I put my hand to Deenie’s cheek. It was soft and smooth, her entire face glowing with youth, her features pristinely beautiful, even if sad. “My darling girl,” I said, “Marie Antoinette’s groom may have been a king, but I can promise you that he was not nearly as wonderful as that man over there. I hope you’ll give him a chance.”
We would depart on the Sea Cloud the next week to explore the Caribbean together as newlyweds. Deenie was scheduled to be with her father for the Christmas holiday and then back at school, so Joey and I would travel by yacht from our honeymoon directly to Palm Beach, where we would wait out some of the winter. From there we would go on to Washington, where my new life as Mrs. Joseph Davies awaited.
* * *
“My dear, I can’t remember the last time a new bride arrived in Washington to ruffle so many of these old vulture feathers. At least, not since my own wedding.” Alice Roosevelt looked at me with a wry smirk over my Limoges china teacup. She was now, legally speaking, Alice Longworth, having married her beau, the Ohio congressman Nick Longworth, but she was still Alice Roosevelt to me. And she knew exactly what she was doing in coming to my house that day to join me for a cup of tea. She was showing her support for me, even as the rest of the Washington social set refused to acknowledge my existence.
“I don’t know Joe Davies well, but I know you, Marjorie Merriweather Post Davies, and if he’s good enough for you, then I trust your judgment. Even if he is a friend of old Feather Duster’s.” Alice used her well-worn nickname for her cousin, our popular president, even though he was no longer the bumbling boy with a childhood crush on her. But the venom between the Oyster Bay Roosevelts, sired by our former president Teddy Roosevelt, and the Hyde Park Roosevelts, the clan of the current president, was the stuff of an epic Greek drama, one that I had no desire to get caught in the middle of.
Fortunately Alice had plenty of other gossip fodder that afternoon, but the topic eventually returned to how hopeless my own social standing was in the capital. “The problem is that Emlen Davies lived here for decades,” Alice explained. “Her family’s been well regarded in the area for centuries, and she’s got a lot of friends. Which means that you, Marjorie dear, have a lot of critics.”
“I do see that,” I said, frowning as I took a slow sip of my tea. Of course I’d noted how the parlor doors had consistently been closed to me when I’d paid calls to my neighbors just shortly after my arrival to town. How the well-dressed matrons in the restaurants and theaters would look away, brows knitting in censorious scowls, as Joe and I entered together. How whispers seemed to trail my wake as I walked along the streets or stopped in to browse the shops of Georgetown. “But it’s not as though I’m an arriviste myself,” I went on. “Why, I spent much of my youth here. I went to boarding school up the street. My father lived here for years. My mother lived here until the day she died.”
“That’s all well and good,” Alice replied, shrugging. “But you weren’t here as Mrs. Joseph Davies. Now you are, and you’re the one they are blaming for Emlen’s heartbreak.”
I glowered at this. “Heartbreak, my foot. She was living apart from him and never cared to see Joey another day in her life.”
Alice sat back in her chair, crossing her ankles as she flashed me an impish smirk. “Oh, but these ladies love a good scandal, and that’s precisely what you’ve given them. Edith Wilson has put the mark of Cain on you.”
“Lovely, just what I need. The former First Lady calling for my head.”
“She’s not the one you should be worried about, dearest,” Alice said, leaning toward me. “The one you should be concerned with is Betty Beale.”
I knew the name. “The newspaper reporter?”
Alice nodded. “Goodness knows my cousin Eleo isn’t First Lady in this town when it comes to society. She’s timid as a church mouse. Goes tongue-tied at the sight of a calling card.”
Eleanor Roosevelt was notoriously shy and retiring as a hostess, even if I did remember her warm and gracious smiles when she’d welcomed me to the White House a few years prior. But I wasn’t going to argue with Alice over her description of her cousin, and she was eager to say more: “If Edith Wilson is the District’s first lady when it comes to society and hosting, then Betty Beale is its gatekeeper. Not a gathering occurs without that woman in attendance. And she always reports on who was invited—and who was not.”