I’d never been intimate with a man before Ed Close, but now that I had decided to go to bed with Ned Hutton, I realized that I’d never in fact been intimate with anyone, ever. There was a closeness with Ned that I’d never known—never even imagined—to be possible with a man. The way Ned loved me, it was as though my body was some delightful gift to be unwrapped and savored. As though my pleasure was his greatest challenge and his only goal. Ed Close had been cool and courteous—Ned was fire, and it was fire that he stoked in me as well. A fire I hadn’t previously known existed. With Ned, it was a mad, fast, intoxicating love. Less a choice than a compulsion—I needed to be with Ned Hutton; it was a fact so much larger than anything I had the power or the desire to resist. And Ned, to my dizzying delight, felt exactly the same way about me.
The girls were happily settled in New York with Pearcie and their tutors, so I remained with Ned a few more weeks, until the end of his stay. Finally, as the season came to its close, I decided to rent a private railcar for the journey north from Florida to New York so that we could travel home together, continuing to bask in the rapturous joy of our new and all-consuming love affair even after we’d bidden farewell to those balmy Palm Beach nights. I’d never known rail travel to be so deliciously enjoyable; the only problem was how swiftly it passed.
When our train did roll into Penn Station and we stepped back onto New York ground, as it was time to part ways—Ned toward his rented bachelor apartment in the Plaza hotel and me toward my mansion uptown—we both paused at the threshold of the station. My sleek chauffeured car waited at the curb. “I don’t want to say goodbye,” I said, feeling ridiculous as I said it, and yet knowing that he’d understand. I’d see him soon—we had plans to dine at Delmonico’s the next evening, but already that seemed too far away.
“How about we don’t?” he suggested, looking at me as we stood there, our breath misting between our faces. All of late-winter New York City roiled around us, but I didn’t hear anything other than those words.
“Don’t what?” I asked.
“Don’t part ways,” he answered, the cloud of his breath merging with mine. “I don’t want to. You don’t want to. How about you marry me? And then this…”—he waved his hands between us—“this never needs to end.”
I gasped out my yes. Yes, I would become his wife. Mrs. Edward F. Hutton. I couldn’t feel anything but giddy, all-consuming joy—Ned was my happiness after more than a decade of loveless days.
* * *
I didn’t want another church affair, a spectacle for hundreds of guests and grasping journalists. We’d both done that once before, a fact I didn’t feel eager to spotlight. So Ned and I exchanged our vows in a private, modest family gathering at my home the following summer, while the girls were off from school and before Ned’s son, Halcourt, was due to start his studies at Yale. We ate lunch together immediately afterward and toasted with cake and champagne. Of course the newspapers caught wind of it as soon as we signed the marriage license, and the journals churned the next day with the news of my marriage to the “handsome Wall Street millionaire.”
The girls were off to Greenwich shortly after that to spend a few weeks of their summer break with their father, so all I wanted was to enjoy my new husband in peace. We decamped from crowded, sticky Manhattan to Ned’s Long Island estate. I loved the calm, easy days out there. We’d sleep late and take our breakfast on trays in bed. By late morning I was outside, wading in the surf, pulling up fish and turtles and small crabs that I brought home and put in bowls of saltwater to keep for the girls. Ned and I went for leisurely horseback rides through the woods surrounding his estate or long walks through the sand. On clear evenings we’d rig up his sailboat and pack a picnic hamper, then go bobbing in the Atlantic surf, making love with nothing but the sweep of the ocean and the summer evening as our backdrop.
Ned’s son joined us out there in the final weeks of summer before he was due in New Haven. Halcourt was a dreamboat of a young man, tall and blond just like his father, and I suspected that both of my girls harbored giddy crushes on him, even if he was their stepbrother. I couldn’t blame them—he had the same good looks and easy smiles that had pulled me so quickly to his father. If anyone knew how irresistible a force the Hutton charm was, it was I.
I was gloriously in love with Ned and thus very willing to love Halcourt like a son. Just as Ned treated my girls with the warmth of a father. And since Halcourt no longer had a mother in his life, there was no awkwardness for me. I had only ever wanted the two girls, but now I had three children suddenly. That was perfect. In my thirties, I was still young enough to feel vibrant and beautiful with my new husband, and yet I did not feel the need to endure another pregnancy or childbirth.