Читать книгу Fox River - Emilie Richards - Страница 13

My father had great hopes for me. I was to marry into New York society and advance the status of our family. My brothers, George and Henry, were, by my father’s high standards, without significant potential. Lumpish and plain-spoken, they would do well enough managing the import and mercantile company that had brought our family to the brink of a better life. But I, Louisa, with my golden curls, my sea-green eyes, the anticipated extension of my considerable childish charm, was to carry all of us over the threshold.

My father died before he could see his plan to fruition, but my mother, lumpish and plain-spoken herself, made my father’s mission her own. When she saw that my brothers could indeed manage the family’s affairs, she focused her attention on me. Even though I was not yet ten, I was to be a memorial to my father’s dreams.

Despite the fact that we—like our three-story brownstone—stood on the fringes of Fifth Avenue society, I was schooled by its finest masters. By the time I was eighteen and Cousin Annabelle Jones invited me to summer at her family estate in Middleburg, Virginia, my posture was perfection, my voice as musical as a canary’s warblings. The fashionable girls’ school I attended had only taught me the rudiments of history, geography and literature, but I could dance until dawn and ride with a proper seat. I had learned the fine art of flirtation and the more advanced art of conversation. I was ready, it seemed, to polish stepping-stones for generations of Schumachers still to come.

If I could not marry a man with a European title, as Astor, Guggenheim and Vanderbilt daughters had done, I could, at the very least, marry one who set us squarely in the middle of the Social Register.

I hesitate to say it now, but from the beginning I cooperated with all plans for our future. Not because I was spineless or without any thoughts on the subject. Born just after the turn of the century, I was the product of a new era, a willful child, high-spirited and fully capable of demanding my way when it suited me. But I was always certain a life of ease, a life of acceptance by people I admired, suited me best. When the Great War ended, I knew I had come into my own.

As I grew, I was seldom in my mother’s presence without an etiquette tutor or a dressmaker in attendance. Mama filled her days overseeing my education or making overtures to women who thought her beneath them. Now, when I think of her, I see unsmiling lips and hazel eyes darting from face to face in a crowded room, searching for the next person who might advance her cause.

I remember little about the days just before I traveled to Virginia. My mother cried. I do remember that. She was plain-spoken, perhaps, but also, at heart, a sentimental woman. On my last evening at home, as I was preparing for bed, she told me that marriage was never quite what it seemed. Men did not marry for friendship but because they wanted their needs attended to. Once I was safely wed, I should use the skills we’d so carefully nurtured to better the life of my husband, but never to set myself above him.

I was to fade carefully into the background, making certain that my husband shone brightest in every setting. I was, in short, to become a more accomplished version of my mother.

I am certain I loved Mama. As colorless, as remote as she seemed, sometimes I glimpsed the woman beneath. I remember a cool hand on my feverish forehead, secret cups of hot chocolate when I’d undergone a disappointment, the flash of pride in her smile when I bested my brothers at some childish endeavor.

I am certain I loved her, but at that moment I couldn’t remember why. I was stunned she understood so little about me.

Annabelle Jones, a distant cousin on Mama’s side, was from a family several generations more advanced in society than our own. Her paternal grandfather, a Union officer from a New York family, had survived the War Between the States at a desk in New Orleans, where he busied himself performing clandestine favors for local businessmen. With an eye for the main chance, Colonel Jones had endeavored to make the wartime lives of those prominent New Orleanians as comfortable as possible. The fact that this sometimes involved smuggling and outright theft hadn’t troubled him.

After Appomattox the colonel had gone on to use his connections to establish himself as a cotton exporter and, later, as an officer of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Now, despite their Yankee origins, the greater Jones family moved among the cream of Louisiana society, as well as that of other Southern cities. Josiah Jones, the Colonel’s youngest son and Annie’s father, had settled in Virginia to indulge his love of country life and horses.

Annie was a grave disappointment to her family. Vivacious and intelligent, she was also, sadly, not a pretty woman. She was as tall as a man, with broad shoulders and hands, and a lack of physical grace that arose from trying to fit herself into a world made for smaller women. Annie’s face was long, and her lovely brown eyes were shaded by unfeminine black eyebrows. I’d seen first-hand the effect she had on eligible men. Each suitor carefully weighed the humiliation of being married to a homely woman against the enticement of her name and influence. As of yet, no one had found the latter to be enticing enough.

Annie was my closest friend. Never, and I can say this without reservation, did I love her because of the benefits our friendship might hold. Certainly I was young and self-centered, but never calculating. I loved Annie for her wit, her insights, her deeply rooted loyalty. I sensed, even as a child, that Annie would never hurt me.

On the morning that Annie and her parents ended their visit to New York and came to take me and my considerable wardrobe to the train station, I said goodbye to the stuffy, cheerless home of my childhood. My mother remained in the doorway as we pulled away from the curb in an autotaxi. She didn’t wave, but she held a handkerchief to her lips, as if to block some latent protest. My last memory was of her tiny, dark-clad figure leaning against a pillar, the heavily draped windows of our house like eyelids squeezed tightly shut.

“You won’t be sorry you came,” Annie promised, taking my gloved hand in her own, as if she was afraid I already might be homesick. “We’ll have such fun, Weezy. I promise we will.”

“You’ll have to stop calling me Weezy,” I told her. “Or I won’t have any fun at all.”

Annie had a wonderful, unfettered laugh, a laugh that frightened men as much as her extraordinary height and masculine shoulders. I smiled at the sound of it and clasped her hand harder. I was absolutely certain that the best part of my life was about to unfold.

I remember, oh, I remember so very well, that ecstatic conviction that everything I’d ever dreamed of was finally within my reach.