“Yes. See to it that Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish receives an invitation.”
“You’re inviting Mamie?” Ward was aghast, leaning forward on his walking stick. “But Stuyvesant Fish is railroad money. If you extend that invitation to Mamie, there’s no going back. You’ll be officially welcoming her into society.”
“It’s better to have her in society than on the outside. I don’t wish to hire the Academy’s symphony and their leading soprano every time Mamie Fish decides to throw a party.”
CHAPTER TWO
Alva
The first annual Stuyvesant fish fish fry has been canceled until further notice. Alva sat at the table in the morning room and studied the ornate calligraphy, the raised black ink on the thick vellum, turning it over as if expecting an explanation on the back. Her only worthwhile invitation of the Newport season had just been revoked.
She plunked Mamie’s note down, pushed away from the table and wandered down a long corridor lined with portraits, three generations of stern-looking, mustached and muttonchopped Vanderbilt men. Alva thought Willie K., whose portrait hung at the end, was the handsomest of them all, perhaps the most handsome man she’d ever seen.
She’d had no idea who he was the first time she set eyes on him, from a distance, on the field at the Westchester Polo Club. The game was new in the States and she’d never been to a match before, didn’t fully understand how it was played, but that didn’t matter. She was captivated by the athletic man with the wavy dark hair, charging down the field, his mallet whacking the wooden ball, driving it through the goalposts. There were cheers from the stands, and Alva was on her feet, not to applaud but to get a better look at him. After begging her friend Consuelo Yznaga—Alva’s only remaining friend from childhood—to introduce them, she found him even more handsome up close. She soon learned that the expression opposites attract was true. Where she was intense, he was lighthearted. Where she was poor, he was rich. Consuelo had casually mentioned that Willie’s grandfather, the Commodore, was a millionaire many times over.
Alva continued roaming through the Vanderbilt cottage—one of three his family owned—where she and Willie were staying that season. The fact that they called it a cottage was absurd to her. A cottage with nineteen rooms. Each one had been decorated in variations of the same forest green, pale yellows and soft browns found in their city homes. For a moment she lost herself in admiring the amaranth wainscoting in the parlor, the Florentine glass pendulum chandelier in the main dining room, the mother-of-pearl inlays in the staircase banister. Sea air and sunlight poured in through the French doors, casting a golden haze over the sitting room at the end of the hall. She paused, leaning up against a fluted column, thinking again about all the Newport parties she hadn’t been invited to, including Mrs. Astor’s clambake.
Being left out was nothing new to her, and yet, each time, it caught her off guard like a shock from touching a charged surface. She thought being married to William Kissam Vanderbilt would have remedied the problem, his family money catapulting her to the top of every guest list. She’d been mistaken.
Willie K., as she affectionately called him, was at the archery range with James Van Alen. No one was around, not even a servant. Alva was still relatively new to the Vanderbilt ways, their exorbitant tastes, spending more on a single chair than most families had to live on for a year. Or longer. A stab of guilt hit her before she let it go. Gradually, she found herself easing into these comforts, luxuriating in their opulence like she would a deep bath. Still, it was so much house for just the two of them and their servants. The walls held the quiet when no one was around, and Alva didn’t do well when left on her own. From the time she was a child, she had unapologetically required an audience—even if of one—needing someone to hear her, to pay attention to her. It was terribly lonely in that cottage without Willie. It made her wish her sisters had changed their minds about visiting, but they were back in the city, claiming Newport was too rich for their blood.
Alva thought she heard someone downstairs, but it was only the ocean breeze blowing a porch door shut. She returned to the morning room, picked up the newspaper already rustled through by the men. Slipping out of her new beaver-cloth shoes, she rested her bare feet on the seat of Willie’s chair and began reading the Newport Daily News while absentmindedly twisting a lock of her red hair. She knew it wasn’t any more ladylike to have her nose in a newspaper than it was to twirl one’s hair, but she needed the distractions.
Alva reached for a slice of toast spread thick with butter and raspberry jam. The first bite sent a shooting pain from her jaw to her temple. She’d been grinding her teeth at night again. A new habit she’d formed. Some mornings she could hear her jawbone click each time she opened her mouth. But the flavors overrode the pain. The jam was so sweet, the butter so creamy and the toast so airy and crusty—nothing like the dense, tasteless black bread she and her family had eaten with every meal just to fill their bellies. Even now, there were certain foods she tried to avoid: cornmeal, beans, cabbage and potatoes. Those had been the staples of her diet for six years and now carried the aftertaste of scarcity.
Before she was Alva Vanderbilt, she’d been Alva Smith from Mobile, Alabama. After the War Between the States, when she was sixteen, her mother died, and within a year, her father had squandered the family’s fortune, which had been considerable by non-Vanderbilt standards. Suddenly poverty-stricken, the Smiths found that the world had turned on them. People who used to be their friends openly shunned them, crossed their names off their guest lists for barbecues and other entertainments, too. Alva’s sisters, Armide, Jennie and Julia, quietly accepted the rejection. But not Alva. Alva fought back, pushing a girl in the park who’d made a snide remark about her out-of-date dress. When someone ignored her on the street, she’d call out their name—Oh, Mary Lou, I see you—hell-low! Well, hell-low there, Mary Lou. Adversity had always fueled Alva, and she vowed that the Smiths would be walking in high cotton once again. She owed her mother that much.
Alva heard someone coming. It wasn’t the porch door this time, and she dropped her feet to the ground, shoved aside the newspaper and sat up straight. Willie and James Van Alen were back, their bows and quivers in hand. Willie’s dark hair was windblown and tousled, a hint of his cowlick poking up, his cheeks tinged pink from the sun. He was squinting, his pale blue eyes adjusting to the light inside the room. Though his lips remained downturned, she could tell he was smiling at something Van Alen had just said.
“. . . I beat you fair and square, mate,” he said to Willie.
“If you say so.” Willie laughed.
“Oh, don’t be such a Podsnap,” he said, adjusting his monocle. “You’re always so bloody chipper.”
Alva smiled, recalling how she’d initially been charmed by James Van Alen’s accent before discovering it wasn’t real. Neither was the eyepiece. Nothing but a circle of glass. He’d spent a year in England and had returned home a myopic Brit. But she didn’t hold it against him. Not like the others, who themselves all spoke with a heavy stilted inflection that didn’t sound quite American or British—but rather something unnatural in between. Even Alva had been known to play the role of a Southern belle when it suited her or, conversely, a worldly sophisticate, peppering her sentences with French.