A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth (4 page)

Did that mean that males had to be catered to?
Never.
French women are absolute rulers in their own domain. But what did my Groton friend think of the rest of Mother's friends? That they were unattractive, unappealing? Certainly not. He only meant that, to them, the game of sex was over. They had attained what they had wanted: in most cases, a husband, often successful and frequently faithful, and children, largely by this time adult and usually good enough citizens. To describe these ladies: they inclined to be large and strongly built, rarely stout, well dressed but not too stylish, accustomed to deference from those who served them, and with good formal manners that placed their interlocutor on an exact par with themselves, if not sometimes a trifle lower.

They left all business matters entirely to their husbands, assuming that everything that went on "downtown" was as strictly honorable as in their own pure lives. They ran their sometimes large households with commendable efficiency and sat conscientiously on meritorious charitable boards. They had a good deal of free time in which to visit each other, to read, to go to the theatre, to hear music, to play cards, to visit museums. Most of them were more cultivated and interesting than their husbands, but they all were aware that their lot in life was easier than that of most of their fellow men and were not inclined to rock boats. They would have been angered to be called snobs.

They wore little jewelry but what they did was very good. Mrs. Clarance Pell, whose husband was the longtime president of the Racquet Club, wore a jangling bracelet of small gold racquets, each representing one of his championships. My mother used to say it was the envy of every social climber in New York.

The lady I have called Rosette, an excellent housekeeper, was twice widowed and used to boast: "Well, at least I have made two men very comfortable." I doubt you would have heard such a remark from Mother's other friends. To them the husband was merged in the family; the children got equal attention. Mother, who had a way of carrying domestic concerns to extremes, went so far as to assert, hearing of F.D.R.'s polio: "Eleanor must have been glad it wasn't one of the children." But that was just Mother.

None of Mother's friends had jobs, but there were some like Mrs. Alsop, who were very active in politics, or Ruth Draper, who triumphed on the stage. I liked how one of them defined the words "My rod and staff": "My rod is my church and my staff is my money." Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a post in a President's cabinet, was known to some of them and admired by all. But she was not an intimate, though she belonged to a tightly knit ladies' discussion group of which Mother was a leading member. F.D.R. at a cabinet meeting was known to have thrown this smiling question to his secretary of labor: "What will they think of
that,
Frances, in the Junior Fortnightly?"

Suppose a lady of this order did not find a husband or did not choose to have one. Well, if she happened to be an heiress, it didn't matter. A Frenchman visiting New York was supposed to have observed that it couldn't harbor a really worldly society because it contained so many rich old maids who in Paris would have been married by force. And indeed, he had quite a list: the Misses Anne Morgan, Ruth Twombly, Julia Berwind, Anne Jennings, Helen Frick, Edith and Maud Wetmore. Less richly endowed but still independent virgins might lead social lives not dissimilar to that of their married friends, depending for affection on loving nephews and nieces, but if really poor they were doomed to act as companions to ancient and long-surviving parents. Indeed, this latter was often considered their sacred duty, even where funds existed for a paid companion.

Suppose the lonely female, even if well to do, was—hush, hush—a lesbian? The term was little used; a preferable one was "horsey." Such matters were better locked in the closet. The particular one in our lives I shall call Aunt Daisy, though she was not related, but a dear friend of the family. She was a large, imposing woman, hefty rather than stout, with blond hair drawn straight over her scalp to knot in back. She wore mannish suits and her love life was hidden but far from un-guessable. What she believed in was almost the exact opposite of everything Mother stood for: that life could, and perhaps should, be lived for the appreciation of art, if one did not have the good luck to have been born an artist oneself.

Mother was fond of Aunt Daisy, but she never yielded an inch in her conviction that the only really good life was to have a faithful husband enthusiastically at work in a beloved profession and a faithful wife happily raising a large and essentially obedient family. The amazing thing about my mother was that she was always able to see her own case as a thing apart, having no special relation to others, so that she brought a fresh and unbiased mind of penetrating power to the problems of her friends who sought her advice in droves. As one of them, whose happy marriage she arranged in a difficult situation, told me, "I was lucky not to be related to your mother, for her mind doesn't work as well with her own family."

Aunt Daisy could only pity Mother for what she regarded as philistine principles. Daisy boasted of having heard more than fifty performances of
Tristan
at the opera house and rarely left town for fear of missing a cultural event. "If you see a tree, give it a kick for me," she used to say to those departing in rustic retreat. She lived amid the large and handsome objects of her prosperous and utterly respectable family, whose money came from one of Commodore Vanderbilt's corrupt judges. New York had its compromises.

Aunt Daisy was warmly interested in any of her friends' children who showed the least intellectual curiosity, and her talk of art in any form was witty and amusing. Her quotations, mostly of poetry, were wonderfully relevant to the subject under discussion; she was the first person to make me aware of pleasures that were of only tertiary importance to my parents.

But Aunt Daisy's tragedy was my bitter disillusionment. Her increasing alcoholism rendered her inanely sentimental about works of art, particularly music, about which she had formerly made good sense. In an opera box (one constantly loaned to her by a rich and devoted friend) she would ask me to bring her drinks from the bar and wax irate when I told her it wasn't allowed. The sad thing was that her deterioration struck me as a kind of justification of Mother's point of view. To this sorry state an overindulgence in the arts brought one!

The elderly husband of Aunt Daisy's most intimate friend once described Aunt Daisy to Mother as the "dark shadow" in his life. Did that mean she and his wife had an affair? I hope so.

A somewhat similar warning though in a different area was offered by a dazzlingly beautiful first cousin of Mother's whom I shall call Sally. Sally's looks and charm had made her a noted figure in society: she had been married twice—the second time happily though both times childlessly—to attractive men about town who shared her epicurean view of a life dedicated to pleasure and the maintenance of a fine appearance.

Like Aunt Daisy, but in a very different way, she was Mother's opposite, but as Mother's senior by a year, she had dominated her in childhood and the bond was never loosened. Sally, whose closest next of kin was a brother married to a great heiress, had once proposed to leave her own not inconsiderable estate to Mother's children, but had been dissuaded by Mother, who had insisted on the brother's preference. It was a typical example of what I used to call Mother's "magnificent disloyalty."

Sally's end might have pointed to the moral in a story written by Mother had she written any. Living alone in an apartment hotel as a widow, surrounded by great gaping dolls in wonderful dresses, she took to the bottle and eventually threw herself out the window. A news account described a pillow in her apartment bearing the legend: "Don't worry—it never happens."

The problem that brought these ladies to the grave was, of course, simply alcoholism, but my young, family-influenced mind insisted on the moral lesson. But there was a third woman in my life who also died of drink and who also lived in striking disaccord with Mother's principles. About her, my mother and I did not ultimately agree. This was Elsa Stanton, wife of Mother's much younger brother, Bill, and the only human being I think Mother actually hated. I'm afraid she was most unjust.

Bill Stanton, a charming fellow, early orphaned by the premature demise of my maternal grandparents, had emigrated in his twenties to Hong Kong where he could afford, with thirty ponies and the needed houseboys, to lead a life based in polo that he couldn't possibly have afforded in New York. There in due time he had met a merry, plump, twice-married but now free, charming lady, a brilliant figure in the crown colony's smart international society, some dozen years his senior with two grown children. He fell violently in love with her, a passion that never cooled, and they were married, very happily. But to Mother, who had been a kind of substitute parent to this adored younger brother, the fact that Elsa could give him no children, was older, and drank, made the marriage a travesty that she could never forgive.

The rest of the family appreciated Elsa's high spirits, humor, and devotion to Bill. She also had great courage, which appeared when Hong Kong fell to the Japanese, and she and Bill were interned in Stanley Prison. Joseph Alsop, a fellow prisoner, speaks in his memoirs of the great example in sheer guts that Elsa provided to the other inmates. Her leg had been broken during the siege, but she saved her diamonds from the guards by secreting them in her cast.

One Japanese officer, with the strange politeness that they sometimes (too rarely) showed their victims, called on Elsa in her cell to ask if they could use her house as an officers club. She wanted to know why they bothered to ask.

"Because it's so much nicer to have permission," he explained.

"Well, you
don't
have permission!" she declared.

Needless to say, she found the house gutted when they returned after the war.

Mother's hostility to Elsa (which incidentally was thoroughly returned) lasted unremittingly until the latter's death from drink. It was quite unlike Mother. Even when she had to search among the family jewels for an appropriate wedding present for Elsa she manifested a sentiment that could only be called savage. Like a true puritan she selected the most valuable jewel of all, a diamond choker with a huge pin, and said she hoped Elsa would stick it right through her jugular vein!

The columnist Joseph Alsop described Elsa in his memoirs, quite erroneously, as the richest woman in Hong Kong. At her death he said to me, "I suppose Elsa's fortune will be tied up for the children. What will your uncle live on?" A typical Joe question. I replied, "He will live on what he has always lived on: his own income. Elsa left him everything she had, and he has already settled it on her children."

B
OVEE WAS A PRIVATE
day school for boys from six to the age of twelve when they were apt to be sent off to boarding school. It occupied a tall brown stone building on Fifth Avenue opposite the Central Park Zoo, through which we were marched two by two at recess but not allowed to visit. That we could do on weekends with parents or nurses if we were not taken to a country estate.

Our building rose to six stories with a class to each floor in order of age, so that the boys who climbed to the top were presumably the oldest and strongest. The school, which expired in 1929, was still in its heyday when I entered. In 1923 it remained under the able administration of its vigorous founder and owner, Miss Kate Bovee, and it was an admired institution considered to be quite the equal of Buckley and St. Bernard's. But unlike these noteworthy institutions, Bovee did not share the fashionable anti-Semitism of that day; it admitted Jewish boys, many of them from "our crowd" and drawn from the great German Jewish finance families of the city. Also in tow were the sons of New York's literary and artistic circles, who were suspiciously regarded by most of our watchful parents. The young Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Mel Ferrer, both destined to become actors, were in my class. This did not effect the school's social position; Jack Astor, who would grow up to be Jack Astor, was sent there as well.

Kate Bovee was not a woman to be trifled with; she was even known to hurl books at recalcitrant boys. There was an aggressive note in the school cheer: "Rah, Rah, Rah, Ree, Ree, Ree; Bee o Vee double E Bovee!"

But all this came to a sorry end when Miss Kate died prematurely, leaving the establishment to her not so serious and rather fatuous younger sister, Eleanor. This was a woman known to have demanded of a class supposed to be studying in silence, "Who is talking in this room?"

"You are!," came the shouts in response.

Before her arrival at Bovee, Eleanor had been teaching eloquence to the girls at Miss Spence's. Gretchen Finletter has well described this ambitious instructor at work there in a delightful memoir: "Miss Bovee explained the 'one, two, three.' This meant that before the great line of the poem (she was reciting) the pupil was to pause and count 'one, two, three,' and then give it everything."

Thus in Emerson's poem about the squirrel and the mountain, the pupil must render the squirrel's retort to the mountain's taunting of his smallness as follows:

If I cannot carry forests on my back,
Neither can you [one, two, three, twinkle, dimple,
and with great archness] crack a nut!

I don't have to tell more than one other thing about Miss Eleanor to explain the school's collapse under her guidance. She instituted a Noble Life medal for the boy who had led the noblest life in the year involved. Of course she was conned into giving it to the boy who we all knew had the dirtiest tongue in the school! And what her insistence on pronouncing her surname and the school's in the French manner (Beauvais) did to our school cheer can be imagined.

Things went from bad to worse until Miss Eleanor decided to give up teaching and move to her beloved France. But she had the last word, for she sold the building to her advantage and threw the poor faculty out of work just as the Great Depression of 1929 hit.