“Tell him I’ll be down in a minute,” she said. She was fastening her pearl choker. It looked elegant with her gray silk dress.
Much as she loved William, she’d rather that he hadn’t called just then. He ought to have remembered she’d be busy. For this was the day of the month when she took his grandmother out for a drive.
Taking old Hetty Master out once a month might be a duty, but Rose also found it a pleasure. Hetty was almost ninety now, but her mind was still sharp as a razor. She sometimes went out in her own carriage, but she liked to be taken out too, and there was never any shortage of things to talk about. She read the newspapers every day, and once Rose had brought her up to date with the latest doings of the children, Hetty would be sure to ask her sharp questions about the relative views of the Pulitzer newspapers or those of Mr. Hearst, which Rose often had some trouble in answering.
It was also very agreeable for the family—and her ambitions for them—to have such a splendid figure in the background.
Sometimes, on the pretext that it might entertain the old lady, she would bring society friends with her on these monthly expeditions. Then the friends, having seen inside the fine old house on Gramercy Park, could not only marvel at how sharp Mrs. Master was—which reminded them that Rose’s own children inherited good brains from every side—but also, at Rose’s gentle prompting, hear the old lady reminisce about the days when the opera was still just down the street on Irving Place and the Master family had one of the few boxes there. Newer money hadn’t been able to get those boxes, despite the huge sums it was ready to pay. Vanderbilts, Jay Gould, even J. P. Morgan himself, had all been unsuccessful—which had caused them to set up the new Metropolitan Opera House where everyone went now. But the Masters had always had a box at Irving Place. That told you everything.
“And didn’t your husband leave the Union Club?” Rose would prompt.
“I always liked the Union Club,” Hetty would say. “I don’t know why people left it.”
“They said it was letting in too many of the wrong sort,” Rose would remind her. “That’s when they set up the Knickerbocker Club,” she’d explain to her guests, “where my father-in-law’s a member now.”
“There was nothing wrong,” old Mrs. Master would repeat, “with the Union.”
Anyway, it was time to put on her coat and go out. Rose hoped her husband wasn’t going to delay her. Downstairs, the butler handed her the telephone.
“What is it, dear?” she said.
“Just thought I’d call. Things are a little rough down here, Rose.”
“In what way, dear?”
“I don’t exactly know yet. I don’t like the look of the market.”
“I’m sure it will be all right, William. Remember what happened in March.”
There had been some anxious days that spring. After a period of easy credit, it had suddenly emerged that several significant companies were in trouble. Then an earthquake had hit California, there had been panic selling in the market, and credit had become tight. The trouble had subsided, but all through the summer while she and the children were at Newport, rumbles had come up from the city as the market went up and down uncertainly.
She knew William took risks—plenty of people did—and this was not the first time her husband had suffered an attack of nerves; she didn’t suppose it would be the last, either.
“We’ll talk about it tonight,” she said. “I have to take your grandmother out now.”
She was wearing a hat with an ostrich feather round the brim, and a coat trimmed with fox fur as she stepped out of the house on Fifty-fourth Street. She had done very well in finding that house. It stood between Fifth and Madison, a little closer to the latter, just a few blocks below Central Park therefore, and close to the great mansions of the Vanderbilts on Fifth. But as it happened, the side streets here were even better than the avenue.
She’d sensed it at the time she was looking. The character of Fifth was about to change—not further up along the park, but here, at the great fashionable intersection of thoroughfares. And sure enough, within a few brief years of their purchase, the change had come.
Hotels. The St. Regis and the Gotham. Splendid hotels, to be sure, but hotels all the same, on Fifth at Fifty-fifth. Now a commercial building was going up on the block above. Rumor said that Cartier, the Paris jewelry firm, intended to be there. Nothing could be more elegant, but it was not a private house. The side streets were another matter, though; they would remain as residences.
A few doors down lived the Moore family. He was a rich lawyer, and they had a fine, five-story limestone townhouse, three classical windows wide, with a central entrance between railings and lamps, and a carved stone balcony at the piano nobile floor. The Master house was one of several big brownstones in the same block, with steps coming down over the stoop. Not so handsome, certainly, but impressive enough.
Rose kept a careful eye on the Moore household, using it as a yardstick. The Moores had nine servants in the house. William and Rose had six—a Scottish butler, an English nanny, the rest of the domestic staff being Irish. Twice a week, the children went across Central Park to Durland’s Riding Academy on West Sixty-sixth. It was with a sense of general satisfaction, therefore, that she started down the steps to the street.
If she had only known what old Mrs. Hetty Master had in store for her that day, she would have gone straight back into her house.
Instead of which, she smiled. For in front of her now, gleaming like the chariot of Apollo, was a new possession that marked the family out from even the richest in New York. As the chauffeur held the door for her, she stepped in.
“This is nothing to do with me,” she would exclaim with a laugh. “It’s my husband’s little madness.” His insane extravagance, certainly.
To say that William Master was a fanatic for the motor car would have been an understatement. The last twenty years had seen huge changes in the city: the quieter cable-car lines up Third and Broadway, the recent electrification of the El trains. Why, even the horse-drawn cabs were being replaced with motorized cabs with taxi meters now. Private motor cars, however, were for the rich.
Even so, there were quite a few makers to choose between, from the Oldsmobile curved dash, the first mass-produced car, to the more expensive Cadillac, named after the aristocratic French founder of Detroit, and the many models of Ford. William Master knew them all. He could discourse on the benefits of Ford’s top-of-the-line Model K, which would set you back an astonishing $2,800, over eight times the price of an Oldsmobile, to the European rivalry of Mercedes and Benz on the racing circuits. That spring, he had become highly excited about the news coming from Britain.
“The new Rolls-Royce is out—Claude Johnson’s been testing it up in Scotland, and the results are astonishing. Autocar says it’s the best car in the world. And it’s so silent, Johnson’s called his own car the Silver Ghost. There’s only a handful been produced so far, but everyone’s going to want one. Well,” he’d smiled, “those that can afford it.”
“What does it cost?”
“Well, Rolls-Royce sells you the chassis and engine. I guess that’s around a thousand British pounds. Then you order your own custom bodywork from the coachbuilder—that’s another hundred or so. There are other things besides. Maybe twelve hundred pounds.”
“How many dollars to the pound, William?”
“A pound is four dollars and eighty-six cents.”
“That’s six thousand dollars! Nobody’s going to pay that,” she cried.
William had said nothing. Last week it had arrived at the docks.
“I had mine done like Johnson’s: silver paint, silver-plated fittings. Johnson had green leather seats, but I went for red. I’m calling mine the Silver Ghost, too. Isn’t she handsome?”
She was indeed. For the rest of that week, William and the chauffeur drove the car together. Yesterday was the first day the chauffeur had been allowed to drive it alone. And today Rose sat in it, feeling l
ike a duchess, as she was driven down Fifth to Gramercy Park.
When she got to the house, Hetty Master was waiting. She inspected the car with interest, asked what it cost, and said, “I don’t approve.” But she got in happily enough. Sometimes she liked to include her friend Mary O’Donnell on these outings, but today she was alone.
Few people could enjoy getting old, but insofar as it was possible, Hetty Master did so.
She was a rich old woman in the full possession of her faculties. Her family loved her and lived nearby. She said and did what she liked. She could indulge a few mannerisms which, when she was younger, it had been wiser to keep in check. She could even, to amuse herself, cultivate some new ones.
Though Hetty had never been so interested in the social world herself, and she was certainly less conservative than Rose, she understood the younger woman’s ambition and respected her. She was also not above teasing Rose, once in a while.
“Where shall we drive to?” Rose inquired.
“I’ll tell you as we go,” the intrepid old lady answered. “First we’ll pick up Lily.”
Rose knew better than to ask too many questions, and as they went back up Fifth, it was Hetty who led the conversation. From Twentieth to Thirtieth, she wanted to know all about the children. At Thirtieth, she remarked that the car was certainly very comfortable, but much too expensive, and that she’d have to tell young William that he was too extravagant. Only when they reached Thirty-fourth did Rose interrupt her. And when she did, it was to groan.
“Even after ten years,” she now declared, waving her gloved hand toward a sumptuous building, “when I think of the scandal, and my poor, dear Mrs. Astor, I can’t bear to look at it. Can you?”
For they were passing the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
There were several Astor wives of course, but throughout Rose’s childhood and youth, by common consent, and whatever her official title might have been, it was Caroline Schermerhorn Astor who had been the Mrs. Astor. The divine Mrs. Astor. Rose’s heroine, mentor and friend.
She was very rich indeed. That went without saying. She and her husband had occupied one of two huge Astor mansions on the site. But if the Astor family had become rich and established enough to assume New York’s social leadership, Caroline, through her Dutch Schermerhorn ancestors who went back to the founding of the city, could claim it as a birthright. And with all this power at her disposal, Mrs. Astor had undertaken a labor worthy of Hercules. She was going to polish New York’s upper class.
By chance she had a helper, who encouraged her to do it. Mr. Ward McAllister, a Southern gentleman who’d married money and toured Europe to observe its aristocratic manners, devoted his life to these things. He declared Mrs. Astor, who was short, swarthy and somewhat plump, to be his inspiration, and together they set about giving New York a higher social tone.
Not that America was a stranger to class. Boston, Philadelphia and other fine cities, including New York, were trying to establish a more permanent order by compiling Social Registers. In New York, the ancient Dutch landowners and old English merchants with their boxes at the Academy of Music had known how to be snobbish. When Mr. A. T. Stewart, the store owner, had made his fortune and built a mansion on Fifth, they didn’t think he was a gentleman, and ignored him so cruelly that he left in despair.
But New York had a particular problem: it had become the big attraction.
With its banks, and its transatlantic connections, it was so much the money center of the continent that every big interest needed to have an office there. Copper and silver magnates, railroad owners, oilmen like Rockefeller from Pittsburgh, steel magnates like Carnegie, and coal barons like Frick, from the Midwest and the South and even California, they were all flocking to New York. Their fortunes were staggering, and they could do anything they wanted.
Yet surely, Mrs. Astor and her mentor argued, money alone was not enough. Old New York had always been about money, but it was not without grace. Money had to be directed, tamed, civilized. And who was to do that, if not the old guard? At the apex of society, therefore, there needed to be a cadre of the best people, the old money crowd, who would let in the new-money families slowly, one by one, after a period of exclusion during which they must show themselves worthy. McAllister set the opening barrier at three generations. In short, it was what the English House of Lords had been doing for centuries.
Exceptions could be made. The Vanderbilts were new, and the old Commodore, who had a fouler mouth than a bargee, never gave a damn about society. But the next generation was very rich, and very determined, and even before they’d got a duke in the family, they’d been let in. One had to be practical.
Yet who was to select this inner circle? Ward McAllister already led a committee of the region’s greatest gentlemen that decided who was eligible to attend the yearly Patriarchs’ Ball. Once he had Mrs. Astor beside him, she became the queen of the event and gave the list her regal stamp. And how many guests should there be? It varied, but not more than four hundred. That, McAllister declared, was the total number of people in the great metropolis who would not feel or look awkward in a ballroom. If one considered the thousands of people in New York who were well accustomed to dances, and who had probably been to as many grand resorts as McAllister, this last claim might have seemed a little specialized. But it pleased Mr. McAllister, and so four hundred it was.
It had to be said that Mrs. Astor’s lists were quite remarkable for their consistency. There were the newer families of massive wealth, of course, from the Astors themselves to the most recent Vanderbilts. There were the solid old-money families of Otis, Havemeyer and Morgan, and eighteenth-century gentry like Rutherfurd and Jay. But sprinkled all over the list were great names, still rich, and going back to the region’s seventeenth-century beginnings: Van Rensselaer, Stuyvesant, Winthrop, Livingston, Beekman, Roosevelt. If Mrs. Astor wanted to keep the quiet wealth of old New York as the example of how things should be done, then you’d have to acknowledge she’d pulled it off.
When Rose met her future husband William, the first thing she had discovered, even before his heaven-sent second name, was that the old-money Masters were on Mrs. Astor’s list. And when after her marriage, old Mrs. Astor had taken her up, Rose became a willing acolyte. Many an afternoon she had sat at her feet, to learn the finer points of social etiquette.
Only one of these rules had caused her any difficulty.
“Mrs. Astor says,” she’d told William, “that one should always arrive at the opera after the performance has started, and leave before it ends.”
It was an interesting idea, imported from Old Europe, where the best people went to the opera to be seen. Presumably, if the artists ever had the good fortune to perform for an audience composed entirely of aristocrats, there would be a mass exodus just before the end, leaving them to conclude their opera to a silent and empty house—and thus, most conveniently, obviate the tiresome need for curtain calls and flowers.
“I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss the overture and the finale when I’ve paid good money for it,” her husband had quite reasonably replied. He might have added that it was an insult to the music, the artists and the rest of the audience. But he had wit enough to know that this was part of the point. Aristocrats were supposed to be above the music, and care not a bean for the feelings of the artists or the audience. “You can go,” he’d told her, “but I’m staying.”
And indeed, Rose might have hesitated to observe this convention herself if she hadn’t felt a loyalty to Mrs. Astor.
She and William found a compromise, however. Rose would leave just before the end of the opera and wait in the carriage a few yards down the street so that, as soon as William came to join her, they could get away quickly from the vehicles of the less instructed.
“When I think,” she now remarked to Hetty Master, “of the way Mrs. Astor was treated, by her own family, it just makes my blood boil.”
It was Mrs. Astor’s young nephew who was the culprit. He’d
lived in the house next door. And because his father had died, and he could claim, technically, that he was the head of the family, he had demanded that it was his wife who should now be called Mrs. Astor, and that Caroline must revert to the less senior appellation of Mrs. William Astor.
“Of course,” Rose said, “he was never a gentleman. He even wrote historical novels.”
Anyway, Mrs. Astor had quite rightly refused. Age and reputation should be given their due. So in a huff, young Astor had left for England, and not returned. He’d even become a British citizen, like the turncoat he was. For a man to let his daughter marry an English aristocrat was one thing, in Rose’s opinion, but to become an Englishman himself was quite another.
“They tell me he lives in a castle now,” Hetty Master remarked. It was quite true. He’d bought Hever Castle, in Kent, the childhood home of Anne Boleyn. “Perhaps he’ll write another novel there,” she added.
But he’d taken his revenge on his aunt all the same. He’d turned his former New York house into a hotel, thirteen stories high. It towered over hers, destroying all her privacy. He called it the Waldorf.
Four years later she’d admitted defeat and moved uptown. The Astor family rebuilt her house as a second hotel, the Astoria, and soon the two had been joined, by the gorgeous Peacock Alley, into a single establishment. Rose still refused to set foot in it.
“Mrs. Astor deserves a statue in her honor,” Rose stated with finality.
There was a pause.
“They say,” said Hetty, “that she’s entirely demented nowadays.”
“She’s not well,” Rose conceded.
“Well, I hear she’s demented,” said Hetty, inexorably.
The Rolls-Royce passed into the Forties. The old reservoir was no longer in use now, and they were building a magnificent new public library on the site. Everyone in the family knew that this was where Frank had proposed to Hetty, and Rose maintained a reverent silence while Hetty gazed at it as they passed. Soon St. Patrick’s loomed ahead on their right. As they reached the Fifties, and the new hotels rose into the sky by the Vanderbilt mansions, Hetty observed that everything in the city seemed to be getting very tall. “I’m surprised you like living up here with all these hotels,” she said.