1876 (10 page)

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
ê
tes 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 imp
é
rial
.
Remember? And of course I used to see you from time to time at the Tuileries, when you were lady-in-waiting to the
Imp
é
ratrice
.”

“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
h
ô
tel 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.”

“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 ‘long’ ...! 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 Ch
â
teau 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-G
ê
ne.

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.”