Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
The Silver Prince
1912
Striped and shot, the tiger lay flat, and I stretched my hungry body across him. He was part treasure, part prey. Though we had so much, I often ignored the chaises and satin chairs, instead gathering my book and lying upon this tattered dead animal. Move, my mother would say, if she happened to be in the room. Peggy, move away from the beast! This request would send my sister, Benita, into fits of giggles. Move away from the beast, Benita would later imitate. The tongue had fallen out, at one point, replaced by a hapless plaster replica. As I read, I would dangle my fingers into the mouth, touching the jagged rise of ebony. Often the head would loll abruptly; the mouth red and raw and somehow alive below the still, crystal eyes.
Oh Peggy, my mother said, move away from the tiger and get off the floor. I would brush the tiger fur with my hand, and stare up at the ceiling, entranced. For a moment, everything in the elegant room felt savage, uneasy.
We were living at the Waldorf-Astoria. We moved there from our former house on 15 East 72nd, right across from the entrance to Central Park. My father was in Paris for business; this is what we were told and what we would dutifully repeat. After weeks of waiting for his expected return, my mother moved us to the hotel. Not to worry. Daniel, my father’s brother, lived there as well. The entire floor below ours was for his family; I imagine the Astors were mortified. The Googs are taking over the hotel. Like money and love, these sudden changes in residence were never spoken of in my family. I’m fourteen, but believe I’m possessed of a knowledge that eludes the rest of them. I know my father will not return.
The morning he left, I begged Victor, his valet, to let me brush my father’s mustache. We sang together, a sweet, secret song he’d invented for me. French and English. Oui, oui, Peggy. A whistle, a dun-la-dun, and I would twirl. Into his pocket, I sneaked the tiger’s tongue.
With him, my father took his secrets, and his shame, packed in one of his seventeen trunks. Silver to the end, he held us each in his arms while all around us the cherry trees of Fifth Avenue erupted into bloom. Clouds above us broke apart. We ran after him. Corseted, silk skirts to our ankles, we were hobbled. Our sailor hats fell off in the breeze, floating lightly over the wheels of his carriage.
Hazel’s sobs were heard all up and down Park Avenue. Adeline Havemeyer and Alma Harrington looked down from their windows. My father’s carriage continued toward the dark strands of river in a part of the city we’d never been. A business trip, my uncle Daniel informed my mother. “He seems to have got in his head to start his own company, the—I believe, it’s to be called the International Steam Company.” He looked appalled, for my grandfather had always told the brothers the story of Aesop, they should stick together like a bundle of sticks. “Florette, has he ever spoken to you of his business matters?”
“Do you think he has? Really, Daniel.”
“Has he ever mentioned—” He stopped, catching sight of me on the rug. “Peggy,” he said softly. “I did not realize you were there.”
“She is having an unhealthy love affair with that beast,” my mother said. “I can’t imagine how their children will look.”
“I am sure they’ll be clever,” he said.
“Dangerous,” I countered, flailing backward with arched back and bared teeth.
The St. Regis was sumptuous and dull. The windows were covered with bars and dirty glass. The park was only a sliver of light through the window. I missed my father’s whims and treasures, however morbid and lavish.
My mother turned sentry. The fact that her own marriage, a merging of fiefdoms, was clearly in decline seemed to only raise her interest in marrying off her brother’s daughters. Weeks on weeks went by without my father’s return, yet she grew perversely more attuned to the possibility of romance. A dinner was held for Mr. Harry Loeb; a lunch for Mr. Roger Strauss. She sent battalions to Barrytown for strawberries; ermine arrived from a valley in Russia. She wore bustles and blouses buttoned to her neck. N.G., she would say of a name on the guest list. Not good. Strike of the pen. The poorer erased.
Why would my father not wish to stay in Paris when this was the woman in his home? I began to despise her.
In Paris, my father must have been elated never to attend another ball, another stuffy Fifth Avenue party. The more my mother neglected us, the more I grew certain that my father would stay in another city with other women who were slim and joyful. I imagined them with such beauty, I almost fell in love with these creatures myself. Peacock feathers in ringlets; the white dive of breasts.
He’s freed himself from all of us, I told Benita. His silly daughters, his greedy brothers, his snobbish wife. Don’t you see it? He’s freed himself from the Havemeyers and the Harringtons and the Loebs and the Strausses and the perfectly lovely Rockefellers.
She always answered me; we spoke sometimes like a song. Our words entwined; giddy. It was a kind of language through a forbidden melody. But when I said this, she walked toward the piano. She played Wagner perfectly from memory. I decided not to mention it again, since she looked so wounded, banging the C sharp, staring into the sheet music for a song she wasn’t playing.
He wrote us letters. Benita and I read them to each other as we lay across our mother’s bed. We ransacked the notes from my mother’s jewelry box, where she kept them under ribbons and emeralds. In April, he wrote me. He’d been gone for nine months. I am glad to receive your kind letter and hope that you will frequently find time to write me. I have found—
Here I stopped reading. Found what? Benita asked. A nice gift for Hazel, I lied.
Oh Haze, she said, sighing.
Why didn’t I tell Benita then? I suppose the rest of the sentence set off such a fierce joy that I felt if shared, I might receive a reprimand. It’s just a promise; he’s always making those. I folded the letter seventeen times, until it was thin as a match. I slid it into my leather ankle boot while Benita stood, asking me to act like a boy and help her practice her curtsy.
In Paris, my father was building elevators that would climb to the top of the Eiffel Tower. This fact alone filled me with love. My father! Setting off to the clouds while all his old-fashioned brothers still sent men down into the infernal mines. It seemed to me that my father was unafraid of modern machines; he refused to return to the places his father sent him—the barren rock of northern Mexico, the choking furnaces of all-night smelters in an empty Colorado. My father believed in the unproven, in volition, in a closer view of the clouds.
One morning, soon after I received the hopeful letter from my father, I was stopped on Fifth by Mr. Rockefeller. He waved his cane and summoned me closer. I had not seen him since we’d moved from 15. He was older now; with white flecks in his eyes; a scent of lily and pines. I was always looking close at these men, trying to see what it was we were all trying so achingly to be. His voice was clipped and magnetic. The clever Miss Guggenheim, he said. He placed emphasis on the heim. Scratchy, German, a sound as if he were clearing his throat.
I started a curtsy, then without completing it, exclaimed. “My father is in Paris,” I announced. “He’s building elevators for the Eiffel Tower!” I knew I sounded ludicrous and impolite, but I enjoyed the announcement.
“Is that right?” he said. He seemed to consider whether the idea was worth his considering. “Elevators?”
“The Eiffel Tower is the highest building in Paris,” I informed him.
He nodded. “Yes, the higher to fall.”
His amusement didn’t bother me. I imagined my father, straddling the immense scaffolding, suspended. Below him the arches of Notre Dame, the Louvre.
I began to speak again, but the governess Cora squeezed my hand. The high sun brushed her face; she lifted her parasol off the ground. “Peggy,” she said. “Do you not know? Has Hazel not told you?”
She was not allowed to embrace me, but it seemed she wanted to lift me as her hands weaved near my chest. That was when she told me, my father had booked a return ticket for Hazel’s birthday. In three weeks, she said, your father will be home.
