Mid-May from 1866 well into the 1960s, the Debutante Cotillion Ball at the Clarkson Ballroom in the Van Doren Hotel opened the social calendar in Boston. It was eagerly awaited every year, but particularly in 1875, when the New England winter had punished Bostonians beyond even their endurance. Once again, the crocuses and daffodils had been a tease, making April fools of everyone. For on April 2, Boston was under siege, pounded by its second blizzard in thirty days, this time two and a half feet of snow, drifts of ten feet, temperatures below zero for close to a week.
The blizzard arrived unannounced around midnight. By 3:00 a.m., half the people in Boston were awakened by the howling winds. In the dark, they listened and felt a chill before they tightened the blankets around themselves and drifted back to sleep. The next morning, they were greeted by the chatter of hail striking glass. This brought them to their windows, and actually their first look at the storm contained an element of fascination with the sheer power of nature. However, as the day progressed, the storm seemed to strengthen, and their fascination was replaced by concern. The winds angrily blasted away, moaning and screeching with a vocabulary undecipherable to human intelligence. Giant tree limbs came crashing down, blocking roads, breaking through the roofs of homes and businesses. The second night was worse than the first. When this was repeated still a third night, the storm began to cut away at people’s sanity, especially because a number of residents were sure they had felt the earth rumble during the night. There hadn’t been a serious earthquake in Boston since November 1755.
Some paced the floor; many more twisted and turned in bed throughout the night, trying not to listen to the wind, not to think, not to do anything other than sleep, the very worst way to fall asleep. By the fourth morning, when the storm still had not let up, some Bostonians had become unnaturally quiet. No one knew what to expect next. In 1875, there was no radio, TV, telephone, or weatherman, no explanation of what, exactly, was happening and when it would end. Fear makes minds work overtime, makes the imagination run wild. Everyone had to make whatever sense they could.
Perhaps the blizzard was punishment for collective sin, for something awful that they had done. The honest among them knew their personal contribution, and this wasn’t altogether comforting, but would God be this angry? At what? In a fury, He had once wiped out the world with forty days of rain when the human race had become corrupted beyond forgiveness. Was this the beginning of a forty-day blizzard? Or was it simply an anomaly of nature, an unlucky rolling of the dice, a-once-in-a-hundred-years storm? And was that an earthquake last night? If only they could hear what the priest had to say, hear if there was news. Not knowing was the worst of it.
It is fair to wonder why there is so much speculation at such times. But then again, it is to be expected. People think and think when something is wrong. Good thoughts or bad thoughts, valid explanations or nonsense, they think and think until they have found something that makes sense. Whether true or false, it almost doesn’t matter. When danger is knocking on the windows, when the wind wildly mocks the ordinary silence of night, what else can people do if they don’t speculate? Pace the floor? Climb the walls? Start bickering with each other? Read the Farmers’ Almanac for the third and fourth time? Collapse heavily into a chair in despair, or spring up like a deer hearing a menacing sound? The people of Boston did all of these things and considered still more theories. None of it was very effective. The truly insane might have done what most would have been tempted to do—attempt to strike back, open the door and scream curses at the storm. The sensible, however, understood that they would be shouting into the void. Their sound would be completely unheard beneath the howling winds.
By the fourth day, those who had earlier learned how to tune out now stared off into space, took a journey inside their minds to familiar places. The less fortunate found crevices from which it might be harder to return. Some people played the piano until they got tired of the same old tunes. Some people prayed; some laughed, or imitated laughter. And when all was said and done, regardless of how they tried to handle it, there was only one true answer to this storm and the winter of 1875: the spring.
To a starving man, a scrap of bread tastes as fine as Belgian chocolate. The same principle applies to the seasons: the worse the winter, the more glorious the spring. A few snowflakes fell in early May, two weeks before the ball, but no one paid it any mind. The snow melted almost immediately. As terrible as things had been during the blizzard and the hard freeze that extended through most of April, the worst had been forgotten after they had sunshine for a week in May, then two weeks, then sixteen glorious days in a row.
Given that the blizzard was still recent, no one was ready to assume they were completely out of the winter, but the evidence was mounting. Profuse dogwood blossoms were a good sign. Then something better, something that often went by unnoticed but this year lit up like fireworks ablaze in the sky. Tulips appeared, followed by azaleas and rhododendron: vibrant colors, gorgeous colors, dazzling reds, purples, crimsons, cranberry, and pinks battled the gray torpor of winter, shook the senses to awaken. From absolute stillness, from a suspended state, from nothingness, life had sprung back into motion. Plants peeked out of the ground, then got down to business. A week or two later, they bloomed. Flowers and more flowers. The brain smiles at flowers even in New England, where smiles are tentative. Especially in New England.
Spring is a parade of flowers in every shape and size, one following another in assigned progression. By the time redbud arrives in the middle of the parade, people’s expectations have reached a point where they expect the marvelous. They aren’t disappointed. Cherry and crab apple blossoms, peonies, poppies, lupine, roses, a procession varying little from year to year. That year, 1875, because of the long freeze, the emergence of each flower telescoped into a shorter time frame. It had a spectacular effect. Each flower appeared, while the earlier flowers still remained. Belize’s flower arrangements were the best they had ever been. Everything appearing all at once, the entire cast together in a finale, leading to a grand crescendo, the Cotillion Ball held in the Clarkson. The ball was the high point, the culminating event. Entering the Clarkson had come to mean that spring was finally irreversible. But it was more. For those caught up in the social calendar, the ball at the Boston Van Doren seemed as if it had been the whole purpose of the parade. Each rite of spring built upon the last prelude, everything leading to this, the grand event. Nature’s most beautiful blossoms, dangerously beautiful city blossoms, debutantes, the fairest of the fair, the daughters of pretty women chosen by successful men, all gathered together in the Clarkson Ballroom, where they could be duly celebrated.
They arrived in fine coaches driven by impeccably attired coachmen, with horses that seemed to prance as they appeared from behind the circle surrounding the fountains and came to the grand entryway of the Van Doren Hotel. Those who were simply witnesses to the ball, those without daughters being introduced, entered the lobby with laughter and gaiety. Those who were presenting their daughters tried to seem just as carefree, but that fooled no one. Strain edged their laughter. Each of the young ladies was ushered to a special room with their mothers and servants, where they might prepare for their moment. They were very excited.
If you looked at the faces of the debutantes, you saw children, dreamy, without a clue, which was very desirable. With the young women dressed in the most beautiful gowns they had ever worn, intimations of the women they might become took hold of their audience. The seeming contradiction of their childish nature and their women’s bodies created a powerful tension. Some consider the beauty of virgins the most precious lure. The most desirable quality was not to have a trace of sophistication. Glorious innocence, but with devilish curiosity and flirtatiousness, was perfection.
They were closely studied by every matron in attendance that night. They were a reminder of a place and time where each of those older women had once been. They could remember their own thrill when, at last, they had been invited to the adults’ table. As at Christmas time, those who delight in the children’s excitement do so because it arouses their own memories. It allows them to recall themselves as children, so they can have Christmas again. In the same way, the debutantes’ youth and energy enticed everyone to share it with them, to recall their own younger physical qualities. The debutantes’ bodies were still perfect, better than they would ever again be, newly formed, natural, with no thought given to repair. Their noses had not yet grown, nor their lips or ears. Their teeth were shiny white; their hair was thick and healthy where it should be, and peach fuzz everywhere else. The men, young and old, could have looked at them forever, or at least until they were aware that they were practically drooling. This happened every year. The ball in 1875 took it to the next level.
The horrible winter, combined with the preceding two and a half weeks of May sunshine, created virulent spring fever, emotions heating up, expectations high, patience thin. Perhaps that explains why people became disoriented when Ariana De Vries, just turned seventeen, was introduced. She started a riot. Not on the outside, where polite society almost never shows what is going on inside. Indeed, there was no discernible reaction to Ariana as she stepped forward to do her curtsy for the Honorable William Gaston, governor of Massachusetts. If anything, she got less applause than some of the other girls, particularly from other women. But if there were an instrument that could measure seismic vibrations inside the mind, this moment was off the scale. Granted that the winter had been so awful that a frog might have looked like an angel and stoked up the hormones. But Ariana’s impact can be best understood in simple terms. Not only did she not look like a frog; she was the most beautiful debutante in this or any other year. She was the most beautiful woman anyone in the ballroom had ever seen.
So, it is not surprising that Eric Lowell, the youngest Lowell in his clan, nineteen, going on twenty, fell into a swoon the instant he saw her. Swoon used to be employed to describe a woman’s reaction to a powerful man, a hunk, as they would say today. But in truth, Ariana was having that effect on men and women alike. She shared her mother Belize’s French features, but there was also another element, more mysterious, more difficult to pinpoint. Was it Dutch? Flemish? Swiss blood that she carried in her veins alongside the French? Was it her hair? Her lips? Perhaps it was the slight flaw, which saves the truly beautiful from banality, a tiny scar above her right eyebrow, the result of a teacup used as a missile by Ariana’s older sister when she was four.