Villa America Read Online Free PDF Page B

edges.
    Sara felt like the light in that painting, always sinking, never rising. Her feelings had not escaped her mother.
    “This oppression of yours, Sara. It’s unbecoming and it’s straining my nerves,” her mother had told her one day over breakfast. “And when I say unbecoming, I mean untoward. ”
    “ Indecorous?” Sara had helpfully offered.
    “I mean stop it,” her mother had said.
    Only Olga had been kind. On the days when Sara didn’t come downstairs, the youngest sister would come up and sit on Sara’s sleigh bed and plait and unplait her hair for hours, the two of them watching the waves outside the bay window. “You have such lovely hair,” Olga would say. “So heavy.”
      
    “I think that’s it, miss,” the maid said to Sara, bringing her back to the hotel room, the London rain, her throbbing eyelid.
    “Yes,” Sara murmured.
    She walked over to the glass and looked at herself. Staring back was a youngish woman in a cucumber-green dress with heavy hair and sleepy eyes. Decorative. At least that.
      
    The ball was a success. Sara saw that almost instantly, having learned over the years to judge her mother’s hits and misses by the telltale signs. In the case of a failure, there would be whispers, and the whispers could grow so loud that the whole room hummed like a grist of bees caught in a glass box.
    With the Vegetable Ball, though, her mother had outdone herself. The main ballroom was swathed in vines with squashes, miniature eggplants, or zucchini sprouting from their tangled arms. The enormous crystal chandelier hanging in the center had also been covered with growing things: tomatoes, carrots, corn, all arranged from smallest to largest. The Ritz’s livery stood against the walls holding trays of champagne with apples and pears dipped in gold paint. It was opulent and imaginative and grotesque.
    Sara was standing off to the side of a group that was jostling for her mother’s attention, talking with the Duchess of Rutland’s daughter Diana.
    “Well,” Diana said, giving Sara a sly look.
    Sara laughed. “Yes, well.”
    “I think your mother may have made a few enemies tonight. There’s nothing these women hate so much as a succès fou. Or being made to come on bended knee to America. This isn’t 1905, after all.”
    That had been the boom year for conquering British titles. America, swelling with heiresses of ink, paper, coal, and steel, had seen no fewer than twenty-five members of the House of Lords take its daughters to the altar. Sara remembered her mother putting down the newspaper in disgust after reading about one or the other of these matches.
    “Imagine,” Adeline had said, “selling your daughters into serfdom. No running water, no money, only cows and horses and dogs. They should be ashamed of themselves.” Adeline had never liked the idea of one single marriage, let alone twenty-five of them.
    Diana scanned the room, then turned her attention back to Sara. “Let’s talk about something infinitely more interesting,” she said. “Me.” Her friend smiled. “What do I remind you of?”
    Diana was clad in a sleek white ball gown with thick seams of red, green, and yellow.
    “I don’t know,” Sara said, feeling weary. “A vegetable patch?”
    “A vegetable patch indeed. That might be all right for some.” Diana eyed Sara’s light green dress and preposterous wreath. “No. These, lovely Sara, these are racing stripes. I plan on winning your mother’s vile ragtime potato race.”
    “Oh, Diana,” Sara said, laughing. “Don’t.”
    “Why not?”
    “You know why not. It’s just one of Mother’s antiquated games. The joke is always on someone else.”
    “Oh, it’s all how you look at it. There’s art in everything.” She winked at Sara. “Even antiquated games.”
    Olga opened the ball with Prince Colonna, who, rumor had it, was as ridiculous a gambler as his father. They were trailed by a servant in blackface dressed in the garb of a Southern