The Gilded Years (15 page)

“You live to shock, Lottie Taylor,” said Anita, her laughter with Lottie serving as a welcome diversion after her alarming meeting. Anita hurried ahead of her and said, “Maybe one day, I’ll shock you, too.”

W
ith the long-anticipated Mohonk trip looming in less than twelve hours, Anita’s dramatic detention slipped even further from her mind. Lottie, meanwhile, redirected all her energy into galvanizing the fourth floor of Main for its day of freedom outdoors.

As was the custom the day of the trip, the first bell went off at 5:45
A.M
. and the two girls rushed through their morning routines, piling on thick dresses and cream-colored wool sweaters with their class year embroidered on the chest. Anita and Lottie savored the moment as they dressed. They would always be ’97, but their time as part of a senior class on campus was ticking quickly by.

With their clothes layered artfully and their hats pinned to their heads, they ran down the stairs as soon as they saw the wagons approaching the drive around Fred’s Nose. They burst out the doors, Anita’s hand grasped in Lottie’s.

“Come, Anita! We need to be in the front of the wagon!” Lottie screamed. They ran, their hats tilting off their heads, tripping on their skirts like youthful tumbleweeds.

“Don’t you take that seat, Mary Chambers!” Lottie warned as they joined the three other girls on the first wagon. “I’ve had that very seat saved in my mind since freshman year.”

“You’re as
childish as they come, Lottie Taylor,” said Mary, moving one row back, but she was laughing. Everyone trod lightly around Mary because she was class president, except for Lottie. The roommates sat snugly together, their hands tight in their laps against the cold, ready to absorb every moment of the day’s promised bliss.

“I’m so happy we are not on one of the barges. This is so much more amusing, isn’t it?” said Lottie, bouncing up and down as the horses twitched and whinnied in their harnesses. “We had to go by wagon again, just like freshman year.”

Anita nodded, eager for the convoy to pass through the Vassar gates. She had wanted to take a barge until this moment, since she had never been down the Hudson in one, but Lottie’s passionate desire to re-create her freshman experience brought Anita to her side.

“Belle! Caroline! Here we are! Join us!” Lottie cried when she saw their friends coming out the big wooden doors of Main.

“Look at the pair of you in your class sweaters!” Caroline shouted. They, too, had followed the trend and layered college clothing over their dresses. The two climbed in with the help of the driver and were soon followed by Sarah Douglas and her roommate, Alice Sawyer.

“Oh, no, no,” whispered Lottie to Anita. “In our wagon? Quickly, Anita, fake a fainting spell so we can move.”

“I will not,” she said, though she would have loved to.

Sarah and Alice took the last row in the wagon and picked up their conversation about the Southern Club’s alumnae reception, which was to be held in the J Parlor the following week.

Anita listened with a mix of dread and fascination, but Belle’s melodic alto broke out, overpowering their conversation, and soon they were all screaming the school song:
“Then
a cheer for the rose and the gray, despondency swift sped away, and we sing alma mater together, three cheers for the rose and the gray!”

Two hours later, their faces chilled by the November air, and with Anita having thoroughly enjoyed the wagon ride after all, they arrived at Mohonk Mountain House—the last time many of them would ever come to that beautiful slice of the Hudson Valley. They immediately recognized the familiar form of Frederick Ferris Thompson, the most popular Vassar trustee and the man who financed the trip every year, greeting them with a smile the size of a croissant.

A chorus of “Uncle Fred!” arose as the girls saluted the beneficent millionaire like their favorite grandfather.

“The ladies of ’97 have arrived! And let’s not forget 1900—our turn-of-the-century class! A warmest welcome to you all,” he said, ushering them into the handsome building.

A light show of emotion took over Anita when she walked inside the imposing structure, thinking of her trip freshman year and how lonely she’d felt then. Her roommate that year lacked Lottie’s warmth, and the two girls did very little in their shared rooms but sleep and exchange polite niceties about their studies. She had been a nervous, cautious twenty-one-year-old that first fall, but she had loved the trip to Mohonk, the rowing on the lake, hiking up Sky Top hill with a pack of girls declaiming Longfellow and Whitman and shouting out every autumnal word they could think of. But this year’s trip, Anita knew, would be better because Lottie was there to breathe her exceptional version of life into it.

As the girls separated into hiking groups, Anita’s thoughts homed in on a particular memory from that earlier trip. She had gone rowing in the afternoon with three girls from her hallway. She had loved the way her muscles felt as
she had dipped her sturdy wooden oars in the lake, the way her dress had seemed to float around her in the narrow boat, the sound it made cutting across the water like her own private rainstorm. The girls had traded stories as they rowed and then broken out into song. Anita, with one of the best voices at Vassar, had sung the loudest, the most vibrantly. She started humming one of the songs they had shouted out that day, “Daughters of Vassar Dear.”

“Why are you singing that little song, Miss Hemmings?” asked Belle, who always picked up a stray note in the air.

“I don’t know,” said Anita. “I think we sang it here freshman year.”

“Did we?” asked Belle. “And I thought just the girls in the eighties sang that old tune.”

Lottie joined them, bowing as Belle took over the singing.

“Why are you bowing at a song?” asked Belle, stopping during the chorus.

“The Japanese bow at everything,” said Lottie, knowledgeably.

“You’re from New York.”

“But I might as well be Japanese. Unless I marry Anita’s brother. He’s American, I take it?” she asked with a coquettish simper at her roommate.

“Anita! Who is this brother you’ve been hiding?” asked Belle. “Three years in choir and Glee Club with you and not a word. I should be terribly vexed.”

“No, you should not be,” said Lottie. “Clearly, it was fate that brought him to me, this year.”

“Well, what will it be, ladies? Are we rowers or are we hikers?” Caroline shouted.

“We are hikers,” said Lottie, and Anita didn’t dare argue for the lake.

She thought of how much she had loved that day in ’93, how that had been it for her: Vassar would be her safe corner of the world, a place she would forever love without limit, despite everything.

The girls climbed as high as nature would allow them to go on Sky Top and looked out at the last of the fall leaves and the gentle arch of the Hudson Valley mountain range. They all stayed quiet for a moment, just letting the heavy breeze move through them, then past them, heading south.

They watched as another group of their classmates made it to the top, huddling together for warmth, acting as if there wasn’t an eye on them. That’s what it was like to exist in this world. It was a perfect, pellucid bubble, moving idly along. But this particular bubble only had seven months until it burst.

B
elle, play something charming on the mandolin, will you? I have a terrible, nearly incurable case of the borings.”

Lottie was reclining on the parlor couch watching a pool of light flooding the window change shapes as the afternoon clouds moved in. The week after the annual trip to Mohonk seemed to stretch on for two. It was nearly a month until the Phil Day dance, and the campus ticked around the clock of normalcy from early November to early December, without a notable event to distract the students from their work. When no such distractions were provided, Lottie had to find a way to create them.

“What are the borings?” asked Belle, making no move to get her mandolin from her room. She loved Lottie, but she seldom did what she asked unless she asked twice.

“Oh,” said Lottie swinging her arm over the side of the couch for effect. “It’s when you’re dreadfully bored and the only way out is through some
one
charming doing some
thing
charming.”

“That makes perfect sense,” said Belle, heading to her room for her instrument. She liked being labeled charming, especially by Lottie.

“But it can’t be someone with just a splash of charm,” Lottie elaborated, making up her definition as she went along. “It has to be someone who smokes charm, weeps charm, who seems to have been swaddled in it from birth.”

“And preferably this charming person can also provide music,” added Anita, who had been Lottie’s antidote to the borings for three months now. But it was fair, as Lottie was everybody’s antidote to the borings.

“I bet it helps if the person is exquisitely rich,” said Caroline, lifting her head from the poetry book she had been reading aloud.

“Frightfully, frightfully rich,” added Belle, coming back with her mandolin.

“Oh, no,” said Lottie sitting up. “It doesn’t help at all. Money does not give people charm. It usually provides them an excuse not to be charming. Not to try at all.” She put her hand to her chest and said, “There are exceptions, of course.”

Belle started to play the mandolin with ease, her lithe fingers moving up and down the neck of the squat instrument.

“That’s wonderful,” said Lottie, closing her eyes. She reached over and plucked an ostrich feather from her desk beside her—which served half as workspace and half as Lottie’s personal museum—and fanned herself to the rhythm. “What is this melancholy song?”

“Bach’s Sonata Number One in G Minor,” said Belle and Anita in unison. Belle and Anita had always been close, having been in Glee Club and chorus together since their first year at Vassar, but they had become much more attached now that they were both Lottie’s friends. The friendship that they shared with Lottie, the fact that they could spend their days together in a beautiful room with a perfect
gatehouse view, made each of them feel part of something fleeting and rare.

Anita and Belle hummed along as Belle’s nimble hand worked its way across the frets, each finger lifting and pressing so deftly it was easy to forget about the music and focus on the beauty of Belle’s hands.

“What a world full of talent we dwell in,” said Caroline. “At least for these four years.”

“Is life among the natives in Syria not like this?” asked Lottie from her place of repose. Lottie, it seemed, was no longer suffering from the borings.

“Oh, but it is,” said Caroline. “Belle, your playing makes me think of the nights when I’m allowed to leave the confines of my father’s school and see the real Syria. The Arab world rather than the Christian one.” Caroline let her head fall to the side in perfect repose while she enjoyed Belle’s playing. “Though there are communities of Jews, too. There is room for all in dear old Syria.”

“And they all play Bach on the mandolin?” asked Lottie, gently mocking her.

“No, of course not,” said Caroline, smiling proudly to show that her one leg up on a Taylor was how much of the world she’d seen. “They play wooden flutes and crude drums and long stringed instruments that could be inspired by a mandolin but are unique to the Arab world. Some are even played with bows. But I’ve only seen them played by men. And they’re very dusty. Everything in Syria is covered in dust. One day you will all come to visit me and I’ll order up a dust storm especially for my Vassar family.”

“I’ll have a hat made now,” said Lottie, throwing the bedsheet on her head.

“That’s almost appropriate,” said Caroline, laughing.

A dust storm, thought Anita. She imagined all the
people, the sights and sounds that Caroline had seen and heard in her life during her childhood abroad and through her travels. Rather than the longing she usually felt when Caroline spoke of her life in Syria, Anita thought about the world that was waiting for her after school—one full of travel, starting with studying in Greece and then a life with Porter in Chicago. She would have her own stories soon, and she would send them to Caroline in long letters. Greece would not have dust storms, but she would write of the pounding sun and the men with their wide black eyes. Yes, she thought to herself, I’ll write to all three of them a year from now and say, You must all come visit me and I’ll order up the bluest sky especially for you.

Anita looked out the window at the snow falling through the swirls of gray clouds, a reminder that everything that started high and holy eventually came tumbling down. But, she thought as the flakes swam past the glass, the process was beautiful. Even if she did not become a professor, even if Vassar was the apex of her intellectual life, as Frederick had said it must be, she had this, these friends, this day.

When the autumn browns began to deepen and the girls could see only tattered leaves when they looked down from the high floor, the gossip at the college turned to the Philaletheis Day dance, the highlight of each December.

Anita and Porter had been going over their plans for the dance in every letter they had exchanged since November 1.

The event was set for a Saturday, and Porter planned to take an early train to Poughkeepsie on Friday with other Harvard men. He had asked Anita if he should pester Henry about Lottie, and Anita wasn’t sure how to answer.

She had her pen poised to write back, when Lottie walked into the room in a burgundy silk taffeta dress, very formal for a school day. She had just returned from lunch
in town with one of her distant relations, the type of older moneyed person who would expect such dress at all times, even from a student.

“Lottie, you look wonderful in that gown,” said Anita as her roommate fell onto the little divan in mock exhaustion, immediately wrinkling her dress.

“Relay that fact to your brother, would you, please?” said Lottie, taking one of her many pleated fans from her desk. “I haven’t heard from him in over two weeks, and he still owes me a reply for the Phil Dance. I’d be panicked, as it’s three weeks away, but I know he’ll say yes.”