The Gilded Years by Karin Tanabe

Author:Karin Tanabe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Washington Square Press

CHAPTER 18

When Lottie joined Anita and the others for breakfast the following morning, their senior table was decorated with twisted pink streamers, elaborately inscribed name cards, and large balloons. It was tradition to decorate the hall for birthdays, the labor done by the students who shared a table with the honoree. The decorations, this time in honor of Hortense Lewis’s birthday, would stay up for lunch and dinner, too, and a party was planned in Caroline and Belle’s wing of the senior hall after classes and chapel.

On that festive morning, Anita felt closer to Lottie, Belle, and Caroline than she had all year. The trip to New York—seeing the city from the Taylors’ carriage, hearing Nettie Aldrich speak about her work, taking in the opera—had left her with the conviction that these women would be her lifelong friends. She would always have Bessie, but now she felt that she wouldn’t only have Bessie. She wasn’t as afraid of life after Vassar. She wasn’t even afraid of losing Porter Hamilton. She felt a reassurance that she hadn’t felt since she received her Vassar acceptance letter. If she made the right decisions—difficult, but right for her—she could have what Caroline, Belle, and Lottie were looking forward to: a career, intellectual stimulation, a husband and family who supported her, the opportunity to make a difference in society. She was sure she could find a way to enter that world—with them, with Porter—while also holding on to some part of her true identity.

During the days that followed, tension mounted at the school as the students began preparing for the midyear examinations at the end of January. Lottie and Anita agreed that their minds had benefited from their taste of freedom in New York, and both passed their tests easily.

It was in the early February lull that Lottie let her academic studies go in favor of a life of hobbies. She had taken up ikebana, the art of Japanese flower arranging, and had stems sent in by the dozen, turning their parlor into a living preamble to spring. But Anita clung to her books. She may have disobeyed Frederick by traveling to New York, but she would not let her grades go anywhere but up. Studying also proved to be the only way she could stop herself thinking about Porter and the fact that he had not yet responded to her letter. She understood his anger and had penned numerous follow-up letters, but she did not dare send them until she had word from him first.

On the Friday before Valentine’s Day, as she tried not to dwell on the holiday that the campus was planning to celebrate with gusto, Anita headed to the library, where she planned to stay until the dinner bell rang. She was hurrying, eager to find a good corner table, but she slowed her steps when she saw Sarah Douglas and her roommate, Alice Sawyer, in the hall outside the library entrance. They both looked at her with interest as she approached.

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