1876

by Gore Vidal

  “I see.” Apparently New York gentlemen do not discuss politics at lunch. In fact, the true gentry, according to McAllister as we drove back down the avenue in near darkness, “never for one moment refer to politics or politicians.”

  “Yet they are all good Republicans, are they not?”

  “We never discuss how or even if we vote. It is simply not done, don’t you know?” It would appear that the gentry has removed itself from the politics of the country, but do they still retain the purse-strings? or have these been surrendered to those people in trade like the ancient Commodore Vanderbilt?—“whom no one ever goes to see, because, my dear Mr. Schermerhorn Schuyler, he is sauvage! He wears his hat indoors.”

  Emma and I duly recorded shock. Our captor was in a captivating mood. “You made a marvellous impression on Mrs. Mary Mason, she was so taken with you both.”

  “She makes rather a large impression herself.” Emma’s humour was again good. She had enjoyed the old woman’s easygoing flattery, not to mention the rather stiff approval of the others who, unlike the old woman and McAllister, are little impressed by foreigners. Only Americans who have travelled a good deal abroad are capable of responding to those rare names that symbolize great deeds, old history.

  Emma turned to me suddenly as we passed the Jewish synagogue (McAllister had mournfully raised his eyes when he identified it for us on the way to lunch). “Do you know why she built her house so far uptown?”

  “To be in the country?”

  “No,” said Emma. “So Mrs. Paran Stevens could never come to call.”

  McAllister laughed softly into the fur collar of his topcoat. “That’s just Mrs. Mary Mason’s way of talking. Actually, Mrs. Paran Stevens would walk barefoot in the snow all the way up from the Battery if she thought she’d be let in, but that will never ever happen. I hope”—suddenly the small eyes looked round with fear—“that you will not attend any of her so-called Sunday evenings.”

  I spoke before Emma could say that we were, that very night, about to hear the tenor Mario sing at the Stevenses’ house. “Why? Is she so disreputable?”

  “Yes! Because she pushes herself onto people. And she is nobody, don’t you know? Just the wife of a hotel manager and the daughter of a grocer from Lowell, Massachusetts, of all places.” McAllister’s voice dropped a register. “You know that before they came here they lived at Washington City!”

  “Oh, dear,” was the best I could do. “Is that so very bad?”

  “Of course there are nice people at the Capital, but the general “tong”…! Well, I give away no secret when I say that no one goes to Washington City if he can help it.”

  What a lot there is to learn about these curious folk. No wonder the country is in the hands of criminals if the gentry are so fastidious—and so fatuous. I have not heard one intelligent thing said all day, neither at the Palais Jones nor the Château Stevens, where of course Emma and I went for the music, the company, the supper.

  Mrs. Paran Stevens is a somewhat coarse-looking woman with a bright manner and that anxious desire to be thought amusing, which in itself never fails to amuse—me.

  “We saw your picture in the window at Ritzman’s!” Thus Mrs. Stevens greeted Emma, whose response was cool, for neither of us is entirely sure just what the customs of the country are. Should a lady be photographed and displayed as if she were Jenny Lind or not? I suspect not.

  Nevertheless the effect of Emma’s entrance into the Stevenses’ drawing room was most imperial. At times Emma looks not unlike our Empress in her youth, the same dark Spanish look to the eyes, though the hair is lighter and done in the current classic style with the parting at the center. Like the Empress, Emma can appear to float—and float she did through that large gathering, through rooms not quite distinguished but complacently rich with too many of the wrong objets, not to mention sujets. Obviously the Ward McAllister manner has taken me over as I write up these notes.

  It is after midnight. I sit beside the fireplace in our parlour. I can hear Emma’s regular breathing from her bedroom, smell the scent that she wore, see the rose-pink camellias she thrust a moment ago into a water jug. Who sent them? I did not ask. She is like some diva in New York and I am relegated to the background, the entrepreneur who makes her bookings, manipulates the press, discourages the over-eager gentlemen, finds her a husband.

  The husband that we may have found (or at least the one that we have acquired on approval) was waiting for us at Mrs. Stevens’s standing beneath a portrait of our hostess disguised as the character she thinks of herself as—Madame Sans-Gêne.

  Emma gave John Day Apgar a tap on the arm and a smile; then she allowed Mrs. Stevens to take her on the full circuit of the room, where nearly a hundred of New York’s most elegant beaux eagerly waited to be presented. There were fewer women than men, I noted; and those women who were on hand had a somewhat too bright look to them, as if they were not really wives or at least not wives to the men they were inclined most to talk to.

  “She does look splendid!” John could not take his eyes off Emma’s back.

  “Yes. But she feared that the effect might be less than splendid, since she is wearing the same dress that she wore in the photograph at Ritzman’s.”

  “All New York is talking about her.” I could not tell if John regards this as a good or bad thing. He speaks without much inflection. “You know how much my family likes her. Particularly Father. And my sister Faith.”

  The thought of Father Apgar and Sister Faith made me ever so slightly depressed. I seized a silver goblet of champagne from a passing waiter. Two long swallows and I was able to exorcize the vision of our last dinner at the Apgars, of John’s grave full-fleshed parents, proud in their dullness; of Sister Faith, a horselike bride of Christ if ever I saw one though Protestant—yet not protesting her terrible fate. Whenever Sister Faith asked about Paris, Father Apgar coughed and Mother A. changed the subject. Paris is not a subject for nice people to talk about, particularly in front of plain girls like Faith. Proper subjects in that household are the demerits of most servants, summer residences (when to open, shut), food (its cost, not its preparation), and an occasional reference to the low sort of people who are trying to take over New York society because They Have Money, like the Paran Stevenses for one, or the vulgar Commodore Vanderbilt for another, or the Astors.

  At this point, I had interrupted our hostess; told her that in my youth before she was born (I think she liked that, presuming she is capable of liking anything other than Apgar-ishness, my new synonym for social worthiness), the original Astor in his old age was much sought after by Livingstons and Stuyvesants. Actually, I don’t think that this is exactly true (the original Astor was a reclusive Medicean figure). But it does strike me as strange that after two or three generations of lawyerhood such markedly middle-class people as the Apgars should have convinced themselves that somehow they are more special, more distinguished, more truly nice than the great nobles, which, like it or not (and I like it not), is what the Astors are; the third generation of that family now dominates the city in what, I suspect, is perfect ignorance of the disapproval of the nine Apgar brothers, whose sole distinction is their innumerable links with a hundred and one similar lawyer-sailor-merchant-thief families.

  But this is not the place for my eventual essay on Apgar-ishness. That must wait until I am safely home again. I will record only Apgar Senior’s view of Governor Tilden. “The man is so often drunk that he cannot get up in the morning.” This was announced over cigars after the ladies had gone up to the dark cold parlour.

  “But I understand General Grant is also a heavy drinker.” I tried to even the score.

  “I have never heard that,” said Apgar Senior.

  Meanwhile there are pleasures here, of a sort, and Mrs. Stevens’s musical Sunday evenings must count amongst them.

  We sat on gold chairs and listened to a powerful Italian tenor from
the opera house. There were tears in the eyes of many of the ladies when he ended his recital with the very loud, sobbing solo from Martha. My own eyes were dry, but there was a definite persistent ringing in my ears. This often happens when my blood is overheated by champagne and music and the presence of, I confess, an uncommonly handsome group of women.

  Music done with, we went in to supper. Mountain ranges of a rather inferior chicken salad were the dominant note. We were seated at numerous small tables. I found myself between a good-looking little woman of Emma’s age and a fair little fellow in his early forties.

  I addressed myself to the lady. We introduced ourselves but neither, at first, heard the other’s name. She pointed an importantly jewelled finger at Emma across the room, and said, “Have you got to meet the Princess yet?”

  “Better than that. I be got her.”

  I was rewarded with a straightforward laugh; not at all Apgar-ish, I was happy to note. This charming creature is called Mrs. William Sanford. She pointed out her husband, who was seated at Emma’s right.

  “I must say she is even more beautiful than her photograph. And the way she moves!”

  I accepted any number of compliments from Mrs. Sanford, learning in the process that she and her husband are building a house in Fifth Avenue, that they have a cottage at Newport, Rhode Island (plainly the most fashionable of the summer places, since the Apgars pointedly prefer Maine), and that Mr. Sanford enjoys yachting, owns race horses, and does—as they say here—nothing, as far as I could tell from her conversation.

  All subjects were touched on. Oh, yes, she knew Mrs. Mary Mason Jones! Such a character! And dear old silly Ward McAllister!—with his “don’t you knows.” We got on famously, passing various names back and forth to establish one another’s place in the scheme of things. I found her delightful; but still had no clue to the source of the Sanford fortune—was it his or hers?

  After several mediocre courses, including fried oysters, which will one day be my happy death, I turned to my neighbour, who introduced himself (as if he needed an introduction to a fellow author). Although the celebrated Edmund C. Stedman is a Wall Street broker by profession, his passion, more or less requited, is for literature and for the making of taste, a sort of rustic Sainte-Beuve (whose name he did not appear to recognize—more of this cultural difference later). Last year Stedman published two volumes on (of?) Victorian poets as well as a volume of his own poetical works which I—yes, all dark things are to be confessed here—told him that I had read and admired. Actually, I did hold the book in my hand at Brentano’s, and listened to the clerk’s description of the author, who regularly visits the shop, presumably to encourage the clerks to sell his works.

  I was rewarded for my mendacity with yet another invitation to address the Lotos Club, as well as with the assurance that I alone of all living historians of the present (sic?) have been able to make clear for Americans the internecine struggles of immoral old Europe. I confess that this encomium made me seem to myself like one of those seedy pitchmen at a side show, showing off for a penny the swallower of swords, the eaters of glass and of fire.

  Since Stedman knows Bigelow, I tried to get the subject onto politics and the day’s scandal, but once again I found myself confronted by this strange New York wall of—indifference? No, I cannot believe that they are indifferent to the ubiquitous corruption.

  I can understand the gentry preferring not to acknowledge the hell that their puritan society has become even as the devils piously continue to mouth puritan nostrums. But for a man like Stedman to shy away from any discussion of the Grant Administration is very odd indeed. After all, Stedman was a celebrated supporter of Lincoln. Provisionally, I take this reluctance to be a form of embarrassment at what they—I can no longer write we—have become. More to the point, the noble new party that freed the slaves and preserved the Union is the very same party that is now in cahoots with the crooked railroad tycoons and with the Wall Street cornerers of this-and-that, thus making it hard for a noble creature like Bigelow—like Stedman?—to confess to the bankruptcy of what only ten years ago was the last or latest, best or better, hope or dream of an honourable system of government.

  “I much admire Bigelow’s pieces from Germany. Not on a par with yours, of course…”

  I was modest. Pressed on. “Now Bigelow goes to Albany. Is this wise?”

  Like a diviner, Stedman tentatively touched a complex aspic with his fork. “It is odd, certainly. After all, we are Republicans. But then Governor Tilden is certainly—respectable. Not long ago I had the most interesting conversation with him about airships.”

  It took me some moments to make sense of this last phrase. When finally I did, I realized that I was in the presence of a most amiable monomaniac. “Man must fly through the air, just as he now travels across the earth at thirty or forty miles an hour and almost as swiftly over the seas. There are a number of practical methods…”

  “Balloons…?” That was my sole contribution, for Stedman did not stop in his discussion of air travel until those about us started to rise. He hoped that I would soon join him for lunch or supper at any one of those clubs that encourage Bohemian membership.

  “Literary New York is eager to meet you.”

  “Surely they hardly know that Rip Van…” But I stopped myself as that dread name once again climbed out onto the end of my tongue. Fortunately Stedman was not listening.

  “You will like Bayard Taylor, I’m sure. He’s teaching German literature up at Cornell. But now he’s in the city. Or have you already met each other in Europe?”

  “No, I think not.” I have been very much aware over the years of those of my literary countrymen who keep coming in what seem hordes to old Europe, where they usually stay longer than planned. Yet I have, as much as possible, avoided them. Somehow they never seem to fit our way of life at Paris: this includes Bryant, though he and I have met in Europe off and on over the years, usually in Italy. I once debated (and the negative won) taking him to Princess Mathilde’s, where he might meet her circle, particularly my especial friend Taine, as well as such amusing novelists as Gautier, the Goncourt brothers and the Russian Turgenev. But somehow I could not imagine William Cullen Bryant in that circle (where even I, after forty years, am still known as the “blond wild Indian”). I fear that that brilliant circle would sooner roast a waterfowl than apostrophize it.

  Lately the young journalist-writers have been descending on Europe like termites on an ancient frame house, and London has taken them very much to heart. The English can never get enough of the grotesque; they particularly delight in those Americans who seem to them truly American, preferably the ones with long hair and Western twangs, who chew tobacco and tell tall tales—ah, those tall tales of wild Indians and of drunken bears and of jumping frogs. N.P. Willis, Joaquin Miller, Mark Twain and, most interesting of all, I am told, a Californian called (I think) Pierce whose work I have not read, but whose brilliant mordant conversation has been reported to me by the Princess Mathilde who hears of him from the Empress at Chislehurst. Our Empress may be bored by literary men and explorers, but apparently a son of the American West has discovered how to make her exile amusing. Needless to say, nothing west of Seine-et-Oise interests Paris, including, alas, their former Empress.

  Stedman mentioned any number of literary men I must meet and I pretended interest, although I have never found congenial the company of professional writers. Also, I do not read novels any more whilst today’s poetry makes me quite angry, since, at best, it is no more than carefully ruined prose.

  History and politics are my field, and New York seems not to be rich in either historians or true political writers despite the often interesting efforts of the Adams descendant who edits Boston’s North American Review. But I am unfair to my countrymen. I have been here too short a time to judge. Also, I tend to compare the home product with Paris at a time when I think that city is, for once, what in it
s eternal arrogance Paris thinks itself always to be, a city of true light with Taine and Renan ablaze, and a thousand ideas stirring.

  I found it amusing (the ironist’s word for “discouraging”) that when I spoke to Stedman of French writers, he seemed not even to know their names. He has heard of Flaubert of course; knows that Madame Bovary was an immoral novel that even the French tried to ban; insists that better than “all that lot, and far more daring” is an American poet much disliked by the prudish American reviewers. I promise to read this poet, who is called Whitman and lives at Camden in New Jersey; apparently, he enjoys good sales in America and good notices in England. Lucky man! The other way round would be unbearable.

  Stedman moved on. I asked Mrs. Sanford if she would like to meet Emma.

  “With joy! I’m French too, you know. I was born in New Orleans. My father was General Delacroix, and we’re Creoles, which does not mean Negro, as they think up here.” She laughed as we made our way across the room. “Not that I would mind one bit. But it would surely annoy my husband.”

  William Sanford is a tall, slender (by New York standards) man, not yet forty, with a head too small for his body, a fine aquiline nose, a glossy beard at whose center is a surprisingly small mouth, rosy-lipped as a girl’s. I describe him in some detail, for he is my first important millionaire. He wore not only a diamond stickpin but a ring with a starred ruby in a heavy gold setting; in the light of the chandelier his dark evening clothes gleamed as if they, too, were made of some rich material like onyx or ebony.

  I presented Mrs. Sanford to Emma. “I’ve enjoyed staring at you all evening,” said Mrs. Sanford in a most direct way.

  Emma was equal to the flattery. “And I’ve enjoyed staring at you, as well as listening to Mr. Sanford.”

  The millionaire took my hand in a firm grip, looked down into my face, as if searching in my eyes for a reflection of his own pale grey eyes. He looked to be so much at home in this particular New York world that I assumed that he, too, was old money like his wife, even Apgar-ish. But he proved to be his wife’s opposite; for one thing, he speaks with a harsh New England country-folk accent in which the final “g” of any word is fiercely decapitated.