When Audrey Met Alice by Rebecca Behrens

Author:Rebecca Behrens
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Published: 2013-11-21T05:00:00+00:00

May 29, 1902

Diary—

I am going to have to ensure that no one ever finds this diary because if some person does read this, and tells my stepmother that I have been proposed to, it will be “Off with her head!” for poor Alice. Yes, I am the recipient of a marriage proposal. Actually, I received two. It is quite a long story.

Two days ago, Edward Carpenter, formerly known as my beau, currently known as a fool, arrived at the White House. Sadly for Carpenter but (given the tumultuous nature of our courtship) probably best for both of us, Charles de Chambrun and a Knickerbocker gent in my circle, J. Van Ness Philips, have already swept in and swiped my interest from Edward. All four of us attended a dinner, during which those three relatively handsome young men all vied for my attention. (A scene straight out of one of my wildest dreams.) We were seated far down the table from my parents, so fortunately they didn’t overhear when Van Ness, after a bit too much of the whiskey I had smuggled to the dinner inside my long gloves, loudly turned to me and proposed marriage. I hadn’t imbibed the whiskey myself, but still I could not control my laughter. Poor Carpenter appeared stricken, slowly turning as red as the wheels of a steam fire engine as it dawned on him that he had real competitors.

The next day Carpenter and I went for a long walk in the gardens. He stammered and stuttered, and it took him over two and a half hours to explain to me how he felt about me. Poor Carpenter, I did love him once upon a time, but now I can only see how twitchy he gets when nervous, how his nose is actually slightly crooked to the left (in addition to his woefully lopsided smile), and how his Adam’s apple pops out of his neck in a most distracting and unappealing way. Recall that letter he slipped me at dinner in Cuba? I no longer think his admission that he “has nothing to say” is part of a clever pun. It’s close to an unfortunate truth. Yet here are the points that he managed to sputter out:

–That he wishes to call me “Alice” when we are alone together (not “Miss Roosevelt”)

–That he is madly in love with me

–That he would like to marry me (Personally, I feel that this was brought on more by the spirit of competition more than anything else. I saw how he used to look at Janet.)

I told him positively no. I told him that we were behaving like two idiots and that he could not possibly ask me to marry him. He tried to interrupt me and make his case again, but I wouldn’t hear it. I bid him adieu and wished him well, but sternly. If he hadn’t acted so idiotically, I might have felt remorse. But I didn’t then, even if I feel a smidgen now.

I received notes this morning from both Carpenter and Van Ness.

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