1876 (43 page)

John’s response was swift and, to a point, heartening. “I would like nothing better. And I’ve told Emma that repeatedly.” I find it curious that Emma has never said a word of this to me. She has remarked, from time to time, that it might be possible one day to persuade John to come to Europe, but she has never told me that he is actually
eager
to make the move.

“But your family ...” No need to finish that sentence.

“My family would survive.” This was very dry; and rather disloyal to the Gens Apgar. “But it would take some arranging. I would have to separate my share of the estate from that of the Brothers. I would also have to find employment.”

“But surely the estate is sufficient?” I shall soon be like one of those Americans who goes about asking everyone how much money he has.

John ever so slightly winced at my crudeness. “I mean, sir, I cannot be idle. I must practise law or do something useful.”

“Of course. Of course.” I was encouraging, spoke of various American and English law firms with offices in Paris.

John interrupted me. “I know, sir. I have even made inquiries. But when I talk about all this in any detail, Emma seems not to be interested.”

“But I assure you, she is!”

“That’s not my impression. She is—I don’t know. Drifting out to sea, as they say.” And confirming the metaphor physically, he hurled a piece of juniper wood toward the rocks. It vanished in the foam of a breaking wave.

Somewhat alarmed, I did and said all that I could to reassure him. I think I succeeded. At least he was more cheerful as we made our way back to the picnic, to the music, to the champagne, to Ward McAllister’s excited anecdotes of the various great personages he has peeped at. Apparently, he once was allowed to watch, from a pantry at Windsor, Queen Victoria’s private dinner table being set.

I had it out with Emma after dinner. Denise did not join us; sent word that she had had too much sun and picnic. So we dined
à
trois
in the cavernous dining room.

After dinner we went into the drawing room and Emma played Offenbach while John and I smoked cigars (we had been given dispensation by Denise). Then John went to bed early. Tomorrow he goes to Providence to do business, even though it is a Sunday. Emma and Denise will, as usual, go to early mass while I, as usual, lie in bed until noon.

When John had gone, I told Emma of our conversation at the rocks. She listened intently, still seated at the piano. Finally, she sighed and said, “Well, is he right? Am I drifting away?”

“You must tell me.”

Emma did scales. Not my favourite sound. “No.” She spoke very precisely. “I feel the same way about this marriage as I did when it was first proposed.”

“Perhaps
that
is what John fears.”

Emma glanced at me, with half a smile and half a frown. “I keep my bargain, Papa.” She shifted to her native language, where she is entirely at ease with every nuance and where I am at ease but doomed to a slow decorous correctness, unlike my conversation—and behaviour—in English.

“What have you done, to make him uneasy?”

Emma struck chords. “It is probably what I’ve
not
done. In affairs like this, there is supposed to be some sort of progress. Well, he has moved and I have not. I’ve stayed the same, from the beginning.”

“All things considered, that is not abnormal. But he is more intelligent than we think.”

“Oh, Papa! Of course he is. And I’m not intelligent at all, as you must’ve noticed in our thirty-five years together.”

“Thirty-two,
ch
é
rie
!”
That is the age we have agreed is most plausible, given the accursedly premature moustache of my oldest grandson. “And you are as intelligent as a doting father who was himself—” I was going to say “son to a doting father,” meaning Colonel Burr, but stopped, for she still thinks me the son of James Schuyler, the cuckolded tavern keeper of Greenwich Village.

Emma had just begun a new set of scales when Denise’s maid entered—a thick-boned, good-hearted woman from the Auvergne. She was very red in the face and out of breath. “It’s Madame. She wants you. She’s not well.”

Emma hurried after the maid, and I sat alone in that dim summery drawing room and wondered how and by what route I have come to be who I am, old, derelict, unreal to myself, a victim of the sheer incomprehensible randomness of living, and of the atrocious running out of time. Why am I I, and not another? Young, not old? Or unborn, rather than (result of a most random conjoining) made flesh and deposited in a hard world, to flourish, mate, and now presently to die.

This sombre train of thought was made even worse by Emma’s visit to me here in my room half an hour ago. She told me that Denise’s doctor had come and gone.

“What is it?” I asked. “What’s wrong with her?”

Emma looked weary. She has been with Denise since dinner and it is now midnight. “She’s pregnant, Papa.”

I felt my own stomach contract, as if in sympathy. “But I thought she could not have a child, ever.”

“So did she. So did everyone. But Madame Restell ... You know who I mean?”

“Yes, my dear. I have even met the infamous lady.”

“Well, Madame Restell says that with proper rest, and a new concoction—to be taken every day, to relax the muscles, or whatever—Denise can have a normal childbirth.”

“Then what was the trouble just now?”

Emma shrugged. “It’s the third month. Her responses are normal. She felt ill. Some nausea ... You don’t really want to know all the secrets of our maternal art, do you?”

“No. Spare me the details. But if everything is so normal, why the doctor tonight?”

“Because she’s easily frightened. And more than anything,
that
could make the birth difficult. Anyway, I trust Madame Restell, and so does Denise.”

“How curious that Denise would want a child. She told me in New York how pleased she was not to be like the other ladies.”

“When she said that, she was making the best of it. She has always wanted a child. After all, she’s a
good
Catholic, not like us. Be fruitful, multiply. She is being obedient and very happy.”

“POLO,” SAID JAMIE, mopping his sweaty face with a towel, “is perhaps the oldest game in the world. And thanks to me, as you can see, it’s on its way to being the most popular American sport.”

“Popular?” I indicated the thirty or forty bewildered spectators, most if not all of them related to the players on the green meadow at the edge of the Central Park.

“Don’t worry. The
Herald
will make it popular.” Jamie was his usual airy self. We were seated beneath a shady tree. Today the weather had been formidably hot, and both horses and riders looked exhausted. For the last two years polo has been the rage in England. Not to be outdone by our—by
his
—British cousins, Jamie has now formed his own club, and a number of young men have taken to the game. Mounted on horses, the players try to hit a small wooden ball with a long mallet. Like so many games, polo is more amusing to play than to watch.

Between matches, we were able to do a little business.

“You are missed at the
Herald
.”
Jamie looked at me accusingly. I looked at him most innocently, rather struck by the trimness of his figure considering the amount of absinthe he daily pours into it. “Nothing from Schuyler in July. Nothing in August. Next week it’s September. A new season.”

“But what is there
new
to write about? I mean politically. No one seems very interested in either candidate.” This is true, and I find it astonishing, considering the issues involved. Yet all summer long the country has been entirely preoccupied with the Centennial Exhibition, with sewing machines, Japanese vases, popped corn, typewriters and telephones, not to mention incessant praise for those paladins who created this perfect nation, this envied Eden, exactly one century ago.

“Things will heat up, Charlie, and you’re the man to do the heating.”

“No, Jamie. Nordhoff heats the pot, which I simply stir from time to time.”

“That’s all right, too.” He gave me a passing grade for this conceit. “Zach. Chandler has ordered the Interior Department to investigate Tilden’s taxes. Back in ’62, during the worst of the war, Tilden said that his income for the year was only seven thousand dollars. Actually, it was more than a hundred thousand.”

“I should think that by
not
paying the infamous tax on income, Tilden would be something of a hero.”

“Boys in blue,” said Jamie, combing his moustache with his fingers. “Union in peril. Slaves to be freed. Every dollar needed. Patriotic duty. Down with Copperhead Democrats. Oh,
The New York Times
is getting ready to pour it on. There is no crime their editors would not commit to help the Republican party.”

“I don’t think that I can be lyric on the subject of taxes not paid.”

“There’s good stuff assembled. And something very sweet about Hayes.” Jamie looked suddenly happy. “Some years ago he shot his mother with a pistol, in a sudden fit of insanity.”

“This need not make him unpopular.” I thought Jamie was joking. But apparently he was repeating the latest rumour to make the rounds.

All in all, I do not think that democracy, as practised in these states, is a success. While Tilden grimly, laboriously presents to the people his plans to reform what is, probably, the most corrupt society in the Western world, the press is busy with idiotic irrelevancies about Tilden’s alleged drunkenness, syphilis, closeness to Tweed—all set to music in a pretty song called “Sly Sam, the Railroad Thief.”

Hayes’s taxes are also under review, since he, too, is a rich lawyer who did not pay, it is rumoured, any tax at all in ’68 and ’69. Lately he has been accused of stealing the money entrusted him by one of his soldiers killed in the war.

“Charlie, go South. Please. I beg you. Get that pony out of the sun, you stupid Irish bastard!” shouted Jamie to his groom.

“Even the heat at Newport is too much for me. I would perish at the South. Besides, Nordhoff’s already done you proud.” Nordhoff’s pieces for the
Herald
on the so-called cotton states have been most sympathetic and vivid; he appears to want some sort of re-alignment to the present political balance.

“Always a breeze at New Orleans, and Florida is a paradise this time of year. That’s where the trouble’s going to be.”

“How do you know?” Although I have no high opinion of Jamie’s general intelligence (certainly he has managed to keep well outside Western civilization and all its works), I am constantly impressed by his sense of this country. He is a sort of human barometer, able to anticipate before anyone else a political scandal, an Indian massacre.

“South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana are all under Federal control. Grant’s got the troops down there.”

“Less than three thousand in the whole South.” I am, after all, An Authority.

Jamie ignored my Authoritativeness. “So what’s going to happen if they vote Democratic?”

“But they
will
vote Democratic, and Tilden will be the president.”

“That’s only a part of it.” Jamie looked about him vaguely. “I’ll give you half again as much as I’ve been overpaying you if you just go to New Orleans, talk to the leaders there ...”

I was firm. I refused to go South. But I did agree to resume my weekly pieces in September, since the last eight weeks of a presidential election are the crucial ones. At least from the point of view of learning who stole what from whom.

“Did Hayes really shoot his mother?” I was curious about that detail.

Jamie was donning his helmet, pony at hand. “Certainly.”

“Shot her dead?”

“No. Just winged the old crow. But then he never could shoot straight. Missed his own fat mother from six foot away. That’s no president, now, is it?”

As Jamie mounted his pony and I prepared to go back to the hotel, I asked him if Madame Restell was in the city. “Oh, Charlie! You’ve no need of her for a friend, have you? Some lady you have wronged?”

“No, dear boy. I want to chat with her about a common friend.”

“Well, she’s away. Nobody’s in town in August, except the
first
American polo team!” He returned to his game; I returned to the Fifth Avenue Hotel.

Denise has been in excellent spirits, faithfully taking her powders twice a day, and there have been no more recurrences of panic. Emma is constantly with her, while Sanford is constantly at sea in his yacht. I would be critical of his behaviour if it did not so absolutely suit the three of us to have him at a distance.

I had hoped my first evening in town to pay a call on Madame Restell and report on her patient’s progress, but instead of an evening at Madame Restell’s amusing atelier, I had an unexpectedly fascinating time with John Apgar, who had got us tickets for a new play called
Two Men of Sandy Bar
by Bret Harte, one of the numerous imitators of Mark Twain.

“They say the play isn’t very good.” John was apologetic. “But there is supposed to be a most comical Chinese character in it.”

I started to tell John about the Chinese club at Paris where a number of us go from time to time to smoke opium but then thought better of it: lately there have been a good number of attacks in the press on the Chinese, whose supposed addiction to opium is always mentioned as proof of their undesirability as citizens. I have always found it strange that a nation whose prosperity is based entirely upon cheap immigrant labour should be so unrelentingly xenophobic.

Since the notices for Mr. Harte’s play had been un-enthusiastic, the audience was small; also, late August is not the best time to open a play. The Union Square Theatre was so hot that it would have been difficult to enjoy any play, much less this one, on such a night. John tells me that Mr. Harte is best known for a poem about the “Heathen Chinee,” and regards himself as a friend to that beleaguered race; he writes, however, like an enemy.

John apologized for the play, as if he’d written it. But I pretended to be amused, and in due course was very much amused when during the entr’acte, John pointed out to me Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, in whose wiry small frame is concentrated everything that I most dislike in American life—or thought I disliked.