crystal chandelier hanging in the center had also been covered with growing things: tomatoes, carrots, corn, all arranged from smallest to largest. The Ritz’s livery stood against the walls holding trays of champagne with apples and pears dipped in gold paint. It was opulent and imaginative and grotesque.

Sara was standing off to the side of a group that was jostling for her mother’s attention, talking with the Duchess of Rutland’s daughter Diana.

“Well,” Diana said, giving Sara a sly look.

Sara laughed. “Yes, well.”

“I think your mother may have made a few enemies tonight. There’s nothing these women hate so much as a
succès fou.
Or being made to come on bended knee to America. This isn’t 1905, after all.”

That had been the boom year for conquering British titles. America, swelling with heiresses of ink, paper, coal, and steel, had seen no fewer than twenty-five members of the House of Lords take its daughters to the altar. Sara remembered her mother putting down the newspaper in disgust after reading about one or the other of these matches.

“Imagine,” Adeline had said, “selling your daughters into serfdom. No running water, no money, only cows and horses and dogs. They should be ashamed of themselves.” Adeline had never liked the idea of one single marriage, let alone twenty-five of them.

Diana scanned the room, then turned her attention back to Sara. “Let’s talk about something infinitely more interesting,” she said.
“Me.”
Her friend smiled. “What do I remind you of?”

Diana was clad in a sleek white ball gown with thick seams of red, green, and yellow.

“I don’t know,” Sara said, feeling weary. “A vegetable patch?”

“A vegetable patch indeed. That might be all right for some.” Diana eyed Sara’s light green dress and preposterous wreath. “No. These, lovely Sara, these are racing stripes. I plan on winning your mother’s vile ragtime potato race.”

“Oh, Diana,” Sara said, laughing. “Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“You know why not. It’s just one of Mother’s antiquated games. The joke is always on someone else.”

“Oh, it’s all how you look at it. There’s art in everything.” She winked at Sara. “Even antiquated games.”

Olga opened the ball with Prince Colonna, who, rumor had it, was as ridiculous a gambler as his father. They were trailed by a servant in blackface dressed in the garb of a Southern plantation slave frantically pushing a wheelbarrow full of vegetables.

The guests laughed uproariously at the spectacle, and Sara saw her mother’s face shining in triumph. From the sidelines, more faux slaves blew green and gold dust out of small handmade cornucopias. Her eye began to throb again. As the guests pushed forward to join in the ball, she was claimed like lost luggage by the first gentleman on her dance card. He introduced himself, but although his lips moved, no sound reached her. She nodded anyway and gave him her hand. He swept her into the crowd and turned her round and round, his arm close at her waist, his breath champagne-sour.

Her eyes wouldn’t focus, so the room spun, a whirl of color over her partner’s shoulder. She felt panic rising up, couldn’t remember her steps. What was this? Yes, a hesitation waltz, that was it. She was reminded of the story of Little Black Sambo, how the vain tigers stole the child’s clothes and then chased one another jealously round and round a tree until they melted into butter.

She felt sick. Round and round, round and round, the room glistening indecently from the gold dust, champagne tipping onto the floor. The band quickened its tempo. She forced her eyes to adjust. The guests themselves had taken on a freakish quality, their rouged lips smacking, arms jerking up and down like puppets’. Even Diana, in a corner of the room, laughing and goading her suitors into betting on her in the race.

“Nothing like a ball at the Ritz…” her partner was saying.

She could see one of his front teeth was slightly discolored.

“I said that just the other day to Frank…you know Frank Wallis, don’t you, Miss Wiborg? Solid chap.”

Sara had the most sudden and furious desire to see the room consumed in a great fire, one that would sweep down upon them and swallow up the vegetables and the livery and the awful people-puppets in one cleansing scourge. Burn it all down.

Sweat broke out on her upper lip and she was sure the same damp was staining her green silk dress. She had to leave the ballroom right that instant or she would die.

“Excuse me,” she said to her partner. “I…”

“You’re not ill, are you, Miss Wiborg?”

“No. Yes. I just feel slightly faint. I think I should sit down.”

“Oh, by all means.” He escorted her to the edge of the dance floor, where Sara fled his solicitous inquiries.

As she squeezed past yards of chiffon and satin and feathers, pressing on her, suffocating her, she saw Hoytie making her exit with a young woman in a yellow tiered gown, a hunter-green silk flower pinned to the bosom. She hurried to catch up with them.

“Hoytie,” she called when she’d made it to the ballroom’s antechamber, her pulse throbbing.

Her sister turned, her dark eyebrows curving only slightly, more in curiosity than recognition.

“I can’t stand it anymore,” Sara said when she reached them. Yet as the words left her lips, she realized that she actually felt nothing of what had come over her only moments before. As if unseen fingers had pinched the wick of that emotion and extinguished it as quickly as it had been lit. She was left only with the emptiness of knowing that she couldn’t even sustain her own despair.

Wearily, she greeted Hoytie’s young friend with the flower: “Hello,” she said.

The woman didn’t meet her eyes but answered, “Oh, hello.”

“This is Irma,” Hoytie said, waving her hand as if that wasn’t really the point. “Anyway, why are you so undone?”

“I…” What could she say?
I wanted everyone to die in a fire, but now, actually, I feel extremely sanguine about the whole thing. Just a little numb, really…

“Well, not to worry. You can just have a nap if you’re bored. Seeing as you can just pass out anywhere.” Her sister gave Sara her most insincere smile.

“Yes, yes,” Sara said, tired of the joke already. “Well, I thought I’d just escape to the ladies’ sitting room.”

“How funny,” Hoytie said tightly. “That’s where we’re going as well.”

“I can’t read your mind, Hoytie,” Sara snapped. “I’m not following you, for heaven’s sakes.”

The mirrored room, with its lingering odor of powder, glowed in the lamplight. Once they were ensconced—Sara lounging in one chaise, while Hoytie and Irma shared the one across—Sara’s sister produced a cigarette and fit it neatly into an ivory-and-gold holder. She leaned back and gave her lighter to Irma. The girl, after fumbling a little with her glove, lit the cigarette and then stared wide-eyed at Hoytie.