Papa went on and I listened, dizzy, his words sounding like a gramophone whose record was scratched and unpleasant; they would be married in the fall in Battle Creek. Now that I was done with school, Leila wished to move back there. The Boulders could be entirely mine, so I’d have room for a family of my own. Oh God, would Papa and Leila have a baby? She was, after all, only a few years older than I was. Was I to be replaced by a son or daughter from that woman?
Papa and I had never spoken long or candidly about my heartbreak over the divorce. Or my deep dislike of Leila. But he knew. Surely he knew. He was the smartest man I’d ever met. And what’s more, Papa was the closest person to me in the world; there wasn’t a single important memory in my life that did not involve him in some way. And yet, in spite of that, or perhaps precisely because of that, I found myself entirely unable to tell him now that he was breaking my heart.
And it was not only my heart he was breaking: Mother had been a withering husk of her former self since the divorce, and yet my father, a man whom I’d always known to be nothing but kind, would deliver this fresh blow to her in marrying such an unworthy successor? And he would allow Leila to look on my mother’s suffering, smiling and gloating, decked in her custom couture? How was it that Papa—a man who saw everything, even what others did not—could be so blind to the tragedy he was writing for our entire family?
By the time we arrived back at the front steps of the Mount Vernon brownstone, I was decided: Papa was going to marry, and he had sought neither my opinion nor my blessing. Papa, therefore, had no right to dictate whom I should marry. He had made his choice; he had done this to our family. He would wed Leila.
Fine, then. I would marry Eddie.
Chapter 9
Greenwich, Connecticut
Fall 1905
I thought that a small wedding would mean only a small parcel of cares and concerns. I was terribly mistaken.
It turned out that the length of the guest list mattered not at all when it came to the woes of planning a wedding, because the only two people I cared about attending—Papa and Mother—refused to be there together.
Papa, who was paying, would not attend unless Leila was invited. I shuddered to think of her introducing herself to my guests. Mrs. C. W. Post, so lovely to meet you. And Mother had declared that she would be there only if Leila’s name was left off the guest list. The two were at an impasse, and I erupted in tears as I surveyed the stack of invitation responses that trickled into The Boulders, tempted to toss them all into the fire and elope with my groom to Atlantic City.
Eddie looked on with an expression of rueful concern. “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.
“I don’t know, Eddie,” I answered, sighing. “I don’t know how we see our way out of this mess.”
In the end, after a series of tearful entreaties on my part, both Papa and Mother agreed to come and put on their smiles. Leila would be invited, but she would sit apart from my parents. And we would offer no celebratory luncheon to our guests following the church service—I could not trust my folks to keep the peace. “I’m so sorry, Ed,” I said one Friday afternoon a few weeks before Thanksgiving, grimacing at the fact that my groom was seeing such discord in my family. I was accustomed to it; but what must he think?
“It’s just as well, Marjorie. All I care about is walking out of that church with you.” It turned out my groom had family troubles of his own, though in his calm, understated way Eddie barely spoke of them. His father, also named Edward, had already passed away, and so it was just his mother who would be attending, but Mrs. Emma Close had survived a terrible stroke a few years prior and could barely walk. When I met the woman who would be my mother-in-law, for a formal lunch with Ed at the Metropolitan Club, she was scowling and unspeaking for most of the meal, and I did not know if that was the effect of her injury or if she was simply unhappy with her son’s choice of a Michigan bride with new money. Or perhaps a bit of both.
But there were plenty of reasons to feel happy in the months leading up to our wedding, too. Edward kept his word and bought me a diamond ring from Mr. Tiffany’s in New York. We also designed our wedding invitations there, cards of thick creamy stock, our embossed names curling around each other. Soon enough those names would be joined, and I’d be Mrs. Marjorie Close.
Because Eddie came from one of New York’s preeminent Knickerbocker families—those finest of Anglo-Dutch clans, his having been the original owners of much of lower Manhattan since before the American Revolution—we would be married at Grace Church on southern Broadway. My future husband’s family had gifted the valuable acreage upon which the storied church now stood.