I climbed the broad staircase toward my bedroom. There, at last, I heard muffled giggling. Then the thunder of Woofie’s bark. “Adelaide? Eleanor? Where are—” I gasped, following the sound of their riotous laughter into my bathroom, where I found both girls splashing in my bidet, drenched and giggling as if they were having a romp in a garden fountain. “Girls!” I stalked toward them, outraged, but before I could reach them to turn off the faucet, I slipped on the damp marble and went skidding across the room. This only sent Eleanor into further peals of defiant laughter.
Just then Pearcie charged in. “Girls!” she bellowed, taking in the wet, messy scene. I was prepared to turn toward the governess with a stern chiding and a piqued question as to how, precisely, she had let the girls get into such mischief, but I could tell by the woman’s expression that she had some reason for her absence. Her face was as flushed as if she had a fever. “What is it, Pearcie?” I asked, slowly rising from the slick floor.
“Mrs. Close, we’ve—” Just then we heard the clamor outside. Church bells ringing from nearby Holy Trinity. At this hour? Then an explosion like gunfire, or perhaps it was fireworks.
“News from Europe, Mrs. Close,” Pearcie continued, her voice thick with feeling. “The Great War—it’s over at last. We’ve won.”
I looked around the drenched bathroom, suddenly completely unconcerned with the gushing bidet, the slippery tiles, my dripping daughters. The Great War was over. The fight was over, and we had won. Europe would be delivered from the scourge of the kaiser and the worst conflict to tear across its land in a lifetime. Peace would return to its ravaged people. Our American soldiers would come home.
Eddie would be coming home.
It was all such wonderfully welcome news. It was what we had hoped and worked and prayed for since the earliest days of the conflict. Why then, I wondered, did I not feel overjoyed?
Chapter 20
New York City
Fall 1919
“Don’t you think it’s a bit”—Eddie looked at me in the mirror’s reflection as I sat before it, scrutinizing the rubies on my new earrings, their glimmer on perfect display thanks to my upswept chignon—“I don’t know…excessive?”
I touched the jewels at my ears. “What? You don’t like the rubies?” I turned to face him, my body draped in a lightweight dress of white, a sapphire necklace and matching blue bracelet adding bright bursts of color. These earrings were the final touch to make my attire red, white, and blue.
“No, I mean outside.” Eddie gestured toward the window and the garden beyond. “The bleachers you’ve had erected in our backyard.”
I tilted my head sideways, pulling my eyes from him. “More than four million young men served over there, including my husband. Excessive?” I shrugged. “Perhaps. But the war is won, and you deserve a grand party.”
I looked at Eddie. He was inspecting his own appearance in the full-length mirror, and I rose to cross the room to him. I touched the decoration on his jacket lapel, awarded to my husband by the French Legion of Honor for his service. He raised his hand and gently nudged me away, disinterested in my adjustments. “It’s not my grand party,” he said. “I think you like any excuse to put on a lavish affair.” With that, my husband offered me a tepid smile and left the room.
The Great War had ended months prior, and now our victorious General Pershing was back home in the States and leading his army on a grand parade, starting at the northern end of Manhattan and marching all the way to Washington Square Park. Because we could see the spectacle from our garden, I’d had my landscapers build a raised platform where we would gather and watch the festivities. Coloring my garden were fresh-clipped heaps of red roses, arranged throughout the space in the shape of red crosses to support our wartime work. But while peace had been restored to war-ravaged Europe, the détente that hovered over our home felt fragile.
It was odd: my husband and I rarely raised our voices or traded harsh words. If anything, that might have been preferable. The discord between us was more of a widening chasm, resulting from the increasingly obvious fact that we shared so very little in common. There was no warmth or tenderness, no laughter or understanding. I shuddered at the fact that lately, I was reminded more and more of the frosty remoteness that I’d spent so much of my childhood observing and mediating between Mother and Papa.
And though my husband was home from war, home meant something very different to him than it did to me. Eddie wanted to be in Greenwich; I was insistent that we remain in Manhattan. He wanted a wife who was happy to sit at home and graciously receive a set rotation of society ladies in her drawing room, or else to step out to visit with those very same ladies for tea or luncheon; he did not want a wife who was constantly hurrying out the door for work at the Red Cross or some meeting to fundraise for the immigrant-aid societies or Spanish flu relief efforts. And he certainly did not want a wife who supported the Women’s Suffrage movement. Being too outspoken on anything rankled Ed Close, but a social cause as controversial and divisive as the women’s right to vote was particularly out of the question. “Marjorie, it’s just not how things are done,” he’d said after he’d come home from Europe and discovered, to his horror, that his wife had become a supporter of the suffragettes during his absence, one whom President Woodrow Wilson knew of by name.