My thoughts were a knot, tangled and thorny with urgent questions that I myself had no hope of answering: Did Mother know? Was she expecting this? Did that explain her surly mood, her strained face? Or was it the other way around—that her ailments and her unceasing melancholy had been enough to finally push Papa toward the final break, to seek his own happiness alone?
Not alone. As my mind reeled, the sound of my corseted breath coming and going in constricted rasps, I heard another noise. I followed the sound, my eyes sliding toward the far side of the drawing room and the thick door into the next room: Papa’s study. I had assumed that I was alone in the house, that Papa was dining out, but from the sound of the voices on the far side of the heavy wooden door, it seemed that I had been mistaken. A voice, Papa’s, mixed with another. Then a warble of laughter, a woman’s. And then the smell of Pears soap and too-sweet perfume clung thicker to my nostrils. I heard the second voice again, its sugary, servile tone mixing with a coo of girlish laughter.
Leila.
Leila was in Papa’s study, behind a closed door, laughing, while in the next room the wreckage of my parents’ marriage papered the floor. More laughter, then Papa’s voice, low and throaty, beseeching even, a timbre I’d never heard from him. A long moment of silence—that silence perhaps louder to me than the laughter of the previous moment—then more talking. Leila’s chirpy laugh and then casual talk, a quick, easy exchange that spoke of a well-worn intimacy.
I had to go. Immediately. I straightened, my mind a whorl of anger and anguish. I’d walked there from school; I could walk back. I’d send a note with some excuse, tell Papa I had a headache. But just as I crossed the room to leave, the study door began to groan open. I hurried the last few steps to the near doorway, but my eyes flickered backward and fixed on the threshold as I saw them: Papa in just a shirtwaist with no jacket or cravat, his top buttons undone and revealing the scarlet flush of his neck. Leila, her hair loose and untidy, her entire face flushed, a relaxed, triumphant smile on her lips. She turned to face him, and as his hands gripped her by the waist, the two of them paused a moment on the threshold, their bodies flush against each other, Leila fiddling with his unbuttoned collar.
My stomach clenched, and I worried that I would be sick right there in the doorway of the drawing room.
They weren’t expecting me just yet, I wasn’t due for another half hour, and I did not alert them to my presence on the opposite side of the room. How could I? I slid slowly backward, away from them and out to the foyer. I’d slip out the front and run, far away. And as I moved to do so, I heard the words. Leila’s words: “Now, now, Charlie Post, look at the mess you’ve made. And I thought you were such a fastidious man.”
“Well, I am sorry, my dear. I don’t know what came over me.” The sound of Papa pulling her to him once more, her fresh, compliant giggles. Leila, stepping on the divorce papers to get closer to Papa, a man who was still married. The pair of them, caressing like that, making a jest of the divorce documents that would destroy my family and shatter my mother’s fragile heart.
Never could I have conceived of such a thing. Of Papa being capable of such a vile act. Perhaps I’d never really known him at all. I, who’d fancied myself growing from girlhood into womanhood. Who had reveled in my new dresses from New York City, in my cheeky small talk with Alice Roosevelt and my Gibson Girl hairstyle. I’d danced at the ball, had relished the admiring looks of those blue-blooded young men all around me. I’d thought my father had such exciting plans for us, moving toward New York City and beginning a new chapter for our Post family. But the reality was that I was nothing more than a fool.
Chapter 7
Greenwich, Connecticut
Summer 1903
The chauffeur opened the door of our automobile, and I accepted Papa’s outstretched arm. As we made our way up the pebbled front path, I examined the fa?ade of the Old Elm Country Club. Soft light trickled through the windows of an old, dignified building painted a crisp white and trimmed with tidy wintergreen shutters. A border of tasteful ivy and low-clipped shrubs added the right amount of natural adornment. Nothing about the clubhouse appeared gilded or flashy, and it was precisely in that fact that one caught the overwhelming whiffs of power and wealth—old, pedigreed privilege, the sort that opted for understated restraint as opposed to flair and sparkle.
“I know I’ve always told you, Budgie, that ‘beauty is as beauty does,’ but I’ll indulge in a rare moment of vanity now to tell you just how beautiful you look tonight.” Papa gave my arm a squeeze, smiling down at me, and I found myself smiling back.