“Wobbly, isn’t it?” said Nora, who had been this way already to escort Vida’s several suitcases.
“Well, yes,” Vida replied drily. “Though I may be wobbly for other reasons.”
Upward they went through the decks, past uniformed sailors and early-boarding travelers, past vast quantities of starched sheets and pillows, glassware and dinnerware, past salons, past dining rooms and observation decks, up interior and exterior stairways, all that brass and oak and freshly painted white iron, all of it brand new and gleaming and as suitable for a grand ball as any millionaire’s house. Nora was urging her on and on until suddenly they were outside again, on the polished planks of the top deck of the Princess, with all the city spread out beneath them.
When she had been a part of it, Vida had sensed the largeness of the crowd, but she hadn’t really understood until she looked down on it from above. Beyond the piers that jutted from the Embarcadero was San Francisco, looking very much like a diorama city constructed by a child out of pastel blocks of Turkish delight. As Vida strode toward the rail, Nora placed the scarlet scarf in her hand; it was half unfurled by the time she reached the edge. For a moment, Vida forgot to breathe. She was farther up from the pier than she could have imagined, and had not been prepared for the dizzy feeling that overcame her when she looked down from on high. Then she remembered herself, and gazed out at the crowd, all of her friends and acquaintances reduced by distance to miniatures.
“There he is,” said Mrs. Redford Flynn to her daughter—they were standing close to the rail a few feet away, both in enormous fur coats.
Vida’s skin prickled at the word “he.” She knew who he was.
Down on the pier was the young man that Mrs. and Miss Flynn had been referring to. Unlike the other men, he had forgone a navy or white suit for a khaki getup, and he was talking to a number of reporters and curious crowd members who had formed a circle around him. He cut a trim and rakish figure, and even at a distance Vida recognized the playful darting of his smile and the aristocratic line of his jaw. She had observed both quite a bit last night, at much closer range. As anyone who read the papers knew, this was Fitzhugh Farrar, the second and handsomer son of Winthrop Farrar, who controlled the Farrar shipping conglomerate.
Fitzhugh, the notorious bachelor.
Fitzhugh, the famous adventurer.
In all Vida’s late nights, it suddenly occurred to her, she had never met a young man to match her own high spirit. She took a last glance at her city and wondered if she finally had.
Two
A flurry of pastel streamers arced through the thin blue atmosphere as the Princess drew away from the pier. Champagne bottles popped as she moved showily along the city’s shore. Cheers erupted, on land and on deck, as she traveled at last through the mouth of the San Francisco Bay—which some poet had bestowed with the moniker the “Golden Gate”—and was finally out to sea.
Vida saw none of it.
She was ensconced in her carpeted and chandeliered cabin, and only emerged onto her private little deck to blow a kiss to the receding jut of rocky green land, before hurrying back inside to resume a rather busy schedule of glamorizing. That was when she encountered the gaze of Nora, her lady’s maid; a mixture of disapproval and knowing amusement. She had come back into the cabin with the welcome gift of a champagne bottle and two coupes on a golden platter. Not for the first time, Vida marveled at Nora’s loveliness, which was somehow or other only enhanced by the plainness of her black dress. Her hair was a titian cloud above her heart-shaped face, with its dark lashes and pink bow of a mouth. Nora was three years older than Vida, and had taught her everything there was to know about how to be a woman of style and grace.
“Afraid they’ll forget you?” Nora asked as she crossed the carpet, put the platter down on a mahogany sideboard, and began to adjust Vida’s evening gown, a fitted cascade of pale red ruffles, beading, and lace, with a square neckline and a petite train that followed the fanning of the mermaid-like skirt. “That’s just the dress for tonight,” she remarked.
“Thank you.” Vida did a twirl, though she didn’t really need confirmation that the dress was made to flatter her form in particular and that it struck an alluring balance somewhere between attention-getting and high-class, which was precisely what she needed for the game she would be playing this evening.
It was after all a game and not a pleasure cruise. Though she wasn’t sure if she would do as her parents wished and return engaged, she knew that she was being talked of, and would not have it said that she, Vida Hazzard, had gone off chasing a boy and been ignored.
“But you missed it all,” Nora was saying, with her usual chiding affection. “The fanfare and all that, of course. This ship, it’s a maze—I got lost twice. But—oh! You should have seen how big the ocean is when you leave the bay and are truly out to sea.”
“Yes, that does sound nice. But you know we can’t all be you.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Nora replied so that Vida’s insides sloshed a little in regret. For all Nora’s confidence in matters of dress and manners, she was a tender being, easily embarrassed, and when anyone drew attention to her remarkable beauty, she felt uncomfortable and went looking for a closet to hide in.
“Oh, Nora, my darlingest, don’t be like that! Don’t make me say it. We can’t all be so effortlessly beautiful as you. Most of us have to try a little bit to get noticed, you know.”
“Well, to me you are the most beautiful girl on the Princess of the Pacific.”
“I am grateful you think so, but I don’t have time for your flattery—my hair is a disaster, and we are running out of time.”
“But cocktails aren’t for another hour, silly. It’s only four. We have plenty of time.”
Vida gasped in anguish. “Is it that late?” And though she knew that widows, and gullible children, and the sweet-hearted and capable, and all those who do good in the world rather than seeking after their own pleasures, deserve the patience of everybody else, she couldn’t help but feel a little irritated at Nora, whose hair went up quite easily into a bright, hazy pouf, for not understanding what a trial it was to have hair that waved and frizzed and could not at all be trusted with a change in the weather.
“Here,” said Nora. She poured a glass of champagne for Vida and assumed the place behind her at the vanity to see what needed to be done. The area was already overpopulated by divers hair tonics and perfumes, lash blackeners, lip tints, rouges, jewel boxes and hairpins, arrayed over a detailed map of all the levels and rooms, public and private, of the Princess, as well as an embossed card listing the evening entertainments for the first-class passengers.
“Lord, Nora, please don’t let me drink alone,” Vida said, and before Nora could begin her work, she had poured her maid a glass, and clinked it with her own.
“What are you up to, I wonder,” Nora mused, as she pinned and looped Vida’s hair—of a middling brown color, nothing special, and prone to unruliness without the taking of extreme civilizing measures—into a high, romantic pile.
“Oh, you’ll see,” Vida replied, and handed Nora the golden, pearl-dotted strand to pin into her coiffure.