by Gore Vidal
“I shouldn’t think she’d feel like laughing in here.” Sanford placed a thick envelope on the table between them. “This used to be Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, the one that McAllister said could only hold four hundred people, the only people who mattered socially, he said. Another little brother.”
“I thought the hotel was all new?”
“The hotel’s new. But half of it’s built on the site of Mrs. Astor’s old house, and half on the site of her nephew’s house.”
“Ah, of course! I remember. They hate each other. Oh, the raging passions of the Astors! I can’t get enough of them. They are like the Plantagenets. Everything on such a monstrous scale, like this hotel.”
Caroline knew all about the rivalry between nephew and aunt. The nephew, William Waldorf Astor, was oldest son of oldest son; this meant that he was the Astor and that his wife was the Mrs. Astor. But upon his father’s death, his aunt had declared herself the Mrs. Astor, causing her niece much pain, not to mention confusion, as invitations were constantly being sent to wrong addresses. William Waldorf then declared war on the Mystic Rose. He tore down his house, which was next to hers, and put up a hotel. Unable to bear the presence of a hotel’s shadow on her garden, the Mystic Rose persuaded her husband to tear down their house and put up a second hotel. Though uncle and nephew were also at war, they were sufficiently practical to see the advantage of joining the two hotels into a single unique monument to the fierce passions of their turbulent family, and so they styled the result, somewhat uneasily, the Waldorf-Astoria.
“Now everyone can sit in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom.”
“Everyone certainly does.” Sanford was sour; but then his mother was an Apgar, a self-regarding old family whose brown-stone rectitude and gentility were forever grimly opposed to the white marble vulgarity of the buccaneer rich whose palaces now extended not only up Fifth Avenue to Central Park but also to the west, where, not long ago, one enterprising millionaire had discovered, to everyone’s astonishment, the Hudson River; and so the Riverside Drive was now a place where the new rich could build their palaces, and live in a rural, riparian splendor, like so many upstate Livingstons with the marvelous amenity of the nearby Columbus Avenue elevated train, which could get them to any part of Manhattan in a matter of minutes. “The world is very much changed,” said Sanford, now all Apgar.
“I wouldn’t know.” Caroline was enjoying everything about the Waldorf-Astoria. “The only world I know is now.”
“You are young.”
“That is the problem, isn’t it?” Caroline indicated the envelope, flanked by a chocolate torte and a blond, pale, damp cake, reminiscent of Harry Lehr’s face.
Sanford nodded; opened the envelope; withdrew some documents. “I have gone on appeal. There are the documents in question. They are… well, I’ll leave them with you. Read them carefully. I’ve also obliged Mr. Houghteling to produce the Colonel’s earlier wills, for comparison. In every will that I know of, each of you was to inherit his half of the estate at the age of twenty-one. But in the last will…”
“Father appears to have written a seven instead of a one.” At first Caroline had thought it some sort of joke; then she realized that the Colonel must have, by mistake, written a French one. Now, for the first time, she was able to examine a copy of the will. “Surely if I’m not to inherit until I am twenty-seven, then the same condition-that is, the same confused cypher-must apply to Blaise, who is only twenty-two.”
“Look.” Sanford tapped the document. She read: “… my son, Blaise, who is of age, to inherit his portion; my daughter, Caroline, when she is of age, at 27, to inherit her portion, as described above…” Caroline put down, the will. “This makes no sense. I was twenty when he made the will. Blaise was twenty-one, and Father says he is of age. So why am I not of age when I am twenty-one, as the previous wills stated?”
“You know, I know, Blaise knows, Mr. Houghteling knows, that Colonel Sanford meant twenty-one. But the law does not know this. The law only knows what is written down and witnessed and notarized.”
“But the law must, sometimes, make sense.”
“That is not the law’s function, I’m afraid.”
“But you’re a lawyer. Surely lawyers make the law…”
“We interpret the law. So far the interpretation in this case has all been done by Mr. Houghteling, who says that the Colonel decided that you, as a young inexperienced woman, must wait until you are twenty-seven, before you inherit. Blaise, at twenty-one, he regarded as being competent, and of age.”
Caroline stared at the will, which now seemed to her even more of a jungle than the Palm Garden, where a string trio was playing softly, La Belle Hélène. “What can I do?” she finally asked.
“What do you want?”
“My half of the estate now.”
Sanford crumbled bits of chocolate cake with his fork. “That will mean going to court, an expensive process. It will also mean overthrowing this will, since your father’s peculiar number one is now accepted by everyone hereabouts as a seven.”
“Why,” Caroline was thinking hard, “did he draw up this will? I mean, is it any different from all the others?”
“Yes. Apparently, he changed his will every time there was a new… uh, housekeeper.” Sanford was ill at ease. Caroline was not. “He would make a bequest to the new one. There are seven such bequests in all. But the bulk of the estate has always been evenly divided between his two children.”
“If I should lose,” Caroline had yet to speculate on such a catastrophe but the palms were suddenly filled with menace and the waltz from La Belle Hélène sounded like a funeral march, “what happens?”
“You will be paid, from the estate, thirty thousand dollars a year until you are twenty-seven. Then you will inherit your half.”
“Suppose Blaise loses it all. What then?”
“You will have half of nothing.”
“So I must get my share now.”
“What makes you think Blaise will lose instead of make money?” Sanford eyed her curiously. For Caroline, a banquette’s advantage was that with a slight turn of the head one’s features-half-visible at best-were no longer on display. She looked toward the next table, where an actress whom she had often seen on stage was trying to look obscure in order that everyone might see how young she looked offstage, when, of course, for an actress, the Palm Garden was the ultimate stage.
“Blaise is ambitious, and ambitious people almost always fail, don’t they?”
“That’s a curious notion, Miss Caroline. I mean, there was Caesar and Lincoln and… and…”
“Two excellent examples. Both murdered. But I wasn’t thinking of that sort of huge ambition. I was thinking of people who are in a hurry, very young, to make others take notice of them. Well, Blaise is rushing into the world like… like…”
“Like Mr. Hearst?”
“Exactly. He tells me, proudly, that Mr. Hearst has lost millions of dollars on his two newspapers.”
“But Mr. Hearst-a true rotter-will make other fortunes. He is made for this degraded time.”
“Perhaps he will. Perhaps he won’t. But his mother is richer than our father was, and I don’t want to end up with half of nothing.”
Sanford looked at her curiously. “If what you call ambitious men lose fortunes, what sort of a man do you think makes one?”
“My father.” The answer was prompt. “He was indolent. He paid no attention to business, and he more than doubled his inheritance.” Caroline turned, full face, to Sanford. “We must find a way to force Blaise to give up what’s not his.”
“But Mr. Houghteling has already taken the first steps. I think a court case might be risky.”
Caroline involuntarily shuddered; anger and fear commingled. “Surrender is riskier. Isn’t this the city where everyone can be bought? Well, let us buy a judge, or is it the jury one pays for?”
Sanford smiled to show that he was not shocked; and looked very shocked indeed. Caroline felt a certain com
passion for her upright relative. “Our city officials are generally corrupt,” he said. “But I wouldn’t know how to deal with that sort of thing. You see, I am with the reform movement. I helped Colonel Roosevelt when he was police commissioner. Of course, reform is dead for the moment and Tammany’s back in power again with Van Wyck, who’s Boss Croker’s man. Croker’s back, too.” The string trio, as if cued, began to play the song of the year, the sickening, to Caroline’s Parisian ear, “The Rosary.” Sentimental religiosity and public stealing, that was the new world. Well, she decided, she had better master it; or be mastered herself. There was, all in all, a certain advantage to having been brought up by a lazy father who could not speak the language of the country where he lived. As a result, Caroline had been in charge not only of her own life but of Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, never really yielding her authority to any one of the resident ladies. In the long run, the managing of the ladies had taught her patience and diplomacy. Unfortunately, the world of men had been closed to her. Blaise, who might have been a link, was always away at school either in England or in the United States; and since the Colonel was like no other man, what she had learned in the managing of him was obviously not going to be of much use to her with the brutes of the Palm Garden. The celebrated actress-who was she?-was listening, head to one side, eyes half-closed, to “The Rosary”; she appeared to be having a religious experience, to the awe of her companions, rude bewhiskered New Yorkers, with red faces, and a reverence for the finer things, of which the actress was, so expensively, one.
“Will you see your brother?” Sanford was tentative; but then he had never known what her relations were with the half-brother who had, so suddenly, turned pirate. Caroline herself was not certain just what she felt, other than fury. She had always appreciated Blaise’s energy, both athletic and moral, if moral was the word for a highly immoral or amoral will to rise. She had even found Blaise’s beauty attractive in the sense that they complemented one another; he was blond and she was dark. He should have been a bit taller with long, less-bowed legs; but then she might have been more usual had she been shorter and fuller-much fuller, since fashion had now decreed magnificent poitrines for the ladies while nature had decreed, in her case, otherwise. Although Worth had made up the difference artfully, the disappointment of her future husband was a source of not exactly pleasant daydreams.
Caroline rose. “Blaise is taking me to the theater. Then we shall go to supper, the two of us, at Rector’s, which I can now enter, as I am a woman of twenty-one though not yet an heiress of twenty-seven.” Caroline saw that she had made her point. Sanford nodded; looked grim; he would do battle for her. As they swept into the Peacock Alley, Sanford said, “You must be very careful of what you say to your brother.”
“I always am. But he does know that we mean to fight, doesn’t he?”
“Yes. I’ve made that clear to Mr. Houghteling. Perhaps you shouldn’t mention the matter to Blaise.”
“Perhaps,” she said.
They entered the high-ceilinged, resonant lobby, suggestive of a Bernini nightmare, thought Caroline, darkly approving the excess of gold and crystal and red damask, through which moved the hotel staff, evenly divided between those dressed to look like officers of the Habsburg court and those got up as members of some very superior parliament where Prince Albert frock-coats were cut to perfection and trousers were subtly, grayly striped. Caroline walked Sanford to the door. He seemed disturbed; then blurted out: “You must have someone with you, you know.”
“A governess?” Caroline smiled. “But surely I’ve been governed all my life.”
“I meant a suitable lady, a relative…”
“Those who are suitable are not available, those who are available… Don’t worry. I have Marguerite. She’s been with us all my life. She sleeps in a small room next to my bedroom. The hotel was relieved to see her honest, ugly face.”
“Well, then, I suppose… But when you go out, she goes with you?”
“When we take the air, yes. But I’m not going to take her to Mrs. Astor’s. She’s far too intelligent for those people. She has read Pascal.”
Sanford looked puzzled; then said, “Good-by. I’ll see you tomorrow, if I may. After I’ve talked to Mr. Houghteling and you…”
“… have not talked to Blaise.” Caroline smiled, as he left; and kept on smiling all the way to the elevator; then caught a glimpse in the mirrored door of her own face, made perfectly stupid by the insipid smile. She frowned; beauty regained.
Caroline’s beauty-such as it was-was again lost at Mrs. Astor’s. Although she had made up her mind not to smile, habit undid her; and she looked, she knew, exactly the way she was expected to look: stupid, innocent, young. But then, she thought dourly, she was all three and the absolute proof of her stupidity was the fact that she knew it and could do nothing about it. She had had a superior education with Mlle. Souvestre. She had read the classics; she knew art. But no one had ever explained to her how not to be cheated out of a fortune.
Harry Lehr pranced toward her as she crossed the first drawing room, empty except for the two of them. “Oh, Miss Sanford! You are a sight for sore eyes!”
“In that case, I shall go live in Lourdes and make my fortune.”
“You won’t need to go anywhere for that.” Lehr had not heard of Lourdes; and Caroline was not in an instructive mood. “She’s pouring tea herself, in the library. Just a few people, the chosen ones, you might say.”
“And then again might not.” Caroline enjoyed Lehr’s deep silliness. Paris was filled with similar lapdogs. There seemed to be a universal law that the greater the lady the more urgent it was for her to have a Lehr to make her laugh, to collect gossip and new people, to be always at her side and yet never give her cause to fear compromise. Lehr was in his late twenties; from Baltimore. He lived by his wits. He sold champagne to friends. On occasion, he liked to dress up as a smart lady; and make people laugh.
Caroline followed, happily, the conventionally dressed Lehr through a second drawing room to a library, newly panelled with ancient wood. Here a dozen “old” New Yorkers sat in a semi-circle around the tea service, where Mrs. Astor presided; she was very much herself, as always, beneath a jet-black wig. The old woman gave Caroline a finger to touch; a thin smile to respond to; a cup of tea to drink. “Dear Miss Sanford,” said the Mystic Rose, “sit beside me.”
Caroline sat next to the old lady, a mark of honor that did not go unnoticed by the other guests, most of whom she recognized but none of whom she could identify. New York had always been like that for her, a series of strange drawing rooms filled with familiar-looking strangers, and familiar-sounding names. She assumed that once she could put the right name to the right face she would be, at last, home, for she had decided that she was going to be what her father pretended, uselessly, not to be, an American. Nevertheless, New York was still a foreign city to her, unlike Paris, where she was at home, or even London, where she had often stayed with family friends or with girls she had known at Allenswood; over the years, she had graduated from children’s parties to the grown-up world, marked, officially, four years earlier, when she had put three feathers in her hair and in the company of the Dowager Countess Glenellen, mother-in-law of a schoolfriend, she curtseyed low to Queen Victoria. Now she sat next to the Queen’s American equivalent, who put her uneasily at ease as is royalty’s way. “You will not have cake?”
Caroline had refused the cake offered her by a maid. “This is my second tea, Mrs. Astor. I had my first in your old ballroom.”
“The Palm Garden.” Mrs. Astor pronounced each syllable with the same emphasis. “I have seen the Palm Garden. But only from the corridor. You are stopping at the hotel?”
“Yes. It is most comfortable.” Caroline was finding this sort of exchange oddly more tiring in English than in French, where the ritual exchange of polite phrases could be, occasionally, charged with meaning. “I think the hotel is unique.” And now, why not, she wondered, get the reputation for being much to
o clever for a girl? She launched herself, “The Waldorf-Astoria has brought exclusivity to the masses.”
Mrs. Astor’s range of expressions did not include astonishment, as, like her British counterpart, she could not, by definition, ever be observed in so fallen a state; but polite disapproval was very much in her repertoire. The eyes, which slightly drooped at the corners, opened wide. The short-lipped mouth was now pursed, as if she might be inclined to whistle. “Surely,” she said in her usual clear uninflected voice, “that is not possible. I also wonder how one so young, though brought up in France,” Caroline did not wince at the low thrust, “could know of these things.”
“Oh, Mrs. Astor, we are nothing if not exclusive…”
“I meant,” said Mrs. Astor, “the… masses.” She blinked her eyes, as if a tumbril had come into view. But it was only the maid with bread and butter. Mrs. Astor helped herself, as if falling back on a basic necessity in order to fortify herself against the mob. “Your grandfather,” Caroline was pleased that Mrs. Astor had made a connection, “wrote a book which I have still in this library,” her dark eyes stared vaguely at a row of magnificent tooled morocco volumes, emblazoned with the name Voltaire, “that told of what happened in Paris when the Communists overthrew the regime. It is a work which gave me many a sleepless night. Those fierce common people, after killing poor Marie Antoinette, then proceeded to eat the entire contents of the Paris Zoo, too dreadful, from antelope to… to emu.”
Caroline smiled politely in order not to laugh out loud. Mrs. Astor had managed to confuse 1870 with 1789. “Let us hope that the mob will be kept happy here by the Waldorf-Astoria with its one thousand bedrooms.”
Mrs. Astor frowned slightly at the raffish word “bedroom”; but then, as if recalling her young guest’s unfortunate upbringing, she said, “Your grandfather always said he was the wrong Schermerhorn and the wrong Schuyler. I was born Schermerhorn,” she added quietly, as if she had pronounced the ultimate royal name Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.