1876 (13 page)

“Or cared for.”

“Your people, Papa, are not kind.”

To this harsh judgment, there is no answer.

My good luck continues. When we came back to the hotel, there was a telegram from Governor Tilden. Might I join him for dinner at 15 Gramercy Park on Christmas Eve? I accepted by telegraph. There was also an invitation for Emma and me to attend the theatre with Jamie Bennett. Accepted.

Whilst Emma changed her clothes for a ladies’ lunch at Mrs. Mary Mason Jones’s, a pageboy arrived at the door with an elaborate floral creation of orchids.

I placed this beautiful tribute on the round marble table at the parlour’s centre and then, idly, opened the attached envelope and read the enclosed card: “Pale shadows of true beauty,” was the inspired message written in an odd loopy sort of hand. The signature gave me a turn: “William Sanford.”

At that moment Emma came into the parlour, wearing a scarf she had bought that morning.

“C’est beau, n’est-ce pas, Papa?”
She looked at the orchids. I gave her the card.

“I’m sorry, I opened it.”

Emma did not look at the card. “Very vulgar ... the orchids, Papa. Every bit as vulgar as Mr. Sanford.”

“You knew he sent them?” In a sense I was relieved.

“Who else?” Without a glance she threw the card into the fire.

“He’s very bold. He knows that you’re practically engaged to John. I told him.”

“Am I ... engaged?” As well as I know my daughter, there are times when I feel that she is far beyond me in her perception of things, and that she weighs with an entirely different set of balances the common morality.

I had not yet told her of last night’s conversation in the bar. Now I did. She listened attentively, then burst out laughing. “Poor Papa! You of all people having to say those things!”

I laughed, too: we are as one in our sense of the absurd. I agreed that I was to be pitied. Having spent my life mastering the intricacies of the French platitude, I now must sink beneath the accumulated weight of the American.

“I can never think of this place as your country.” Emma examined the orchids; she knows flowers; used to advise the Princess Mathilde on what to grow in her conservatories before the war ...
before the war
, that phrase sums up our Eden, an entire world forever gone, and only five years ago.

“You don’t like your father’s city?”

“If you do, I do.” That was mischievous.

“Well, it’s only for a short time.”

“Until I am married?” From her voice I could not guess her mood. I suspect that this is because we now speak only English to each other and in English she is someone else, as I am. Languages do bend one morally to their grammatical requirements.

“Until I get my post as minister to France
if
I get it.” I then shifted to French and that made for our old intimacy. “Do you want to marry John?”

“If you want me to.”

“No. Never like that, my girl. You make your own choice.”

“But you would like it?”

“He is suitable.”

“Suitable!” This caused a change of colour—good! She is a Latin woman in French, and I am at home with her: her father, in fact.

“The Apgars are ...”

“Magnificent! I know. They tell me that every day. And Sister Faith! She thinks she is the equal of a Daughter of France!”

“There is money.” I was to the point.

She was, too. “But how much?”

“I should think, in time, a lot.”

“Can
you
see me living here?”

Tears came to my eyes most unexpectedly. “I should not want you ever to be at any distance from me now.” I did not need to say the rest. Of all living creatures, only the man of letters knows that he must die.

“John wants to announce the engagement at the New Year’s.” As Emma pulled on mauve gloves, she looked at herself in the pier-glass mirror whose scrollwork walnut magnificence mars the parlour of our suite rather than furnishes one of the bedrooms. I must remember to have the valet move it.

“An engagement can always be broken ...” I began, not certain of how the sentence was to run either on my tongue or in my head. Since I am truly undecided, I did not finish. Instead I picked up the envelope from Sanford and from habit felt its surface. The type was expensively raised.

“Not easily. Not here. Not in the land of the Apgars.” Emma knows the country already, better than I. She should be the one recording this world, for she really
sees
it whilst I see only the two of us, struggling to survive.

“He did mention the possibility of one day living in France.” But this was weak and I knew it.

“They’ll never let him go. Well”—Emma picked up her mother’s still-splendid sable coat—“we shall be engaged at the New Year. I think that’s best.”

“And married in June?”

“At Grace Church. Where else?” Emma smiled, and the dark hazel eyes reminded me poignantly of Aaron Burr’s most beautiful luminous all-seeing eyes. “From the New Year to June is a long time.”

“Thank heaven. What do you think of him?” I was still holding in my hand William Sanford’s envelope.

“I think he is singularly brutal and wild”—she used the word
sauvage
—“and overconfident.”

I did not understand. “John is none of these things.”

Emma watched herself look startled in the mirror. “I thought you meant the unspeakable Mr. Sanford.”

“No. No. Even for an American millionaire his manners are not supportable. I meant John.”

“Oh, John ...” She spoke on exhalation. “Well, he’ll be what he seems. That is something. Certainly, after Henri ...”

“John is not half bad?”

“No. Not half bad.”

“But not half good?”

“Papa, I am thirty-five years old, and there is very little choice and very little time left for me.” And that was that. I have always admired the hard French practicality even when it chills me to the bone. Emma kissed my cheek and left me; her violet scent still fills the room.

THE DAYS RUSHED BY in a constant and tiring round of encounters, mostly social. According to the popular press—of which there is altogether too much—the glamourous Princess d’Agrigente is the sensation of the New York season; and it is coyly hinted that she may soon make a marriage here in “Old Gotham” to a member of the “Knickerbockracy.” The style is hideously imitable.

Not so coyly, the Apgars were told that Emma’s mission on this planet would be fulfilled in June. Thanks to their kind encouragement, she told them that she is now willing to surrender the eminence of her tinselly old-world highness for the dim but oh so pregnant with distinction and true worth title of Mrs. John Day Apgar.

Sister Faith looked as if she might faint with the joy of having such a sister-in-law, whilst the Third Brother Apgar was quietly pleased and assured me, man to man, over one of his stale Park and Tilford cigars that the marriage has, as of this moment, the blessing of a two-thirds majority of the Nine Brothers. The dissenters were troubled by Emma’s religion, and by
Paris
.
“But they’ll come round, on New Year’s Day, when we make our announcement.” Meanwhile, for the next week or two, the secret is known to all but not to be discussed in front of any of the principals.

Since receiving the money from Mr. Bonner of the
Ledger
I no longer wake up in the middle of the night, unable to get my breath as I wonder desperately how I am to support us. Yet even with the
Ledger’s
money, dollars do seem to melt as rapidly in this city as last night’s snow.

It is now decided that we shall go to Washington City on February 15, when I begin for the
Herald
my “observations” (a good word for what I shall be doing and one that Jamie says he likes).

Mrs. Paran Stevens has given us letters to twenty intimates we must know. We are still undecided whether or not to let a house for the two or three months we shall be in the city, or simply stay at a hotel. I incline toward hotel life, as it gives one an excuse
not
to reciprocate the many kind invitations we mean to accept.

Today has been as full as all my other days. I lose Emma to the Apgars at noon. Then I lunch, usually at an oyster bar. These charming places are to be found in cellars; from the street, they are identified by a striped red and white pole with a large globe on top.

But today I had to forgo the oyster bars and have lunch with Richard Watson Gilder—at a restaurant. I firmly refused to dine with him at his house for fear of his sister. A manly girl, Jeanette is devoted to literature and has views on everything; no sooner does she ask you a question than she answers it. Gilder’s wife is charming, but she is usually painting in her studio at the lunch hour. I also refused to be taken yet again to either the Century Club or the Lotos Club. One meets altogether too many writers at those places, and not enough publishers.

I did give my promised talk at the Lotos Club last Saturday. Everyone seemed most pleased by my comments on France since the fall of the Empire, but there was no interest at all in the French writers.

I met Gilder at a French restaurant reputed to be good, on Fourteenth Street just across from the imposing Steinway Hall, where orchestras play and lecturers bray. I believe that Charles Dickens inaugurated the Hall on one of his visits.

Mother Linau’s is a most congenial restaurant, and though perhaps too self-consciously Bohemian (the clientele,
not
the waiters and cooks), I quite enjoyed our lunch. I even enjoyed the company of Gilder who is most likeable, despite a relentless desire to get ahead in the literary world that makes me uneasy. I see him because he is the editor of
Scribner’s Monthly
and likes to publish me. He sees me because he has developed some sort of a passion for my—exotic-ness?

“You are so much an American writer always and yet so foreign!” The face opposite me looked pleased through the rising mist from the excellent hot bean soup.

Happily, at Madame Linau’s, there are small tables as well as the institutional-type long tables that Americans are devoted to. Even at the Fifth Avenue Hotel one must dine at a table set for thirty and, worse, often occupied with as many strangers. Democracy.

I have told the munificent Mr. Bonner that I might do him a piece on New York’s restaurants. “Make it
Paris
restaurants, and I’ll buy!” Someone at the Lotos Club told me that Bonner paid Bryant five thousand dollars for some limp verses on the death of Lincoln. For that amount even I would turn poet, and on any subject.

“I don’t feel in the least foreign,” I lied to Gilder, enjoying the bean soup, which I liberally seasoned with vinegar. “In fact, this is like old times. We could be in the Shakespeare Tavern.” Gilder looked puzzled. I told him how literary and theatrical New Yorkers of the thirties used to gather in that pleasant place, long since torn down and forgotten. He hungers for memories of Irving, Halleck, Cooper. I do my best to amuse him.

“I suppose in those days there was more fraternity amongst our literary men than now.” Gilder is younger than Emma, it suddenly occurs to me.

“We did not really think of ourselves as ‘literary.’ Writing was something any educated man might try his hand at for the amusement of himself, of his friends. If one was poor—like me or Mr. Bryant—why, we wrote for newspapers, often under pseudonyms because we didn’t want to embarrass our friends.”

“Our literature is a battlefield now. Mr. Schuyler.” Gilder looked stricken. “It is a war to the very knife between the realists, as they like to call themselves, and the writers of good taste—like you, like Mr. Bryant.”

I did not enjoy the joint wreath so sweetly offered, but left it unremarked. After all, my interest in these urgent literary matters is slight. As long as I don’t have to read all these great new writers, I am willing to praise or condemn them as the occasion demands.

The citadel of realism is the
Atlantic Monthly
, published at Boston by a Middle-Westerner named Howells, an engaging if somewhat too literary man whom I met years ago in Venice, where he was the very young American consul—his reward for having written an exultant campaign biography of President Lincoln.

Note: remind Mr. Dutton that I am in a position to write a similar biography of Governor Tilden. Bigelow and I have corresponded on the matter and though he is the logical choice for such a work, he will be too busy with the campaign “and think you the best of all people to present the Governor to that small part of the electorate able to read.”

Howells publishes realistic stories in the French manner as well as lively stories of the Far West, currently the most popular genre. In fact, if one is not a Westerner (or cannot write like one), the door of true success hereabouts is at best only half ajar. At the other end of the literary spectrum are the polite journals for which I write, including the one edited by Gilder.

“We must never forget,” said Gilder loudly, perhaps suspecting that I was already beginning to forget what he was about to say even as it was being said, “that our audience is made up almost entirely of the ladies. Bless them!”

I blessed them through a chunk of decent French bread.

“That’s why Howells and the
Atlantic
are losing circulation,” he continued. “Because they insist on shocking or, worse, boring the ladies.”

“Then our reading ladies must be as easily shocked as they are boring.” Alas, I had said exactly what I meant instead of what I had only meant to say.

But like most people, Gilder heard what he expected to hear. “I don’t always agree with Stedman, say, or some of our other friends at where the line should be drawn. As rough and—well,
shocking
—as Mark Twain can be, I think him a very
moral
man and a good influence.”

“I think him the most contemptible music-hall performer that ever pandered to an audience of ignorant yahoos.” I do detest Mark Twain, and several weeks of having to hold my peace on the subject caused me uncharacteristically to explode.

Gilder was not as astonished as I would have thought. “Of course, Twain is a sort of god in these parts,” he observed mildly.

“Particularly amongst those who do not read.” The fit was upon me. “He is what he is, isn’t he?” For some years Twain has been lecturing around the world, telling interminable jokes and tall tales like another Davy Crockett. Unhappily, I doubt that I shall live long enough to see him duly installed at
his
Alamo.