But Caroline said that she had-she almost said the unsayable word “work” but quickly remembered the common phrase-“letters to write,” and clothes to be changed. Mrs. Delacroix let her go; and took to her carriage alone except for a poor relation called Miss Spinals, who acted as companion during the high season. The rest of the year, Miss Aspinall rusticated at Monroe, Louisiana, where she could enjoy the quiet pleasures of a pastoral spinsterhood.
Marguerite had laid out an elaborate costume from Worth; perfection, except that it was three years old, a fact that the sharp eyes of Newport’s ladies would be quick to notice. But Caroline’s reputation for eccentricity had its social uses. Also, was she not a Sanford? and had she not been taken in by Mrs. Delacroix, supposedly a mortal enemy of her mother, Emma?
Supposedly? Caroline sat in an armchair covered with worn Aubusson and looked out at the sea where sailboats tacked this way and that, and white spinnakers filled with wind; blasphemously, she found herself thinking of pregnant nuns; the influence, no doubt, of her hostess. What indeed did the old woman feel about her mother? What indeed did she feel about her mother’s daughter? and why the sudden peremptory invitation that had taken precedence over the annoyed Mrs. Jack? Yet they had come to enjoy each other’s company; also, there were, despite the high season, no other houseguests, something of an oddity. Vague references to Louisiana relatives who were too ill to travel suggested to Caroline that she might be a stopgap, a last-minute improvisation. If anything, the emptiness of the huge marble house was more to be revelled in than not. The servants were well-trained; that is, invisible when not needed; and a number were French, to Marguerite’s uninhibited joy. The great cool, sunlit rooms smelled of roses, lemon furniture-wax and, always, the iodine-scented sea-air.
There was a good deal to be said for idle luxury, thought Caroline, carefully placing side by side on the parquet floor the front pages of the nine newspapers that were her daily reading. By now, each newspaper was like an old acquaintance. She knew why one newspaper relentlessly played up-when the editors did not invent-every Boer victory in South Africa: the publisher’s wife and daughter had not been received at the Court of St. James’s; while another newspaper spoke only of British victories, a tribute to the managing editor’s long affair with a British lady whose husband owned an auction house in New York City. Caroline was now able to predict how any American newspaper would respond to almost any important event. Only Hearst occasionally baffled her, because he was, in his way, an artist: mercurial, unpredictable and devoted to invention.
Newport itself was featured inside two New York City papers; and not much elsewhere. Currently, Newport was in the news because William K. Vanderbilt, Jr., had driven a French motor car from Newport to Boston and back, some one hundred sixty miles, in three hours and fifty-seven minutes. She memorized the item. This would get her nicely through Mrs. Fish’s lunch, where Harry Lehr was now full-time major-domo. Old Mrs. Astor no longer entertained as much as she had; she preferred to remain in her cottage, receiving only the faithful. Power was shifting-everyone said-to Mrs. Fish, though Mrs. Ogden Mills, born Livingston, was the ranking American archduchess at Newport, and when Mrs. Astor let the sceptre fall she should, by the very number of her democratic quarterings, succeed. When asked her views of the Four Hundred, Mrs. Mills had said coldly, “There are really only twenty families in New York.” Mrs. Mills did have one marvellous, even unique, gift: she could make absolutely anyone feel ill at ease in her presence. “A priceless gift,” Mrs. Delacroix had observed, mournfully, unaware of the permanently terrified expression of the spinster Aspinall, always at her side.
Other, lesser, candidates for the throne included the lively, clever Mrs. Oliver Belmont, “the first lady ever to marry a Vanderbilt,” she would say with some satisfaction, particularly if there was a descendant of the old tugboat commodore in the room, “and the first lady ever to get a divorce, on her own terms. I was also the first American lady to marry her daughter to a duke of Marlborough, for which I shall, doubtless, suffer in the afterlife. But I meant well. And, of course, I am the first lady ever to marry a Jew, my darling Oliver Belmont. Now,” she would say, with a formidable glare in the dark intelligent eyes that fascinated Caroline, “I shall be the first woman-not lady-to see to it that every American woman will one day have the vote. For women are the hope of this country. If you doubt this, then pray to God,” she had said when she first met Caroline, and tried to recruit her for women’s suffrage, “and She will help you.” Caroline revelled in Alva Vanderbilt Belmont, but no one else in the great world did. She was too shocking and too advanced to be popular; she was also too rich and too powerful to be ignored. But she was definitely not in the line of succession to Mrs. Astor; nor wanted to be, any longer. There had been a time when Alva had threatened to replace the Astor-Plantagenets with the Vanderbilt-Tudors. But divorce had intervened; and, more dismally, good works.
Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, heiress-presumptive, greeted her guests in the great hall at Crossways, a Colonial-style mansion, with a dining room that could seat two hundred, said Harry Lehr, greeting Caroline warmly.
“That means you must eliminate half the Four Hundred,” said Caroline. “So which will it be? The gentlemen or the ladies?”
“We shall never experiment, because Morton won’t let us. Sixteen is now his limit for lunch.”
Morton was the English butler, who had served rather too many dukes, thought Caroline, who also wondered why Mrs. Fish was so impressed by the number of his grand employers while ignoring the briefness of his service with each. Morton was a tall florid man, who treated Mrs. Fish and her guests with a disdain that they may have deserved but ought not to have allowed. Caroline was not charmed.
The ladies proved to be the season’s best; the men were not. The young and vigorous were sailing off Hazard’s Beach; or driving motor cars. Lispinard Stewart was present, however; he seemed to have stepped from the pages of a “silver fork” novel of the early nineteenth century; he was elegant, effeminate and wondrously boring. He fluttered about Caroline; who fluttered, as best she could, in the general direction of Mrs. Fish, who stood, one eye on the door to the dining room, to make sure that the magnificent Morton would not be kept waiting once he had announced that dinner was served.
Mrs. Fish received Caroline with an interest that might have passed for warmth had Caroline been less experienced in the social wars. Mamie Fish was a plain but interesting-and interested-looking-woman with deep-set wide eyes beneath arched brows; but the rest of the face had not been worked out with the same care: the jaw was large but characterless and the mouth had been crudely sketched in, rather as if the Divine Artist-plainly, a woman, as Mrs. Belmont maintained-had decided not to undermine with incongruous beauty the easy wit of Mamie Fish, who had, in any case, captured early in life a descendant of not only the Puritan but the Dutch founders of the nation, one Stuyvesant Fish, known fondly to Mamie in Puritan parlance as “the Good Man.” As it was, the good man preferred his old house at Garrison on the Hudson to Newport or New York, an arrangement that perfectly suited Mrs. Fish and the sparkling Harry Lehr, now grown plump and somewhat less sparkling of eye.
“I feared we should never capture you.” Mrs. Fish stared interestedly at Caroline. “We are used to Blaise in New York. But you are the enigma of Washington, a city no one ever visits. Old Mrs. Astor-not well, you know, not well at all-thinks you a great addition. But to what? I asked.”
“Washington, perhaps.” Caroline was tentative. “Where, if you’re right, no one will ever visit me.”