“But Maman,” Anisette said, “it’s been so long since you’ve had to work.” She knew that her mother had been a nurse, trained by the nuns at the convent school, but her marriage to Anisette’s father had rescued her from any further toil.
Mrs. Bingham looked at her daughter’s rosy, untroubled face in the vanity mirror. Anisette had been raised on her father’s stories of pulling rocks from the earth, of controlling things that other men needed and making his fortune from that. He claimed land and sold it. He built mines and towns and railways. He owned houses and boats and estates that he never even visited. He bought men, or at least their opinions, their contracts, their votes. In Montana, in the years before he moved to New York, he had even bought himself a seat in the U.S. Senate, back when that sort of thing had been easier to do. All of that was work, he never failed to point out. Taken together, it formed the epic story of the labors of Emery Bingham.
But the story her daughter had never heard—not in its entirety, not in its most important parts—was the true tale of just how much work her own life had required. Anisette knew of the tender young nurse despairing over the death of the first Mrs. Bingham, and finding in the widower an answering grief—a grief that gave way to love, and a love that rejuvenated the anguished heart of Anisette’s father. Told like that, it was a story governed by loyalty, sympathy, and the all-conquering power of love.
The facts of the courtship were considerably more calculated and much less sentimental. As a girl in Montreal, Delphine Loisel had been sent to the nuns, her education purchased through hours spent cooking and scrubbing in the convent kitchen. While she scoured and studied, her father drank himself half to death and her mother tended to a shop that trafficked in tobacco, penny candies, and periodicals (and, for her more worldly customers, in “preventive powders” and other abortifacients). In search of a match for her daughter, Delphine’s mother kept an eye on the neighborhood’s sturdy tradesmen. But the magazines in her mother’s shop had filled Delphine with stories of elegant lawn parties and coastal estates, the playgrounds of Gilded Age excess, and she dreamed of more than a life spent totaling receipts for a good-natured horse butcher.
At sixteen she found another dreamer with just enough money and very little sense and convinced him to elope with her across the border. Together they traveled as far as Plattsburgh, where she separated him from his wallet and continued alone to New York City. By seventeen, with the aid of letters of reference forged in her own elegant, scripted French, she had secured a position as a nurse to Mrs. Bingham, whose health had been in decline since her husband moved the seat of the Bingham empire from Big Sky Country to this cramped and sunless city. From her first days on the job, Delphine was aware of Mr. Bingham’s interest, and she embarked on a campaign of tortured resistance to his advances. Though he was thirty-five years her senior, she made it clear with lingering looks and sudden blushes that she thought about him almost as much as he thought of her, but she confessed that her Catholic upbringing and the memory of her dearly departed mother would not allow even a kiss. He made offers—of apartments, jewels, clothes, money—but always she resisted. Delphine was playing for bigger stakes.
When Mrs. Bingham at last relinquished her grip on this fallen world, Delphine in her grief went to Mr. Bingham, who offered comforting words and the greater comfort of his bed. Finally, his long pursuit would reach a sweet conclusion. But just at the moment of surrender, Delphine claimed to hear the voice of her sainted mother (still tending the till of her tabac, unbeknownst to Mr. Bingham), and she fled, leaving her employer inflamed and unfulfilled. Not until his promises of marriage became marriage itself did she allow him to claim his prize. Now that had been work.
None of that, however, was a story to tell a daughter. Instead she told Anisette that someday soon she would see just how much work it was to have one’s own family: to run a household, to manage the staff and a budget, to plan for meals and entertainments, to organize and attend the never-ending galas and fetes that supported the city’s cultural life, its parks, its hospitals. All of that would be Anisette’s someday soon.
“But what if I don’t live in New York?” Anisette said. “What if I’m not even in America?”
“Everywhere has its responsibilities,” Mrs. Bingham said. “I imagine if you were in—oh, let’s say London, or Edinburgh—”
“Maman!” Anisette said in poorly feigned surprise. “What are you suggesting?”
“I’m just choosing cities out of thin air, aren’t I?”
In the mirror, mother and daughter exchanged a conspiratorial smile.
“Wherever you live,” Mrs. Bingham said, “you will have to learn where to go, and who to know, and how to behave. Not that you’d have any trouble fitting in.”
“Would you miss me, Maman?”
“Terribly,” she said. “But a mother always wants what’s best for her daughter.” She had sometimes thought, during the past thirty years, of sending her mother a letter, just to let her know that she had not succumbed to shame and misery on the streets. But she could never find words that didn’t make her life sound like a fairy tale—I am happily married to a very wealthy man in America—or a complete lie, and eventually a letter seemed pointless. Her own maman had never been a particularly sturdy woman, and Montreal was such a cold city in winter.
Anisette closed her eyes and leaned back against her mother, who continued to draw the brush through her hair.
“I’ll tell you this,” Mrs. Bingham said. “If you are interested in Angus—really interested—then we’ll need to act soon. He has been our little secret, but after the royal visit, there will be quite a buzz. He may find that he has more than a few dinner invitations.”
“He wouldn’t even,” Anisette said.
“Of course he would,” Mrs. Bingham said. “Unless he’s said something to you that might indicate his… intentions?”
Anisette had read enough Jane Austen to know that in the best of all possible worlds, you found someone who answered the call of your soul, and together you found a happiness you could never achieve with another. Now she searched her memories of the park for a moment she could point to as proof that he was being more than cordial. But there had been no promise, no proposal, no ring, no letter spelling out the secrets of his heart. Still, she knew how she felt, and she hoped—and almost believed—that he felt the same.
“He won’t be in New York forever,” Mrs. Bingham said when Anisette didn’t answer, and she rose to turn off the lights. “And if he’s going to make any decisions while he’s here—well, let’s just try to help him make the right ones.”
THE PLAZA HOTEL