EDWIN’S FINANCIAL REINCARNATION occurred just weeks before Sadie Price Pell’s early autumn wedding, and Emily’s husband was not on the list of attendees. Divorced from playboy Archie Pell only four months earlier, Sadie radiated happiness begrudged by no one in the Price family. Celebrated on October 8 at Manhattan’s Church of the Ascension, at Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street, Sadie’s ceremony, while modest, seemed bathed in the warmth of the crowd’s satisfaction, her gray gown shining in what seemed a reflection of the bride’s happiness.
Though the wedding was set in New York, the bride still managed to carry gardenias, just as she had in Baltimore. Percy R. Turnure stood tall and obviously smitten with his bride. A physician from one of the oldest families of the city, Turnure brought as varied a roster of talents to the Price family as the Post wedding had over a decade earlier. When Percy’s father, Lawrence, had died a few years before, the New York Times had pronounced him among the best-known bankers of New York and the most “prominent representative of [an ancient] Huguenot family.” Sadie’s new uncle, Arthur Turnure, had helped found New York’s Grolier Club in 1884, America’s oldest and largest society for bibliophiles and lovers of the graphic arts. He had also speculated on the more frivolous side of life by funding the start-up of Vogue magazine.
In spite of marrying into a prominent New York family, Sadie had issued only a few verbal invitations to her “very small wedding,” the Times noted. Mrs. Edwin Main Post was her attendant, and once again, her father, Bruce’s brother Benjamin Price, gave his daughter away. The select guests included Phoenix Ingraham, who seemed these days to be present whenever and wherever Emily was. The suave lawyer was such a good family friend—though a few years younger than Emily, he had grown up knowing Josephine and Bruce as well—that he came to dinner at the Posts’ even when Edwin was away. Phoenix was the type of man Bruce Price admired: the boy who had matured into an impressive young man was named after his paternal grandfather, the Honorable Daniel Phoenix Ingraham, a justice of the New York Supreme Court.
A modest party was held at Bruce and Josephine’s apartment. Probably the couple would have sponsored Sadie’s reception whenever it occurred, but there were compelling reasons for Bruce to celebrate his family these days. Emily’s father was sick, for the first time in his life, and at moments he seemed seriously ill to his worried daughter, in spite of her mother’s optimistic bulletins. Managing her husband’s care, Josie had recently sanctioned far more than the Christian Science beliefs she ordinarily preferred to medicine, an overriding of her convictions that caused Emily to grow anxious. Then, when she heard that her father sometimes felt too weak to go to his office, she got scared. For Bruce Price, his job came before everything.
Bruce had begun to limit his creative work, even as his firm was burgeoning into one of the nation’s most prestigious. Before long, a new routine had developed at his home, with Bruce’s most recently appointed associate, the ten-years-younger John Russell Pope, stopping by the house daily on his way to the office. Having been employed briefly by McKim, Mead and White, Pope had joined Bruce’s firm both because he knew the older architect personally and because Bruce had promised to promote him rapidly. Now, however, Bruce increasingly spent his days at home, where Pope paid him loving homage with his calls, ostensibly to talk shop but, as everyone knew, to bring a sense of normalcy and hope to the sick man’s surroundings.
Taking the measure of her father’s bad health, Emily came to a decision: she would stay in town to watch over him rather than spend the autumn at Tuxedo that year. She soon found that she enjoyed being included in the talks at Bruce’s bedside, where she was treated as more than just a wife and a mother, even more than a daughter. Hop and Pope were there daily, their presence calming even as the men cheered up the invalid. During one such visit, as the guests engaged in idle talk, Josephine grumbled that Emily’s letters to Bruce from Europe a year earlier were far more vivid than the boring epistolary novel she had recently wasted her money on. The Visits of Elizabeth, by Elinor Glyn, was a current bestseller, whatever Josie’s disdain, and Emily was surprised to hear herself compared to a successful author. Secretly she had envied her husband’s success in publishing the story about his father and the Macy, but she’d never considered herself talented enough to write for others.
She was startled, too, that her mother had not only saved her letters but so clearly valued them. Most of her life, Josephine had felt the need to constrain her daughter, arguing against what she considered the flights of fancy Bruce and Emily tended toward, in place of grounding themselves in reality. But now Josephine was flourishing Emily’s letters in front of Uncle Frank, who, as the author of several commercial novels, was well connected to the publishing world. Hop immediately offered to share the carefully crafted letters with Richard Duffy, an editor of Ainslee’s Magazine. Within weeks, Duffy had struck a deal with Emily to publish a fictionalized version of the letters in his magazine.
Emily was thrilled. She had been deeply disappointed when Lorillard convinced her parents to take her off the stage. Dutifully, as a young matron, she had stopped all acting and had given up playing the banjo. Now, overcome with disappointment that her marriage had failed to provide the partnership she had expected, she needed a purpose again. Her relationship with her father had provided a port of entry into a professional world of her own: this chance to write for the public was a gift to her and to her father, whom she would honor with her words. When she told him what she was doing, he encouraged her, saying that she could write “not only this book, but others, probably better.”
“You and I are alike,” he explained. “We are workers. We are only fully ourselves when we are working.”
And so, as Emily’s father deteriorated in front of her, she wrote her first book. Soon realizing that his illness was probably mortal, she was determined to finish it before he died; she would make him proud of his daughter. At the beginning of 1903, Bruce rallied to visit the George Gould mansion he had designed, asking Emily and Edwin to accompany him to the opening. But within days he collapsed, and his family convinced him to go to New York Hospital, where Emily arranged for him to be seen by a specialist. Following surgery in March, the doctors acknowledged that Bruce Price had stomach cancer, a malignancy that killed more Americans than any other at the beginning of the twentieth century, probably as a result of the popular cured and smoked meats, a favorite of Emily’s father’s.
Privately, the doctors told Bruce’s family that there was little hope for his future. Everyone agreed to pretend otherwise, and when Bruce suggested that he recover in Paris, Emily immediately set sail. Determined to prepare the way for her father’s recuperation, she procured spacious rooms at the Hôtel de la Trémoille for her parents’ tenure abroad. But within a few days of his arrival with Josephine, after a hellish passage during which he was in constant pain, on May 29, 1903, Bruce Price died.
Emily helped her mother transport to New York the remains of the man they both cherished. The women sailed home from Le Havre on June 2, 1903. They returned on La Savoie, the ship only a few years old and capable of a sea crossing in a mere seven days, sufficiently fast to preserve a body if it was packed heavily in ice and watched closely for signs of thawing. Ever practical, Josie chose to have Bruce cremated instead, his ashes placed in a coffin for transporting back to New York. When Emily and Josephine arrived in Manhattan they were driven at once to the Lee family plot at Wilkes-Barre’s Hollenback Cemetery, where services were held and Bruce Price buried.
Emily’s father had impeccable timing, one of the many gifts he would cede to his daughter. He even died at the right moment. Bruce Price was one of the leading architects of the American Renaissance, an aesthetic born of the post–Civil War wealth and the rash of American artists who went abroad to study, returning determined to mesh the great European past with their country’s brash new promise. Now the movement was dying, just behind the architect, his nation’s culture seeking original new ways to celebrate modern
life.
Bruce Price’s contributions, like those of his father, would be lauded by his profession. The New York Times rehearsed his achievements as an architect and the “many monuments of his genius” that he bequeathed the country. The paper also honored his distinguished heritage, from the eminent lawyer William Price to his mother’s family, the Bruces of Scotland. The obituary concluded with a list of all the clubs Bruce had belonged to, followed by a line that would have meant the most to both his daughter and to the man himself: “He was also President of the National Architectural Society.”
The Architectural League of New York printed its own appreciation that week: “Resolved. That we deeply mourn the death of our former President, Bruce Price. We realize that not only as friends and associates have we sustained an irreparable loss, but that the profession of architecture has lost one of its most eminent members, one who was found ready at all times to advance its interests in the highest sense. He was sincere, earnest, and always willing to make personal sacrifices for the general good. Resolved. That we tender to his family our heartfelt sympathy and condolence.”
Though Bruce’s wife quickly and stoically resumed her social life, the architect’s daughter did not rebound so easily. Bruce Price had always been the one to grant Emily her full worth, though Josie had generously fostered the relationship of her two intense family members, even at the expense of her own needs for intimacy. If the stalwart mother was unable now to provide a conduit for her daughter’s grief, Emily got even less support from her increasingly estranged husband, who finally had Emily all to himself—if he wanted her. He didn’t, and Emily mourned alone.
BRUCE LEFT LITTLE money for his family. His style of living, as well as that which he underwrote for his family, had absorbed most of what he’d earned. Emily’s frugal mother, protecting her father’s bequest, decided to move into a smaller—although perfectly appointed—house in Tuxedo Park, and the park’s records and newspaper accounts confirm that she rented out property she had previously used for friends and family. But the encomia lavished on Bruce’s head must have gratified his widow and daughter more than great monetary inheritance anyway: Josephine had traded her wealth decades ago for exactly what she got, the deal as close to perfect as any she had made during her subsequent dabbles in the stock market. Through the years she would sometimes feign dismay at her husband’s generosity to everyone from apprentices to beggars, but in truth she basked in his generous spirit—the mark of a true gentleman, the girl from coal country often proudly noted to her daughter.
One of the last official notices involving Bruce Price would appear on June 13, 1903, just around the time his ashes had made it to the burial grounds in Wilkes-Barre. He was sued by James N. Stout for failure to complete a task (as he was dying) and for costs incurred during the delay. The judgment was for the plaintiff. It was the first and only time Bruce Price would not finish a project, let alone fail to pay a bill.
While her father’s obituaries recalled the Civil War, Emily was steeped in a culture that witnessed an entirely different world. Helen Keller, blind and deaf since the age of two, would graduate from Radcliffe College—the same year that another woman was arrested for smoking on Fifth Avenue. The first New York subway opened to anyone who could pay a nickel, revolutionizing work and city neighborhoods. The New York Cancer Hospital (now Memorial Sloan-Kettering) was the first in the country to capitalize on what the Curies had discovered: only six years after the discovery of radium, the institution was using radiation to treat patients. The twentieth century marched on, and Emily Post would assume a place in its history books, her edifice more monumental than Bruce Price’s own.
CHAPTER 24
THE POST MARRIAGE WAS BEING PUSHED FAR BEYOND ANYTHING Emily’s parents’ relationship had endured. In light of the grief Emily suffered upon Bruce’s death, Edwin’s increasingly serious money problems at least proved a distraction for her. After opening Post & Co. in September 1902, Edwin overextended the company to include four branches, located by July 1903 in Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York. Now, just a month later, a newspaper column announced that these offices were being “discontinued.” In the process of expanding his stockbrokers’ company, Edwin had run it into the ground, barely escaping legal charges and losing his entire investment besides. Apparently he had tried to sell his seat on the stock exchange without, in effect, actually giving it up. It also transpired that Edwin had invested in two trust companies in Baltimore, probably calling upon his wife’s family’s local stature. Both companies had failed, their liabilities estimated to hover at $10 million, a fortune even in turn-of-the-century dollars.
When the New York Times announced the “dissolution” of the one-year-old stock exchange firm, no one was surprised, least of all Edwin’s wife. But the Posts weren’t even allowed the chance to deal discreetly with their present disasters. On November 1 Edwin faced a judgment involving failed enterprises belonging to his old partner E. R. Thomas. Unlike the friendly publicity surrounding Edwin’s “voluntary” departure from the firm, the current article didn’t pretend that Edwin and Edward Thomas had parted amicably: there had been “differences of opinion regarding the handling of International Silver securities,” the Times reported.
Emily’s novels suggest that she was less concerned about money than by his boredom with her—and by his lack of integrity. Whether yachting or spending time with friends, relatives, or actresses, he preferred to be with anyone rather than his wife. Cavalierly, he sold his carefully stockpiled wines for $10,000, explaining to Emily that his wise collecting would help them through the bad times. She saw none of the money. Alone night after night in Tuxedo Park, except for Josephine at her side, she knew that her current residence made sense in light of her mother’s desire for companionship, her husband’s neglect, and her sons’ pleasure in the on-site grammar school. At least she could devote her energies to the epistolary novel based on her European letters to her father.
In typical fashion, she was soon immersed in her assignment. To her surprise, she even grew to resent the time consumed by her society life in the city, though it took at most two hours to travel to Manhattan. Still, she did her wifely part. That fall, just after Edwin sold his yacht, the couple was one of thirty at a party Mrs. Astor gave for the Dowager Duchess of Roxburghe and her daughter. The illustrious gathering also included the Elbridge Gerrys, the Cornelius Vanderbilts, the John Drexels, and the Robert Goelets. Increasingly distressed at the careless disregard to which Edwin subjected her, both in public and private, Emily found herself concentrating on the next chapter she was planning to start, even as she danced with her undeniably handsome husband.
By the beginning of 1904, Emily and Edwin were long settled into that most typical of society marriages, one maintained for appearances and for the sake of their children. The spouses were estranged in heart if not in fact—a pattern inherited from their parents’ generation. Emily’s accommodation came at a high price, and she could not have been unaware of the cost. She’d observed friends who had to hold their heads up high in order to avoid seeing the pity or condescension in other women’s eyes.
But she went about creating her own satisfying life within the outer shell of her marriage, if only because she, unlike her cousin Sadie, had children. In addition to the boys, she had her friends. She and Katharine Collier saw each other frequently, and her long friendship with Minnie Coster remained as energetic and forthright as it had been when they were children, though she had to go to France, where Minnie had moved, to enjoy it. At least she saw more of Juliet Morgan Hamilton now than before both of them were married.
Worried at times that Emily seemed too curious about pursuing outside interests, instead of being content with the society she moved in, her friends nervously warned her not to become too serious about her writing. Don’t be silly, she retorted. Whatever do you mean?
The Flight of a Moth began its monthly serialization in Ainslee’s Magazine in January 1904, less than a yea
r after Bruce’s death. The architect’s encouragement, given to Emily as he lay dying, had inspired his daughter to believe that she might have a literary career, forever linking the idea of writing with the beloved figure of her father. She wrote nearly nonstop on The Flight of a Moth, even allowing for her surely exaggerated claim of working through thirty-eight drafts. The forum itself was auspicious: Ainslee’s was a well-received if recent addition to the monthlies, publishing fiction whose authors’ names were usually recognized. Though she had called on Uncle Frank’s literary connections to ensure an initial reading, Emily knew her novelized correspondence to Bruce Price was published on its own merits.
She earned $3,000 (around $68,000 today) from serial and later hardback sales, a very respectable showing for a first book. By the beginning of October, the serialization in Ainslee’s was complete, and a display ad in the New York Times announced Appleton’s fall publication of the novel. The Flight of a Moth, a correspondence between two friends, allows the heroine to narrate “an unusual and unheard of” tale “that will be the talk of the town.” Grace, a beautiful, vivacious twenty-five-year-old widow with an “enthusiastic pleasure-loving temperament,” has had “very little chance” to put pleasure first, never in her childhood and certainly not “at all in her married life.” At seventeen, she had married an “egotistical, faultfinding man of the world,” who recently—unexpectedly, dispatched by Grace with a sentence—had dropped dead.
Writing to her friend back home, Grace details her adventures abroad. Tempted by a Vronsky-like character right out of Anna Karenina, the heroine renounces her quest for experience and, after the kindhearted “Lord Bobby” squires her away from the tempting exotic men who woo her, chooses the pleasures of the hearth instead. The lord’s patient attentions cause her to “open her eyes” to the virtues of matrimony. The young widow gushes that she had always assumed she would “hate marriage. [But] if I knew what it was to be ‘in love’ I wouldn’t feel as I do, would I?” Bobby, she concludes, has taught her what life should be.
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