1876 (23 page)

“But we like him. Not,” I added firmly, “as much as we like you.”

“I did want you to say that!” The girl beamed at me. “I feel that I’ve known the two of you all my life. Would that I had! This”—Denise glanced at Mr. Mari
é
’s charming fussy rooms filled with tame writers and painters as well as with quite untame magnates and their wives—“is really the very best that we can do. And it is not
chez
Princess Mathilde, is it?”

“There are
longueurs
at Paris, too.”

“Not like here where there are no
courteurs
?
Is there such a word?”

“There is now. You’ve invented it!”

“Well, I shall want you and Emma all summer at Newport, Rhode Island, and the days will pass like minutes as we enjoy our
courteurs
.”

“But Mr. Sanford ...?”

“I hope ... I think he will enter politics.”

“Good God!”

“I’m one of the few ladies who do not pretend to mind having Senator Conkling as a dinner partner.”

“I should’ve thought that that huge beautiful creature would be in great demand.”

“Not with the likes of us who want nothing from Washington. And, of course, the poor goose is so very vain.”

“And you would want your husband to be like Mr. Conkling?”

“In his own way, yes. It’s not the fashion, of course, for people like Bill to go into politics. Why should he? Why should any of us? After all, we buy the senators who buy the elections. Even so, I think Bill is well suited for that life. And it would give him an interest.”

“Would
you
like to live at Washington?”

“Heavens, no! I should be like Mrs. Conkling and cultivate my garden the way she does hers in—where is it? Utica!”

Emma and I both agreed that we are sorry, all in all, to be leaving New York.

“But then Washington will be an adventure.” Emma is in enormously good spirits.

“For me certainly.” I have not told her how much I dread the work that I must do. Daily I receive memoranda from Jamie. Lists of people I
must
meet, as well as keys to the locks of innumerable cupboards containing political skeletons.

Fortunately, I am caught up in all my other work. The truly dreadful piece on the Emperor’s death is written. The long and perhaps overintricate analysis of Cavour and the House of Savoy is in Godkin’s hands at
The Nation
.
The campaign biography of Governor Tilden waits upon his nomination: Mr. Dutton was firm about that. Meanwhile, Bigelow and Green have set advertisement-concocters to work, assembling the raw material for a book.

I have also had several unsatisfactory meetings with a lecture agent who insists upon reminding me at regular intervals that I am not Mark Twain. I tell him that this pleases me more than not, but subtlety is lost on him. He thinks that I can do well on the lecture circuit if I stick to the dresses and hair styles of the Empress and her court. When I finally balked at this, loftily told him, “You should really book not me, not a political writer, not an historian, but my daughter the Princess d’Agrigente.” The little man was all afire. “Would she do it? I can get her twelve thousand dollars for thirty nights.”

Emma was much amused. “If worse comes to worse, I can keep us both. Perhaps I will. Poor Papa, you work too hard.”

Just now, as I was writing in this book, Emma came in to say good night. She kissed my cheek, as always. I kissed her hand. “October,” she whispered. “Not June. John’s agreed.”

“Good,” I whispered back; we are like two conspirators. Now that she stands poised at the edge of Apgar-land, I want her with me as long as possible. To the end, I nearly wrote; have written.

SHORTLY AFTER DAWN the hotel’s carriage took us across town to the North River and then down to the Cortland Street ferry, where we embarked for Jersey City and the Pennsylvania Railroad Depot. During the ferry trip, we stayed in our carriage and watched through misty windows the shoreline of New York City become miniature.

“I used to live just there. See? That big building. Near the wharf.” The building was—and still is—the Washington Market. I once lived nearby, with a girl long dead.

It is odd, in a way, that Emma should know almost nothing of my life before I met her mother. When she was young, she used to be curious about America but I told her so many made-up stories about Indians and suchlike that she took them for a kind of truth, and to this day regards my life during the twenties and thirties as, literally, fabulous. She also was brought up to regard me as something of an exotic. Early on, Princess Mathilde dubbed me the Blond Indian, and the name stuck. Most impressed, Emma would tell her school friends that her father was an authentic American Indian, from a fair-haired tribe.

The cars for Washington were luxurious; and we left on time. I was not prepared, however, for the amount of commerce that goes on. First, one is tempted by a doughnut salesman. Then a small boy appears with a large pile of magazines and cheap novels as well as bags of peanuts. Without a word, the boy shoved a ladies’ magazine onto Emma’s lap and a novel about the Wild West onto mine. Then he disappeared.

“Is this a present?” Emma was astonished.

“I doubt it.”

When the cars pulled out of the station, we were still in possession of our unpaid-for reading matter. Meanwhile we were tempted by a fried-oyster salesman in a white coat; only a stern look from Emma kept me from devouring my favourite food, the only American dish that in France I used to dream of and could never find a cook able to approximate that marvellous mixture of Atlantic sea-taste and old lard.

The car was more comfortable than any European car, with curtains of green plush, stuffed chairs that turn this way and that, gas lamps in good cut glass, mahogany wood fittings, and, all-pervading, the smell of burning fuel mixed with that of fried oysters.

After a leisurely lunch in the restaurant car, we returned to find the young book salesman standing beside our seats. One hand pointed to the discarded novel, magazine; the other was extended to be paid. “That’ll be one dollar and two bits, sir, for the two.”

The subsequent battle was finally joined by the conductor, who gave the young entrepreneur a sudden kick in the shins just as I was giving him “two bits” for what he had, finally, minimally, insisted was “an out-and-out rental of my publications.” With a cry of pain and triumph, he was gone.

“They always get on the cars, sir.” The conductor spoke as of dust, flies. “There’s nothing we can do.”

As the locomotives were being changed at Baltimore we got off the car and strolled along the siding. Suddenly I heard a sound above me. I looked up and saw a dozen tramps at their ease on top of our car.

Aware of my gaze, one of them swung down onto the siding with a monkey’s agility. “Ma’am.” He approached Emma who was nearest him. Leering, he held out a dirty hand. “Won’t you give a bit for a poor old veteran?”

Before either of us could respond, a second and a third and a fourth tramp joined their colleague. Grimacing and grasping and hideous with soot from the locomotive, they formed a menacing circle about us. I raised my stick, and Emma screamed.

In a moment two armed railroad guards appeared on the run from the nearby depot, and the tramps disappeared amongst the cars and warehouses.

This most alarming experience was made even more alarming by the conductor, who said matter-of-factly, “Nothing you can do about ’em. Soon as we’re out of the depot, they’ll hop right back on again. And if you’re fool enough to get anywheres near them, why, they’ll throw you right off the train.”

Interesting and sinister note: as far as I could tell, not one of the tramps was an immigrant. All looked to be of the old American stock, wounded or debauched or both in the war, and ruined by the Panic.

Thirty years ago I would never have dreamed that there would be such a vast floating criminal class in this country, or so much grinding poverty in grisly contrast to the awful richness of the sort of people we have been seeing at New York. I pity Tilden. For all his intelligence and ambition, I doubt if he has the capacity or the will to do anything about those sooty figures which like monsters in a nightmare suddenly appear and re-appear when least expected, to remind us of the pit. Emma is still shaken, and so am I.

We arrived at Washington City in the late afternoon of what appeared, unexpectedly, to be a spring day. Though it is mid-February, the south wind was warm and languorous and the gardens and vacant lots were bright with premature spring flowers, with daffodil, narcissus, hyacinth.

In front of the Pennsylvania Station there was a long line of dilapidated hackney cabs, each in the charge of a Negro driver. Since I have always had difficulty understanding Southerners, it was Emma who finally made the arrangements for transporting us to Willard’s Hotel.

“Why have you never told me about this city? It
is
a city, isn’t it?”

We had just entered Pennsylvania Avenue and Emma was looking about her with absolute curiosity, and some surprise.

“I was only here once. For two days in 1836. So I don’t remember much except that there was not much to remember. Now at least they’ve put up a city.”

“Where?”

“To our left and right. A great world capital.” I waved grandiloquently at the boarding houses and bars, restaurants and hotels that line Pennsylvania Avenue, only recently paved, the driver told us, with asphalt. The dingy red-brick and white frame buildings to our left and right look even smaller than they are because of the enormous width of the avenue that extends from the Capitol to the White House—or used to.

Since my last visit the direction of the avenue has been changed; it now goes in a straight line from the Capitol to the Treasury Building, and then veers off sharply to the right for a block or two when it turns to the left, dividing in half the original front lawn of the White House. The section of lawn separated from the White House by this new extension of Pennsylvania Avenue is now known as Lafayette Park, at whose center stands not a statue of Lafayette—that would be too logical—but one of Andrew Jackson, astride his horse.

I was pleased to see that the Capitol is at last finished. “It used to have a very disagreeable-looking temporary dome ... brown, I think it was.”

“A good building.” Emma gave the Capitol her imprimatur. “But there is nothing really to go with it, is there?” She indicated Pennsylvania Avenue. “I mean, this won’t do at all.”

We were now at Sixth Street, just opposite the Metropolitan Hotel, a somewhat seedy revision of the famous old Indian Queen Hotel, where I once stayed in the high heat of a Washington summer, retching most of the night from having eaten too much of a sumptuous dinner at Andrew Jackson’s White House, my one and only visit to that center of so many of our countrymen’s dreams.

“And look at all the black people!”

“The Negroes have always been a majority here. Certainly, they do all the work.”

“We are in Africa! And it’s marvellous. But why did no one warn us?”

I suspect that Emma is more right than she knows, for Washington City
is
a curiously tropical, colonial-seeming place. Certainly, one senses a native life going on beneath the surface quite separate from that of the white visitors—a category which includes not only the transient members of the government but those native whites who are proudly known as Antiques—and bear the same relation to the political transients as those old New Yorkers who live below Madison Square bear to the flashy folk who live above.

Willard’s Hotel occupies the corner where Pennsylvania Avenue turns right at the Treasury, a neoclassical building that put Emma in mind of the Church of the Madeleine at Paris. “And equally charmless.”

Willard’s Hotel is a six-storey building. Rather plain on the outside, the interior is elaborately decorated in that quaint American version of our Second Empire decor which many find vulgar, though, personally, I rather like the crowded, gilded, Gothic glitter of so many American houses and public places.

As we stepped beneath the marquee, amiable if not eager black servants came forward to collect our baggage. At the entrance of the main lobby stood the manager, a younger version of Ward McAllister.

“Welcome to the nation’s capital, Princess. Mr. Schuyler.” He bowed low. We murmured our delight at being guests of the hotel. Like a parade, we were led across the darkly frescoed main lobby, carefully avoiding in our solemn progress a thousand bronze spittoons.

“Your friends are already here, Princess. Waiting for you in the rotunda.” This was said as I registered us (only ten dollars a day for a two-bedroom suite with three meals apiece). In the general flurry, neither of us quite took in what the manager had said. In fact, Emma was too busy looking at everything and everyone while I was reading a message from Charles Nordhoff, the Washington correspondent of the
Herald
:
if we are not too tired, he would like to take us to dinner this evening.

The manager then led us not to our suite but to a large reception room, with a great dome supported by gilded columns. On the tessellated floor, numerous sofas and chairs contain what look to be politicians with their constituents: in their way, as alarming and dangerous-looking a group as the tramps at the Baltimore depot.

Directly beneath the dome stood a tall, formidable full-bosomed lady. “She’s here!” The manager exclaimed to the lady. “I mean
they’re
here. Mr. Schuyler and the Princess, your friends!”

Emma and I stopped in front of this complete stranger, who inclined her head with all the dignity of the Mystic Rose. “I,” she proclaimed in a voice that echoed in the rotunda like that of the Cumae Sybil with some curiously bad news to impart, “am Mrs. Fayette Snead.”

The manager left us to the Sybil’s mercies.

“I don’t believe that we have had the honour ...” I began. Emma simply stared, as though at the zoo.

“You doubtless know me as ‘Fay.’ ” The accent was deeply Southern but altogether too easily understood, for each syllable was boomed with equal emphasis.

“As ‘Fay’?” I repeated stupidly.