The Second Mrs. Astor

by Shana Abe

I gave you his name. He gave you his eyes and that swirl of fair hair.

Your father towered, remarkable and alone, over everyone we knew and certainly over my heart.

I am a waterfall of memories of Jack; I drown in them; and so for your sake, and perhaps for my own peace, I will write down what I can for you now. Someday—some faraway day—I will hand these pages to you, and my memories will become your own.

Colonel Jack Astor was likely the richest man in America, and difficult to miss.

the purpose of going to a concert at the Building of Arts was not, of course, to actually listen to the music. It was to see and be seen, and on this occasion, she would be seen in her new evening gown of palomino crêpe, which had arrived only that very morning from Redfern in Paris.

“If you encourage her, though, she’ll never stop trying to throw us together.” “Madeleine,” he replied quietly, leaning his head toward hers, “what on earth makes you think I want her to stop?”

Jack reached over and took her hand—deliberate this time, nothing absent-minded about it—and he held it the entire while, the entire performance, while Madeleine’s cheeks went warm again and her heart bloomed like a savage flower inside her chest.

“It is the nature of our lives, Madeleine. If you dance in the limelight, it’s only natural that people will look at you. You can’t expect otherwise.”

“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 imagine the colonel could tell you something about what that’s like.”

“Being in love makes all that work easier, but it does not make it go away. There will be necessary sacrifices. There will be pain. So I’ll ask you again: Do you think you’re in love with him?”

December brought my debut.

Officially it happened one gray frosted afternoon, at the coming-out reception my mother hosted for members of our circle at our Manhattan home. I wore white, of course. We had tea and punch and sandwiches and éclairs, and all my friends attended, along with their various minders attached.

Yes, once and for all, your childhood is over. Womanhood means you must not ever laugh or burp or break wind again. This is how you will marry well.

The papers would later call me a Christmas present for all of New York society.

What a dear girl she was; what a solid, faithful girl, the kind that one might suppose may be always counted upon to be waiting in the wings.

It was important to your father that it not be publicly announced until after I turned eighteen, which by then was only four months away.

Oh, I do want you to be happy, Maddy. I want you to enjoy fine health, a good marriage, a safe home. A superior man for your husband and gay children of your own.

“I would not have the world be cruel to you,” she emphasized. “I would not have Vincent Astor be cruel to you. But if—when—those things happen, I would not have you be cruel in return. Kinder hearts are stronger, I think.”

more than enough of a ship to handle it. The captain had actually winked at Madeleine as he’d added that last

“The elite. The leaders of Colorado high society.” Madeleine looked at her, waiting. “‘The Sacred Thirty-Six.’”

“The thirty-six best families of the Rockies. The thirty-six who determine who is good, who is bad, and who is merely uninvited. At least here it’s only a number,

and a bigger one at that. Four hundred. Plenty of room, so to speak. Out there, it’s only thirty-six, and they had to throw in a sacred....

I

was a poor girl who fell in love with a poor man, and married him. A man who later

on became rich from gold. I was nineteen when we wed. He was thirty-one, days from thirty-two.” She shot Madeleine a glance from beneath ...

“Those pinched-nosed biddies in Denver would sooner kiss the lips of the devil himself than invite me into their homes.”

The fire. The maids. The hundred doors of this empty, haunted mansion, opening and closing. Men dying in tents. It all echoed through her, over and over and over, all the ghosts rising up, taking command. “Madeleine,” said Margaret carefully. “Are you feeling perfectly well?”

There weren’t many on board we knew, which was sublime, and no reporters at all, which was more sublime still.

The sight of food, no matter how elegantly plated, left her queasy; the odors of sautéed meats and rich sauces were enough to make her leave the table. All she could bear to consume was freshly baked bread and softened cheese—which, happily, Paris had in abundance.

I had absolute trust in him to keep me safe, no matter how much I did not or could not see happening around me.

I mean for you to know, in every motherly way that I can convey it, that your parents were in love.

That we were twin spirits in love.

“I am,” he said soberly, “without question, the happiest man in the world.”

The name painted upon her side was Habibti. Beloved.

Oh, I hope you have his smile. I hope I get to see his smile again, through you.

“It’s plain as day Jack adores you. I think he adores you to the point that the thought of being without you terrifies him to the core. And for a man like Jack Astor, that is significant.”

Kitty had been his companion through the sticky months of his divorce and all the notorious, lonely days after, when even the crème de la crème of society, his own kind, had angled away from him.

Jack had booked their passage to New York on Bruce Ismay’s fine new steamship, her maiden voyage, which to Madeleine sounded like a recipe for enduring all sorts of little things going awry, but which her husband was looking forward to with open enthusiasm.

She wanted never to forget the perfect heat, the sand, the stars spread above her in a shifting, infinite river of platinum, stretching from end to end above the earth. The meteors that fell in silence all night, every night, sketching slow blazing lines into the heavy blue.

I would not have wished that voyage upon anyone, especially a friend.

“You are the sole object of true beauty in all the world,”

This blanket was your father’s first gift to you. And it was the last thing I stuffed into my pocket before fleeing the ship.

“I genuinely cannot imagine my life ahead without my husband by my side. He is my rock and my true north and my whole heart. I’m not afraid to say it.”

He said I was going to lose everything but my life, and that I would be saved but that others would be lost.”

I didn’t know it would be our last kiss, the last time we ever spoke. I didn’t know it would be the last time we ever touched.

and her breath was flashing more quickly now because underneath her veil of acquiescence was a black feeling roiling so deep and dark she had no name for it. It was panic and fear and bleak desperation. It was anger and fear, fear, fear.

Madeleine could see her, her familiar outline, so small and shadowed against the ship’s lights. The shape of a tall, spare man standing next to her at the railing, one hand on her head.

Jack and Kitty, her barks still echoing, slid from her view.

“We have to go back,” Madeleine said.

“We abandoned ship with seats to spare. We left behind our husbands and sons because you told us we had to, and now they’re out there dying.”