Eugene Stein
THE HOUSE OF MOURNING
I.
The Old Man wanted to see him. Henry Vanderburgh, knocking on Alfred Beach’s door, worried that a client had complained, although he couldn’t make out whom he’d disappointed or disconcerted. He was relieved when his employer asked him to look over the proofs for the October 6th issue. Beach had edited Scientific American for nearly fifty years and had cofounded with Orson Munn the most important firm of patent attorneys in the United States, but still stood expectantly, hands clasped behind his back, waiting to hear Henry’s response.
Henry examined the articles: The Fort Wayne Electric Corporation – Its Dynamos and General Electric Lighting Apparatus; A Velocipede to Run on Snow and Ice; Easily Read Thermometers; and Mr. Maxim’s Flying Machine. Hiram Maxim’s enormous biplane, launched on the grounds of his estate in Bexley in front of an audience including Prince Albert of Wales, flew three hundred yards through the air – astonishing. There was also an article on the Pleiades star cluster by Professor William Payne from Carleton College.
“What a wonderful issue,” Henry said.
“It really is, isn’t it? One of our best. Sit down, my boy.”
So there was something else after all. Henry sat stiffly, careful not to dislodge the embroidered antimacassars on the arms and back of the armchair facing Beach’s desk. Behind Beach was a large window with its panoramic view of lower Manhattan.
The Old Man was of middle height, with carefully parted gray hair and a thin gray mustache under his broad nose. His chin dipped inward briefly before protruding outward. The large nose and bulbous chin, along with Orson Munn’s thicket of sideburns and Charles Munn’s neatly manicured walrus mustache with its waxed tips, were featured prominently in the Thomas Nast-inspired caricatures of management drawn by the office staff of Munn & Company, Attorneys at Law. Henry took care to keep his brown hair and his mustache clipped, lest he invite similar ridicule. He knew he probably worried too much. He was only a few years out of law school and hardly part of management.
Still, he hated attracting attention – a family legacy, Henry supposed. His father, Thomas Vanderburgh, had hated notice of any kind. He found it vulgar.
“I’ve come to learn, never mind how, that you’ve been dining lately with a Miss Caroline Wilkes at Sherry’s.”
Henry found he was gripping his knees. New York society was certainly small and insular, and he worried Beach would bring up the Walter Sides, Jr. situation. What business was it to the Old Man whom Henry chose to take out for supper, anyway? “Yes.”
“I understand she’s very beautiful.”
“She is,” Henry replied at once.
“And has she quite captured your heart?”
But this question was more difficult to answer. “Perhaps she’s on the way to capturing it, sir.”
“You hardly need my encouragement, but I think it would be a propitious step for you to wed. Men who live alone too long can become – peculiar,” Beach said.
Henry knew his employer was thinking about his cofounder’s son. Charles Munn was ten years older than Henry, in his late thirties, and had never married, but seemed to prefer the company of the handsome young men with whom he played polo, golf, tennis, and racquets. Henry considered another peculiar bachelor, his father’s first cousin James Vanderburgh Parker, who insisted on driving his four-in-hand carriage through clogged Manhattan streets. Lately Parker had taken up with a married woman from Provincetown.
Not that the Old Man should cast stones. Beach was odd himself, with his enduring obsession with a pneumatic subway, a system he had patented. The first electric underground line was about to open but the Old Man held out hopes for his invention and kept a model of a Beach Pneumatic Transit train car in his office. The model had its role in the office caricatures, too: sometimes Beach wore the train as a bowtie in the cartoons.
“I think, if you were to marry, we’d raise your salary,” Beach said.
“Thank you.”
“Two can’t live as cheaply as one, contrary to what many believe. And if Miss Wilkes is as lovely as people say, well, you’ll want to show her off a bit. That costs money.”
“I suppose so,” Henry said. But Caroline wasn’t a figurine to be admired by gawkers and the gauche, like the latest novelty at the Schwarz Toy Bazaar in Union Square.
“Life has its inevitable vicissitudes and disappointments.” And here, inevitably indeed, Beach glanced at his model subway train. “A man needs a helpmeet to face them. Marriage has its vagaries, too, but my boy, you’ll find you can get through almost anything if you share the same values.”
Life advice from the Old Man; Henry hadn’t expected that. But what he found pressing wasn’t so much the counsel as the need to speak with his stepmother, Lillian. If the news that Henry was courting Caroline had reached Beach, then Lillian must have heard as well. He didn’t know why he hadn’t discussed Miss Wilkes with her yet. Surely she’d be happy for him. He stopped at her home on Irving Place – his home, although he didn’t live there any longer; legally it belonged to the trust established for him in his father’s will, and Henry was forbidden to sell or otherwise dispose of it – and walked up one side of the curved and ornate split staircase leading to the entrance. The three-story, Italianate brownstone was not so imposing as the staircase seemed to suggest. Like its tall windows, the building was rather narrow and, hemmed in by trees and neighboring row houses on either side, rather dark as well.
The Irish maid said she would see if Mrs. Vanderburgh was in. He heard murmured voices and then the soft flurry of footsteps heading upstairs, and he wondered, not for the first time, if Lillian only dressed in black when he visited. The maid returned and said his stepmother would be down in a few minutes.
Lillian had livened the drawing room with a decorative mantel over the fireplace, light wood tea tables and chairs for playing bezique, and the pastel palette she’d chosen for the carpets, curtains, and upholstery. It was here that his stepmother greeted him. She received him with her usual smile and a quick peck on the cheek.
“An unexpected treat.”
“I was walking in the neighborhood and decided to try my luck and see if you were home.”
Lillian was amused. “Your chances were certainly good on a Tuesday morning. But you can see me anytime, you know that.” Meaning, she was always home.
She was in her thirties, with a comely face and a fine outline, as Thomas Vanderburgh would have put it, dark-haired, light-eyed, smooth-browed, and far too young, Henry thought, to cloister herself in this dark house on Irving Place.
“When is Jennie back?”
“All Saint’s Day. I’ll have her home for a full week. Another treat.”
“Then you’re quite alone,” Henry said.
“I don’t mind.” Meaning, she minded.
He knew her well, could tell what she was thinking just as she knew what he was hiding. He presumed that she didn’t visit friends often because she couldn’t afford to entertain in return. His father, whose meanness lived on even after his death, had left Lillian a meager inheritance and nothing at all to Jennie. The capital for Henry was tied up in the unbreachable trust. Some dividends, at least, dribbled down to him.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been here to visit you more often, but I must confess, I’ve been distracted lately.”
“Distracted?”
“In the most entertaining and delightful way. By a young lady.”
“Oh yes?” Meaning, she already knew. “How wonderful.”
“A Miss Caroline Wilkes.”
“Wilkes… Is she related by chance to Sarah Wilkes Cushing of Tuxedo Park?” Meaning, she knew exactly whom he was wooing. Her cousins, or her friend Mary Lorillard Barbey, or who knew, perhaps the mayor or the Irish maid had heard the gossip and hurried to inform her.
“Her sister.”
“I remember, Sarah Wilkes was very good-looking. If Caroline Wilkes has caught your fancy, then might I assume there’s a family resemblance?” She was smiling at him again.
His stepmother was good-looking herself. It was no wonder that his father had pursued her.
“I haven’t had the pleasure of making Mrs. Cushing’s acquaintance yet, but they do say both girls take after their mother,” Henry said. “And Mrs. Wilkes was known as a great beauty in her time.”
“Well, then Harry, I’m not the least bit surprised that you’ve been distracted.”
Only his stepmother called him Harry, her pet name for him when he was a boy. “Harry” because it almost rhymed with “scary,” and she claimed that he had intimidated her at first. Only later did he realize that she feigned her fear to reassure him. He was fifteen when his father remarried, and Lillian was twenty-five, closer in age to Henry than to her husband.
“You must bring her to the house,” Lillian said. “As soon as possible.”
Henry presented an envelope with cash for Jennie. Lillian demurred accepting it, but Henry insisted. “I just received a dividend from the B&O,” he lied. His father had invested in railroad stocks like the Baltimore and Ohio, that much was true, but Henry’s dividends had been slashed since the Panic began the previous year. “It gives me pleasure to share it with her.”
Lillian reluctantly took the envelope.
“Then it’s settled,” Lillian said as he was leaving. “Sunday afternoon. I can’t wait to meet her. We’ll be sure to discuss your foibles and embarrass you terribly.”
Miss Wilkes was looking forward to meeting his stepmother as well, sensing this marked a further development of her relations with Henry. She took the opportunity of buying a new day dress at Lord & Taylor and asked Henry if she could model it for him. The dress was azalea pink and made of silk, with a square neckline, a corseted waist, a matching overskirt à la polonaise, and a sash belt. It was certainly lovely, although perhaps elaborate for a casual visit.
But Caroline – she really was ravishing. How had Walter Sides, Jr. parted with such a delightful creature?
“You like it?”
“Very much,” he said. The Old Man was right after all, she should be shown off in a dress like that. He stared frankly at the square neckline of the dress. A man’s head can be turned by a pretty woman: another of his father’s admonitions. But maybe, for once, he wanted his head to be turned, wanted to escape – what?
“You’re scaring me,” Caroline said with a smile.
Lost in thought, he’d been staring at her too long, and now he smiled too, to reassure her.
“You can’t blame me for looking.”
“Look but don’t touch,” said her mother, who had overheard them.
Henry and Caroline’s eyes met, and they laughed.
* * * *
After his father died, Henry had thought it might look improper if he continued to live with his attractive stepmother. He told Lillian that he intended to relocate uptown to be closer to his friends and his clubs. In reality, he wanted her to feel comfortable remaining in the house, where she wouldn’t have to pay rent. He’d taken a bachelor flat at the Wilbraham, a new eight story building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 30th Street with a copper-covered roof and electric lighting.
Henry had explained to Caroline that although the house had been left in trust to him, his stepmother resided there. Caroline was touched by his generosity – but Mrs. Vanderburgh couldn’t expect to live there forever, could she? It wasn’t fair to Henry and certainly his stepmother must hate imposing on him so much. Now that her daughter was away in boarding school, she could live in simpler quarters.
They walked together in the mellow October afternoon to Irving Place. The oppressive heat of the summer had lifted, and the beauty of the trees with their changing leaves, the blooming asters, and the autumn crocus pleased the eye just as the gentle sun warmed the skin.
The social season would start soon, in November. They had just been invited to a dinner party at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles “Carley” Havemeyer, of the Havemeyer Sugar Trust family. Havemeyer, usually cheerful although like Henry sometimes subject to melancholia, was a good friend. Unfortunately, his marriage was not known to be a happy one. The Havemeyers belonged to the upper echelon of Manhattan society, and Caroline was excited to be included.
Margaret had Sundays off, and his stepmother let them in. After some polite chit-chat in the drawing room, and after Miss Wilkes declined any coffeecake as she was watching her figure, the young woman asked to see the rest of the house and Mrs. Vanderburgh took her on a tour. Caroline professed to adore it. She said that the townhouse had excellent bones, that it would be a good first home for a couple before their family expanded and they needed more room. She wondered if they’d considered installing a skylight over the interior stairs to let in more light, and perhaps another oriel window in the third floor façade. Henry’s stepmother smiled indulgently.
Caroline proceeded through the house, offering her various recommendations: lantern shades from Macy’s for the gas lamps, a rocker for the nursery, they were on sale for $2.15 at Bloomingdale’s on Third Avenue, a new carpet in the drawing room. W. and J. Sloane were selling Oriental rugs; the carpets were expensive, but they would last a lifetime. At Stern Brothers they had an adorable infant’s basket with a tufted silk center and silk lining for $7.98.
She knew the Brothers, Louis Stern was a friend of her grandfather.
She had certainly done her research. “Carrie,” Henry murmured, trying to get her to stop.
His stepmother’s smile was tighter now. “No, please go on.”
Caroline described the changes she would make if she were living there. The curtains –Lillian’s favorite curtains in the drawing room – might need an update and B. Altman was having a sale. Her grandfather was friends with Benjamin Altman, too. As for housewares, Caroline preferred Hilton, Hughes & Company.
She left the house on Irving Place in fine spirits. Henry was sure the visit had been a disaster.
II.
His mother died when he was thirteen. Henry had no siblings and he and his mother had been close. Sometimes she was highly active and high-spirited, sleeping fitfully if at all, and full of passionate plans. Sometimes, lugubrious, she withdrew to her bedroom. But even when she was downcast, she drew Henry to her side so that they might snuggle. It was as if, he sometimes thought, they’d sensed that they wouldn’t have much time together.
Henry was an excitable boy, charging through the hallways of the house on Irving Place, shouting commands to his imaginary army, routing Napoleon or the Confederates, incapable of quieting himself down. Or, like his mother unaccountably disconsolate, he would withdraw to his room, quiet and sullen, comforting himself with books and almanacs, marveling at the ancient Egyptian’s engineering of the pyramids at Giza and the latest scientific advances. His mood swings infuriated his father who insisted he learn to behave himself and who read to him from exhortatory tracts on thrift, industry, and self-control.
His father must have loved Henry’s mother too, Henry reasoned, because he changed after her death. It was then that the Biblical readings started – Ecclesiastes, mostly, but not so much the eat, drink, and be merry passages as the various admonishments. His father was especially fond of one verse: The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. As if Henry didn’t know already that he was living in the house of mourning.
His father respected learned professors, scrupulous accountants, and beautiful women who lived within their means, but little else. He certainly didn’t respect his son, who disappointed him first with his rowdiness, now with his prolonged melancholy.
Little by little his stepmother brought him out of his depression, with her nicknames for him, her playfulness, and her teasing. Almost at once there sprung up between the boy and Lillian a mysterious bond. They were like mother and son, sitting close together in the family room and sharing confidences; they were like brother and sister, laughing at private jokes and plotting against their strict father; they were like mischievous friends, looking to make trouble and sneaking into the liquor cabinet without getting caught. And superadded to these relations was something else, a sentimental attachment that both felt but couldn’t define. She even shared his interest in Egyptology.
She was shrewd, very shrewd. And patient, too. As his father was opposed to changing the furniture or atmosphere of the house, Lillian’s alterations were imperceptible at first. Slowly, so slowly that his father couldn’t object or even notice, she was able to take possession of a single room on each story. First the drawing room on the first floor, where she entertained her lady friends for card games or kaffeeklatsches; then an intimate family sitting room on the second floor, the friendliest space in the house as it was lit up by the bay window, a cheerful chandelier, and, when it was cold enough for Thomas Vanderburgh to countenance, a fire blazing in the fireplace; and finally, Jennie’s room on the top floor. Jennie, who arrived at Irving Place when she was only three years old, was a great and unexpected gift to an only child. She idolized Henry and he was devoted to her in turn. At times she was sister to him, at times nearly a daughter.
When he graduated from law school, his father hoped that he would join him at Carter, Hughes, & Cravath, where Thomas Vanderburgh practiced law, but Henry didn’t want to be indebted to his father nor under his surveillance. He sought and won a position at Munn & Company as it better suited his interests. The scientists and inventors he represented were changing the course of history, and he negotiated with patent agents in London, Paris, Madrid, Hong Kong, and Calcutta. The whole world was at his feet. He loved his work. It sustained him.
III.
Lillian sent him a note asking him to call on her. Henry procrastinated as long as possible, but at last the feared encounter could be delayed no longer. The sun was setting as he walked from his office on Wall Street to Irving Place. The electric lights on Fifth Avenue, still a novelty to him, gleamed yellow in the gathering darkness. He rehearsed his responses in advance. He was old enough to make his own decisions. Caroline meant no harm, she was just exuberant, she took after his mother in that way. Lillian could stay in the house as long as she wanted.
Margaret let him in, ushering him to the charmless parlor, presumably according to Mrs. Vanderburgh’s instructions. The gas lamps cast a sickly light over the dark furniture. His stepmother came down the stairs, elegant in one of her borrowed black dresses. This time she offered him a hand, not a kiss.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“Of course.”
They sat down for tea, and both felt the strain as they avoided the matter at hand, talking instead about Jennie, home soon for the first of November, about the weather, about Cousin James Parker’s latest peccadilloes. Parker had always been a particular favorite of his stepmother.
“Miss Wilkes is quite charming,” Lillian finally began.
“She liked you, too. Very much.”
“And she’s certainly very beautiful. Like her sister Sarah, as I expected.”
“Thank you.”
“But I must say, she’s not whom I imagined you marrying.” Lillian’s brow wrinkled, as though to suggest perplexity.
“Really? How so?”
“I’m not sure you share quite the same values.”
Values again, as the Old Man had preached. “I don’t follow,” Henry said.
“Well, you’ve never been guided by money, not really. And she’s certainly very commercially minded, don’t you think? She seems to know the price of everything. I imagine that’s been passed down to her from her ancestors. That ability with money, it can be a gift, I suppose.”
Henry understood that she was referring, and far from obliquely, to Caroline’s maternal grandfather, a Jew from Austria who had converted. But this was strange behavior for his stepmother. She’d never cut Mrs. Therese Schiff or Mrs. Harriet Lehman if she chanced upon them during one of her infrequent excursions to Lord & Taylor or Arnold Constable, and she was family friends with Fredericka Belmont Howland, a socialite, whose father was a German Jew.
In any case, Caroline’s ancestry hadn’t hindered her sister from making an advantageous marriage.
“And then, I hate to be indelicate,” she said, now with a pained expression on her face, “but there’s the Walter Sides, Jr. situation that we have to consider.”
Like Caroline, his stepmother had done her research. “It’s not like you to respond to gossip.”
“You’re angry with me.”
“No,” Henry said. “Disappointed.”
Walter Sides, Jr. had courted Caroline assiduously then suddenly dropped her, probably under pressure from his parents. That was Caroline’s perspective, and Henry believed her. The Sides family made out that Caroline had schemed to marry Walter, spreading rumors that they were to be engaged in order to compromise him, and that Walter had narrowly escaped her manipulations. It was probably true that Caroline had got ahead of herself, assuming a commitment from Walter that hadn’t been formally offered, but this expectancy wasn’t based on Caroline’s flight of fancy, but rather on Walter’s sedulous attentions.
“I have to be both mother and father to you,” Lillian said.
“Not really. You don’t hold either position.”
He’d been harsh with her, and she considered her response for a moment. “All right. Then I trust you’ll allow me to call myself a friend. And as a friend I must tell you that I can’t approve of this union. I know you may find this hard to forgive, but I owe it to my love for you to be truthful. She’s not the proper companion for you. She’s too eager to spend her family’s money and yours, she lacks depth, and from all accounts she’s too open with her affections.” These last charges struck him with almost physical force. Caroline was deemed a spendthrift, a flibbertigibbet, and a flirt, all based on a single meeting and overheard innuendo?
“You’re a serious person, Henry, you need a serious wife,” Lillian concluded.
* * * *
Break off with Caroline? Preposterous. The affrontery of his stepmother’s attack – the indecency of it. Carrie was a wonderful girl…Choked with rage, he walked blindly to Union Square and then up Broadway past Madison Square Park, barely noticing his surroundings until he came to 39th Street and stood across the street from the Moorish facade of the Casino Theater.
A few years earlier he had seen Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Yeoman of the Guard at the Casino. The audience hadn’t liked the operetta with its unhappy ending – two barely tolerated marriage proposals and the despair of a scorned, broken-hearted jester – but Henry had loved the production. For weeks afterward he had found himself singing “I Have a Song to Sing, O!”, one of his favorite melodies from the show:
It’s a song of a merryman, moping mum,
Whose soul was sad, and whose glance was glum,
Who sipped no sup, and who craved no crumb,
As he sighed for the love of a lady.
Was he then the bereft Jack Point, the strolling jester, condemned to collapse insensible at the feet of his beloved?
Except – except he wasn’t bereft. That’s what he had to admit to himself, that’s what infuriated him most of all. What if Lillian was right? Carrie was too quick to spend money, and it was clear that she was planning to spend much more. Even if she imagined these were all wedding presents from her father, well, he hadn’t wanted to be beholden to his own father, he certainly didn’t want to be beholden to hers.
Didn’t he want to marry a woman, yes, a beautiful woman, who lived within her means? It was also true that she had given him her affection rather quickly. Was he only – his great fear – a quick replacement for Walter Sides, Jr.? Was she trying to scrub off the stink of her social embarrassment, believing that marriage with any eligible gentleman would cleanse her reputation? An attorney from an old Dutch family and the owner of a house on Irving Place, yes, that checked the box, that would certainly do.
Did they, in the end, share the same values? Not really. She cared about social status and pretty clothing as anyone might, but what else? Did they speak of education, their hopes for the future, the Panic and Coxey’s Army, impressionism and art nouveau, the latest scientific advances? Or even Gilbert and Sullivan and Pudd’nhead Wilson?
Break off with Caroline? He had to.
Caroline crumpled to the floor, her satin dress billowing around her and rippling with the heaves of her sobbing.
She cried, “I despise you. I wish I could die.”
She cried, “I’ll show you one day, I’ll make you suffer like you’ve made me suffer. You’ll see, you’ll beg me to come back, and then I’ll laugh. I’ll laugh in your face because I loathe you so much.”
She cried, “But I still love you. What did I do to deserve this?”
She cried, “Why are you so cruel? Why can’t you let me love you? It costs you nothing.
Nothing at all. My parents have money, they’ll give it to us, it could be yours.”
She cried, “It would be so wonderful, the two of us. We could travel, to Rome, to Cairo, you said you wanted to see the pyramids, I’ll go anywhere you want, and I can pay for it, just let me go with you.”
She cried, “You’re despicable. Oh my God, it hurts. One day you’ll understand. But it will be too late, and I won’t forgive you. You’ll see.”
She cried, “Don’t leave me.”
IV.
Spring came and many of the Four Hundred decamped for Paris. Those who remained, needing to fill seats at dinner parties, remembered Mrs. Vanderburgh, poor thing, who’d been left next to nothing by her husband. Lillian was invited as well to Mary Barbey’s second home in Tuxedo Park, and even to Cousin James’s Sans Souci in Newport, already open for the summer by May. Henry was invited out less often, except by the Carley Havemeyers, as he was deemed eccentric with his interest in elevators and electricity, new mining techniques, safety boilers, and other contraptions. His charitable work was important, Society reckoned, but dull.
Esteemed by the Munns and Alfred Beach, however, and working long hours after the break-up, Henry assumed greater responsibilities at the law firm. The Old Man had come to rely on him, and he was sent for several weeks to the branch office in Washington, D.C. when Munn & Company were short-staffed there. During his stay, Lillian obtained an invitation for him for dinner at the Howlands’ residence in the capital, where he met a woman, Ida Fletcher.
Ida was from Philadelphia and had mutual friends with the Howlands, who had taken an interest in her. She was not so thin or attractive as Caroline and considerably less affluent, and she was Henry’s senior by a few years – nearly an old maid at thirty. What she possessed instead of youth, wealth, and great beauty was an innate charm, a musical laugh (she laughed often), and a wonderful enthusiasm. She had dark brown hair, brown eyes that danced when she was amused, a dark complexion with hints of auburn red in her cheeks and mouth. She was buxom and wide in her hips, not slender not tall enough for the wasp-waisted Gibson Girl ideal, but she wore a vivid lavender dress that complemented her skin tone, and Henry was drawn at once to her. Sensing his earnestness, she began immediately to tease him, making fun of his love of the law and his do-goodery with the Red Cross, but it was a tender chaffing that suggested she respected the very things she was teasing him about. To be admired and teased simultaneously: delicious.
Carley Havemeyer had asked Henry to come with him to inspect the Sugar Trust’s new refinery in Philadelphia, extracted from a rival after a bitter price war. As he had business with clients in the city, Henry was able to join his friend. He had written to Ida and asked if he could accompany her to a meal. They dined together several times, at Wanamaker’s tea room, where Ida entertained him with stories of her boisterous childhood in Colorado and Arizona mining towns before her father was ruined, and at the Continental Hotel on Chestnut Street, where they feasted on Little Neck clams, spring lamb with mint sauce, croquettes of sweetbread with peas, and orange méringue pie for dessert. Henry was glad to see her enjoy her appetite after Caroline’s abstemiousness.
Ida wanted to travel to Europe, but as the trip was beyond her means, she was waiting for an opportunity to serve as a companion to someone taking the Grand Tour. She loved architecture especially and hoped to visit Florence to see Brunelleschi’s Duomo, Giotto’s campanile, and Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library.
He visited her again in Philadelphia, and she visited him in New York, accompanied by her mother. Mrs. Fletcher’s face was etched with worry lines. She had been through too much, the move to rough, lonely mining communities, the shame of her husband’s bankruptcy, the difficulties with their son. Rumors of their troubles had followed them back to Pennsylvania. Ida’s marriage prospects had been dashed by the irregularities associated with her father and brother – although perhaps they might recover with the patronage of the Howlands; her parents certainly hoped so. This, anyway, was what Henry had gathered. He had done his research, too.
In June at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts they stood a long while in front of Whistler’s controversial Arrangement in Black (The Lady in the Yellow Buskin). Was the subject a haughty aristocrat, wearing modish boots and disdainfully holding a yellow glove, or a harlot, a common streetwalker casting a backward glance toward a potential client? That the woman could be mistaken for both gave the work its frisson.
In July, with Ida’s mother as chaperone, they took a ferry from Manhattan to the Clason Point resort at the southern tip of the Annexed District of the Bronx. They picnicked on cold roasted chicken and lemonade, they shared a paper sack of Saratoga chips. When Mrs. Fletcher was pretending not to watch, they took off their shoes and dipped their toes in the East River at the bathing pier. They held hands and his heart swelled. He loved Ida. What he had experienced with Caroline paled in comparison to this new relation. He had been infatuated with Caroline, nothing more. Now he knew the real thing.
The Old Man, during a rare vacation in Newport, had met Henry’s stepmother at Sans Souci. Beach, who considered himself an expert on women and fashion, extolled Mrs. Vanderburgh’s appearance. She was wearing a lustrous cinnamon-orange tea gown of chiffon velvet with gigot sleeves, he recalled, somewhat low at the décolletage, with a lace collar. A French design, he assumed, probably House of Worth and probably a few years old, which was seemlier and less ostentatious than wearing fashion from the current season. “No corset, she doesn’t need one. A fine figure of a woman.” He approved.
Henry went to see his stepmother to tell her that he intended to marry Ida. Lillian wore black when they conferred in the drawing room and when Ida, like Caroline, was invited to an afternoon tea at Irving Place. His stepmother was still wearing black when she summoned Henry for a meeting. But she couldn’t object to Ida, Henry thought, as Ida had behaved impeccably.
“She’s not so prepossessing as Miss Wilkes,” Lillian observed.
“No, but lovely in her own way.”
“And she’s quite serious, isn’t she.”
Henry, tense, found he was gripping his knees again. “Not always. But you disparaged Miss Wilkes’s lack of seriousness, as I recall.”
“I have to tell you, I’m worried,” Lillian said.
“Why?”
“The Fletchers’ history.”
“Mrs. Howland has no such reservations,” Henry countered.
“Mrs. Howland is a generous woman, and she pities Ida. It’s bad enough what the father did. But the brother…”
“That was ten years ago.”
“It’s still fresh in people’s minds.”
He was no longer surprised by his stepmother’s ability to unearth whatever facts were needed to support her arguments. After Mr. Fletcher’s mining investments had collapsed in 1884, during the previous Panic, Ida’s brother had stolen funds from the bank where he worked, trying to pay off his father’s creditors. The bank hadn’t wanted any publicity that might scare away their already skittish customers, and the embezzlement was hushed up as the Fletchers borrowed from relatives to reimburse the stolen money and left the territory. Over time this sordid history had come to light in Philadelphia and now New York.
“It doesn’t seem fair that Ida is being punished for other people’s mistakes.”
“I wish it wasn’t the case. But wishing won’t make it so. You’ll be ostracized, Harry,” Lillian said.
“I don’t believe that.”
She looked at him and Henry thought that her eyes filled with pity. Or was she playacting? “You could lose your job.”
“No. Mr. Beach depends on me.”
“And the fiduciaries might decide you were violating the morality clause of the trust.”
Was she threatening him? He couldn’t imagine that the officers of the Guaranty Trust Company cared whom he married, if she bore no personal responsibility for any malfeasance.
“I’ll have to take that chance,” he told her.
He worried that the Old Man would call him in for another tête-à-tête, but it was Charles Munn who invited him for drinks at his home. Henry had forgotten that Charles knew his stepmother. They were the same age and had attended cotillions together when they were young. Munn’s townhouse on East 65th Street was impeccably furnished. When not sporting with his lusty friends, Charles collected portraits of George Washington and colonial silverware.
“Mrs. Vanderburgh was quite right to contact me,” he told Henry. “You understand that we can’t tolerate any hint of misconduct at Munn & Company. I’m afraid you’d be implicated if you wed Miss Fletcher.”
His stepmother had gone for the jugular. “And sir, you understand that she is completely innocent of any wrongdoing. This is guilt by association. It wouldn’t stand up in a court of law.”
“I’m not talking about the court of law but the court of popular opinion. We simply can’t have it, old boy. If you were to marry this girl, you’d have to leave.”
Leave Munn & Company? His job was everything to him.
“Of course, we’d bear you no ill will,” Charles Munn said, “and we’d give you a sound recommendation for future employers. But I imagine they’d be hesitant as well.”
That night Henry felt the old pain returning. Usually he could fight his depression, busying himself during the day with legal work, filling his evenings with club events, fundraising for the Red Cross, and theater and opera productions. But he didn’t think he could manage if his job was taken away. The rest wouldn’t suffice, not even with Ida accompanying him.
He walked all night long. He hadn’t escaped, in the end. The house of mourning accompanied and encased him everywhere he went. Like a turtle, he thought, like an ugly turtle that was always at home in its shell. He sang softly to himself:
Heighdy! heighdy!
Misery me, lackadaydee!
He sipped no sup, and he craved no crumb,
As he sighed for the love of a lady.
He looked up at the sky, searching futilely for the Pleiades. In his article on the star cluster, Professor Payne had quoted the Book of Job. Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades? Or loose the bands of Orion? Henry felt no sweet influence, no fatherly or motherly advice to guide him, only the bands of anxiety that were tightening around his chest.
In the morning, still without having slept, he called upon James Parker. His cousin agreed to see him and Henry, fatigued and therefore less restrained, poured out his story. His cousin lived without seeking or requiring society’s approbation, could Henry do the same?
Parker looked at him, genuinely confused. “But my child, you don’t have the income.”
Ida cried softly on her chair. Henry had come to Philadelphia to break the news to her.
She said, “Don’t talk like that. You don’t mean what you say.”
She said, “Don’t leave me. Please don’t go.”
She said, “You know how I really feel. You’ve been lonely in your life, too.” She said, “I never meant to harm you.”
V.
He wasn’t the same; he’d never be the same. He missed Ida terribly.
Three years passed. Lillian had become a passionate Dreyfusard. She read Le Petit Journal at the home of James Parker, who imported the Paris newspapers. There or at Sans Souci she met Parker’s friend Robert Underwood, the retired American consul for Alexandria, Egypt, now a major investor in the Buffalo, Rochester, and Pittsburgh railway. Lillian married him and moved into his house, a newly built mansion, after they honeymooned in France and Italy. The property on Irving Place was temporarily vacant.
News reached Henry that Ida had married Edward Granville, a man of limited means and even more limited intelligence. He was just smart enough, Henry surmised, to know that he needed a smart wife to guide him. Granville, hoping for a career in politics or the foreign service, was angling for a post with the State Department, and the Howlands’ connections in Washington would help him. Apparently the State Department had no objections to Ida’s history. Henry knew Granville slightly. He could have wished for a more substantive husband for Ida, but he understood that in breaking off with her, he had damaged her already weakened position in the marketplace.
He had damaged his own reputation as well. Young women were wary of a man who had disappointed two brides-to-be. He was alone, and he still longed for Ida. At least at work he was busy; the Panic had finally subsided and the economy was booming. He saw the latest Ibsen play, John Gabriel Borkman, at Hoyt’s Theater and the American premiere of Manon at the Met. He raised money for Clara Barton and the victims of the Hamidian massacres. He had given up attending dinner parties, even the Carley Havemeyers’. At night he read the weekly Scientific American or Professor Petrie’s published reports on his archaeological dig at Tanis. And none of it, not the plays, not the operas, not the reading, made him miss Ida any less.
He was becoming, Henry supposed, another peculiar, confirmed bachelor.
His stepmother sent him a note, asking to see him. He called on Mrs. Underwood at her new Riverside Drive residence. A butler let him in. It was a five story building of light brick and limestone, and with its oversized dormer windows and mansard roof, it resembled a Parisian mansion. Lillian must love the windows, Henry thought, which let light pour into the vast interiors.
She received Henry in the music room, more intimate than the parlor, Lillian assured him. Overhead were electric chandeliers in the shape of Queen Anne’s Lace, designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany. Margaret, who had accompanied Lillian to the Upper West Side, brought them a small silver tray with a Waterford sherry crystal decanter and two petite sherry glasses which she rested on a rosewood side table. They would have a drink before tea, Lillian explained. He thought that she’d been drinking already.
She sipped her sherry. “I was visiting Mrs. Barbey in Tuxedo Park, and I ran into Miss Wilkes there.”
“Oh?”
“She asked after you. After you, most especially.”
He reached reflexively to clasp his knees but stopped himself. “I hope Caroline’s well.”
“She is. And she’s certainly still beautiful. But I must say, there’s a greater maturity to her now. And I also must say,” Mrs. Underwood’s hands were trembling slightly, “I think I misjudged her. I was too harsh, and for that, I’m truly sorry.”
“Perhaps it wasn’t meant to be.”
“She wants to see you, Harry.”
“I find that hard to believe,” he said evenly.
“It’s true.” She finished her drink. “I would like to invite her here for luncheon one afternoon and I’d like you to join us. If you’ll permit me. A quiet meal. Nothing very elaborate.”
He gestured at the chandeliers. “I find that hard to believe, too.”
She smiled. “Well, I’ll do my best. May I, Harry? Scary Harry?”
“I think we’ve established that it’s hard for me to refuse you.”
Lillian kept glancing at the decanter and Henry filled her glass. They talked about Jennie, who would soon be a debutante and whom Henry would escort for the father-daughter dance at the Patriarchs’ Ball at Delmonico’s, and about her husband, who was in Rochester for a board meeting. Mrs. Underwood said that he treated her generously. The munificence had taken some getting used to, she confided, after Mr. Vanderburgh’s illiberality. Illiberality of mind and pocket. She drank another sherry and she was getting drunk.
She declared, “You and I – only you and I – can discuss your father frankly. My selfishness revolts me, but your father’s rectitude revolted me more. He was a pedant at heart. An exacting schoolmaster and a moral bookkeeper, tallying the ways we disappointed him.” She declared, “You can do anything if you have to. The truth is, I never loved anyone except my children. At least Jennie is safe now. But I’m worried about you. I fear you’re too much alone.”
She declared, “I only hope you can forgive me for what I’ve done.”
She declared, “I have to go on living.”
VI.
The luncheon and a subsequent dinner two weeks later went well. By their third meeting, a cozy afternoon tea at Mrs. Underwood’s house, they settled into their former ease with each other.
Caroline had returned to the city for a two month’s stay with her parents. The Havemeyers – drawn into Lillian’s web, Henry assumed; she must have spoken with them, although he doubted they needed much cajoling – invited them to an informal dinner at their Manhattan home and then, a few weeks later, to an afternoon of sleigh rides at their farm on Long Island. Henry and Caroline tried to ignore their hosts’ bickering. They were invited to a Sunday musicale at Carley’s brother’s house as well, where they viewed H.O. and Louisine Havemeyer’s superb art collection. Henry studied a recent purchase, Monet’s Four Trees, surprising Caroline with his absorption. A line of trees rose like long stalks, the thick purple bushes on the riverbank gathering like their skirts or tutus, as if the poplars were dancers frozen in time and space. He wished he could show the mysterious painting to Ida. It was Ida he wanted at his side.
But why not marry Caroline? Didn’t he owe her that much?
Officially engaged, Henry and Caroline joined Lillian as they re-opened the property on Irving Place and inspected it. Of course, they would need to electrify it immediately. As Caroline rattled off the improvements she wanted to make, noting the various sales at Stern Brothers and the new Siegel-Cooper department store, and Lillian excitedly added her own suggestions, Henry’s heart sank. Mr. Edison’s incandescent lights would brighten this home and the next one, but these would still be houses of mourning.
The women were debating new curtains in the drawing room, lilac or chrysanthemum yellow. “What do you think, Henry?” Caroline asked.
Henry thought: It doesn’t matter.
Henry thought: It’s my own doing.
Henry thought: I wonder what my life would be like if I were marrying a woman I loved.
