Manhattan Monologues (3 page)

Who or what I was or thought I was, as a young girl, appears to be what today is called an identity crisis. I was and still am rarely mentioned in any social column without the added legend "a grandchild of Samuel Thorn." That was and is, of course, also true of my siblings and of my first cousins on Mother's side of the family, that cheerful, boisterous group of youngsters who in our youth stuck so harmoniously together in our neighborhood of brownstone mansions up and down Fifth Avenue. They were the offspring of Mother and her sisters: Sewards (that's us), Hammerslys and Degeners, and of her brother, Samuel Thorn, Jr., almost a society of their own, united in friendly and loving awe of Grandpa and Grandma Thorn, smug and smiling in their immense chocolate-colored cube of a residence. You can see the latter today in my living room, in the conversation piece by Seymour Guy, facing each other complacently in opposite armchairs, hands in lap, surrounded by walls cluttered with academic canvases. Grandpa was known to the public as simply the richest man in the world.

Yet it was still important that I was
not
a Thorn; I was a Seward. Mother, of course, had been a Thorn, and we lived in a house adjoining Grandpa's, waited on by a staff of fifteen, but I never regarded my branch as wealthy. Children look up the social ladder, rarely down, and we all knew, and fully accepted, that Grandpa was intent on establishing a dynasty in his name and that Uncle Sam had already received half his fortune and could look forward one day to receiving the rest, minus the settlements on his sisters, which, however small in relation to his own, would have been considered princely in any land of accepted primogeniture. We children learned exactitude in using the vocabulary of wealth. I never, for example, considered myself an "heiress." That in our world denoted a dowry of ten million and up. Mother was an heiress, yes, but she had four children to divide an inheritance much diminished by Papa's lavish spending. In my generation Uncle Sam's daughters, Beatrice and Diana, were the real heiresses and could marry European dukes if they chose—or were chosen—while we other granddaughters would have to make do with humbler mates.

Not that I minded these distinctions. I have always been devoted to Beatrice, who found happiness in a second marriage, and to Diana, who survives to this day in a renowned and rather bristling virginity. But the situation was somewhat complicated by the fact that I was the one who was supposed to be Grandpa's favorite. Yet I never ascribed this to personal merit, nor did I expect any compensation for the status. It was a role that had been handed me by a quixotic deity in the skies who might just as well have given it to any other grandchild. There was no cause for pride on my part or jealousy on anyone else's. When I was told to run next door to Grandpa's, where the smiling butler behind the bronze grille awaited me, because Grandpa wanted to show me off to his breakfast business guests, I would scurry into the dining room and raise my round little face to be kissed by a rotund, balding, thickly whiskered old gentleman with glinting piggy eyes and a smell of tobacco, and be called his "darling Aggie-Baggie." I recognized it as a kind of charade of homely piety, and that once I was dismissed with a friendly little pat on my rump, the great man would totally forget me in the resumption of his business discussions.

That different adult males should play different roles in the family drama did not strike me as inconsistent. It was the way things were. Papa, for example, saw Grandpa, his father-in-law, through lenses not adjusted to the more general family view. He used to say—and he was never one to lower his voice or spare anyone's feelings—that the "Thorn tribe" of my siblings and cousins tended to cling together because the reputation of Grandpa Thorn's deceased father, to whom Papa referred unceremoniously as "that old pirate," was still sufficiently odorous to keep the Knickerbocker families at bay, and that even the cloak of Seward respectability (we were dimly related to Lincoln's Secretary of State) that Papa had provided for his own offspring would not wholly shield us from the snubs of Livingstons and Van Rensselaers. But looking back on that era, I can see that only the stuffiest of the old guard would hold themselves aloof from a crowd of good-looking and amiable youngsters who had money to spend and large country estates for congenial house parties. Even people who shunned Grandma's receptions were happy to have their issue play with and ultimately marry her grandchildren.

But Papa never changed his mind, never altered a position once taken. I see him now in the solid marble bust so out of scale with the rest of my apartment. How the round eyeballs over the strong aggressive nose and flared nostrils seem to glare! From the richly thick wavy hair and tall formidable brow down to the pointed moustache and trim goatee and to the astrachan collar of his frock coat, it is only too clear that you are faced with the type of American orator or statesman of his day, as seen in those dreadful statues in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington. Except that Papa was not a statesman; he only dreamed of being one. He had been president of a street car company that went bankrupt because he would not allow the cars to operate on the sabbath, and he had managed, by the extravagance of his residences in town and country, to go through all of Mother's money that was not nailed down in trust. But he had fought gallantly as a cavalry colonel in the Civil War, and as a leader of civic groups he had thundered impressively and ineffectually against the corruption of the age. It never occurred to any of his three daughters that he could be disobeyed or criticized. It did occur, however, to his only son.

My brother, Otto, had none of Papa's vigor or much of the
joie de vivre
of our cousins. He was tall and skinny and highly critical of almost everything. I'm afraid that he hated Papa, and that his feeling was richly returned.

"He thinks he's such a god among men," Otto would ob- serve sourly to me. "But he's really only a figurehead on the pedestal of Grandpa's money."

I, as the eldest daughter, was chosen to take the place of honor in Papa's life that Otto declined. This only confirmed the childhood impression, already created by Grandpa's favoritism, that my life was a series of sets before which I, like a professional monologist, was to enact certain prescribed roles. As the great Ruth Draper, whom I was later so to admire, would in one scene be an empty-headed debutante and in another the wife of a miner lost in a cave-in, so I had the different but equally factitious parts to play of the idolized grandchild and the adoring daughter. It wasn't that I found the parts difficult to perform, but I was afflicted at times with the haunting sense that there was no Agnes Seward left of me when I had to run off stage into the wings.

One could argue, of course, that I was no different from Grandpa or Papa, who were also playing roles. Certainly Papa enjoyed responding to the image of the virgin priestess daughter who would love him more than she would any swain, who might indeed elect to remain permanently unwed to tend the paternal shrine, an Iphigenia, who in the Racine tragedy that I always detested, assents docilely to her father's demand that she be sacrificed to bring winds to the becalmed Grecian fleet. But it was always evident to me that neither Grandpa nor Papa suffered from any loss of identity when the curtain dropped. They were only too visibly strong and definite characters in the "real world," which the former dominated and the latter tried to.

Sometimes I would speculate that it was a matter of gender; that men were not acting, that off stage as well as on they were the same persons, that it was my own poor sex who had to learn our parts in the play that duplicated the lives of our masters. Yet even here there was an "out" for some fortunate ladies. I use the term "ladies" advisedly, for this "out" was evidently not available to humbler females. Mother and her sisters were "heiresses" and did not have to perform before the footlights; they could remain, serene and placid, in their big brownstones or Beaux Arts country chateaux, or migrate on set dates to distant villas appropriate to the changing season, and live for clothes and cards in overheated conservatories filled with palms and marble fauns. The sputterings of their sometimes irascible husbands dashed like spray against the rocks of their tranquillity; they were too confident that nothing the latter could do would undermine the eternity of solid support guaranteed by their father's limitless fortune.

It was in the year after my debut, a time when it was generally expected that a young lady of decent looks and ample fortune should take a mate, that I learned of a third role that I was perhaps destined to play. It was Papa who revealed this to me. He did not, after all, it appeared, wish me to remain a virgin priestess at his altar. Far from it! He wished me to marry, not one of what he called "the silly fops you and your cousins play around with" or even one of the golden heirs of our circle; oh, no, he wanted me to marry a "great man," or one who bore the signs of becoming—a statesman, an ambassador, a many-starred general!

He confided in me gravely that I was the only one among his offspring who had any of his brains and talent. He described my two poor younger sisters as giddy and party-obsessed, and I have already written what he thought of Otto. He predicted that, as the partner of greatness, I could make a contribution to history and that it was a woman's only way. But wasn't he in fact preparing the sole poor candidate he had to attain the success that had consistently eluded him? Did he love me? Could he? And did I love him? Really and truly? Certainly he frightened me, but he also awed me. I had always been flattered by his attention, which made me feel pleasantly superior to my siblings. Now I began to wonder whether I was getting too much of it.

He and I had in common a love of reading; his happiest, or perhaps I should say his least frustrated, hours were spent in his dark leathery library, whose walls were covered from floor to ceiling with shelves of closely packed volumes, including the rare quartos and folios of his favorite Jacobean dramatists. He liked to read aloud to me from the latter, and, though impressed by his noble tone and theatrical emphasis, I was sometimes appalled at the blood and thunder he admired. I can still hear him in Malcolm's speech in
Macbeth.

Nay, had I power, I should
Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell,
Uproar the universal peace, confound
All unity on earth.

Was that what Papa would do if
he
were a great man? Was there a wish under all his oratory to wreak revenge on the universe? At any rate, after his first pronouncement of the desirability of my ultimate union with a gentleman of national importance, he did not mention the subject again, and I am fairly sure that he never discussed it with Mother or any of her family. I began to wonder, with some relief, whether it had been a momentary fancy on his part. I should have known better.

It was my cousin Lily Hammersly, Aunt Maud's daughter and my exact contemporary (we had "come out" together in a joint ball given by Grandpa and Grandma), who came closest to convincing me that life didn't have to be as I or even as Papa visualized it. She was considered the "belle" of the family, though her little brown pert face was not much prettier than my rather pallid blondness. But she had animation and high spirits and wit, and wasn't in the least in awe of anyone, even Grandpa, whom she dared to tease, or Papa, her uncle-in-law, who was strangely tolerant of her even when she contradicted one of his pronouncements. She regarded the older generations as obstacles that could be made to yield to cajolery, and all of the cousinage depended on her to extract permission for whatever outing or other project that, without her, might be subject to family veto.

In the first year after our coming-out, Lily's interest vested exclusively in the young men who called at our houses on afternoons when our parents received and among whom it was expected we should ultimately find a spouse. Needless to say, Lily's temperament led her to entertain highly romantic ideals, and she had little patience with the concept of an "arranged match." She also had little patience with my mild preference for Winthrop, or "Wintie," Tillinghast, who was the most assiduous of my not madly assiduous beaux.

"He's too old and too stuffy, Aggie," she insisted. "He's like Osric in
Hamlet.
He genuflected to his mother's dug before he sucked it."

Lily was not only well read; she was very free with her literary allusions. But she had a point. Wintie was certainly older; he was thirty plus to my nineteen and already established as a junior officer in the bank that handled the Thorn trusts. He was tall and perhaps too dignified, with a regular, rather immobile countenance and prematurely gray hair, but he had a surprising sense of humor and a kindly manner. He knew everybody, was well liked and a popular leader of cotillions. The Tillinghasts were not rich but were well connected, and his two elder brothers had married substantial fortunes. I classified him as the kind of man who, even if he had to marry money, would marry only a rich girl he sincerely loved. That was a distinction that most of my female cousins learned to make early. I was very fond of Wintie and tended to resent Lily's aspersions, but she did alter my vision of him.

We used sometimes to take afternoon callers next door to see Grandpa's great picture gallery, and once, when Wintie and I found ourselves alone there, we had a colloquy that irritated me.

Of course, the paintings that Grandpa so lovingly collected are all—or almost all; some of his canvases by Corot and Millais are still admired—subject to public ridicule today. They tended to be academic and what was then considered realistic: Meissonier's Napoleonic battles gleaming with brandished swords and rustling with charging horse; elegant Roman dames by Alma-Tadema gazing down at blue seas from marble balustrades; stout cardinals drinking champagne in paneled parlors by Vibert. I quite accepted the high estimate of the gallery by family and friends and took it for granted that although Leonardo and Michelangelo may have produced greater art, it was because it was locked away in museums that it had not been lured across the Atlantic by Grandpa's checkbook.