The Second Mrs. Astor
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And yet, in Madeleine’s hidden heart, she could only marvel at the obedience of her peers, those girls who could sink into such quiescence that their voices never rose, their skirts never twitched with a restless foot as they sat; their hair was never mussed and their jewelry never fiddled with. She wondered if they fell asleep like that, facial expressions composed and pleasant, hands arranged neatly over their bellies and legs pressed together.
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Stella was the sort of girl Madeleine always privately envied, because she was the sort of girl that Madeleine feared she would never be: refined and chic and creamy cool, no matter the circumstances.
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She looked like a Gibson portrait of a girl, a poet’s idea of a girl, one who would be perfectly content to pass the span of her days reading upon a chaise lounge, or embroidering samplers, or contemplating the number of tumbling, adorable children she would someday produce.
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“She’s very impressed with your flowers,” Madeleine said under her breath, and the colonel slanted her another look. “Only she?” “No. Not only she.”
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It was one of the hallmarks that branded them as sisters, their matching laugh: low and full-throated, bubbling up without reservation. It remained the despair of their mother (who feared it revealed a shade too much a bourgeois background) but was as natural as breathing to Madeleine and Katherine, who both brimmed with appreciation of anything absurd.
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Madeleine would have many years to reflect upon this moment. She would study it, pick it apart in a dozen little ways and wonder how things might have turned out differently had she been daring enough
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to overrule her mother. To say, No, I’d rather he didn’t take our photograph, please. I’d rather we all just turn around and walk the other way. Set a precedent, as it were.
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To be honest, it likely wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. In the space of just that single conversation—the sea light, the clouds, his gray eyes and his dog—she had already made her choice. She was already plummeting off that cliff, ready to soar.
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His eyes were gray, like the colonel’s, only darker. More dire. Careful, warned a voice inside of her, clear and sudden. Careful with this one.
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If only Katherine were here—she always knew the exact right thing to say, something droll and smooth and gracious. Then be Katherine, directed the voice. Play the part.
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. . all men are created equal . . . It was, perhaps, the one topic the Old Money Girls and the New Money Girls could agree upon. Of course, we’re not all equal. You see, little Jakey, there’s equal—in the sense of human potential and dreams and the rule of law—and then there’s equal. As in, who are your people, my dear?
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“If you won’t believe in your own worth, Madeleine, at least have the sense to allow other people to believe in it.”
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“Because love is a tremendous gift, Maddy. A gift and a burden. Marriage especially is more than just hope and luck and a handshake. Marriage is work, enormous work, because it’s a living entity that needs everlasting attention. It will push you and bend you and test you, and if you’re not prepared for any of that, it will shatter you. I
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As if you are his own secret sun, warming his innermost soul.”
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“They pick apart every little thing I do! If I smile at them, they call me insipid. If I don’t smile, they call me aloof. Remember that article in the Caller last month? They said I was brazen just for waltzing with Jack twice at the Olyphant ball.” “Twice in a row,” Katherine pointed out. “You harlot.”
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Kitty, in fact, became one of the photographers’ favorite subjects, maybe because all decent people love dogs, and it truly seemed like she was nearly always smiling.
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Back then, the ocean was a friend. Back then, being out at sea felt like freedom.
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“How grown up you are now, little sister.” “Am I?” She smiled, dry. “Most of the time I don’t feel so. At least, not lately.”
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“More than I am, I think, because there isn’t a man alive who could drag me to the altar yet. From now on, I shall have to call you missus, and you’ll have to wear your hair in a curly pile on top of your head, along with pounds of pearls around your neck, and when young ladies walk by, you’ll cluck at them and think them saucy just for the sparkle in their eyes.”
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“I told him that I would not marry him, because we were too young, and I didn’t want to fall in love with the idea of love. I wanted actual love, not a looking-glass reflection of it. Not stolen kisses, or sotted promises. I wanted the truth of love, the pure molten core of it, because anything short of that was just a cheat.”
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I told him that we had only just met, but even still I knew it wasn’t because my skin didn’t melt from my bones at his touch, and my soul didn’t sting, and I didn’t have butterflies in my tummy, only the shredded ham and egg salad from supper. I let him kiss me one more time, and then I walked away.”
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(Or “Yamsi,” as he called himself in the supposedly secret messages wired from the Carpathia to White Star’s New York offices, attempting to commandeer another ship to spirit him away to England after the sinking. So that he could cower there across the Atlantic, where the United States Senate inquiry could not touch him.)
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She wished she felt the same. She wanted to feel the same. She wanted her heart to be as lifted as his, to keep them in harmony, because she adored their harmony and always had. But so far, all she could bring herself to feel about her pregnancy was a thin, distant amazement. Like all the tumbling, strange changes in her life now were happening to someone else, and she was only watching them from afar, observing all their fascinating little facets. Look at that lucky girl, that newlywed in her coat and lace and
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jewels. Consider her fine life, her husband, her unborn child, and still all she does is complain about the weather.
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So they’d said the words after all. And the words had taken nothing away from them, their dark and precious bond. The words had only added another flavor, smoky sweet, like the night.
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They traveled along the heat-shimmered path of ancient gods, on their way to walk over and through the burial sites and shrines of lost kings. So many other souls
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Whoever wants to know how
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it’s all going to end before it actually does? Only poets and madmen, I would think.
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I imagined a dog would be more like a baby, you know? Adorable and dear, something you
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could show to your friends and then put away. Something you could hand off to the help when necessary.”
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demure.