I couldn’t help but laugh at this, a rueful exhalation.
“Now, Marjorie, I’m being entirely serious here. I know a thing about scandals, and I know a thing or two about unhappy marriages.” It was true; Alice had been married to Nicholas Longworth for decades before his death, and I wondered if even a single one of those years had been happy or harmonious. Perhaps the only truly joyful years of her adult life had been after she’d given birth to another man’s baby; but Alice Roosevelt had never let anyone see her mope. And neither would I.
I hung up the phone decided: I was not Mrs. Close-Hutton-Davies. I was not a homeless divorcée with her confidence shattered and her treasure plundered. I was not a Serial Cereal Bride whose misfortune made for juicy chitchat and flashy newspaper headlines.
Would I love again? Perhaps I would. Would I marry again? It was not impossible. Though sixty-eight years old and drained by the years of unhappiness with Joe, I still felt the deep warm embers of energy and hope. And I was enough of a romantic to know that it would be foolish to say absolutely no. But of one fact I was certain: I would never again make myself small in order to allow a man to feel big. I would never again root my home in another’s name, or put my own name aside to take up a man’s. I had been a leader, mother, businesswoman, and philanthropist all along. There was going to be no more denying that.
Chapter 46
Hillwood Estate, Washington, D.C.
July 4, 1957
“Mother, you live like an empress.” Adelaide stood at my side, hooking her arm through mine.
“That may be,” I answered, with a shrug of my bare shoulders. “But I don’t have an emperor picking up my bill.”
As I looked out over the grounds of my new estate, open that night for the first time to guests, a glittering and well-dressed crowd of hundreds, it was true that the scene could have been plucked directly from an oil painting of a bygone imperial court; but I knew better than anyone the amount of hard work it had taken to produce that tableau of merriment and beauty.
I’d always thrived when put to work on a meaningful mission, and for the past couple of years, my mission had been building my best and final home. This would be the ground on which I would finally lay down my roots, separate from any man, and I’d known that this property was for me when I had first toured it and the agent had told me the name: Arbremont—Wooded Mountain in French—that sounded an awful lot like Hillwood, the name of my beloved home on the Gold Coast. So I’d bought the estate and translated the name, and then I had set about making it into a home that would suit me in every inch.
I rebuilt walls and fireplaces, ripping out dark, old paneling to bring in custom pale wood and glistening ivory marble from France. I redesigned the front stairway so it could curve like one belonging in a Parisian palace. I tore down ceilings so that they could be rebuilt even higher. I covered the walls with my stunning art from the tsars and other European nobles, and draped my ceilings with chandeliers from empresses. I constructed a new high-ceilinged pavilion, where I could hold dances or give viewing parties for the latest American movies with my massive new projector.
Because my gardens here were even more extensive than the ones I had cherished at my previous estate, I made sure that mine would be a house perpetually adorned with flowers, both inside and out. My bright breakfast room was wrought entirely of glass, packed with orchids and overlooking my roses and azaleas. All along the ground floor, French doors gave easy access onto terraces and lawns that burst with greenery and color.
The finished product was such that even I could say that it was blameless on that summer night. The air hung warm, and my gardens and tree-covered hills were leafy and green, with the nearby Rock Creek Park offering its lush backdrop. My guests milled about, moving easily throughout the high-ceilinged ground floor and the rolling gardens, admiring my walls lined with Fabergé eggs forged in every shade and precious stone, holy icons and chalices, diamonds belonging to the tsarinas and plates belonging to the tsars. Knowing that my Russian collection surpassed the splendor of any museum exhibit here in the States, I’d displayed my treasures as if we were in fact in a museum, and little golden knobs beneath my pieces could be pulled out to reveal written descriptions of each priceless artifact. In the library, oil paintings of my family members hung alongside a photograph of my old friend Winston Churchill and a model of my beloved Sea Cloud.
And it was in the library that I stood as Betty Beale approached me just a few minutes into my party. I turned to her with a warm smile.