It was time to put on my good head, I decided, drawing in a fortifying breath, rising from the chair determined to start cleaning up before the entire thing was left for my staff. I turned toward my husband to enlist his aid, but then I couldn’t help but frown: Ned was snoring on the lounger.
* * *
Weeks later, I awoke shortly after midnight to searing cramps gripping my belly. I groaned, reaching across the bed to wake Ned. “What is it?” he asked, his voice woolly with sleep.
“I think you need to call for the doctor,” I said, my words little more than a strangled whisper. I’d told Ned about the baby just shortly after I’d gotten over my frustrations with the Versailles party. He had been ebullient, sharing my joy with a childish giddiness. But now something felt terribly wrong. “It’s my stomach,” I groaned. “What if it’s something with the—” But then I shrieked when Ned pulled back the covers and we both saw the bedsheets smeared a flaming red.
“A baby boy,” the doctor declared, his features ashen as he told us. I had been three months along in carrying my son. Our son. When Ned heard the pronouncement, he covered his face in his hands and fled the room. I curled up in my plush bed and shut my eyes, too weak, too carved out and emptied even to cry. I ordered Renée to draw my thick drapes, encasing my room in black, and for several days I sent tray after tray of food back to the kitchen, untouched.
It was the strangest thing: after feeling certain that I did not wish for more children, once I’d decided to have another baby, with Ned, I had become desperate for one. I longed for that third child, the child that would be ours together. And after years of trying, I’d almost gotten it. “Why don’t we try again?” Ned asked late one evening as he joined me in the dark bedroom, attempting to cheer me up. It didn’t work, as I was hardly in any mood for romance.
I knew that my window was closing, now that I was well into my thirties. I wanted desperately to have a baby with Ned. But I began to feel more and more certain that our lifestyle was contradictory to carrying a healthy child within. Our pace was so frenetic, our schedules so exhausting. Late, booze-soaked nights. Hours of chaos and dancing and cigarette smoke. Always on the move, trains and cars, always packing up and going here and there. “I think we need to find another place,” I said to Ned one morning at breakfast. I hadn’t slept well, and my head felt mottled, but on this point at least, I had found some measure of clarity. “Someplace…other than here.”
Ned raised an eyebrow, questioning my meaning. He loved Long Island; he’d always known me to love it as well. And I had. I’d picked this land myself, designed the home and the grounds with care so that every inch would be in accordance with what we had wanted. And yet…“I need a change, Ned.”
Ned considered this, nodding slowly as he took in the full impact of my appearance, and I could see in his expression what he saw: my drawn eyes that had been crying far more than usual of late; my complexion pale because I no longer spent my days enjoying walks through the sand and swimming in the ocean; my hair limp, whereas before I had always styled it with such care. “Let’s take a trip,” he said. “To a spa town. Saratoga? Or Vichy, if you would prefer something overseas.”
I shook my head no. “I don’t mean simply a trip. I mean a new place we can call home. New faces. New scenery. A slower pace.”
Ned breathed out. Eventually, he answered. “That’s fine, Marjie. You know that for me, wherever you are is home.”
* * *
I set my sights on two hundred acres in the wilds of the Adirondacks. The girls were getting older—who knew how many more summers we’d have with them?—and I wanted to make a place where we could spend our summers as a family, free of the excesses of the Gold Coast with its gin-soaked parties and money-rolled cigarettes.
Because it was entirely my vision, I wanted to bring Ned around to the idea, and so I proposed a name that I knew was sure to please him: Camp Hutridge. “Wait until you see it, Ned,” I said, as we stepped off the sleek wooden Hacker-Craft boat and stared at the splendid swath of property that surrounded us. It was a crisp, clear fall day, the sort of day that made the water of Upper St. Regis Lake shine like a mirror, reflecting the rich green of the mountains all around us.
As Ned and I toured the wooded lakefront on foot, he did not need much convincing to fall in love with the place: a tranquil ridge covered in virgin forest of white pine and birch, a waterlocked camp hemmed by the Upper St. Regis and the two Spectacle Ponds. “This could be a refuge for us, Ned,” I said, already enjoying the calm of the place, noting the way my body felt softer, my breath slower and easier after only a few hours there. “Peace and quiet.”