1876

by Gore Vidal

  Then the cars were gone. The nervous horses were persuaded to cross the avenue and enter the quiet precinct of Washington Square Park.

  “My God!” Emma put handkerchief to cheek; did not care to refine her language for Mr. John Day Apgar, who was more thrilled than not by our adventure.

  “I’m sorry. I ought to have warned you. There’s really nothing like it in the world, is there?”

  “I’m happy to say, no, there is not.” Emma’s colour was now high; she looked uncommonly youthful—the sudden fright, the cold wind.

  I did not repeat my now constant and, even to me, interminable refrain: How things have changed. Yet in my time (was ever any time mine?) Sixth Avenue was just a name to describe a country road that crossed isolated farms and thick marshes, where my father once took me duck shooting.

  As we turned into Washington Park, I vowed I would not again make any reference to the way things were—except in print for money. More to the point, it is always difficult to discern whether or not one entertains or bores the young, since their politeness requires them to appear at all times attentive. I should know. In my youth I made my way in the world by using the old without conscience. Is there retribution awaiting me now? In the guise of some young listener smiling his betrayal as I maunder on.

  I must stop this. Not dwell so much upon the past. The present is too exciting, and the small time left me must be well used to re-make Emma’s fortune. At this instant I feel that nothing can stop us if I do not perish first of the heat.

  Heat billows from the pipes, from the burning coals in the grate of the marble fireplace. I have tried and failed to open the parlour window. I positively gasp for air. But I am in my dressing gown and do not want to call a servant. Emma sleeps in her room.

  Two bedrooms, parlour, and—remarkably—a private bath all for thirty dollars a day. Three meals are included, of course, whilst a fourth, supper, can be had for an additional two dollars and fifty cents. Yet even at this rate we will be penniless in three months. But the gamble is worth it. This hotel is the city’s grandest; everyone of importance can be seen in the lobby, the reception rooms, the bars. So this must be our El Dorado, to be mined with care.

  Curious, my pulse rate has almost doubled at the thought of money—and its absence!

  I have just taken an opiate, a powerful laudanum mixed for me in Paris. So now, sleepily, I write rather as one dreams, not knowing what is real or not.

  Washington Square Park is as handsome, in its way, as London’s Green Park, with comfortable houses side by side, as neat and as unimaginative as a row of new American novels. In fact, the monotony of the architecture in the city’s better sections takes some getting used to. But many of the newer buildings are in a different, more grandiose and—let me admit it—for me, more pleasing style.

  We left Washington Park and began the ascent of Fifth Avenue, a pleasant boulevard not so wide or grand as the Champs-Élysées but pleasing enough, with tall ailanthus trees at regular intervals. Again, however, the avenue is lined for the most part with those sombre houses of dullest brownstone.

  “Do all your houses look alike?” Emma was less than enchanted by fabled Fifth Avenue.

  “They are dreadful, aren’t they?” John’s year in Paris had made him critical of what, I seem to recall in the early days of our acquaintance, he once boasted of. “You’d never recognize New York now,” he would say to me. “It’s every bit as fine as Paris.”

  “But things are changing uptown,” he added.

  “Not that your houses aren’t…appealing.” Emma smiled at him. “And obviously comfortable.”

  “Oh, they’re that. This part”—John indicated the section between Washington Square Park and Madison Square at Twenty-third Street—“is where the old families live.”

  “Like the Apgars?” Emma was mischievous.

  John blushed; his long face is rather like that of one of those llamas from the highlands of Peru. “Well, we’re not old in the city. We’re from Philadelphia, actually. The Brothers didn’t move to New York until just before I was born.”

  “But you live in this quarter?”

  “Right along there.” John pointed east, to Tenth Street. “That’s my father’s house. I’m staying there while looking for a place of my own—of course.”

  Since the conversation was now verging on the indelicate, I changed the subject, asked him about certain landmarks of my youth. No, he had never heard of the City Hotel; so that once famous center of the town has obviously been long since razed. I told him that it was the Fifth Avenue Hotel of its time.

  “I thought the Astor House was.”

  As I heard the name I had a sudden crise of memory…a bright sultry summer afternoon when the walls of the Astor House were going up and a block of stone fell into the street, nearly killing a passer-by. Now the Astor House, once the leading hostelry of the city, “isn’t what it used to be. Convenient for business people but too far downtown for the fashionables.”

  Today the center of the city is Madison Square and I must say its showiness provides a certain relief after the dull mile of Fifth Avenue brownstones we had driven so slowly past. I duly note that today’s uptown traffic is every bit as bad as it used to be on lower Broadway.

  One enters the square at the point where Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue, and immediately the eye is taken with the Fifth Avenue Hotel, a six-storey white marble palace that occupies the entire block between Twenty-third and Twenty-fourth streets. The half-colonnaded marble façade faces onto the gardens of Madison Square, and very pretty they must be in summer, though now the bare trees are like so many iron forks standing on end against a steel sky.

  But…always the “but” in dealing with things American. Between the hotel and the park at the center of Madison Square, the avenue is wide and without much style. Half-hearted attempts have been made at paving certain sections. Asphalt, Belgian block, cobblestones succeed one another without design whilst everywhere, at irregular intervals, tall telegraph poles with their connecting wires dominate the vista just as the messages those copper wires are constantly transmitting define and govern this raw world: buy cotton, sell gold, make money. Well, I am hardly one to be condescending. Why else am I here?

  John assured us that above Madison Square, as far north as Fifty-second Street, European-style mansions are going up. “While way up at Fifty-seventh Street, Mrs. Mary Mason Jones has built herself a French villa. Most extraordinary sight! Just sitting there all by itself in the wilderness with nothing around it except a few saloons and squatters’ huts, and the goats.”

  Despite stern laws the goats are everywhere; they even invade the elegant premises of Madison Square. Emma was enthralled by the sight of a policeman attacking a half dozen dingy goats at the north end of the square, where they had taken up residence in front of a building in the process of renovation: the newest restaurant of the Delmonico family, soon to open.

  We were met just outside the front door by a director of the hotel, a cousin of the late Mr. Paran Stevens, whose widow is known for her Sunday-night evenings, to which everyone goes save the most staid of the gentry like Mrs. Mary Mason Jones. I don’t know why, but I do enjoy writing that name.

  The opiate is beginning to take effect. I yawn. Am drowsy. Note that the heart now beats more and more slowly whilst the little drum in my head has slowed its thudding.

  The Stevenses’ cousin was most flattering: “A great honour, sir. To receive you and the beautiful Princess.”

  With much ceremony, we were led into the hotel lobby, a vast room crowded with tall palms and fat green rubber plants—a jungle contained by marble walls and red damask hangings and filled with the infernal smell of cigar smoke, of burning anthracite, of the heavy perfumes worn by the many ladies (not all, I should think, properly attended) who made their promenade either in pairs together or on the arm of a gentleman—recently met? The fact t
hat I can no longer tell a prostitute from a fine lady is the first sign that I have been away for a very long time. As a boy, I always knew.

  I registered us at the desk; pleasantly aware that we were the center of much attention. Obviously, I am better known than the overcoats have led me to believe. Also, the fact that I am accompanied by a bona-fide princess is stimulating. Americans care desperately for titles, for any sign of distinction. In fact, since the War Between the States, I have not met a single American of a certain age who does not insist upon being addressed as Colonel or Commodore. Invariably I promote them; address them as General, as Admiral; they preen and do not correct me.

  The Stevenses’ cousin…but I forget: he, too, is titled. The Colonel said that he would like personally to escort us to our suite on the sixth floor. “We shall take,” he said, “the perpendicular railway.”

  I assumed that this was some sort of nonsense phrase and thought nothing of it as we made our regal progress across the central lobby. Many of the gentlemen bowed respectfully to the director; he is a handsome man, heavily bearded as almost everyone is nowadays except me. I continue to wear only side whiskers despite the fact that having exchanged the blond silken hair of youth for the white wiry bristle of old age, I resemble uncannily the late President Van Buren.

  Halfway across the lobby, a puffy bewhiskered man of fifty, elaborately got up, with perfumed (and dyed?) whiskers, bowed low to Emma and me.

  “Princesse, allow me to introduce myself. We met at the christening of the prince impérial.”

  The voice was Southern with a most peculiar overtone of British; the French was frightful but confident.

  Emma was gracious; I, too. He told us his name; neither listened to it. Then he was gone. The Colonel, who had been talking to a huge man with a diamond stickpin, turned; his eyebrows arched at the retreating figure. “You know him?”

  Emma chose to be mischievous. “Paris. The christening of the prince impérial.”

  “Oh, yes.” I could not tell if the Colonel was impressed or not. In any case, we were at that instant stopped by a nervous young man; with a sidelong glance at the disapproving Colonel, he pressed his card upon me. “I’m from Ritzman’s, sir. We’d like to do you, sir. And the Princess, too, sir. If we may, sir.” He took to his heels.

  Emma was amused. “What will Mr. Ritzman want to do to us?”

  “To photograph you.” The Colonel had stopped before a mysterious grilled gate that seemed to be locked. We stopped, too.

  “They have a store, across the square. Ritzman photographs everyone of importance.”

  “But what,” asked Emma, “does he do with the pictures?”

  “Sells them. Great demand for portraits of a princess like yourself…and a celebrated author,” he added quickly as the grilled gate was flung open to reveal a small panelled chamber containing a uniformed man gravely fiddling with mysterious wheels and levers. At the Colonel’s insistence we entered the closet. The door shut behind us and we rose into the air.

  Emma is delighted, but I confess to a certain giddiness, not so much going up as when, in obedience to the law of gravity, the thing comes down and one’s stomach seems not to keep up with the rest of the falling body.

  Our suite is large and nicely furnished, with flowers everywhere—so many, in fact, that between the overheating and the odor of the tuberoses I have had a headache most of the evening. The private bathroom is indeed a luxury unknown in Europe’s hotels, and rare in New York.

  On a table in front of the marble fireplace was a stack of letters and telegrams. I could not wait to open them, but politeness required that I wait until the Colonel demonstrated for us the many conveniences of the suite, including the new calcium or lime lights that cast a rather lurid glow over everything, though they make reading particularly easy for one who is developing, as I am, cataracts.

  “Mrs. Paran Stevens has invited you to her next Sunday.” The Colonel indicated one of the envelopes. “She always has music. Usually someone from the opera. She hopes you will come.”

  “You are too kind,” Emma murmured, removing furs (her mother’s, I fear).

  “She’ll want to see you, too, Mr. Apgar.” The Colonel was casually agreeable, and John blushed and said that he would be honoured.

  After a demonstration of the mysterious speaking tubes that connect the suite with those bowels of the hotel where dwell valets and maids and waiters, the Colonel withdrew.

  “We’re really here.” Emma ran to the window to look out onto the square filled with omnibuses and carriages and telegraph poles and goats (actually the goats were now trotting down East Twenty-fourth Street).

  A large sign on a building just opposite implores one and all to drink Old Jacob Thompson’s Sarsaparilla.

  Since I still felt I was aboard ship and the floor appeared to be heaving in a most unnatural way, I sat down beside the fire and began to open telegrams whilst John showed Emma those sights of the town that are visible from the window.

  “That’s the Union Club over there. It’s quite nice. We’re all members,” said John. Apparently the Apgars move in a herd up, down and all around the island.

  But Emma was more concerned with the beggars.

  “Why don’t you do something with them?”

  “Like what?”

  “The Emperor would have started a war.” Emma laughed. She was, however, quite serious.

  “But we’ve just had a war.”

  “Well, you need another one. And very soon.”

  I found the invitation from Mrs. Paran Stevens for Sunday night, to hear the tenor Mario. Also, an invitation to be guest of honour at the Lotos Club any Saturday of my choosing, to give an impromptu chat. A note from Mr. Hartman, wanting to know if I would be interested in a lecture tour. A message from William Cullen Bryant (the whole name spelled out) to say that he would be happy to have me for breakfast any day, before 8:30 A.M.

  I’ve just been counting on my fingers and my old editor at the Evening Post—who is still the editor of the paper—is now eighty-one years old. Everyone else from my New York youth is dead except for Bryant, whom I thought of even then as being the oldest person I knew.

  There was a welcome from my publisher, Mr. Dutton, and a note delivered by hand from Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Scribner’s Monthly, where I publish when I cannot get a decent price elsewhere; he proposes an early meeting at my convenience; he, too, wants me to address the Lotos Club. There was nothing, however, from Bonner of the Ledger or from Frank Leslie, whose monthly pays the best of all the magazines—I had written both men that I would be in New York on the fourth.

  I was also disappointed to find no welcome from what has been for years a principal source of revenue, the New York Herald. But then young James Gordon Bennett is but a pale (and drunken) version of his father. Even so, he might have had the courtesy to have left at least a card.

  But I found what I most wanted to find amongst the telegrams: an invitation to take tea tomorrow with John Bigelow. He is the key to my good fortune…if that fortune is to be good.

  Words now begin to blur agreeably on the page. The opiate takes effect. In spite of the night’s approach, I feel optimistic. Young. No, not young but comfortable within this carapace of old flesh as I prepare to make one last effort to place myself in such a manner that for me the setting of the sun will be the best time of my long day and Emma’s noon.

  3

  NOON, and I am exhausted.

  The opiate worked marvellously until four in the morning. Then I was wide-awake. Could not fall asleep.

  I dressed. Watched the dawn. Worked for a time on my Empress Eugénie; ordered tea; made sure that the waiter was very quiet, for Emma is a light sleeper and needs all the rest she can get. New York will be a siege for her. No, a triumphant progress.

  If Mr. John Day Apgar is able to support her in decent style, t
hen I shall be reasonably pleased to have him for a son-in-law. Of course, he is a year or two younger than Emma but that hardly matters, since her beauty should have a long life whilst he has no beauty at all.

  Emma is to spend the day with John’s sister, visiting the shops—or stores, as they call them here. Did they always? Or have I forgotten? It is plain that I am no longer a New Yorker. But then this New York is no longer the New York that was.

  Restless, the article finished and sealed in its envelope and addressed to Harper’s Monthly, I decided to take Bryant at his word and pay him a breakfast call. He lives now at 24 West Sixteenth Street.

  Without delight, I entrusted myself to the perpendicular railway. “Fine morning, sir. But near to freezing,” said the operator who looked to be, at the very least, a commodore in full uniform.

  The lobby was almost empty. I gave the envelope to a page who vowed he would deliver it to Harper’s; then made my way amongst green shrubbery and bronze spittoons to the front door, where I was respectfully offered, as it were, the square by the uniformed chasseur, who also warned me of the cold and of the fineness of the day.

  I had forgotten the brittle, dry exhilarating cold of the New York winter. The wet cold of Paris makes my ears ache. The clammy cold of London congests the lungs. But despite the fumes of anthracite, New York’s air has a polar freshness. And everything appears new, even the sun, which this morning looked like a fresh-minted double eagle as it began its climb over the island.

  Even at such an early hour the city is very much alive with horsecars rattling up and down Fifth Avenue whilst the pedestrians—mostly the poor on their way to work—walk swiftly with their heads down, exhaling clouds of steam. Many of the beggars are Civil War veterans, wearing the remains of old uniforms; armless, legless, eyeless, they sell pencils, shoelaces. “Lost my arm at Chickamauga, sir.” And the dented tin cup is thrust accusingly in one’s face. Italians play hurdy-gurdies; shivering monkeys dance in the terrible cold. Homeless ragged children huddle together in doorways.