1876 (15 page)

The Delmonico family was originally from Ticino in Switzerland, and I have by now come to know well the autocrat of this dynasty, Lorenzo (the uncle of Charles), a man my age with a constant cough and wheeze made no better by the cigar that is never out of his mouth even when, most elegantly, he leads the ladies to their tables.

As we crossed the main dining room to Jamie’s special corner, Ward McAllister rose from a table, and greeted us ceremoniously.

Jamie took Emma on to our table, as McAllister whispered into my ear, breath smelling disagreeably of port. “
She
wants you for Wednesday. For dinner! You and the Princess.”

“Who?” My voice is sometimes overloud. Although my hearing is good, I am prone to the characteristic booming voice of the deaf because of the blood’s most disagreeable habit of pounding against my eardrums, deafening me.

“The Mystic Rose!” He hissed the magic phrase into my ear. “Shall I say you will accept?
She
will make the invitations. I am her scouting party, don’t you know?”

“With pleasure, of course. You are kind. So is she. I mean
she
.”
I
babbled; withdrew.

Jamie and Emma were quoting lines from the play and laughing. But when I sat down, Jamie was curious. “I didn’t know that you knew old puss.”

“It’s hard
not
to know him.” Emma answered for me.

I turned to Emma. “Apparently the Mystic Rose would like us to come for dinner on Wednesday.”

“I hope you said ‘No.’ ” Emma was superb.

“Of course I said ‘No,’ Emma, but it came out ‘Yes.’ ”

“Most awful old creature.” Jamie grimaced. “I’d stay away if I were you. Boring. Boring. Bill Astor’s not bad. But he won’t be there. Drunk all the time.”

“Stop it, Jamie!” Emma was again the Parisian schoolgirl giving sharp lessons in manners to the young barbarian from New York.

“No. I think I’ll just start it, Emma!”

We supped indiscreetly but well. The lobster salad is a specialty of the house and it is as good as any dish I’ve ever had at Paris (paprika somehow makes the difference). Canvasback duck followed, enclosed in a savory aspic. One gets this notable bird so often at important dinner parties that for the gentry it has taken the place of the American eagle. Terrapin is another Delmonico specialty that I am learning to like. But I shall never take pleasure in what everyone regards as the chef’s peculiar triumph, ice cream
with truffles
.
On the other hand, Delmonico’s produces an iced coffee that I cannot get too much of; half cream and half coffee and well sugared, the concoction is kept near-freezing until served in a frosted glass.

It is now two in the morning, and for some time the terrapin has been warring with the canvasback duck, whose eagle-like beak tears at my Promethean liver. Yet my pulse is normal and there is no pounding in my ears. Obviously Colonel Burr’s prescription for good health and a long life was right: the discharge of the seminal vesicles as often as possible. Tonight I have added at least a month to my life’s span.

Emma was taken home, and I was taken on. At first I was reluctant. “I’m much too old for this sort of thing.”

“How do you know what sort of thing I have in mind? Come on. Be a sport, Charlie.” The boy has now come to treat me as a contemporary. I suppose that I should be pleased. Certainly, I must allow him a degree of beard-tugging since yesterday’s agreement between the
Herald
and me: a thousand dollars for each piece written during the four months preceding the Republican Convention. One long article a week would mean $16,000 by the time my tenure of office ends. Not bad!

Incidentally, the
Ledger’s
version of my Empress Eug
é
nie will be published Saturday. I read the slips with some dismay. They have hacked everything about, trying to “improve” my poor work by adding a number of detailed descriptions of the Empress’s clothes in what they take to be my style. The result is horrendous, and deeply humiliating.

When I suggested that I write a companion piece on the Princess Mathilde, I was told that no one in the United States had heard of her. But
The Last Days of Napoleon III
has been accepted. The only problem is that I know nothing about the poor man’s last days except that he had a most difficult time with his prostate and bladder. I suppose I can concoct something
Ledger
-esque.
After all, I saw enough of the Emperor over the years to be able to describe, with a sob in my prose, his poignant coda.

I cannot say that the coldest night in New York’s memory is the best night to go aprowling with a man young enough to be my son but old enough not to get as drunk as Jamie does most nights. Unfortunately, my appetite had been morbidly whetted by the Five Points. I am drawn to prostitutes, obscure rooms, the rattle of ill-tuned pianos, the red-tasselled boots of “dancing female waiters,” as they are advertised in the
Herald
.
From his very own newspaper, Jamie is able to find out exactly who is where and what they are doing.

Jamie’s driver knows his master well. Without a word exchanged, he headed west across Fifth Avenue; the street was a sheet of ice. A number of sleighs were to be seen even at that late hour.

We were headed, as Jamie said, sobering up somewhat, “to the Chinese Pagoda, where they’ve got the most beautiful creatures you’ve ever looked at. They know me,” he added, as if I needed that reassurance.

We came to Sixth Avenue, which is now to New York what the Five Points used to be. In the daytime, from Fourteenth Street to Twenty-third Street, the avenue is in perpetual shadow from the Elevated Railway. At night the Elevated’s shadow makes absolutely dark the street or “jungle,” the word most used by vivid journalists. And I must say that the pillars of the Elevated do suggest sinister trees, perfect hiding places for gamblers and whores, for thieves and murderers, as well as for those who would play with them or be played by them, the victims ending, often as not, on a rag heap, to be cut up by the “street rats” who sell the remains for fat, for bone, for hair.

The street was empty, the night frosty. Our carriage clattered beneath the silent Elevated Railway. In certain windows lamps gleamed, bowls of tinted red or blue glass with the owner’s name in white,
Flora, The Pearl, Amazon
.
Thus the prostitutes advertise.

We stopped at a tenement. In the absolute darkness, there was no sign of life. We got out. The coachman addressed Jamie. “Do you have your pistol, sir?”

Jamie nodded and tapped his greatcoat. “And you?”

“Yes, sir. I’ll wait right here. The usual place.”

An alarming exchange.

Jamie rapped on the tenement’s door. A grilled window was uncovered. A murmured exchange. Then we were admitted to a loud, bright, smoky hall where a band played Offenbach as a line of girls in cancan costumes danced; each girl wore red-tasselled boots. For some reason they are
de rigueur
in this sort of place. As a means of identification? or simply some manager’s vice?

A large well-dressed ape of a man greeted us warmly; addressed Jamie cryptically, “Pearls but not diamonds. Rubies possible. This way, gentlemen.” He led us to a plain wood stairway at the back. Feeling most uneasy, I followed them upstairs to a long corridor with a series of doors at close intervals on either side.

Our guide opened one of the doors and ushered us into a box from which we could observe everything that went on below from behind a dusty velvet curtain.

“Just give me the eye, Mr. Bennett. I’ll be down there.” The man pointed to a place near the stage where the girls were dancing; and left us.

“Well, Charlie, what do you think?” Jamie’s drunkenness comes and goes; just as his speech becomes slurred and incoherent and the body starts to sag and be ill-coordinated, he will suddenly pull himself together, force the alcohol from his brain and appear for a time to be sober. The cold journey from the theatre had no doubt cleared the head which now he proceeded again to muddle with champagne from a cooler.

“Very elaborate,” I said neutrally. “Nothing like it when I was young and living here.” I must stop referring to my great age and how far back I go in time. After all, I must still convince publishers that I have the strength to drive pen efficiently across paper.

I looked down at the dancers below. Not at the girls on the stage but at the girls who were dancing with the rough sorts: fresh-looking young women despite painted faces.

At the end of the room farthest from the stage was a long, crowded bar.

“Expensive place, the Chinese Pagoda. Not that there’s anything Chinese about it. They don’t let just anybody in either. You’ve got to be a proper rake like me or a successful murderer for hire like Iron-man down there.” He pointed to the bar, where there were at least twenty candidates for Iron-man.

“Now if you see anything you like, it’s on me.” Jamie waved graciously at the crowd beneath us.

“I fear ...” Oh, I feared at Polonian length. Actually, despite the heavy dinner, I was slowly getting into the mood of the place. For the first time, let me confess shamefully (an adverb invariably chosen to please lady readers, but men—if any read—may substitute for “shamefully” “delightedly”), I felt that I was again in
my
New York, the world of the Five Points of forty years ago when Leggett and I would prowl like figures from the
Arabian Nights
, getting to know the good brothels of the region as now I am obliged to learn the Cabinet of General Grant, the legal victories of Governor Tilden.

A waiter-girl came to see if we wanted anything. Blond, blue-eyed and but recently from the country, she seemed terrified (did Jamie prefer the frightened “virginal type”?). “Another bottle, Polly. You are Polly?”

“Dolly, sir.”

“The same! And more of the same.” She took the bottle. “And my love to Polly, Dolly.”

Jamie roared at his own wit and then said, suddenly, most seriously, “There was a safe out there, you know, filled with all sorts of incriminating documents. They broke into it.”

“What, dear boy, are you talking about?”

“General Babcock. I’ll send you my notes tomorrow. All very secret. Even the grand jury doesn’t know the whole story but I do.”

“Babcock himself tried to open the safe?”

“He and his friends in the whisky ring have stolen close to ten million dollars. He got his cut, of course. Oh, he’s in up to the eyeballs.” Jamie was drifting off: the sharpness of his first remarks was now succeeded by a slurring of words if not of thoughts.

“The safe, what about the safe?”

“Oh.” This brought him to. “Babcock used Secret Service men to break it open.”

“But that’s illegal!” was the stupidity that came from me. The band was now playing Mexican music.

“Oh, yes! Very illegal. And that’s the angle we want to play up. President’s private secretary uses members of the Secret Service to burglarize a safe. If that don’t touch Grant, nothing will.”

Directly beneath us a dark girl was dancing on a table. Jamie whistled appreciatively. “Do you like that, Charlie?”

I could no longer maintain the Polonius rôle. “Yes,” I said, “very much.”

“It’s done.”

And indeed it was done. Each of the doors on the opposite side of the corridor opened into a small bedroom. I found myself not only nervous as a boy but as abashed as anyone over sixty, overweight, overtired, is bound to be when confronted with a vivid black Irish girl, with gentian-blue eyes and a full, very full, figure.

“Well, you’re quite the gent, I see.” She gave me a smile as she started to remove her blouse. “So ring for some champagne, will you? Not for me, mind you, but Mr. Horner gets angry as can be if we don’t sell the client at least one bottle of his homemade champagne. The bell’s just there. Oh, these boots are killing me.”

I rang for the champagne, which arrived an instant later. The old Negro waiter opened the bottle with a certain flair. I tipped him fifty cents (Jamie had instructed me in prices as well as in protocol. The girl was to get twenty dollars for which “she’ll do
anything
, Charlie!”).

“Anything” proved to be not much of anything except that at my age the elemental ritual must be conducted with a slowness that in my youth would have been unthinkable. Fortunately, I have not the slightest inclination to brood over my youth, since poor young Charlie Schuyler is as dead as can be, buried beneath this heavy earth-falling flesh that I with such effort still manage to animate and keep from gravity’s final tug and fall, into earth.

As Cathleen—her name—helped me dress, we spoke comfortably of this and that. Like so many girls in her situation, she dreams one day of owning a shop (the young Charlie once tried to set up such a girl as a dressmaker; and terribly failed).

“But you have to be practical and money’s scarce these days. And I’ve hardly a penny now to go see the elephant.” (Whatever that means ... the zoo?) “I had saved more than a thousand dollars, you know, and lost it all when Jay Cooke failed in ’73.”

I burst out laughing, and was not, amazingly, short of breath. “Why, I was caught, too! And wiped out. Just like you.”

“Poor soul!” We commiserated with one another. I found her extremely knowledgeable on finance. More so than I. But then, regularly, she sees a banker who is currently enthusiastic about a certain Ohio railroad stock.

She congratulated me on my prowess. Apparently, “Half the gentlemen still haven’t recovered from the Panic.”

“You mean their—uh, sexual performance is affected?”

“Something tragical. They try. I try. We try. But it’s no good when you’ve lost all that money. I do pity men, sometimes.”

Jamie was already downstairs waiting for me at the bar. Feeling uncommonly pleased with myself and with the fact that I was not in the least short of breath, I started down the narrow stairway only to come face to face with a ghastly creature from the past, William de La Touche Clancey. He is as hideous as ever, face now marked with the sort of distressing eczema that sometimes afflicts those suffering from tertiary syphilis. With him was a forlorn olive-skinned youth, Turkish or Hebrew, obviously well-muscled and eager—no, desperate—for Clancey’s money because only someone starving would rent himself to a creature so plainly diseased.