Nothing Daunted (10 page)

For young women, the principal diversions were luncheons, afternoon teas, the annual charity ball at the Armory, and dances every Saturday in June and July at the Owasco Country Club, where they were vigilantly chaperoned by parents. Dorothy and Ros went to their luncheons in the prescribed evening coats, dresses of broadcloth or satin, and large picture hats with plumes and flowers. The hostess’s dining room always contained vases of freshly cut flowers, and the table was set with heavy damask, long rows of monogrammed silver, fine china, and crystal. Etched finger bowls were presented on dessert plates before the final course, with a flower petal or a slice of lemon floating in the water. Sometimes people who were new to such occasions picked up the bowl and drank from it.

French food was in fashion, and the cooks in Auburn’s kitchens sometimes turned for guidance on formal entertaining to
The Epicurean,
a Franco-American culinary encyclopedia by Charles Ranhofer, the former chef at Delmonico’s in New York. Dorothy’s favorite part of these meals was dessert, and she was especially fond of Baked Alaska. William Seward had bought the territory of Alaska from the Russian empire in 1867, to widespread ridicule.
Seward, though, was a loyal patron of Delmonico’s
, and Ranhofer commemorated the occasion by creating a variation on a dessert of hot pastry filled with ice cream that Thomas Jefferson had eaten at the White House. Ranhofer’s version, which he called Alaska, Florida, involved hollowed-out Savoy biscuits, apricot marmalade, banana and vanilla ice cream, and meringue.
The incomprehensible instructions
in
The Epicurean
conclude: “A few moments before serving place each biscuit with its ice on a small lace paper, and cover one after the other with the meringue pushed through a pocket furnished with a channeled socket, beginning at the bottom and diminishing the thickness until the top is reached; color this meringue for two minutes in a hot oven, and when a light golden brown remove and serve at once.” In the accompanying illustration, it looks like a dunce’s cap, but perhaps it was meant to resemble an iceberg rising from the ocean.

Arriving at one Wadsworth event, Dorothy and Ros decided
to gauge how much they consumed. There was a bathroom off the bedroom upstairs where the guests left their coats and hats, and they got on the scale before they went down to join the other guests. After the epic meal, they weighed in again, and according to the scale—and Dorothy’s memory—together they had gained four pounds. “I don’t know why we weren’t all big as houses,” she said.

They were soon ready for a change. At their first Smith reunion, they learned that many of their classmates had married, and a few arrived with baby carriages. Several had begun teaching or had gone into nursing—two of the few careers open to women; social work was just getting started as a profession. “None of those appealed to either Ros or me,” Dorothy said. There was only one other avenue of escape available to unmarried, well-educated women. They conspired to spend a year in Europe, accompanied in the initial months by Ros’s family. After their travels, they would live in Paris on their own, perfecting their French and broadening their cultural sensibilities. Ros persuaded her parents to take them, and Dorothy announced to her mother and father, “I am just going, and that is all there is to it.”

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On the morning of June 18, 1910, the low, echoing horn of the S.S.
Lapland
sounded as the ocean liner glided out of New York Harbor, on its way to Dover and Antwerp. Dorothy and Ros were on board, accompanied by Ros’s parents; Mrs. Brookfield, an elderly cousin from Manhattan; and Ros’s fifteen-year-old brother, Arthur. “He was . . . very much bored with us and we certainly were bored with him,” Dorothy remarked. The two girls rushed to claim their deck chairs, which were in a secluded section in first class. There was a strong wind blowing, and Dorothy put on a heavy coat over her suit. Before long she noticed an acquaintance from Auburn whom she hadn’t seen in years. The girl, dressed in deep mourning, was alone in the world with the exception of a brother she was traveling with. Dorothy was sorry
about her loss but commented, “She has been abroad so much that she is very blasé, and it makes me tired.”

After lunch, they made a dive for their stateroom, and, Dorothy wrote to her family, “It was more exciting than any Christmas, opening all the things.” Friends and family had sent a tremendous box of fruit, enough candy to make them ill, and more than a dozen books, including new novels by G. K. Chesterton and Mrs. Humphry Ward, a popular English novelist who was a good friend of Henry James. Dorothy’s favorite gift was a bottle labeled “Sure cure for homesickness,” which contained a furled silk American flag. Mrs. Brookfield, who had made the crossing many times, had brought along a selection of new magazines that she shared with them. Far less austere than she looked, she was a generous and humorous companion.

Both girls suffered from seasickness the first several days and treated themselves to a simple breakfast in bed. Occasionally, the boat rolled so deeply that they felt as though the deck would touch the water. Mrs. Brookfield made them coffee each morning, another indulgence from home. They spent the time lounging and reading belowdecks, but they soon recovered and made up for their days of fasting by eating lobster and roast grouse.

Although transatlantic journeys in first class were considered an opportunity to mingle respectably with single men, the S.S.
Lapland
was disappointing in that regard. Dorothy and Ros played shuffleboard with a doctor from Washington who took off his coat when the day was warm but fussily kept his gloves on. At a dance one night on deck, there was a “scarcity of swains,” and even a boy of sixteen deserted them, which left only Arthur and the doctor. “There were a few clouds,” Dorothy wrote, “behind which you could see the moon, and it would cast a beautiful light on the water, and then it would break through entirely. . . . It is too bad we lacked the necessary adjuncts for such a romantic setting, but even so, we stayed up until 11:30.”

The passage was eight days, with little to distinguish among them: “walk, write, read, talk, play shuffleboard—eat, and then begin all
over again.” One morning Dorothy woke up to see the bath steward standing in the middle of their room, bellowing, “ ‘Bath, ladies!’ with the most wearied look on his face, and goodness only knows how long he had been standing there. . . . He is the funniest little man, in absolutely skintight white clothes, and I wonder if he ever sits down.”

From their deck chairs, they watched the whitecaps and the passing clouds, a lulling sight enlivened now and then by a breaching whale. Their best diversion was spying on a tall, dark-haired beauty who was traveling incognito. She sat alone not far from them and “affects the simple athletic style of dress,” Dorothy wrote, “wearing a Panama plain suit, and rubber shoes.” She was Miss Katherine Elkins of West Virginia, the daughter of a former senator and secretary of war, who had been carrying on a long-standing romance with Prince Luigi Amedeo, Duke of the Abruzzi. At the same time, William Hitt, the son of a former congressman from Illinois, was wooing her.

Newspapers in the United States and Europe had been breathlessly following her story for years; it included trysts in London and Lugano. A couple of months after the S.S.
Lapland
docked,
Miss Elkins was reported to be in Vichy
, where her mother was “taking the cure,” and she remained in seclusion. The romance with the duke was finally broken off, at the insistence of the royal family, and she married Hitt in 1913. It was the culmination, the
New York Times
reported, “of a courtship the equal of which for romantic features it would be hard to find a parallel for in these matter-of-fact days outside of the covers of a novel.”

As the boat drew close to Dover, it was joined by other steamers and flocks of seagulls. Dorothy and the Underwoods got up early to watch the docking and to see off the departing passengers. “The chalk cliffs were so very white,” Dorothy wrote to her mother, “with the bright green fields coming to the very edge—and I loved the old fortresses. We weren’t there long, but I saw my first comic opera Englishman—with pale blue spats and a monocle.” After the boat pushed off again, she and Ros and Arthur spent the day running from one side of the deck to the other, trying not to miss anything. As they turned up
the Scheldt River at Flushing, a picture-book village appeared, with bright-red gabled roofs. “All of Holland which we saw was just the same,” Dorothy wrote, “so painfully neat and regular—and even the cows were spotless.”

In Antwerp, she and Ros spent their first morning at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts, and Dorothy delivered her opinion about the collection to her mother: “I don’t like Rubens’ pictures—they are too spectacular, and his women are nothing short of beefy, but I liked the portraits, and I simply fell in love with the cunning little Dutch scenes from the little Dutch masters. But the old, historical scenes of Antwerp in the Middle Ages were killing, they were so out of proportion and no perspective, but they give a fine idea of the times.”

The next day they woke up to a heavy rain but set out with Arthur for the zoological gardens and the Gothic Church of St. Jacques, tracing their way with their Baedeker. Tired and hungry after examining the cathedral, they decided to stop for a simple lunch. They went to the Hotel St. Antoine, where they ordered lobster, potatoes, and lettuce “and had a fine meal,” Dorothy reported, “dining—as Papa said—not feeding.” Then they were presented with the bill: seventeen francs (a reasonable seventy dollars a hundred years later). “We slunk away, feeling that we had been very gullible.” As they made their way back to their hotel, Arthur kept pointing out that it cost more than their ten-course dinner the night before.

After touring Holland, they settled in for a long stay in the Dolomites, where the girls played tennis and hiked with Arthur and Mr. Underwood. In Cortina, near the Austrian border, Dorothy wrote a long, chatty letter to her sister Anna, exclaiming over a succession of Auburn weddings: “It does seem as though all my friends were getting married.” She conveyed the beauty of the mountains and dwelled at length on the other guests at the hotel, mostly English and Italian, “with a few French & German scattered in.” She could be a merciless observer and was quick to confirm national stereotypes: “The English people amuse me a great deal—for they are so like the books you read about them, that it is too good to be true. Every woman we have seen
has her skirt sagging behind, and short in front. . . . They chirp up a lot at night, however, and are so much better looking that you can hardly believe they are the same people.”

From Italy they went to Germany, then Switzerland, and one day Dorothy and Ros rode the funicular in Zermatt. They positioned themselves in the front, for the best view. Just before the car began to move, Dorothy said, “in stepped a perfectly enormous German.” He had a big rucksack on his back and was wearing high hiking boots. The girls had on their own space-consuming attire, including their wide blue “merry widow” hats with tall feathers. “He pushed me over against Ros, and if the door hadn’t been locked she would have fallen out.” Dorothy politely told him in German that the space was not really large enough for three of them, and asked if he would kindly move. He stared straight ahead, ignoring her. Rosamond, who spoke the language flawlessly, reiterated Dorothy’s request, adding that it really was very crowded. This, too, was met with impervious silence. “We were good and mad,” Dorothy said. She spitefully stepped on the man’s foot, but he stood his ground. Tempted to poke him with one of her long hatpins, she concluded that it would have no effect, so they removed their hats and had “a most uncomfortable trip up that mountain.”

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In early September 1910, they arrived in Paris, where Ros’s mother helped them get settled. Before her parents returned to Auburn, her father took them and Arthur to the Paris Opera to see twenty-year-old Nijinsky in
Scheherazade,
which was being performed that season by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes—perhaps the most influential ballet the company ever produced. Some of their friends had already been four times to see “the Russian dancers,” as Dorothy referred to them. They were “the sensation of Paris.” She liked the intricate toe dancing and Nijinsky’s fantastic leaps, but she took particular notice of the exotic sets and costumes, designed by Léon Bakst. Nijinsky,
clad in jewel-encrusted gold harem pants and a gold bra, played the Golden Slave, the lover of the Shah’s favorite concubine, Zobeide. The sensuous Ida Rubinstein, who played Zobeide, wore her own harem pants, her torso and legs looped with pearls. In the middle of the ballet, the women bribe a eunuch to release the slaves, and stylized lovemaking ensues. It was a world away from Auburn’s Burtis Opera House. “The whole thing was like a scene from the Arabian Nights,” Dorothy wrote to Milly, only partly aware of what she was watching. Thinking back on it, she said that she and Ros were mystified when Mr. Underwood announced halfway through the ballet that he was taking them back to the hotel. They eventually overrode his concerns and stayed until the end. Even as an older woman, she was perplexed. “Something must have seemed indecent to him,” she said, “but I can’t imagine what it was.”

Dorothy and Ros lived for a brief time in a dark, narrow house at 5 Avenue de la Bourdonnais, the finishing school a block from the Seine where they studied French. The walls of the drawing room were crowded with prints and paintings in ornate gold frames. Mme Rey, who ran the school, was “an aristocrat to her fingertips,” Dorothy told her mother. She later described Madame as always wearing black dresses that had very high collars with little bones in them. The girls were more serious about their studies than they had been at Smith. Mme Rey had high expectations, and provided them with demanding teachers whom they described as the best in Paris. At the same time, they found “Madame” simple and kind, and she prepared delicious meals, especially on Sundays, when she served Parisian specialties like chestnut soufflé, which the girls considered “food for the gods.”