But that was all fine. She let the tranquil tones of the pastor wash over her and barely heard what he was saying, and it was all fine.
“Colonel and Mrs. Astor,” the pastor said, and Mother and Father and everyone else broke into applause, muffled because they all wore gloves.
Jack turned her to him and bent his head and kissed her, his hands light against her upper arms. Their third kiss.
A change of seasons, indeed.
All of her seasons, from now on, were going to be nothing but splendid.
She knew it in her mermaid soul.
CHAPTER 14
Off we sailed.
For months we sailed, up and down the coast, the Noma our own sweet personal paradise.
But every time we went ashore—and we did need to go ashore at times; the yacht ran on coal, not dreams, and frankly, sometimes my joints longed for dry land—they were waiting for us. The journalists. The tourists. The gawkers.
The Four Hundred, those avid and disgruntled beings.
Our marriage had not sated them, not a one. The press wanted more and more of us because the public did, and at least that was something I understood. Our names and faces sold their papers; our names and faces paid their salaries; and by devouring even the most mundane details about us, people around the country could imagine themselves, if only for a few moments, living our lives instead of their own.
But the fashionables! The Newport cottagers, the old Rhinebeck families, with their gnarled ancestral roots sunk deep into a fading Dutch–American history . . . they simultaneously craved us and despised us.
I suppose that, to them, Jack and I represented the elimination of that last crumbling battlement shielding the Old Guard from the New. The thought of our unholy union must have been both fascinating and horrifying.
Oh, my Jakey. My poor, beloved boy, who will have to navigate both of these worlds without your father’s guidance.
How I fear for you.
In the end, we humans are creatures of marl and earth. We must return to our own soil.
December 1911
Manhattan
Colonel and the second Mrs. Astor spent their days aboard the Noma lazing in the sun or beneath the skating clouds, dazed and suspended between the heavens and the vast heaving ocean. They spent their nights entangled, alone together, learning new ways to dance. Learning the language of each other, rhythm and flesh and scents and kisses, and Madeleine was intoxicated.
They never said the words to each other. They never said I love you, because everything was still so wild and tender and new, and their souls were still understanding how to fit together. Or perhaps they never said it because they never had to. It was a silence understood by both of them, dark and secret and precious. Their connection, their union, was nothing ordinary, configured from the ordinary world.
But Madeleine was a bride; she knew what love was. She knew as sure as she knew her own body, her own mind, its measureless, electric thrill. In their sleep, they still touched, her hand on his arm, his arm around her waist.
He draped her in jewels, even as they basked in their splendid, salty isolation. More ropes of pearls, emerald chains for her hair and neck, sapphire drops for her ears. Belts of hammered silver studded with turquoise or malachite. Gold bangles chased with dragons, with flowers, or shaped as buckles or ruby-eyed snakes. At night, sometimes she dined with a ring on every finger, so that when she sipped her soup or sliced her fish, sparks would scatter in every direction, and in the softly lit saloon of the Noma, she became a minor star.
Because he liked to see her sparkling, he said.
He loved to see her glimmer.
Eventually, however, their constant movement across water began to wear on her, their shifting from place to place like swallows who could never alight home. Madeleine found, after weeks of her glittering life aboard the yacht, that she missed land. She missed riding horses, going to plays, to concerts. She even missed the rattling tumult of the city, automobile horns honking, the stink, the muck. Vendors in the parks calling out about balloons or hot chestnuts or scoops of fruity ice cream.
What she truly missed, she supposed, considering it, was the stability of solid ground. Which was odd, because she was positive she’d never even noticed before now how mindlessly reassuring it was to have a steady world beneath her feet.
But with that stability came a cost—their treasured privacy. Their cherished honeymoon bubble, annihilated the moment they set foot ashore.
The summer season was over, so they might have been safe （safer） holed up in Beechwood or Ferncliff for Christmas, as only the locals tended to confront the merciless winters. But Jack Astor was a businessman. Although his many, many interests were competently managed by a series of clever men, he was not content to abandon his affairs for too long. He needed to go into the city.