Inevitably, given the couple’s radically different priorities, the trip was less than successful. When the Posts arrived at the fashionable Brown’s Hotel in London, where the afternoon tea was said to be the best in En gland, Edwin immediately tackled the stack of invitations awaiting them, while Emily wrote long reflective letters to her cousin Sadie. She became preoccupied with the refined Englishwomen she saw everywhere, perhaps in part due to the appreciative gazes they received from Edwin. Though Americans could be quickly identified because they dressed “exquisitely,” Emily admired the more subdued English style: “the born Englishwomen . . . wear evening dress with an air many Americans would do well to copy. They never seem to be afraid of it, if you know what I mean. And they don’t seem to be blazoning it, either.”
In Paris, Edwin repeatedly begged off Emily’s intricately choreographed museum excursions. In addition to being deeply disappointed at her husband’s lack of interest, she grew furious at her expatriate hostess’s condescension. Esther Voss’s superior attitude as she commanded Emily along with the castle’s servants irritated the now experienced housewife. Unfortunately, the offender was Edwin’s favorite cousin and Ned’s godmother, a countess by marriage. The night the Posts arrived, Esther had presumed to instruct her cousin-in-law on appropriate dress for Maxim’s. Compounding her humiliation, Edwin had been graceless enough to suggest that Emily listen and learn, his easy assumption of his cousin’s superiority making Emily almost apoplectic. She prided herself on her unerring sense of style, a self-assessment echoed by others, and Edwin’s lack of appreciation offended her more than his cousin’s recently acquired hauteur.
But Emily knew how to give as well as she got, and now she seized the chance to employ her talent for impersonations. After all, she reasoned, Edwin, who reveled in her theatrical nature, had urged her to exploit her gift of mimicry. Playing charades, Emily imitated Esther’s cavalier treatment of the maids, her performance drawing applause from everyone except the countess, who turned bright red and left the room.
The escalating tension between the two women encouraged Edwin to turn his wife over to another royal relative, Viktor, or “Vico,” the younger brother of Count Hans Voss, Esther’s husband. While Edwin escaped to go hiking, Emily, Vico at her side, could tour the art galleries. After a few weeks of his wife’s daily museum trips with the officious count, however, Edwin grew nervous; intuition told him something was amiss.
His instincts were correct. Vico picked flowers for Emily and insisted that they stop for long, extravagant midday meals. He took her to outdoor gardens filled with nude voluptuaries, one of which she mentioned, quite deliberately, to Edwin. Vico was flirting outrageously with someone he viewed as a typically neglected American wife. And Emily was luxuriating in the perfectly proper attention kept within the boundaries of decorum, its sexual tension genteelly implied.
Alarmed at what he sensed was Emily’s potential love affair, Edwin missed his wife’s plea for his attention: Didn’t Vico have the worst possible taste in art? she asked, urging him to understand. Instead of listening, Edwin rushed out and bought Emily an oversized copy of a Jean-Léon Gérôme garden sculpture Vico had appreciated, to Emily’s private dismay. Gérôme, a late-nineteenth-century artist who specialized in nudes, including slave women, was at best full of passion. To some, such as Emily’s teacher Bruce Price, Gérôme’s sculptures were ridiculous and overwrought. Edwin proudly presented the overlarge statue to Emily before they boarded the ship home.
She wanted to laugh. Looking at her still sophomoric and certainly untutored husband, Emily realized that he couldn’t tell the difference between the original that Vico and she had examined and the replica—to him, they were equally expert. Edwin’s look of pleasure, what she would later call a “little-boy look of satisfaction from having done the right thing,” stopped her from lecturing him on quality. She could only hope, she would recall in later years, that the statue would break on the way back to the States, but it didn’t. In fact, the safe passage managed by the suspiciously well-packed replica every time Emily moved suggests she associated her husband’s purchase with a rare effort to win her heart.
But Edwin’s attempt to impress Emily through his knowledge of the arts was a bad idea that only emphasized his lack of awareness: Bruce Price had the lock on that showground, and Edwin’s obviously weak aesthetic judgment further alienated Emily. Comparisons between classical statues and one’s lovers were popular these days, and frequently, at dinner parties just before they’d left for France, Emily had recounted how she had happily rearranged her father’s hands in his lap throughout her adolescence. They were, after all, the exact measurement of those of a famous marble statue he had once shown her in a museum. One of the Tuxedo Park crowd bragged that his own body dimensions matched exactly those of a certain classic figure in the Louvre. Edwin, however, hadn’t done the groundwork to exploit this particular trend, and now he looked foolish in his wife’s eyes. When Bruce Price saw the imitation piece as it was being uncrated, he exclaimed, “My God! Where did that come from?” Or at least that’s how Emily remembered it.
Decidedly a stranger to the art world, Edwin was in his métier as soon as the Posts returned home from their trip. The Times had decided to list his beloved Great South Bay as one of the best of the New York resort areas, and he felt the ranking as a personal victory. The community of Babylon was pronounced “the Newport of Long Island,” where one could now boat, fish, or explore the village’s charm, its streets completely illuminated by electricity. One hour from Manhattan by express train, the community was notable, the Times added, for two illustrious residents, H.A.V. Post and Dr. Charles Parkhurst.
In spite of his mother’s stifling presence, Edwin still much preferred the authentic South Shore to what he considered the artificially natural environment of Tuxedo Park, a place he found increasingly silly. He’d realized, after years of efforts on everyone’s part, that Emily and Caroline Post would never get along. Yet for several seasons more, however much his wife disliked his mother and stern sister Nathalie, Edwin’s family of four would spend part of each summer at Babylon, Emily gamely hiking her long skirts to her thighs in order to take the boys into the water. She and Mrs. Post dueled often over their equally strong beliefs about children, Mrs. Post demanding that her daughter-in-law choose between soft and strict. Instead, Emily insisted both were appropriate approaches, correct at different times. Such flexibility made Caroline Post think Emily little more than a pushover, and she didn’t try to hide her disgust.
Feeling alone in the marshy lands Edwin loved most, Emily couldn’t wait to get back to Tuxedo that fall. The Price Colliers had returned to the park after a five-year self-imposed exile. Emily had found the couple interesting and lively the brief times they’d met years before, and now, in 1897, they would all be reunited at the park’s annual autumn rituals. Katharine Delano Robbins, an attractive young widow and sister to F.D.R.’s mother, Sara (“Sally”) Delano Roosevelt, had caused a scandal when she’d married the defrocked Unitarian minister Price Collier. A successful diplomat, intellectual historian, and, eventually, bestselling author, he would found the Tuxedo Park Library.
That fall, Katharine, who was to become one of Emily’s lifelong friends, seemed to chatter nonstop about the grand house Bruce Price was about to build for her and her husband. Emily loved having someone appreciate both her father and Tuxedo Park almost as much as she did. And now she had this someone to talk to on a regular basis.
As Emily reinstated her annual fall and early winter rituals—dancing at Tuxedo’s opening ball, playing in the season’s snow with her children—Edwin worked, she sometimes worried, nonstop. Even without his participation, Emily was determined to create the childhood she thought their children deserved. In early December she helped craft a scene for her sons similar to the ones she had reveled in as a child. The boys, dressed as colorful blossoms, strolled through the benefit audience, selling the flower each represented. The fairyland stage r
eminded her of that magical moment when she was six, debuting on stage in The Sleeping Beauty, her parents leading the march. But nostalgia had little place in the Price household, as Josie inadvertently reminded her daughter.
This current event at the Astoria Ballroom raised money for St. Mary’s Free Hospital for Children, a charity that Josephine pooh-poohed in favor of trusting to the healing powers her own body and soul possessed. Over the past few years, Josie had come to embrace the Christian Science philosophy of mind over matter. There was no need for hospitals, she believed. Irritated, Emily changed the subject.
CHAPTER 20
BY AN ACT OF THE STATE LEGISLATURE, ON JANUARY 1, 1898, NEW YORK City instantly tripled its population. Now, in addition to Manhattan, it included Brooklyn (previously an independent city) and the boroughs of Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx. That New Year’s Day, the new New York encompassed more than 3.5 million people, in contrast to the 1.5 million populating the region when Emily was a baby. Clearly, this was a city marking progress, its horse-drawn carriages yielding to the streetcars that would dominate the city’s public transportation till the end of World War II.
As if such expansion and modernization encouraged movement in the social sphere as well, the feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her Revising Committee released The Woman’s Bible, a reinterpretation of biblical scriptures that the women believed demeaning to their sex. The project managed to offend almost everyone, and the women were widely denounced as deranged. Though such conversation was completely outside of Emily’s interests, she took note when the hoopla caused her mother, as intolerant as ever of feminists, to reiterate her belief: in order to change things, people had to emphasize their strengths. Especially for women, calling attention to what they lacked smacked of whining.
Emily, to her surprise, found herself missing Josie these days. Rather than tending to her daughter’s toddlers, as Emily had envisioned, Josephine lived for weeks at a time in Canada, where Bruce was working for a large English syndicate, building hotels in Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Niagara Falls. The experience of designing the mammoth complex on Long Beach had paid off handsomely: Bruce Price was at the top of his game, while his daughter was just getting started on hers. Emily digested her disquieting realization: she suddenly needed her mother, not her father, to tell her what to do.
IT WAS PROBABLY BETTER that Josie was unable to watch her son-in-law operate just now. Edwin had gone into business with the disreputable cad E. R. Thomas, the louche head of the newly opened Thomas and Post banking offices at 71 Broadway. Hearing that Edwin had teamed up with Thomas could not have pleased Emily’s parents. It was well known that Thomas had an indulgent millionaire father who lavishly endowed his son’s pleasures, fast actresses and even faster cars. A notorious playboy, Thomas had quickly replaced his first wife, the Posts’ friend Linda Lee, a southern belle like Emily, with a succession of minor stage stars.
Thomas’s misdeeds took their toll on more than his marriages. During the years Edwin worked with him, his partner’s infamous driving killed two people, including a child, in separate accidents. Finally, after being granted legal immunity on one flimsy excuse after another, Thomas would be forced to pause. One day, his 120 horsepower Hotchkiss Vanderbilt Cup racer couldn’t stop in time for the carriage in his path. Horses went flying, the passengers lucky to get away with their lives even if the animals didn’t. Impatient as ever during his interminable recuperation, Thomas left the New York hospital early and traveled south, where, he believed, the tonic of southern friends would help him heal faster. This was the man Edwin had decided to partner with in 1898.
Giddy with success and the promise of ever more money, Emily’s husband had arrived. He now ate a hearty breakfast every morning at the new Luncheon Club at the Stock Exchange, its wood-paneled dining room on the seventh floor encasing the clubby timelessness modern men of the day sought to embody. Here, feasting on oysters before returning to their offices in the late afternoon, the weary but still excited members retired to discuss their latest transactions. This was the life Edwin had confidently expected, but even he was surprised at how quickly it had arrived. As if such triumph on the floor of the exchange wasn’t enough to swell his ego, he also was ranked among America’s ten best bridge players. During bridge games—yet another enthusiasm he did not share with his wife—Edwin’s carefully honed talent for waiting out the other’s bluff served him well, while Emily’s impatience at lingering inevitably derailed her. Bridge, of all card games, she found particularly exasperating.
A bit startled herself at her zealous domesticity, Emily had discovered that her pleasures lay more at home. She genuinely enjoyed functioning as a prudent and frugal helpmate, though she wished her husband would notice her efforts. Bruce had always appreciated Josephine’s thriftiness and eye for a bargain; without his wife’s attention to the mundane, he could not have indulged so freely in the imaginative. Mindful of the grandiloquent effect her own husband preferred, Emily religiously recorded the dress she wore to each social event, to ensure that she wouldn’t repeat her ensemble when revisiting the same crowd.
Perhaps such outlays of energy on behalf of her family did impress Edwin, but the Macy’s logbook that autumn suggests otherwise. While his wife sought little more than his appreciation for her hard work, Edwin was busy scribbling about his discontent at home: For five years he has been living as a married man, having “committed matrimony,” and, he wrote, been “sentenced to life for it!” Jocular as always, he penned: “I confess my crime was great; but look at Don Alonzo [Edwin’s brother A. V. Post, the bachelor who led all the cotillions], who didn’t! He is simply a degenerate. Smokes, swears, drinks ‘slow’ gin and quick cocktails and has acquired many other habits which render life happy tho unmarried!”
Bright, talented, vivacious young members of society, Edwin and Emily Post lacked guidance in negotiating the cross-purposes of their marriage. Models allowing both husband and wife to express their skills were scarce. Even the exceptional few had to compromise their unions: five years later, Marie Curie was denied the opportunity to accept her half of the Nobel Prize, forced to sit in the audience as Pierre was given the award for both of them. A template for a marriage that comfortably and logically accommodated both wife and husband didn’t yet exist.
At least such inadequacies were starting to gain attention. At the end of the summer of 1898, yet another article directed at Emily’s social set and its unsatisfying marriages appeared in the New York Times. The essay, written by an Englishwoman, bluntly decried the state of married American women, whose lives everyone assumed to be “immeasurably superior” to those of their sisters elsewhere in the world. Englishwomen, especially, were envious of the freedoms granted young American debutantes—until they noticed the girl’s odd transformation after her wedding. Subsequent to her earlier freedom, the American socialite had to be “content to sink gracefully into the background as soon as the wedding march is over,” the writer noted, her life converted to a “path of duty.” The young American wife found herself submerged into “an almost Turkish seclusion,” she added. Discouraged from forming friendships with men or participating in sports, she was even denied true companionship with her own often absent husband.
It is tempting to think of wives like Emily sharing the article with their husbands, suggesting options to the lifeless path their marriages had followed. But at the turn of the twentieth century, even voicing the problem took courage. Emily and her friends were not the type to denigrate the institution they had inherited; nor were they willing to shirk what they assumed, unthinkingly, were their proper duties. A “Turkish seclusion” seemed, to most of the socialites, the price they were meant to pay for the financially lucrative life they had signed on for.
THAT AUTUMN, EDWIN, who seemed to find time for any activity that interested him, submitted an article to Field and Stream. In January 1899, the magazine published the essay, a reverie about hunting in the Great South Bay. Graceful a
nd informative, it would be anthologized over one hundred years later in a book of sixteen classic hunting tales that included authors such as Theodore Roosevelt and Zane Grey.
“Brant Shooting on Great South Bay” commemorates the intimacy Edwin and H.A.V. Post shared on the water over the years. “Father named the boat Macy after an old friend,” Edwin wrote, “and has had her continuously in commission since she was launched; . . . her first captain is still in charge—a bit gray now.” In loving detail, he rehearsed the routine of the hunting party as they lay flat in the boat, waiting to get off their first shot at the ducks. Edwin Post was a more than competent writer. His prose was smooth, while a knowing urbanity offset his temptation to be merely glib. Though in 1910 he would also publish a short story in Smart Set magazine, sharing space with major contemporary writers, Emily never encouraged his avocation.
By 1899, the separate directions the couple took daily, emotionally and otherwise, seemed set. On February 11, a blizzard paralyzed New York for most of the month, forcing snowbound market traders such as Edwin to sleep over at their downtown clubs. Emily’s ledger noted such absences from home as if they were the norm, business matters their cause as often as foul weather. Her life was not matching the image she had envisioned. She had neither the companion nor the lover that she had assumed marriage would confer. Only the springtime photographs of a laughing young mother standing next to Minnie Gray, Emily’s longtime friend from childhood revelries at the park, recapture the vibrant woman who had married Edwin a long seven years ago.
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