By The Sea, Book One: Tess (3 page)

Just as the great marble cottages were not
actually designed to be homes, the dazzling equipages were not
intended as mere transportation. They were entries in a grave
competition of wealth, painstaking arrangements of rosettes and
braided manes, issuing from huge stables and carriage houses that
would humble virtually every home in America. Never mind that on
this typical Sunday afternoon, many of the husbands were hiding on
their yachts or had fled to the safety of their Wall Street
duchies; never mind that the miserable young heirs and heiresses
who were pinned to their carriage seats were forbidden to move a
muscle. The important thing was that, to most of the participants
as well as to the spectators, the display of opulence
seemed
to have enormous significance.

Certainly Maggie thought so.

"Ooh, Tess, just look! It's Mrs. Astor; I
could tell her anywhere, even without the blue livery, by the way
she holds her head so high and still. Why, she don't see anything
or anybody!" Maggie giggled and pulled at her sister's sleeve.
"Would you be looking at
those
two—in the barouche—fussing
for her attention. There, now, she never saw 'em, and their heads
spinning around like piano seats when they passed."

"And
look
at the wheel spokes," Tess
added in a scandalized tone, humoring her sister. "Caked with mud,
and the sky without the merest cloud in almost a fortnight. Wait
until I tell Father. Who are they, do you suppose?"

"Trash from New York, I'm sure," Maggie said
flatly. "Bridget says most everyone new this summer is in trade.
Bridget says it's got to where everyone's a millionaire and the
'Four Hundred' is soon to become the 'Four Thousand.' Bridget says,
why, it's madness, and there's folks will gladly pay fifteen
thousand dollars to be invited into one of Mrs. Astor's balls, only
they'd be laughed at. Imagine that." Maggie never took her eyes off
the snail-like progression that was inching its way up the Avenue
as she babbled breathlessly on.

"And you're going to believe everything
Bridget says, are you?" Something like affectionate jealousy crept
into Tess's challenge.

"Well, of
course
," said Maggie
equably. "If Bridget isn't the third cousin of Mrs. Astor's
scullery maid, I don't know who is."

"The scullery maid! And I suppose
she
hobs and nobs with the rich cottagers, does she?" demanded
Tess.

"Oh, Tess, don't be that way, so standoffish
with the other servants. Bridget regards you as the most haughty
creature, and she'll never believe me that it's you're shy—"

"I am
not
shy, Margaret Moran. And I
am not standoffish. It's only that I have—other considerations on
my mind."

"I know you do, Tessie," Maggie agreed,
instantly repentant. "Don't I know that you're the one holds us all
together? And that you're doing my work for me in the laundry? But
soon that will change, Tess. I'm better today, and tomorrow I'll be
better still, wait and see."

"I should think so, my dear Mag. And when
you are, I'll make you my slavey and you shall do all the work
while I loll on a chaise longue or knock about with the others at
Easton's Beach."

The prospect of Tess, who possessed a rather
fierce energy, lolling about on a longue or anywhere else caused
both sisters to burst out in laughter so bright and merry that the
occupants of a passing phaeton all turned as one to stare. The two
women in the carriage, both of them young and pretty, lifted their
chins and returned their attention to their companions. But the
young men gazed on a bit longer, and one of them, wonderfully
good-looking in his silk hat and dark mustache, smiled
encouragingly. Instantly he was poked good-naturedly with an
unopened parasol by the livelier of the two ladies, but not before
poor Maggie, confused by the attention, waved her gloved hand
timidly in greeting.

Aghast, Tess whispered, "Maggie, how
could
you!"

A bright scarlet, an unhealthy shade of
scarlet, suffused Maggies cheeks. "I didn't mean to be bold, Tess.
Only, he seemed kind. I don't expect they're people of any
consequence, Tess; it was only a phaeton, after all."

"And that's one phaeton more than you or I
possesses. Oh Maggie, they were laughing at us, didn't you see
that?" Now it was Tess's turn to blush, which only heightened the
translucent beauty of her pale skin.

"There you go again, Tessie. It's what
Bridget says: you don't trust anyone. He was only being
friendly-like. And why shouldn't he? Aren't you prettier hands down
than either of
them?"

"It takes more than looks to make a lady,
Mag," said Tess, a little wistfully.

"And who is it that's reading the works of
Tolstoy in her room every spare moment she gets? Not theirselves,
you can be sure," Maggie argued.

"Everyone in the world has already read
Anna Karenina
, Maggie. Now stop."

"I'll bet a hat they haven't," insisted
Maggie. "I haven't, and no one
we
know has, and what does
that tell you? That you're as good as they, or better."

"This is getting us nowhere at all, and—oh,
look, Maggie, maroon livery!" Tess said, diverting her sister's
attention to a footman perched atop a magnificent victoria that was
parading north. "Would that be the Vanderbilts, do you think?" she
asked innocently.

"I'm sure of it!" cried Maggie.

The Vanderbilts, having taken Mrs. Astor and
her Newport by storm, had, for the last several years, been engaged
in a ferocious competition among themselves to out-cottage one
another. The mid-century era of summering in Newport's comfortable
hotels became unfashionable with the advent of stick- style
cottages—large wooden mansions designed to house one (and one's
retinue) in luxurious privacy. Inevitably a competition resulted,
and the Vanderbilts understood the game better than anyone else. In
1888 William K. Vanderbilt commissioned the illustrious Richard
Morris Hunt to build for his wife the biggest and the best Newport
cottage, and the aptly named Marble House was the result: an
eleven-million-dollar neo-classic palace modeled after the Petit
Trianon in Versailles.

All during the building of Marble House,
which took place behind high walls in closely guarded secrecy, wild
rumors swirled around the servants' halls: of a ballroom carved
from gold; of an entire medieval museum inside for the old man's
pleasure; of entry doors weighing as much as a coach-and-four. And
then, after the grand housewarming in August of 1892, a hundred
ladies' maids brought back confirmation: all of it was true. Alva's
divorce of her generous husband two years later sent the servants'
halls rocking once more, but even that paled against the
captivating rumors a few months later of a grand coming-out party
for Consuelo Vanderbilt. It was whispered that nine chefs would be
serving dinner to five hundred guests, and that one of the courses
required the flesh of four hundred different birds.

But Consuelo's coming out was not until late
August, and meanwhile another Vanderbilt cottage was going up and
another Vanderbilt daughter coming out, earlier in the month: that
ultimate symbol of the Gilded Age, The Breakers, was to be house
but not especially home to twenty-year-old Gertrude, her four
siblings, and her parents. From the beginning, the Breakers project
had captured the imagination of Newport's domestic class. Of its
seventy rooms, thirty-three were designated for service, by far the
greatest number of any place in Newport. A fair-sized house could
be dropped into its two-story kitchen and never noticed. The
building itself occupied nearly an acre of land; its entrance hall
was four and a half stories high. The Breakers had more marble than
the Marble House, and more of everything else besides. The Breakers
overwhelmed you with its situation, crushed you with its
significance.

Tess knew that, because she had sneaked down
to the Cliff Walk one Sunday afternoon and had stolen a peek at the
furiously ongoing construction. Before she was shooed away in
Italian by a stonemason, she'd caught a glimpse of the mansion's
stunning east-facing facade. Tess knew then that nothing built by
the other millionaire barons would ever surpass it. If The Breakers
did not actually represent the end of an era, it was certainly
destined to be its apex. Although she'd flinched in the afternoon
sun before its excesses, Tess had been left almost dizzy with
longing:
to have that kind of wealth, that kind of
power...

"Tessie, look!" squealed her sister. "It's
Bridget, dashing in the way of the Vanderbilt carriage. She must be
mad; she'll be run over sure," cried Maggie, covering her eyes.

Tess snapped back to the present. "Maggie,
open your silly eyes. The horses are barely moving; there's a delay
ahead. Still, Bridget’s a fool to challenge Mrs. Vanderbilt's right
of way."

Bridget was making a beeline for the two
sisters. Surprised, Tess said, "It's
us
she's rushing for
pell-mell."

Bridget, red-faced and out of breath, her
bright orange hair still pinned to receive a cap, fetched up before
the two sisters like a setter on a short leash. "Maggie! Tess! Come
quick! The house is in anarchy! Cook has left, but first he spit in
the soup, and two of the footmen as well, and Enid's run off with
the butler, but first Mr. Waterman and the head coachman were
rolling around on the stable floor like two schoolboys, and your
father has one eye black as a lump of coal! Hurry!"

The three young women ran back to Beau Rêve
as fast as Maggie was able to manage, while Tess did her best to
untangle the hopelessly knotted skein of events that Bridget had
described. As far as Tess was able to make out, it all started when
one of the lunch guests made a disparaging observation about French
Catholics. One of the footmen had carried the comment straight back
to the kitchen, and the overworked, temperamental chef, his Gallic
pride flattened like a failed soufflé, dug in his heels and refused
to serve lunch. Unfortunately, the remark was made just as the
guests were being seated. For fifteen minutes Mrs. Winward and a
dozen of her peers languished on gilt chairs and the
purée
d'aspèrges
sat in the kitchen, cooling in its Sèvres tureen,
while the staff split up into pro- and counterrevolutionary
forces.

"Cook was livid, he was," said Bridget. "And
himself descended from six generations of chefs—he said not one at
madame's table knew who their grandmother's father was, much less
what faith, and then he said "Pfooey' and spat in the tureen, and
may I burn in the deepest circle of Hell if he didn't! Then Jimmy
Conner said, 'An Irish Catholic's still a Catholic for all that,'
and
he
spat in it too; and Herbert—a simpleton if ever there
was one—he spat in the soup because Jimmy did."

"But what did Mr. Waterman have to say about
all that?" Tess cried, shocked.

"Well, that's the amazing thing," Bridget
continued. "He was for dismissing them on the spot, as you might
expect. But just in the middle, if it isn't Enid herself bursts in
from the laundry room and cries, 'I've taken about all I can from
them pigs'—her family name being St. Onge, you know, though I
couldn't say as she's seen the inside of a Catholic church in
Newport or anywhere else—and doesn't she make straight for the
tureen, but Mr. Waterman stops her.
Then,
as God is my
witness, and before you could say 'Bob's your uncle,' why, herself
is in Mr. Waterman's arms, and crying, 'You promised to take me
away from this hellish life, you did,' and meanwhile a queue is
forming to spit in the soup tureen."

"Did
you
spit, Bridget?" asked
Maggie, wide-eyed.

"And I a Protestant? Whyever would I?"

"What about Mrs. Bracken? Where was
she?"

"Yes, yes—the housekeeper!" cried Maggie.
"
She
didn't spit, then?"

"That wretched pill, if only she had!"
Bridget, like most of the other women servants, had little use for
the severe Mrs. Bracken.

"But how did my father get a black eye? Oh
God, this is terrible!" Maggie's breath had become short, and the
two others were forced to stand and wait a moment while she
gathered up the last of her strength.

"Well, now, that
was
unfortunate, and
himself a perfect innocent in the matter, and only doing his
Christian duty. It wasn't myself in the stable, you see, but Peter
Boot. I was in the kitchen, afeard for my life. Well! Enid breaks
from Mr. Waterman's arms and flies to the stable, where the
coachman, without a thought in the world of the goings-on in the
kitchen, to say nothing of the torridness that's caught up his
wife, is in the harness room, about to put his horses to the
carriage. In roars Enid and, pointing a finger at his nose, says,
'You forced me into this marriage, see if you didn't!' If the
coachman didn't stare! Peter Boot says his mouth were open so, the
flies had no place else to go. Hard on Enid's heels comes Mr.
Waterman, and
then
don't the fireworks begin."

Bridget paused for breath and for effect,
her gray-green eyes wide in a sea of freckles. "As it turns out,
Enid and Mr. W. was lovers at a house in Saratoga ten years before,
when he was valet and she a lady's maid. That being a man's world,
she
fell from grace while
he
was let off with the
merest warning. She only married the coachman after it was certain
he was to accept a position here, you know," Bridget finished up
loftily. "To be with Mr. Waterman. Imagine. And him always so much
more grand than Mr. Winward, even."

Tess had her arm around her sister, who had
begun, owing to her shortness of breath, to cough uncontrollably.
Distressed, and irritated beyond endurance by Bridget's long-winded
sensationalism, Tess snapped, "Can we get on to the part concerning
my father's injury, or would that be hurrying you along,
Bridget?"