by Gore Vidal
“You are all that I have,” Emma said suddenly yesterday. When I mentioned that she is also the mother of two sons, she was brisk, “They will be men soon. And they’ll make their way at Paris. You are what matters to me now.”
I was deeply moved; must not disappoint her. I must find her a splendid husband here. Failing that, I must at the least get us the American legation at Paris.
Today—Sunday—we have had a most extraordinary visitation. Emma still does not know what to make of our caller.
It began yesterday with a dozen Jacquesminot roses; and a note from a Mr. Ward McAllister, asking if he might have the pleasure of our company—should the weather be good—for a tour in his carriage of the Central Park, after church.
“Whatever time is that?” asked Emma, as pleased with the roses as she was mystified, no, taken aback, no, contemptuous of a stranger putting himself forward so boldly. “Not to mention who is this McAllister?”
John Day Apgar’s arrival for tea in our suite answered both questions. The services at Grace Church (where everyone goes) would end at eleven-thirty, if the Reverend Dr. Potter did not go on too long. “Should you like to go to church? We have a pew?” John put the question to me but meant it for Emma.
Emma shook her head most demurely. “Remember. I am Roman Catholic.”
“Oh, yes. But you, Mr. Schuyler?”
“I converted to Rome when I married Emma’s mother. The conversion was more practical than serious, since I thought my wife well worth a mass!”
The reference passed the young man by. But Emma soothed him; remarked that she herself was not rigid in these matters—was indeed like so many of her class at Paris a Roman Catholic pro forma. In other words, if one of the marrying Apgars was to affix himself like ivy to our noble (on Emma’s side) tree with its roots deep in the soil of Unterwalden, then religion need be no bar and she would marry him in the Episcopal Church without a qualm. Actually, my wife’s losing battle with the Jesuits over the deed to a certain property at Feldkirch in the Vorarlberg caused her to turn violently against the Church, and as she turned, Emma was pulled part way round with her. I myself am a deist like Thomas Jefferson—that is, atheist.
“Now that we know what time Mr. McAllister will come to fetch us, who is Mr. McAllister?” Emma touched one of the silvery pink roses. They are beautiful, particularly on a cold day in winter when the New York sky is like so many tiered layers of lead.
“Oh, he is famous!” John’s emphasis of the adjective sounded ironic but was not. The Apgar style is entirely literal (in the course of one week we have met eleven Apgars and twice as many of their connections). “I’m surprised you never met him in Europe. He used to spend a lot of time in Paris. In Florence—”
“We cannot know everyone, dear John.” When I am paternal with John, I remind myself of someone that I used to know years ago and despise myself as I hear the false unction positively bubbling in my throat.
“Ward McAllister rules our society.” John’s eyes were wide; so the original Prince d’Agrigente used to look when he spoke of the Emperor Napoleon the First.
“But then,” I said, “we must have met him at your family’s house.” A dash of vinegar added to my oil of unction.
“Oh, we don’t know him. I mean we do but we move in different circles. Of course he sees Cousin Alice and Uncle Reginald…” Names of the grandest of the Apgar connections were then invoked; nevertheless, it became clear that the Apgar gens proper do not move in the McAllister high circles, for “he is the closest friend of Mrs. William Astor. And she is everything in New York, or thinks she is.” A rebellious note; quickly modified with “Of course, Cousin Alice Chanler thinks her nice.”
“But what does the best friend of this marvellous Mrs. Astor do?” Emma was teasing. She still cannot take seriously any New York society.
“Oh, he’s rich. From the South, I think. Then he went West when he was very young and made a fortune during the Gold Rush. After that, he lived in Europe. When he came back, he decided to give us an aristocracy or an Astorocracy, as Father says. This was kind of him, since the McAllisters themselves are no one and related to no one except old Sam Ward.” The Apgar concern with family connections asserts itself even negatively.
“Anyway, Mrs. Astor ‘adores’ him, as they say in those circles, and he helps her with her receptions, dinners, balls. The season—their season—begins the third Monday of every January with a ball at Mrs. Astor’s. The guests are chosen by Mr. McAllister. Three years ago he also started something called the Patriarchs. Every Monday, during the season, twenty-five families and their guests give a dance and a supper at Delmonico’s, usually after the opera.”
“Do you go?” Emma’s look was again teasing, but I saw something else in those dark eyes: so the eyes of justice herself must look behind their blindfold.
“Once or twice, when asked. Usually by Cousin Alice. My mother thinks the whole thing a joke in bad taste. After all, those Patriarchs aren’t really the nicest people. They’re simply the richest, the most ostentatious…” How well I know the puritan diatribe. Those whose lives are given up entirely to the making of money are the first to cast in public a stone at the Golden Calf of their not-so-secret worship.
We were joined by John’s sister—a sallow maiden of thirty, appropriately named Faith, who brought with her a large box from Lord & Taylor, containing an expensive shawl for Emma, a gift from Faith herself (not from John, as that would be bad form). After many demurs, the shawl was accepted and Emma embraced Faith in the French manner, and Faith sighed with bliss.
True to his word, and not having been instructed to the contrary, Mr. Ward McAllister presented himself to us in one of the hotel’s smaller reception rooms, a stuffy room off the lobby known somewhat mysteriously as the Amen Corner. I immediately recognized him as the man who had spoken to us in the lobby on the day that we arrived—a plump, corseted, lavishly turned-out dandy of fifty or so, with a bad French accent and, alas, a good deal of French to go with it.
“Enchanté, Madame la Princesse!” Emma’s hand was kissed, and mine was weakly clasped. McAllister called me “Mr. Schermerhorn Schuyler,” as though mine was a hyphenated name. More of that later.
“You are kind to let me show you the Sunday sights of our city which is so crue and yet so gaining each day in ton.” Ton was pronounced like “tong,” and is now a favourite word with Emma and me.
McAllister’s barouche was discreetly handsome. Driver and footman wore full livery. The morning was grey but not cold; even so, a great fuss was made over us as the fur blanket was carefully tucked in place.
During the first half-hour McAllister did not once stop talking to us; he also did not once look at us, for his eyes were focussed on the occupants of all the other carriages engaged in the Sunday passeggiata of grand New York. Certainly there were hundreds of smart equipages; and innumerable fine horses, snorting steam like so many railway engines: in this modern industrial age the writer must use only mechanical references to define old-fashioned fleshly things.
Just above our hotel on Madison Square is the Hoffman House; across from it is the Brunswick Hotel, a favourite of our cicerone. “Personally, I think that Madame la Princesse might find the ambiance there more agréable than the somewhat too large hotel where you are now staying. I mean most of the people we know from Europe stay at the Brunswick.”
The “we” was thrown over one shoulder as he raised his hat to a passing carriage filled with ladies. “Rutherfurds,” he said, as a quality poulterer might say “quail.” “And old Mrs. Tracy.” A pheasant?
Upper Fifth Avenue is indeed an improvement on the lower part. Although brownstone is still king, there are occasional, encouraging variations. At Thirty-third Street we were reverently shown the twin Astor houses: two tall thin slices of chocolate cake connected by a low wall. In one dwells the Mrs. Astor, as McAllister refers to his heroine (also kno
wn to her intimates as the Mystic Rose). In the other house lives the true head of the family, John Jacob Astor III; his wife is charming, everyone says, and interested in all the arts, not least in that of conversation, whilst her junior the Mrs. Astor has no interest in any of the arts save that of Italian opera, which she attends each Monday and Friday evening during the season. Since she invariably leaves during the second interval, it is said that she has not a clue how any of the stories turn out. I must say I know a lot about the Mystic Rose after this morning’s ride.
But McAllister was not allowed the uninterrupted flow of gossip he is plainly used to. Suddenly Emma stopped him in mid-discourse. “What is that?” A huge white marble palace at Thirty-fourth Street made the neighbouring Astor twin houses look altogether the quintessence of New York dowdy.
McAllister’s small eyes looked if not steely at least penny-ish. “A Mr. Stewart, a merchant, resides there…”
“Not the Mr. Stewart of the department store?” Emma’s mockery was exquisite as she invested the article before Stewart’s name with the very same awe that McAllister reserves for his Mrs. Astor’s unique “the.”
McAllister is immune to irony, like most of those who tend to—metal again!—the brassy. “The same. But of course no one knows him. No one goes to his house.”
“But I know him! Or I think I met him at his marvellous department store.” Emma explained to me the other day that a department store—new phrase to me—is exactly that: a huge emporium in which many different kinds of things are sold, with each kind relegated to its own section or department, an innovation apparently of Mr. Stewart.
I grow disturbed—in parenthesis—by the ease with which Emma allows the family Apgar’s female members to give her presents. For one thing, it is not done before an official engagement. For another, I do not want them to suspect that she needs such things and that we cannot pay for them.
McAllister told us the Stewart saga as we drove through the grey slow-chilling air. It is not, alas, an interesting story. Rather it is the American story. Poor boy comes from Scotland. Opens shop. Prospers. Becomes the richest or the second or the third richest man in the city. Builds a palace but no one will visit him, for he is in trade! As if all New York is not or was not within living memory in trade, or worse—the latter category to which I consign slum landlords like Mr. Astor, railroad manipulators like the Vanderbilts, not to mention anyone (including Apgars) who has chosen for a career that truly base profession the law. I know. I was nearly a lawyer.
“They say his collection of paintings is not as vulgar as the rest of the house’s furnishings, but who’ll ever know, now I ask you, Princess?”
“Obviously those who do visit him.”
McAllister pursed his lips; hid the small grey troubling (to my eye) teeth. “A few gentlemen do dine with him. But without their ladies, don’t you know?”
We were now at Forty-second Street and duly admired the huge wall of the reservoir that runs for an entire block down the west side of Fifth Avenue. It is truly a remarkable sight—something like one of those huge sloping temple walls up the Nile at Luxor. Atop the wall is a sort of rampart where sightseers get a remarkable view of the city.
As we continued uptown the carriages, like the houses, became scarce. But there are occasional architectural surprises, including an enormous unfinished church just beyond the reservoir, on the opposite side of Fifth Avenue. McAllister looked unhappy as he pointed out what proved to be a fair copy of Strasbourg Cathedral (though—for once—not nearly so brown!).
“We have a good many new Catholic immigrants,” he said; then stopped himself, suspecting Emma’s religion. “The spires are yet to be added. You know that my own family, on the maternal side, were French.” He was confiding. “In fact, my mother is a direct descendant of the Charlotte Corday who killed that dreadful revolutionary Marat.”
“But surely Mademoiselle Corday had no children? And wasn’t she executed…”
Emma could not stem the flow. “I feel French deep inside. I said to myself when I came to Paris in the late fifties, Ward, vous êtes chez vous enfin! I stayed at the Hotel Meurice, and met everyone. Not the least of tout Paris, you, Princess, at the christening of the prince impérial. Remember? And of course I used to see you from time to time at the Tuileries, when you were lady-in-waiting to the Impératrice.”
“But…” My hand under the fur robe nudged Emma’s knee. Emma was not a lady-in-waiting until ’68, by which time our devoted guide to this paradiso that is New York was living (he had told us earlier) elsewhere.
Nevertheless, if McAllister wants the world to believe—as obviously he does—that we were once intimate friends, then I shall be happy to oblige him. I don’t care how absurd the Astors themselves are. What matters to me is the one thing that can never be absurd, their money. I am, frankly, desperate, and would sell Emma to the highest bidder. No! That is hyperbole, brought on by too much champagne this evening, and far too many new faces and old dull talk.
“There is the Central Park.” McAllister pointed to a wooded area only slightly more pleasing to the eye than what surrounds it: squatters’ huts, small farms, empty raw fields, and the palace of Mrs. Mary Mason Jones at Fifty-seventh Street.
“How extraordinary!” Emma was transfixed. So was I. Mrs. Jones has built herself a proper cream-coloured Paris mansion in the midst of nowhere.
McAllister smiled with sudden sweetness; and I realized that this seemingly repellent climber of the social alps is simply a small boy who has unexpectedly developed the sort of passion vis-à-vis aristocracy that proper small boys feel for games. “I’ve tricked you! Mrs. Jones wants you for lunch. But she never stirs out of the house and so she couldn’t or wouldn’t write you, so I was told to kidnap you both and bring you here.”
“But we are to lunch at the hotel.” Emma was furious enough to lie, or rather to tell the truth. We usually take lunch in the parlour of our suite, since that meal is paid for as a part of the hotel’s American plan.
McAllister looked stricken—small boy again: ball lost in the bushes. “Oh, I say, Princess, I am sorry but I had thought…”
I made amends. Our lunch at the hotel was a casual matter, with relatives who might or might not join us. Emma’s colour was high with anger, but McAllister was again happy, easily pleased. So we lunched with Mrs. Mary Mason Jones.
The house is like a Paris hôtel particulier, only just a bit wrong. There is an air of travesty to the painted ceilings with their nymphs, clouds, satyrs; to the gold leaf that encrusts everything save our enormously fat and very jolly hostess.
“So glad you could come.” La Jones waddled forward to meet us, a necklace of huge pink pearls tried with almost no success to make itself visible through two of the pink rolls of fat that make up her neck.
There were a dozen other people for lunch. I did not learn their names (admirals, generals, of course) but I think they were all related to our hostess. We were to be included at table en famille and Emma was beside herself with rage. I suppose such a casual entrapment is an insult to an empress’s lady-in-waiting, not to mention a princess who is in her own right a Most Eminent Highness, or so the D’Agrigentes always insisted (due to some connection with the Knights of St. John). Certainly it is true that the old man for a season or two actually reigned over his Sicilian principality, a remote place noted for bandits and Greek temples. But all this was lost to him when the first Napoleon fell.
Lately, I have begun to realize just how very foreign my daughter is even to me. For one thing, I am still afflicted with the American casualness of my generation—now apparently superseded by a new solemnity and pomp that would be vastly amusing if the puppets involved were not so very rich and I so very poor.
I have spent the day trying to make up to Emma and she is now in good spirits and realizes the usefulness of our having been acquired by the puppet master of grand New York, whose own strings
, I suspect, we shall soon be pulling.
“I saw you both any number of times when I was staying in Paris, but no one would ever introduce me to you because you were much too grand for the likes of me!” Thus Mrs. Mary Mason Jones in her cheery way made us at home and made our fortune, as it were, in the eyes of that small company, certainly in those bright pennies of McAllister. He looked like a cat who had managed to bring into the house and to deposit upon the best sofa the very largest rat.
The lunch was as ample as our hostess; and we did it justice, I must say. One grows tired of hotel food, and when we do dine out it is usually to one or another of the Apgar houses where the meals stick, as they say in these parts, to the ribs but no more.
The lady on my left at lunch felt obliged to tell me that I was one of her favourite authors, and that of my works The Bedouin Song was the one she most often returned to for solace, playing it on her own piano. I thanked her politely; politely did not tell her that I am not Bayard Taylor. With age one does grow, if not wise, forgiving; also, forgetting—also, forgotten.
On my other side sat a very solid sort of gentleman, cousin to our hostess. I asked him what he thought of the current scandal at Washington City. Incidentally, Jamie was right. Shortly after our meeting in the bar of the Astor House, President Grant’s private secretary, General Orville E. Babcock, was indicted by a grand jury at St. Louis for his alleged part in a whisky—yes—ring. The jury proceedings promise to be most lurid, for Babcock is thought to have collected illegal monies from the whisky distillers not only for himself but for the President.
“I know nothing of these matters.” At first I wondered if perhaps my companion might be in some way involved with the Administration and that I had been tactless. But, no, he really did know nothing of such matters. “Because, Mr. Schermerhorn Schuyler”—thanks to McAllister’s pretensions, I am now, in these high circles, hopelessly hyphenated—“one does not choose to know about such squalid matters.”