The Gilded Years (26 page)

“Do take the newspaper for the train, Louise,” said an exhausted Mrs. Taylor from her perch in the drawing room the next morning as the girls were preparing to leave. “You are mentioned, which is astonishing considering the appearance of Mr. Rhinelander. How impudent of him.”

“What does it say about me?” asked Lottie, taking the
Times
from her mother’s hand.

“It says you were asleep, dear,” said Mrs. Taylor, her face in her teacup.

“Does it really?” said Lottie, holding the paper in two fingers as if it were poisonous.

“No, it does not, but I know you were. Nothing will change you, not even that college. Mr. Force compared you to a gardenia. Or was it a cactus? You’ll just have to read it for yourself.”

Lottie tucked the paper under her arm and gave her mother a kiss. “It could be worse, mother. Let’s try to remember that.”

“Who was Mr. Rhinelander with, dear?” asked Mrs. Taylor. “The one night I leave the box to you I miss the most scandalous event of the season. I am very surprised Mr. Force did not mention it in his column. I suppose it was the discreet thing to do, but Mr. Force and discretion tend to go together like your brother and sobriety.”

“He was alone, Mother,” said Lottie. “Sitting in the Rhinelander box very much alone.”

“Scandalous,” said Mrs. Taylor, waving goodbye to the group. “Just scandalous.”

The four returned to Vassar on Monday evening, three of them confiding in one another that the visit had opened their eyes to a new, appealing world. This, they decided, could be what awaited them after college. Not the opulence—only the very few could obtain that—but the activism, the conversation, the art. They did not have to turn into their mothers, because many in their mothers’ generation wanted to turn into them.

W
hen Lottie joined Anita and the others for breakfast the following morning, their senior table was decorated with twisted pink streamers, elaborately inscribed name cards, and large balloons. It was tradition to decorate the hall for birthdays, the labor done by the students who shared a table with the honoree. The decorations, this time in honor of Hortense Lewis’s birthday, would stay up for lunch and dinner, too, and a party was planned in Caroline and Belle’s wing of the senior hall after classes and chapel.

On that festive morning, Anita felt closer to Lottie, Belle, and Caroline than she had all year. The trip to New York—seeing the city from the Taylors’ carriage, hearing Nettie Aldrich speak about her work, taking in the opera—had left her with the conviction that these women would be her lifelong friends. She would always have Bessie, but now she felt that she wouldn’t
only
have Bessie. She wasn’t as afraid of life after Vassar. She wasn’t even afraid of losing Porter Hamilton. She felt a reassurance that she hadn’t felt since she received her Vassar acceptance letter. If she made the right decisions—difficult, but right for her—she could have what Caroline, Belle, and Lottie were looking forward
to: a career, intellectual stimulation, a husband and family who supported her, the opportunity to make a difference in society. She was sure she could find a way to enter that world—with them, with Porter—while also holding on to some part of her true identity.

During the days that followed, tension mounted at the school as the students began preparing for the midyear examinations at the end of January. Lottie and Anita agreed that their minds had benefited from their taste of freedom in New York, and both passed their tests easily.

It was in the early February lull that Lottie let her academic studies go in favor of a life of hobbies. She had taken up ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging, and had stems sent in by the dozen, turning their parlor into a living preamble to spring. But Anita clung to her books. She may have disobeyed Frederick by traveling to New York, but she would not let her grades go anywhere but up. Studying also proved to be the only way she could stop herself thinking about Porter and the fact that he had not yet responded to her letter. She understood his anger and had penned numerous follow-up letters, but she did not dare send them until she had word from him first.

On the Friday before Valentine’s Day, as she tried not to dwell on the holiday that the campus was planning to celebrate with gusto, Anita headed to the library, where she planned to stay until the dinner bell rang. She was hurrying, eager to find a good corner table, but she slowed her steps when she saw Sarah Douglas and her roommate, Alice Sawyer, in the hall outside the library entrance. They both looked at her with interest as she approached.

“Anita! What are you doing here?” asked Sarah when Anita was in close enough range that she did not have to shout. “Didn’t I see Porter Hamilton disembark at the Poughkeepsie
station this afternoon? I was sure he was coming to see you. Did he leave already?”

Anita couldn’t hide her confusion, and both girls knew immediately that Anita did not have plans to see Porter. He must have been in town to visit another girl.

“Are you sure it was he?” asked Anita. “Porter Hamilton from Harvard?”

“Absolutely,” said Sarah. “He’s not one you miss, is he? I was on the three o’clock train from Albany. I was in the capital visiting Mary Mumford. Perhaps you remember her from the class of ’94? Beautiful red hair, a bit darker than Caroline Hardin’s, and president of the Shakespeare Club during her days here. She is teaching near Albany now, making quite a name for herself at the Emma Willard School in Troy.”

Anita looked at her blankly and said nothing.

“But I am going on about something you have no interest in,” Sarah said, collecting herself. “It was certainly him. I recognized him from Phil Day. Porter Hamilton. The rumor at school is that you and he are engaged. Is that not the case?”

Anita looked into the library at the clock. It was almost five. The dinner bell would ring in an hour, and she did not have permission to miss the meal.

“Do you have an idea why he came to Poughkeepsie?” Alice asked Anita.

“I don’t,” she said honestly, though it must have been to see her. Maybe he had tried to surprise her with a visit, to plead his case, but none of the maids or students could find her when he came to the visitors’ parlor. She had been in the chapel earlier that afternoon practicing her solo for the Easter concert. Perhaps no one had thought to look there.

“I imagine he has come to see me,” Anita said. “I must have missed a letter or telegram from him saying as much.”

“Of course he has,” said Alice, kindly. “You are lucky in love.”

“And much better off than your roommate,” said Sarah. “For all her money and that pretty face, she does seem to find an incredible number of scandal-ridden suitors.”

“Lottie does?” asked Anita, every comment from Sarah more bewildering to her than the last.

“Of course, Lottie,” said Sarah. “Can you believe the news about Joseph Southworth?”

“They’re engaged?” asked Anita.

“Engaged!” she said putting her hand on her chest and laughing. “Anita! Have you been ill? They are anything but engaged. Have you not spoken to her at all this week?”

“I suppose we’ve both been rather busy with midyear examinations,” said Anita, hoping her excuse sounded plausible. The truth was that she and Lottie had been inseparable that week, and had been ever since their return from New York.

“It is high time you had a little chat with her,” said Sarah. “She confided in Caroline Hardin that the story Joseph Southworth told about his mother being a deceased Japanese geisha is true, the deceased part being the exception. Benjamin Southworth, Joseph’s father, paid thousands of dollars to get Joseph’s mother, who was sixteen at the time, out of her contract in the geisha house in Kyoto because he was madly in love with her. Then he married and impregnated her! Hence Joseph Southworth’s arrival, not on American soil, but Japanese. Yes, he was born there. Sounds terribly dangerous, doesn’t it? Of course the Southworth family was outraged, so Benjamin fabricated some story about this woman’s death and brought Joseph back to the United States. Lottie told Caroline that she had tea with Joseph at the very end of Christmas vacation in Cambridge and that’s
when her feelings for him truly developed. But then, when the two were speaking about his family in Japan, Commodore Perry and all, he told her this story! She didn’t believe him, of course, but Lottie’s father did a little prying, and it turns out it’s all true. The geisha woman is still alive, and Benjamin and Joseph make routine trips to the Orient to see her. Joseph even admitted that when his American grandparents die, his father plans to bring her to America.”

“And how did you come to know this?” asked an increasingly disturbed Anita, suddenly understanding why Lottie was in Cambridge in late December.

“Lottie told Caroline the whole story in the middle of the senior parlor with the dividing curtains all thrown open. One has to think she did so on purpose. It only took a matter of hours for it to fly through the school like a carrier pigeon. Had you really not heard?”

“I really had not,” said Anita. “But that sounds like the type of story that Lottie would love. I would think she would be more attracted to the prospect of Joseph after hearing it, not less.”

“Anita, dearest. Let’s be realistic,” said Sarah, her smooth southern inflection taking her vowels for a ride. “She’s a Taylor! Her father might let her marry a Japanese man from the royal family—though none would ever marry her, their culture won’t allow such a thing—but she would never be permitted to consider a child of a common prostitute!”

“Are geishas really prostitutes?” asked Anita. “Lottie described them as talented entertainers who—”

“Anita, you know Lottie romanticizes everything. Joseph’s mother is no better than a brothel woman in New York.”

“Have you ever heard anything more scandalous?” said Alice. “It’s the gossip of the year, that’s for certain.”

“It’s amazing that Joseph has managed to remain so popular at Harvard,” said Sarah. “Though I suppose northerners care less about such things. It’s all very shocking.”

“Lottie has cut off contact with Joseph now?” asked Anita.

“Of course she has,” said Sarah. “What choice did she have? He is very handsome and as charming as a man can be—he was on my dance card at Phil—but he’s the child of a common whore,” she said, whispering the last word. “The venerable Southworth name means nothing after hearing about such a lineage, doesn’t it?”

“It’s a pity. He was very handsome and good-humored at Phil,” said Alice. She swatted at the hair falling on to her forehead as if it were a fly and rearranged the expertly cut plaid shirtwaist she was wearing. After Lottie, Alice was the senior with the most expensive clothes, though she didn’t seem to care a thing about fashion. She wore, like all the other girls did, what her mother sent up. Alice was a girl who was happy to follow, even if her soft, measured personality was often stamped out by those bolder and louder than she, like Sarah Douglas. “He was on my card, too,” she added.

Sarah gave Alice a stern look and then smiled at Anita. Anita could sense that she was thrilled to be the one recounting the story to her.

“She’ll have no trouble finding a new love interest, though, will she?” she said to Anita after a moment. “She’s Lottie Taylor.”

“The rich win at everything,” added Alice.

“Not everything,” said Sarah, who was known to be competitive on every level.

“Of course, Sarah. I didn’t mean—” said Alice, but Anita, uncharacteristically, cut them both off.

“So Southpaw, I mean, Joseph Southworth, was really born of Asian parentage? Through his mother?”

“Yes, Anita. Haven’t you been listening?” said Sarah. “Lottie must be beside herself. She loves to say shocking things, Crown Prince of Japan this and that, but she would never, she
could
never, marry someone like Joseph Southworth.”

“I appreciate your telling me,” said Anita, backing away, all her plans for the library forgotten. “I must go and find her.”

Turning quickly Anita rushed upstairs and checked her shared rooms for Lottie, but they were empty. She walked briskly down the hall to Caroline’s room, which already had her Valentines from the freshmen taped to the door, and knocked loudly.

When she heard Caroline’s voice, she opened the door and saw her friend sitting in her rocker with a volume of Stendhal’s
Le Rouge et le Noir
.

“Is it true what Sarah Douglas is saying about Old Southpaw?” said Anita, still in the doorway. “That his mother was a teenage . . . courtesan?”

“Yes, it is. Can you imagine? Lottie is in shock,” said Caroline, putting down her book. “Did she not tell you?”

“Not yet,” said Anita, so worried about her friend that she had even forgotten Porter Hamilton was in Poughkeepsie. “She must be devastated. Is she . . . have you seen her?”

“She said she was having tea at the Nelson House Hotel. She had permission to leave campus and to miss dinner this evening.”

“She did?” She had said nothing to Anita. “Was this something she had planned for several days?”

“I think so,” said Caroline, shrugging. “Perhaps she’s already found a replacement for Joseph. You know Lottie: she doesn’t mourn for long. Or at all.”

Anita nodded her thanks and backed away from the door. A replacement. No, she thought to herself, it was impossible. She ran back up to her rooms and opened the door to Lottie’s bedroom. She opened the drawers of her nightstand and went through the papers, but found nothing but letters from her mother and father. She closed the drawer carefully and looked through Lottie’s desk and in her wardrobe. She had gone through every coat pocket, looked under her mattress and behind pillows, but it wasn’t until she reached Lottie’s favorite school dress that she found what she feared. She pulled the thin duplicate of a telegram out and searched for the recipient’s name. It was to Porter Hamilton.

WRITING ON BEHALF ANITA. IN NO STATE TO RESPOND TO YOUR LETTER. DISTRAUGHT. HER DECISION FINAL. MEET ME FRI. FEB. 12 POUGHKEEPSIE LOBBY NELSON HOUSE HOTEL 4 P.M. WILL EXPLAIN ALL. MUST CLOSE HEART TO HER. IS ONLY SOLUTION. L. TAYLOR