The Innocents

by Caroline Seebohm

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

The whole world was about to change, and no one would be affected more deeply than Dorothea and Iris Crosby, sisters—identical twins—born to the wealth and social standing of New York City's Park Avenue. It was 1914, and while life in Manhattan seemed to center on grand balls and exotic parties, in Europe everything was coming undone. World War I was about to explode, and when it did it would involve many thousands of young Americans already heading overseas.

Aroused by the perils of the rest of the world, Dorothea and Iris decided to join the American Red Cross in France. Sent immediately to the battlefront, they became immersed in a daily struggle to help save lives, and when that wasn't possible, to at least make death less terrifying for the young French soldiers in their care. Beautiful and mysterious, the twin sisters were dubbed les anges, the angels, by the wounded men.

They charmed the Americans as well, among them a fighter pilot with whom Iris fell in love—the first threat to the singular bond that held the sisters together. As the losses mounted, however, the link between the sisters grew stronger. Finally, when the battles ended, they awoke to the reality that the world they had known was forever gone, and home seemed a distant and alien place.

A powerful story of spiritual awakening, of innocence lost, and of the emotional toll of war, The Innocents is sure to appeal to readers of such outstanding historical novels as Regeneration by Pat Barker, Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks, and Rebecca West's classic The Return of the Soldier.

Release date: April 6, 2007

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

WHAT FUN IT WAS! The New York society columns were full of it for days afterward. Even in a time when such extravaganzas were commonplace, the event somehow outdazzled the most jaded of partygoers. On January 6, 1911, Mrs. Hermann Oelrichs, one of New York’s most prominent hostesses, gave a fancy-dress party at Sherry’s. Of course the venue was Sherry’s; nobody would think of giving such an important party anywhere other than at Stanford White’s gorgeous Forty-fourth Street establishment opposite Delmonico’s. But even the staff at Sherry’s found themselves conceding that they had not witnessed such a glamorous evening in years.

Mrs. Condé Nast, wife of the magazine owner, came as La Tosca in a gown of white satin embroidered in gold. The interior decorator Elsie De Wolfe, whose claims to beauty were tenuous at best, had transformed herself into a frilly Dresden shepherdess. New York society’s doyenne, Mrs. William Jay, was dressed as Brunnhilde (she was not asked to sing), while the hostess, Tessie Oelrichs, a personage of ample proportions, was covered from head to foot in a pearl-encrusted gold and blue robe, with a dangling gold headdress that reached down from her ears to her gleaming bosom — the very essence of Amneris. (Characters from grand opera were all the rage that year.)

George Crosby, who, like most of the guests, hated opera, decided to go as Louis XVI. His wife, Lavinia, was a rather pinched-looking Marie Antoinette. (Her wig aggravated her migraine.) They were some of the younger set at the party, although George did not really notice. His impression of the evening was largely shaped by the presence of his twin sisters, Dorothea and Iris, whom, after much cajoling, he had persuaded to attend.

At this time, Dorothea and Iris were nineteen years old, and like all identical twins, their distinctive appearance was difficult to forget. Their skin was pale and transparent looking, as though rarely exposed to the sun. They both had huge dark eyes that seemed unusually solemn in creatures so young. They wore their thick raven black hair parted in the center and tied back in a chignon, accentuating the oval contours of their faces. Their foreheads were high, above finely sculpted cheekbones, with noses perhaps a little too sharp for such a fragile framework. Their mouths were full and sensual, another paradoxical gesture from the designer of these unorthodox beauties. The subtle conflicts in their features created an impression of mystery, setting them apart from the innocent prettiness of many of their contemporaries.

At first, the twins had refused to attend the party, declaring all such extravagant social events a waste of time. But their brother, beginning to get anxious about their marital prospects, had made an extra effort to get them to change their minds. Standing in for their parents, who were both dead, George felt very deeply the responsibility of introducing his younger sisters into society. Their social shyness had become, in his view, a serious obstacle to their future. If they appeared at Tessie Oelrichs’s party, he felt sure that their charm and grace would be noticed and that before too long they, like all the other debutantes, would be announcing happy matrimonial news.

Shortly after receiving the gilded invitation, he ordered a large gin from the butler and padded reluctantly down the corridor of the apartment to his sisters’ suite, as always stopping to admire the oil paintings of Crosby family horses that lined the walls of the long gallery. Most of them were painted by the highly regarded English horse painter Ben Marshall, and George would always smile as he remembered the artist’s famous remark that a man would pay him more for doing a portrait of his horse than of his wife. This brief moment of good cheer instantly vanished as he knocked on his sisters’ door and waited gloomily for them to invite him in.

The twins’ sitting room had the classic look of the late Victorian period — red damask walls, fringed lampshades, Persian carpets, and pictures inherited from their father, who had collected a serious set of old master drawings before his untimely death. Bookshelves lined the walls. A small gold goblet from classical Greece and a pair of seventeenth-century glass vases from Venice gleamed in the soft light. All these objects were kept in pristine condition by the twins’ personal maid, Anna, whose duties for her reclusive mistresses were otherwise not arduous, requiring only the laundering and ironing of their simple shirtwaists and riding clothes and the bringing of tea and cakes during the long afternoons when the twins were working at their writing.

The overall effect was inappropriate for two young women, George thought as he stepped gingerly over the threshold. It was a room that might belong to someone who had lived long and cautiously, with an eye to the prevailing standards of conventional taste. There was no youthful touch to liven up the furnishings. It was an old person’s room.

Dorothea liked to sit in an armchair upholstered in dark green velvet, with a small mahogany table beside it covered in manuscript pages, on which she was always working. Iris preferred a wicker chair with quilted cushions, close to the fire, where she warmed her feet. For George, the sight he most dreaded when he ventured into their sanctum was that of the twins bent over the large table in the center of the room, whispering together, Dorothea eagerly guiding her sister’s pen as Iris struggled over the streams of romantic verse that George found utterly incomprehensible. They were thus positioned when he made his latest foray into what he had begun to call — privately, to Lavinia — the doghouse. (“I’m always in it when I go there.”) Anna was collecting their teacups and placing them on a porcelain tray when he entered.

“I’ve got another invitation for you,” he said with false heartiness, waving the stiffly engraved envelope.

The twins looked up from their writing and sighed.

“Darling brother, you know we don’t really like parties,” Dorothea told him.

“Well, we like them well enough, but we find them boring after a while,” Iris added helpfully. “People seem so uninterested in talking about anything except the next ball or trip to Newport. Perhaps you’d like some tea?” She looked at Anna, who held out the tray expectantly.

“You read too much poetry,” George said, waving Anna away. The young girl curtsied and left the room. “That awful school you went to has a lot to answer for.”

The twins laughed, and Iris went over to him and kissed his cheek.

“Perhaps we’ll publish some poetry and surprise you,” she said. George groaned and took a large drink of gin.

“What am I going to do with you?” he demanded with a note of irritation.

“Do with us?” Iris repeated. “Are we such a trouble to you?”

“Of course not. I wish you were more trouble.”

“Don’t worry about us,” Dorothea said. “We are really very happy here.”

George got up, moved to the door, and cast his eyes back into the room, wistfully remembering the playful boudoirs he had visited during his bachelor years.

“We dine as usual at eight,” he told them. “I think Lavinia has ordered salmon tonight. And a very good white Burgundy from Father’s cellar.” He looked down at the invitation once more. “I wish you’d come,” he pleaded. “Won’t you do it for me? People are always asking about you both. I never know what to say.”

After he had gone, Iris returned to her chair. “We are a worry to him,” she observed.

“He wants us married,” Dorothea said.

“Do you think we will ever marry?”

“I can’t bear the thought.”

“Well, you’ve never been in love.”

“In love? How could we fall in love with the bores and fools George keeps introducing us to?”

“I know.” Iris looked dreamily out the window. “But the poets talk about it so.”

“Well, I don’t want anyone intruding into our lives here.” Dorothea indicated her handwritten pages on the table. “We have much work to do if we are to produce anything worth publishing.”

“Perhaps we’re getting like the madwoman in the attic,” Iris said.

“You and I are enough for each other, Iris. We always have been. That’s all that matters. There’s no room for anyone else.” Dorothea got up and put her arm around Iris’s shoulder.

“You’re right, darling.” Iris smiled and stroked Dorothea’s slim fingers.

Dorothea looked carefully at her sister. “You really want to go to this . . . extravaganza, don’t you?”

“Of course not,” Iris replied quickly.

Dorothea turned away and sat down again, picking up her pen. “I should be able to correct some of these verses before dinner.” She bent her head and started to write. Iris watched her for a while, then raised her eyes to the window, where the rays of setting sun struck the panes like gilded darts.

“It’s a beautiful evening,” she murmured. “I’ve never seen such a golden light.” She sighed deeply.

Dorothea put her pen down. “All right, Iris,” she said. “We’ll do it — to please George.” Iris ran to her sister and embraced her. “Thank you, dear Dorothea,” she said eagerly. “You always know everything I feel.”

“Haven’t I always?”

They laughed and went to the window together, watching the sun slowly fade into darkness.

So it was that the twins agreed to go to Mrs. Oelrichs’s ball. With the help of Anna’s nimble fingers (she was an excellent seamstress), they designed for themselves identical costumes made up in the diamond-shaped patterns of the commedia dell’arte. Dorothea had seen pictures of this form of theater in an illustrated book on sixteenth-century European stagecraft and was charmed by the disguises worn by some of the performers. It was the masks that particularly appealed to her.

“Wearing masks makes one unrecognizable,” she told her sister. “We can hide behind them. Isn’t that the best solution to the ordeal George is putting us through?” Iris was delighted by the idea. After much preparation, they finally left for the party dressed in multicolored pantaloons, black satin shoes, and capes. Like princes in a fairy tale, they wore their hair tied with black ribbon in a braid down their backs. Clutching their jeweled masks, the twins felt confident that they would be able to carry off the evening without difficulty.

The entrance of Dorothea and Iris Crosby into Tessie Oelrichs’s ballroom caused a sensation. Having naively supposed that by disappearing behind their masks they would therefore be rendered invisible, the sisters quickly discovered that the opposite, of course, occurred. All eyes were on this intriguing pair, so provocatively dressed in identical Harlequin costumes. Who were these masked creatures? Were they male or female? A married couple or strangers? Where had they come from? Even the chandeliers seemed to tremble with excitement. Curiosity reached such a pitch that George felt it incumbent upon him to reveal their identities. The twins, mortified at the attention, fled.

Poor George! This was not the kind of social entrée he had intended for his sisters. What were they thinking of, wearing those strange clothes? Poor Lavinia! Humiliated once more at the eccentric behavior of her sisters-in-law, she tore up her wig and threw it into the fireplace, where it burned to ashes. Poor Dorothea and Iris! In equal measure, they found their expectations of delightful anonymity cruelly betrayed. The lesson they took away from the experience was that social engagements such as this were too painful to pursue.

On the following day, George groaned as he read the newspaper report of the Crosby twins’ dramatic arrival and departure from Tessie Oelrichs’s ball. The prospect of having two spinster sisters on his conscience for the rest of his life was becoming alarmingly close to reality.

APHOTOGRAPH OF THE TWINS exists, taken with a group of debutantes at a garden party during the year of Mrs. Oelrichs’s ball. Most of the girls wear large hats, high-necked blouses with fashionable bows at the throat, and flowing skirts. Their faces reflect optimism and confidence, a cheerful mirror of the times. The twins wear identical dark dresses, with no ornamentation or decorative flounces. Their heads are bare; their hands hang stiffly at their sides. The overriding impression of their appearance is of austerity and plainness. The most striking aspect of the photograph, however, is that the twins are not sitting together. Their expressions reflect this aberration. Compared to the self-conscious poses and smiles of their companions, they are guarded. Dorothea in particular looks resentful, almost angry. Her mouth turns down, while Iris’s forms a tense line, as though suppressing the urge to cry out.

When George was shown the photograph, he was astonished that the photographer had managed to separate them. It must have taken a threat of violence, he said to himself. It did not help the picture, of course, to have his sisters look so disagreeable. Why did it matter so much, he wondered — their inseparableness? Had he not given them everything a young woman might require in order to make a good marriage? Clothes, horses, domestic skills, and excellent dowries for them both? Was that not enough? Why did they always have to be together? They lived in a realm that even his wonderful wife, who was so good with people, could not penetrate.

In fact, Lavinia had mostly given up on the twins, thinking them irritatingly unworldly and selfish in their failure to make the slightest effort to catch a good husband, as she had so successfully done. But George felt that he, as their brother, should attempt an understanding. Without a mother or a father, who else could assume the role?

The twins’ father, Chanler Crosby, had been a senior member of the New York Stock Exchange and founder of the distinguished brokerage house that bore his name. His wife was a Thayer, from Boston. In spite of these optimistic credentials, tragedy struck the marriage early. On December 3, 1892, Laura Crosby died giving birth to the twins. She was over forty years old and not strong. The pregnancy had been unexpected and perhaps unwanted. George was already twelve years old when his sisters were born. It was a sad Christmas that year.

Then shortly before the twins’ thirteenth birthday, their father died after a fall from a horse while hunting near their country house in Far Hills, New Jersey. All the Crosbys were excellent riders, and the accident was a cruel shock. It appeared that the horse shied after the unexpected appearance of an untethered bull and threw its rider onto a rock that marked the entrance to the stables. Mr. Crosby survived for a day before succumbing to a fatal head wound. George, angered by the accident, wanted to destroy the horse that had killed his father, but Iris interceded. Although she rarely questioned her older brother’s judgment, she knew the horse well and would not see it put down. In an unusual division between the twins, Dorothea sided with her brother.

The scene that ensued was unprecedented. The grieving siblings stood in the driveway near the stables. Two horses put their heads out of their stalls, hoping for a piece of carrot.

“The horse is bad, Iris,” Dorothea told her sister. “He’s unreliable. He’ll do it again. We can’t keep him.”

“He was scared by something,” Iris protested. “He’s never done it before. He’s a wonderful horse.”

“Wonderful horse!” Dorothea scoffed. “He threw our father. He killed him.”

“It wasn’t his fault!”

The twins glared at each other. Each was trembling, cheeks flushed, hands clenched. The dispute between them had suddenly become enormous, a collision of fragile identities formed with the care of an artist. It was as though a piece of Ming porcelain had suddenly cracked in two. Alarmed at the damage, Dorothea walked away. Iris burst into tears. One of the horses tossed its head and snorted anxiously.

“I can’t bear it,” she sobbed. “Do what you have to do.”

For several days after the grim sentence was carried out, Iris did not speak to her sister. George watched them anxiously, knowing the exceptional nature of the rift. Dorothea was pale and withdrawn, suffering equally the loneliness of their separation. Finally she persuaded Iris to walk with her to the stream at the bottom of the garden, far away from the stables. “I can’t bear it, either,” she said, taking Iris’s hand. They fell into each other’s arms. “I’m sorry,” Iris whispered. “It’s worse than anything, being away from you.”

“I know,” Dorothea said. “We’ll mend quickly now.” They sat down and picked some daisies from the lawn and made a chain, something they had often done as little girls. When it was long enough, they divided it in half and placed the two necklaces of white flowers around each other’s necks, like garlands. “There,” Dorothea said. “We’re whole again. Let’s tell George.”

George worked in the Crosby brokerage house. After his father’s death, he and Lavinia moved into the family apartment on Park Avenue and brought his twin siblings to live with them. It was a rich life in the material sense. There was a cook, a butler, a housekeeper, and several maids who worked for the Crosbys full time. The twins employed Anna as well, who was devoted to her mistresses. Her dark eyes and sad expression made George and Lavinia sometimes feel that she was another twin, a shadowy third player haunting the apartment.

The place was stylishly decorated in the fashion of the times, with French antique furniture, Italian silk curtains and upholstery, colored-glass lamps by Tiffany, and paintings by various artists of beloved family dogs, as well as portraits by the current society favorites, Boldini and Sargent. As young girls, Dorothea and Iris showed no interest in these matters and divided their time between the apartment and the country house they had inherited in Far Hills.

The twins’ passion was riding, and much of their lavish annual income was spent on acquiring the finest horses and carriages, which they drove daily in Central Park. People later remembered them from their days driving a four-in-hand through the park, sitting upright and looking straight ahead, holding the reins firmly, sometimes caressing their horses’ necks or murmuring to each other in soft voices. They were always beautifully dressed in English riding habits and hats, with suede gloves and gleaming brown leather boots. They rarely greeted people, as though fearful of an intrusion into their private world.

But it was the fact that they were twins that set them apart from most other young people promenading in the park in those early years. Identical twins were an uncommon phenomenon, so that observers sometimes had to look several times to make sure they were not hallucinating. The duality of their physical presence was unnerving. Their delicately chiseled, unsmiling faces, seen in double exposure, provoked a feeling of unease, almost as though they were exhibits at a freak show. The very idea of twins seemed to some people unnatural, a biological mistake, a check in the smooth progress of human reproduction. (Gemini’s signature, for those who gave credence to astrology, included the traits of instability, intellectuality, and brittleness.) Passersby on the street sometimes actually stepped out of their way to avoid them, as though still adhering to the primitive notion that twins were the handiwork of evil spirits, or a mother’s punishment for sinful behavior (particularly if she died in childbirth).

Dorothea and Iris, already thrown together more than most twins because of their family losses, were aware of the effect they had on people and clung together in self-protection. They would look at themselves in the mirror, intently analyzing each other’s features, conceding the identical nature of their appearance. Sometimes these examinations gave them a pleasing sensation of confidence, suggesting that each one’s individual character was duplicated in the other, thus lending form and resonance to their personalities. More frequently, the suspicion that they were indeed anomalies caused by nature’s perverse trick made them reluctant to leave the apartment.

Buffeted by these conflicting emotions, they learned to cultivate their interdependence with their own abbreviated style of communication, developing a kind of extrasensory mutuality of support. When one laughed, so did the other. When Iris was sick, Dorothea followed suit. They finished each other’s sentences like a long-married couple. Their self-sufficiency was almost insulting to those who knew them. It was as though they had created an invisible barrier between themselves and the world. Holding hands, they seemed protected against the everyday afflictions to which most mortals are prey. Many people found this social quarantine discomfiting.

George worried about them more and more as they grew older. The twins made few demands, and if sometimes they seemed a little melancholy, he attributed it to the general feeling of emptiness that accompanies the premature loss of one’s parents. But their reclusiveness was not. . .