1876

by Gore Vidal

  “I’ve decided, Mr. Schuyler, that your daughter is the best-lookin’ lady in this room.” The head inclined toward me; he is taller than I by rather more than that small head.

  “It was my impression that Mrs. Sanford held that distinction.” I was ceremonious.

  Mrs. Sanford laughed without self-consciousness. “My husband is the most terrible flirt. I know. I married him. But he’s right about your daughter.”

  I demurred. More compliments were bestowed. Then Sanford put his arm around my shoulder (something I detest) and led me to a sofa for two and sat me down. He produced superb cigars. “Rolled for me by my own firm in Cuba.”

  My cigar was set afire by a friction match after the ritual circumcision with a bejewelled cutter. “Now then, you want to know all about Orville, don’t you? Well, I’m the fellow who can tell you.”

  Not until Sanford had talked at some length and the blue smoke between us had begun to have an almost narcotic effect did I realize that Emma had told him I was to write about the Grant Administration, and the difficulties that I had encountered in getting anyone outside the political world to so much as respond to a name as grandly notorious as General Orville E. Babcock.

  Babcock and Sanford are friends. They were once associated in a railroad speculation.

  I fear that I have drunk too much champagne this evening, smoked too many fine cigars, and so gorged myself on fried oysters that I cannot recall many of the details Sanford so willingly supplied, but I do recall his offer to give me an introduction to Babcock—to Grant, for that matter. “A good sort of man, you know. Fact, I served on his staff.” My heart sank—Major, Colonel, General Sanford? But whatever his title, he does not use it and whatever it was he did or did not do in the war, he tactfully refrained from mentioning.

  “You see, the thing to be remembered is this, Mr. Schuyler. This country isn’t like anything that ever happened before. Oh, maybe your first Romans were like us, but I doubt it. No, sir. We are sui generis—of our own kind.” He translated nicely for me. I kept on nodding, eyes full of tears from the fine blue smoke between us; his face seemed magnified, if that is possible, while the grey eyes glared at me through the smoke. “The Millionaire in Hell” occurred to me as a title.

  “What I’m trying to tell you is, yes, we cut a few corners when we set out to build our railroads like I did or like my father did when he made jeans for the Westerners and those encaustic tiles for the Easterners, regular old villain he was!” I expected a cheerful? apologetic? mitigating? laugh. But none came. Sanford saw nothing wrong in villainy if more miles of track were laid, jeans stitched, tiles encausticized.

  “Of course old Orville’s in up to the handle. No doubt of it. I’ve warned him, ‘You’re too close to the wind,’ I told him, oh, maybe a year ago. Not that I know a thing about this whisky ring in St. Louis. Chicken feed, I’d guess, but Orville’s greedy, and if you want a real fortune you’re never greedy.”

  “Are you greedy, sir? Or fortunate?” My own voice seemed disembodied to my own ears.

  “Well, sir, let’s say I’ve always known when to push myself away from the table. That’s what my father used to say. From Lowell, Mass., we were. Same as Mrs. Stevens, though I don’t think she admits to it now. We had the big house and her family was nearer the river, which is where our factory was. Darwin is right, you know.”

  The unexpected reference is, I gather, very much the Sanford style. I was not surprised to learn that he attended—but did not graduate from—Yale. His conversational style is an amazing mixture of elegance and tough low-down Yankee. I would suspect that a certain amount of art has gone into the figure he so decisively presents to the world.

  “Anyhow, that’s why we’re the first country in the world. Fact is, we’re so far ahead of the next set of monkeys on the ladder they’ll never catch up. And we got the way we are because we let nothing stop us from getting what we want.”

  “Even that second helping of dessert?” I teased him; and the small rather pretty mouth gave me a smile.

  “No, sir. You push yourself away from the table so that you can come back another day, for a whole new dinner.”

  I was aware that people were leaving. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Emma vanish into the room where the ladies’ cloaks were kept. I got Sanford away from homilies—useful as they are to contemplate, since they appear to comprise the national philosophy—and onto the more specific, onto Governor Tilden.

  “I like nothing about that sanctimonious old weasel. He did make his fortune, I’ll say that for him. He’s the richest lawyer in the whole country, and you don’t get to be that without trailing some of your pretty dress in the mud. Anyways, if he runs for president, some of us’ll have a lot to tell the world about a few of the railroad deals be was involved in. Oh, we’ll have him forty miles down the Delaware, don’t you worry.”

  I tried not to look worried. “Mr. Sanford, do you think that the sort of corruption we are living through now is good?”

  “I do.” The answer was brisk. “Who gives a goddamn if a bunch of congressmen take money for services rendered? That’s the way you get things done down there. Why, I reckon we’ve paid off the whole pack of them one time or another.”

  “Including the President?”

  But Sanford’s brutal candour has its limits. “It’s the Tildens I can’t abide, and the Bigelows and the Bryants and the whole moaning tribe of old women who think we would have had all this wealth, these railroads and manufactories, just by going to church! Well, damn it to hell, we got these things by cuttin’ each other’s throats and stealin’ whatever wasn’t nailed down. Mr. Schuyler, the strong devour the weak every time, and that’s the way of the world, and the law is just something you buy if you can, for it sure don’t apply to any man with the dollars to buy himself a smart lawyer like Tilden—and the judge, too, if he knows how.”

  “You paint a dark picture, Mr. Sanford.”

  “It seems full of light to me, Mr. Schuyler.”

  Unsteadily I stood up. Emma was in the middle distance, cloaked for departure. In an instant Sanford was on his feet; he moves as gracefully as the predator he pictures himself to be. “Let us take you home.”

  “Mr. Apgar has us in charge.”

  “Ah.” The single note betrayed not so much contempt as the indifference a well-feasted panther might experience at the sight of a scrawny rabbit.

  Farewells were made in the marble vestibule. The Sanfords offered us the city, whatever we wanted—a box at the Academy of Music, anything. While Mrs. Stevens condemned Emma to a round of gaiety.

  Mrs. Sanford took my hand in both of hers. “I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed myself so, talking to you.” She is obviously as perceptive as she is charming to look at. “And I can’t tell you how…” She looked about to make sure that no one would hear her. We were to one side of the open door, and the freezing night. Opposite us Mr. Sanford was talking down into Emma’s face while John Day Apgar attempted to draw her to the door. A footman had already announced the arrival of the Apgar carriage. Mrs. Sanford had time to impart her secret. “How very dull New York parties are. No one talks about anything of the slightest interest while half the gentlemen are already in their cups before they come to the dinner party.”

  I pulled myself erect; did my best to disguise my own champagne-induced drunkenness. “I thought tonight was unusually scintillating.”

  “Oh, that was just me!” She laughed. “Sanford,” she called to her husband. “Let the Princess go. Their carriage is waiting and that’s keeping everyone else waiting, too!” She had missed nothing apparently. We vowed to see one another every day of our lives, for they are living just across the square from us at the Brunswick Hotel until their house is ready.

  Snow was falling as we crossed the sidewalk to John’s carriage at the head of a line of other rather grander equipages. Suddenly I found in my path the ine
vitable Civil War veteran; with his one arm, he held forth a tray of shoelaces. I put a coin into the tray, looked for one guilty moment into the man’s face and saw almost the same face as Sanford’s looking back at me—the same cold grey adamantine eyes. The veteran looked straight through me; face blue in the calcium light from Mrs. Stevens’s house.

  I hurried into the carriage, frozen to the bone and entirely sobered.

  On the way to the hotel John told us something of the Sanfords. “She’s from an old New Orleans family. She was born Denise Delacroix and she’s also well-connected here. I think it was her grandmother who was a Livingston. Everyone likes her, and she’s been to the house.” John always speaks of those who come to his father’s house in rather the same way Saint-Simon refers to the peers of France.

  “He seems rather—rough.” To my surprise, Emma was intrigued: after all, she has spent most of her adult life in Paris successfully avoiding this type of American.

  “It’s all a performance.” John did not pretend to disguise his dislike—jealousy? “Sanford’s father was a real Yankee barbarian who made money and moved down to New York, where no one ever spoke to him.”

  “Poor man! What punishment!” Emma, I knew, was smiling in the darkness.

  “I suppose it was hard on him.” John is a kindly boy. “But then his son married Denise Delacroix and that made the family in New York. She gave him position…”

  “And he gave her money?” I asked.

  “Oh, no. It’s her money mostly.”

  This was a surprise. “Then he’s not a self-made hard-drinking manipulator of railroads and briber of congressmen?”

  John laughed. “Certainly not. That’s why it’s so funny. The way he carries on. Even Mother finds him amusing.” The ultimate recognition in Apgar-land.

  “He is most convincing, this actor.” Emma was as surprised as I.

  “Oh, he’s done well himself.” John made a concession. “He did make a killing on one of the Western railroads with his wife’s or perhaps his father’s money. But everyone says it was an accident.”

  “How wrong one can be about people,” was my wise summing up.

  I grow sleepy. I have rapidly gone through the ill-effects of overdrinking, headache and all, and have now come out the other side and note that it is only one in the morning.

  Emma enjoyed herself; and I was pleased at the way she is taking hold here. If we had money…

  But I refuse to worry. For one thing, the problem can be solved tomorrow if I want it summarily solved.

  Just now, in the hotel bar where John and I went for a “night cap” after Emma had gone up to bed, he said, “I would like to marry your daughter, sir.” Just like that! Although nervous, he knew exactly how the dialogue should go.

  I was less certain, not having read the same novels or seen the same plays from which he had managed to achieve a proper Apgar-ishness of tone.

  “My dear boy!” I knew that phrase was the right one: affection, surprise—menace? “Does she…” But even I could not say the expected “love you.” I substituted for “love” “know?”

  “Yes, sir. She knows that I would like to make her my wife. I told her how pleased my parents are.”

  “She must have been gratified.” I could imagine Emma’s response to that. “Let me talk to her,” I said. No unseemly haste, desperate as we are for money.

  “You are not opposed, sir?” The boy was actually anxious; caught in the web, the fly was trying to tempt the spider.

  “Of course not. I want only…” Ah, I am getting the hang of it. George Sand once told me that writing novels was the easiest thing in the world. “Just turn on the tap,” she said; and obviously the thing flows with the greatest ease, for in our stylized bourgeois world nothing ever—in conversation at least—surprises. “I want only her happiness.”

  Shall I tell Mr. Dutton that I would like to try my hand at novel writing? No. Because then I would have to read a few, and that requires more effort and a stronger stomach than I possess. The only novels of our time I can read with pleasure are those of that altogether charming Parisian-Russian Turgenev. With uncommon passion he writes only of politics, and so is able to create living men and women on the page unlike all the other novelists who are so intent on rendering in words the people they think they know or have read about that they end up with a kind of chatter not so good as the sort we hear every day of our lives.

  “I want only her happiness”—“I shall do my best, sir.”—“Your prospects?”—“A quarter interest in my father’s share of the firm.”—“Quite enough to maintain my Emma?”—“Oh, yes, sir! I’ve already found a house. Just opposite my parents’.”—“How convenient!” So we rattled to the end of the familiar scene. I not daring to interject a single intelligent or unusual note; he not capable.

  Just how much share of the firm of Nine Apgars can his father have? and of that, how much is a quarter? If Tilden does not become president, the newlyweds may have to support an aging literary relative.

  2

  THE Ledger HAS ACCEPTED my article on the Empress Eugénie, with pleasure. I am to get seven hundred and fifty dollars. Mr. Bonner himself wrote to tell me how much he liked the piece. “If you approve, we will of course want considerably to cut the text, and perhaps rearrange…” For all I care, they can print it backwards. I telegraphed my approval before breakfast.

  In a good mood, I took Emma shopping. Both Altman’s and Lord & Taylor already know the Princess, and she has unlimited credit. I must say I find bemusing these huge palaces dedicated to the selling of things by departments. They line Broadway from Stewart’s white iron building at Ninth Street (replacing the old Washington Hall Hotel of my youth where Irving and Halleck used regularly to dine) all the way up to Twenty-third Street. Ladies’ Mile they call it; and even on a damp winter morning, elegant ladies descend on the stores like a conquering army.

  Yet along this rich mile one sees everywhere signs of the economic crisis. Innumerable beggars and prostitutes and “street rats.” The “street rats” are ragged, emaciated children who paw through trash cans, collecting bones and rags. According to the Herald, there are more than thirty thousand homeless children adrift in the streets, living in cellarways, in barrels, packing crates. The few who manage to survive into adolescence turn to prostitution and crime.

  I must say that this is a peculiarly brutal city, very different from the town of my youth where indeed there was crime and poverty—concentrated mostly in a single ward whose capital was the notorious Five Points. (Must go there soon and see what if anything has changed. At one time I knew every brothel in that neighbourhood.) Now half the city is haunted by the poor, most of them immigrants from Europe. On freezing nights they are allowed by the thousands to sleep on the floors of the police stations. The rich burghers have every reason to fear communism. This place is worse than Paris in 1871.

  Emma is as horrified as I. But her solutions tend to be martial. “If they won’t fight another war, then they must send the poor out West. There is room, isn’t there?”

  “Yes. But these people can do nothing…”

  “Then they will die.”

  “It seems hard on the children.”

  “It is terrible.” Emma was compassionate but hard. “So terrible that it is better for them to be dead.”

  “Or cared for.”

  “Your people, Papa, are not kind.”

  To this harsh judgment, there is no answer.

  My good luck continues. When we came back to the hotel, there was a telegram from Governor Tilden. Might I join him for dinner at 15 Gramercy Park on Christmas Eve? I accepted by telegraph. There was also an invitation for Emma and me to attend the theatre with Jamie Bennett. Accepted.

  Whilst Emma changed her clothes for a ladies’ lunch at Mrs. Mary Mason Jones’s, a pageboy arrived at the door with an elaborate floral creation
of orchids.

  I placed this beautiful tribute on the round marble table at the parlour’s centre and then, idly, opened the attached envelope and read the enclosed card: “Pale shadows of true beauty,” was the inspired message written in an odd loopy sort of hand. The signature gave me a turn: “William Sanford.”

  At that moment Emma came into the parlour, wearing a scarf she had bought that morning.

  “C’est beau, n’est-ce pas, Papa?” She looked at the orchids. I gave her the card.

  “I’m sorry, I opened it.”

  Emma did not look at the card. “Very vulgar…the orchids, Papa. Every bit as vulgar as Mr. Sanford.”

  “You knew he sent them?” In a sense I was relieved.

  “Who else?” Without a glance she threw the card into the fire.

  “He’s very bold. He knows that you’re practically engaged to John. I told him.”

  “Am I…engaged?” As well as I know my daughter, there are times when I feel that she is far beyond me in her perception of things, and that she weighs with an entirely different set of balances the common morality.

  I had not yet told her of last night’s conversation in the bar. Now I did. She listened attentively, then burst out laughing. “Poor Papa! You of all people having to say those things!”

  I laughed, too: we are as one in our sense of the absurd. I agreed that I was to be pitied. Having spent my life mastering the intricacies of the French platitude, I now must sink beneath the accumulated weight of the American.

  “I can never think of this place as your country.” Emma examined the orchids; she knows flowers; used to advise the Princess Mathilde on what to grow in her conservatories before the war…before the war, that phrase sums up our Eden, an entire world forever gone, and only five years ago.

  “You don’t like your father’s city?”