LoveMakers Read online

  Setting the suitcases down she absently fingered the pansy encased in crystal suspended from her neck. Her sharp eyes roamed the lobby, taking in the gleaming marble walls, the veined, inlaid marble floor, and the opulent brass and crystal chandelier glittering overhead. The Louis XVI settees and chairs dotting the room were large and formal, and Charlotte-Anne and Rebecca set down their cases and plopped themselves onto the brocade upholstery. Zaccheus Jr. let out a 'whoop!' and, making a headlong dash, leapt onto a settee of his own. Regina accompanied Elizabeth-Anne, who strode to the massive carved reception desk and fixed the clerk with a smile. It was a totally disarming smile, but it did nothing to soften the dour, haughty expression on his face.

  'We need two rooms, please,' Elizabeth-Anne said. 'One with two beds and one with three.'

  The slim, dark-haired man took one look at her neat but simple country clothes, sniffed disdainfully, and announced in a haughty voice, 'its seven dollars for the two rooms. I'm afraid our only vacancies are on the second floor, no view, only an airshaft. With this heat you'll burn up. May I suggest the Algonquin or the Plaza or any of the many other fine - '

  Elizabeth-Anne, who quickly estimated there were some seventy cubicles behind the reception desk, half of which had keys signifying vacancies, continued to smile radiantly. 'Those rooms will suit us just fine, I'm sure.'

  'Well, if you insist - '

  'I do.'

  The clerk began to say something, but the steadiness of Elizabeth-Anne's gaze caused him to think twice, and his jaw snapped shut. He fished out two sets of keys, each attached to a large brass tag with the room number engraved on it, and laid them down on the desk. 'That'll be seven dollars in advance,' he said.

  Elizabeth-Anne counted the bills out on the desk. The clerk slid them toward him, at the same time smacking his palm on the bell to summon the bellboy, but the moment it clanged, Elizabeth-Anne laid her fingers on it to silence it. 'Just the keys, please,' she said. 'We can find our own way and carry our luggage ourselves.'

  'As you wish,' the clerk said with a sigh of disapproval.

  'Thank you, Mr. - '

  'Smythe.'

  'Thank you, Mr. Smythe.' Elizabeth-Anne picked up her two battered suitcases, and, after the children had done the same, they all proceeded toward the marble staircase with its gleaming, solid brass bannisters.

  The clerk cleared his throat noisily. Elizabeth-Anne half turned, a questioning look on her face.

  'The elevator is that way,' he said, pointing in the opposite direction. 'Just ring the buzzer.'

  Elizabeth-Anne inclined her head and changed course. 'Thank you, Mr. Smythe.'

  He didn't reply. He didn't have to. It was written clearly in his mirthless eyes: Country bumpkins.

  Soon after dark, the children went to sleep, exhausted from their long, exciting day.

  Elizabeth-Anne crossed her arms, walked slowly over to the window, and leaned out. The desk clerk had been right, she thought. Despite the open windows, the room was stuffy and hot. But she discovered that if she leaned out and angled herself just right, she could catch a thin sliver of view - a tall, compact slice of Manhattan skyscrapers winking and glittering in the night.

  She felt conflicting emotions coursing through her - a million fantastic dreams stirring within her - while at the same time she asked herself what on earth she was doing in the midst of the noisiest, strangest city in the world. It was like coming to a foreign country where she knew no one and where many different languages were spoken. After the down-home friendliness she had always known, why had she come here to subject herself to the hustle and bustle of New York, to the hordes of always rushing, unsmiling people?

  An unbidden sigh slowly escaped her lips. She knew why. Because Quebeck could no longer feed her ambitions, could not match the scale of her imagination. She longed to build, to create, and the opportunities were here, amid the crowds and the noise, amid the energy that made the air crackle with electricity. Here, through sheer hard work, and given enough luck, she felt she could fulfill her dream. The dream she had nurtured ever since she was a child.

  She smiled to herself, wondering at her ambitious cheek and gall. Other little girls she knew dreamed of meeting a handsome prince and being carried off to his castle to live happily ever after, but not her. No, her dream was far more practical, but just as romantic in its own way. For she, Elizabeth-Anne Hale, had always imagined herself as the queen of a grand hotel. She had seen one such edifice as a child, and it had been engrained in her mind ever since. She remembered the endless games she had played alone while growing up, imagining herself not in the plain rooming house but in charge of a glittering palace filled with bejeweled guests, her guests. She would give them elegant meals, gentle music, sumptuous rooms and they would line up to see her, to come stay with her in the greatest hotel in the world.

  As she grew, the vision she had created as a child never changed; it simply grew clearer in her mind. Carriages became automobiles, gaslight became electric, but the quality of luxury, her personal touch, remained. And the older she became, the more she envisioned not a single grand hotel, but two, three, even a hundred - and they would all be hers. Hers.

  The rooming house, the cafe, and the Tourist Court back in Texas had merely been the beginning. She had known that all along. They had been the first step toward realizing her dream. But in order to achieve it, she had had to leave Texas and come to New York City. Here, dreams which were too big to be contained could be forged into reality, of that she was certain. She would become a somebody. Given time, she would shine brighter than all the glittering night lights of Manhattan, more forcefully than the kaleidoscope of colors on Broadway. Because here the very air smelled of prosperity and success, and everywhere you went, you could hear the cash registers ringing. Having been born in Texas, a native-born and bred American, Elizabeth-Anne would not realize until many years later that she, was in effect, not all that different from the hordes of foreigners who had passed through Ellis Island. She did not hail from Lithuania or Greece, but she was an immigrant of sorts.

  No, right now she knew only one thing: Here she would make it. Here she would triumph.

  She could sense it.

  But first, she had to find a home. Then, when she and the children were settled in . . . then she would set out to conquer this city.

  2

  Elizabeth-Anne was not prepared for Ludmila Koshevalaevna Romaschkova, nor was the white Russian emigrant prepared for her. They had nothing in common except the townhouse on Gramercy Park South, and it was that which brought them together.

  The elegant, five-story house with its pale granite facade and tall, graceful parlor-floor windows had been left to Ludmila by a foresighted admiral in the Imperial Russian Navy who had fled the Bolsheviks with her (his mistress), four Imperial Easter Eggs by Carl Faberge, and a numbered bank account in Switzerland filled with millions. It was a cruel twist of fate that brought a fatal cerebral stroke to the admiral, to whom Ludmila had been unofficial consort for seventeen years, on the eve of the wedding that would have finally fulfilled his promise to marry her. Only a lengthy and highly publicized court battle, during which Ludmila found herself face to face with the hatred of her departed lover's other heirs, as well as the entire exiled Russian community, had given her even a small compensation for the years she had devoted to the admiral. She received the title to the lavishly furnished townhouse they had shared together but nothing else. Otherwise penniless, she subsequently converted the upper three floors into autonomous apartments and rented them out to selected tenants.

  'Who there?' a raspy, thickly accented voice finally called through the door after Elizabeth-Anne had knocked on it the sixth time.

  'I've seen the Apartment For Rent sign outside,' Elizabeth-Anne called back, trying to speak above the hysterical yapping of dogs on the other side of the door. 'I would like to see it!'

  'Who?'

  Elizabeth-Anne spoke up louder. 'I want to see the apartment!'
<
br />   There was a pause. 'Now why you not say that before?' There was a series of clicks as various locks were thrown, and the door opened a crack, held there by a thick safety chain. One huge gray eye, dramatically outlined with black liner, looked her up and down. 'Did they send you?' The voice was suspicious.

  'They?'

  'The Bolsheviks!'

  Elizabeth-Anne suppressed a smile. 'No, I'm not a Bolshevik.'

  'Good.' The door closed abruptly, the chain rattled and clacked, and Elizabeth-Anne found herself face to face with Ludmila Koshevalaevna Romaschkova.

  Elizabeth-Anne stared at the diminutive woman in fascination, feeling an immediate liking for this stranger. Madame Romaschkova might have stood little more than four feet three inches tall in her heels, but she nevertheless projected a commanding presence. She held herself with instinctive dignity, and her carriage bespoke another, finer age. Even her thick accent, though exotic, was well-bred instead of amusing; it conjured up visions of ice palaces, tiaras studded with diamonds, and ermine fringed gowns.

  Here is a somebody, a character, someone with a past, Elizabeth-Anne thought. She didn't know how right she was.

  Although by the time Elizabeth-Anne met her, the glory of Ludmila's life in Russia was long over, you would never know it to look at her. She had retained her air of grace, beauty and privilege simply by making time stand still, by pretending nothing was different. She was as beautifully turned out as she had been fifteen years earlier. Her figure was still excellent with a tiny, cinched waist and a well- mounted bosom, although her fine, oval face had become increasingly lined, the tell-tale web work of wrinkles spreading deeply into her once flawless skin. She dressed as she had in Russia, in the lavish fashions of pre-1917 St. Petersburg. Her dresses were perhaps a bit moth-eaten and tattered, but somehow that only emphasized the faded beauty. She draped herself with elaborately embroidered, fringed shawls, dressed in regal, heavy brocade better suited to the cold Russian winters than the milder climate in which she now lived, and, after the admiral died, she never took off the necklace he had sent her the morning after they had met - a malachite Faberge egg encrusted with gold filigree hanging off a web of gold.

  The entire effect was enough to make Elizabeth-Anne gape unabashedly.

  'Well?' Ludmila Romaschkova demanded. 'What are you waiting for? Come in, come in.'

  Elizabeth-Anne glanced down at her feet, afraid that if she moved she would step on one or more of the four white Maltese spaniels yapping at her heels.

  'It is okay,' Madame Romaschkova assured her. 'The children, they know when you walk, they get out of way. Quick, quick.' She took Elizabeth-Anne by the arm, pulled her inside the apartment, slammed the door shut, and began locking the bolts across it.

  'Are you afraid of burglars?' Elizabeth-Anne asked.

  'Burglars? Burglars! Ha.' Ludmila Romaschkova whirled at her, gray eyes flashing. 'If only they were burglars. No, they are worse. Evil. First I have to fear the Reds, then the Whites. Burglars I could take care of.' She glowered dramatically, and then her face softened. 'Come, have tea with me. First we talk. Then we look at the apartment.'

  Madame Romaschkova led the way into the parlor, preceded by the dogs. The dim, stuffy room was at once as entrancing as the woman herself. It looked more like the dusty storage room of a museum than a parlor. The furnishings were so tightly packed they had obviously once graced all five stories of the house. As Elizabeth-Anne's eyes adjusted to the dark she could make out two grand pianos, three daybeds, four consoles, a marble column, a Napoleonic candelabra, two desks, a baroque chest, a medieval chest, a dark, carved Elizabethan table, and a gold and crystal Empire chandelier. Meissen parrots, lamps with fringed silk shades, chairs with gold hooves or claws for legs, tapestries, silver-framed photographs, icons mounted in silver, and Coptic fragments behind glass were crammed together and on top of each other, all in happy, riotous, clashing splendor. It was an auctioneer's paradise, but no matter how strapped she was for cash, Madame Romaschkova's emotions won over her practicality. She would never dream of disposing of a single item.

  'This is real tea,' Ludmila announced as she poured the strong black brew from the huge silver samovar. Elizabeth-Anne accepted the delicate, engraved crystal cup and its silver holder and was about to drop a cube of sugar into it.

  'No.' Ludmila cried. 'You put the sugar in your mouth and sip.'

  Elizabeth-Anne did as she was told. The tea was bitter and thick, not at all the way she liked to drink it, but when it met the sugar the taste was honey-sweet.

  'This is how tea is to be drunk.' Ludmila sipped at hers and sighed contentedly. She was ensconced on a green velvet, four-sided siege, a round chair with four seats built out from a carved center post. It dated from the era of Napoleon III and looked as though it belonged in the lobby of a Second Empire opera house. Facing her, Elizabeth-Anne was seated on a straight-backed Regence fauteuil upholstered with Aubusson Royale tapestry.

  Finally Ludmila leaned forward and placed her cup beside the samovar, which sat on an octagonal folding Bedouin table inlaid with ivory. Then she sat back again and made herself comfortable. 'Now. Tell me everything about yourself,' she demanded.

  'Everything? About myself?' Elizabeth-Anne looked taken aback. 'Why, there's actually nothing to tell.'

  'There is always something to tell.' Ludmila raised her chin and nodded sagely. 'You are married?'

  Elizabeth-Anne set down her cup. 'Yes,' she said carefully, 'but I'm . . . alone.'

  'Your husband? He is not here?'

  She shook her head.

  'Divorced?'

  'Not really.'

  'Ha. Men.' Ludmila shook her head angrily. 'Sometimes I wonder why we women put up with them. But do yourself favor. Next time choose nice Russian. They are the best,' she finished with a decisive nod.

  Elizabeth-Anne smiled. 'I'll try and keep that in mind.'

  'You do that.' Ludmila flipped open a cigarette box made of paper-thin burled wood, carefully chose a cigarette, stuck it in a long holder carved of horn, and lit it. Immediately a strong, pungent blue cloud of smoke enveloped her. She narrowed her eyes. 'You have children?'

  Elizabeth-Anne nodded. 'Four.'

  'Four?'

  'Why, yes. I hope you don't mind - '

  'Children,' Ludmila said grimly, 'are noisy, dirty and make much damage. I tell people always, you want apartment, no have children.'

  'Well, I really ought to be going, then.' Elizabeth-Anne rose to her feet and smiled apologetically. 'Thank you for the tea. It was delicious.'

  'You barely touched!' Ludmila wagged an accusing finger at Elizabeth-Anne's cup. 'Sit down, finish. Is a shame to waste.'

  'But I really must go,' Elizabeth-Anne protested. 'I have to find us an apartment, and I mustn't lose any time.'

  'Who says you lose time? We go upstairs and I show you the apartment. Is small for five people, but very nice.'

  'But. . . I thought you didn't want to rent out to anyone with children.'

  Ludmila puffed regally on her cigarette. 'Usually I don't,' she said nonchalantly. 'As soon as someone tells me children is no trouble and argue I say, well, Ludmila, you in trouble. If someone says, well, then I must go and look at someplace else, then I know is okay.' She beamed through the scrim of smoke at Elizabeth-Anne. 'Now finish your tea.'

  Elizabeth-Anne looked at Regina and smiled hopefully. 'Well, what do you think?'

  Regina looked around the bedroom thoughtfully. 'It's nice. I think we'll like it here.'

  Elizabeth-Anne looked relieved. 'That's why I wanted you to be the first to see it. To see what you thought.' She paced the small bedroom, picking her way around the furniture. 'It's smaller than what I would have liked us to have, and a lot more expensive, but the neighborhood is very good, and so are the schools. But the best thing about Gramercy Park is the park. Madame Romaschkova . . . I mean, Ludmila - ' Elizabeth-Anne broke off with a laugh. 'Somehow I still find it difficult to call her Ludmila. She just looks like a Mada
me or a Countess or something.'

  Regina laughed too. 'I know what you mean.'

  Elizabeth-Anne continued. 'Well, she told me the park is private. That only the tenants who live around it have keys, and she has had duplicates made for us. You children need fresh air and a safe place to play, and for that, this place is ideal.'

  Regina nodded. 'But it's one bedroom short, isn't it?'

  Elizabeth-Anne shrugged. 'Giving up my own bedroom's a small enough sacrifice for the convenience of having park privileges. I'll be comfortable on the chaise in the parlor.' She paused then and looked around fondly. 'And the furniture Ludmila's lent us is so beautiful. It just isn't worth shipping everything up from Quebeck. It would cost a lot more than the things are worth.'

  'What's important is that you like it here Momma. That you're comfortable.'

  'And I know you all will be, too.' Elizabeth-Anne hugged Regina warmly, but upon releasing her, she frowned. 'It's still a big change, and in a way, it frightens me.'

  'But you wouldn't have it any other way.'

  Elizabeth-Anne shook her head. 'You're right, I wouldn't. Come on, let's go sit in the parlor.' She led the way down the narrow hall and stopped in the doorway, studying the parlor with satisfaction. It was small but had a high ceiling and a marble fireplace. The parlor's single window looked down upon Ludmila's overgrown garden in the back of the house. Standing at that window when it was very quiet, Elizabeth-Anne could imagine she was not in one of the world's largest cities, but in a peaceful country oasis instead.

  But there was nothing remotely reminiscent of the country inside the apartment itself. Since she was living in Manhattan, Elizabeth-Anne had decided that her home should reflect the mood of the city: electric and vibrant, fashionably contemporary, yet rooted in the traditions of the past. At the same time, she meant the apartment to be a fortress in which she and the children could feel secure, a place to keep at bay the high-charged, bustling energy which greeted them whenever they stepped out the door. She had painted the parlor a rich shade of blue, though she kept the ceiling above the molding white. By using only a few large, bold pieces of Ludmila's furniture, including two huge, gilt mirrors, and balancing these with the lightness of the beige carpet, she had succeeded in creating the illusion of greater space in a unique way.