Julie was old money. And she had some money, too. She was blonde and blue-eyed and bland, and her family were Social Register, like the Masters. Mrs. Astor’s famous Four Hundred might be a thing of the past, but the registers, those broader guides to the good old families of America, were very much around. Indeed, it was perfectly possible, Charlie supposed, to lead a fulfilling social life without stirring outside their pages. His mother had been delighted when, at the end of the war, he’d married Julie.
And not too pleased last year, when they’d divorced.
He’d supposed it was his fault. Julie had grown tired of his ever-shifting employment. Not that he didn’t earn any money. In the thirties, though money had been tight, he’d always got by with a variety of freelance activities. And even during the Depression you could make money in the entertainment industry. He’d collaborated on plays and movies; by the time he married, he’d even had a small share of a Broadway musical. And after Julie bought the apartment, he’d always been able to pay the maintenance and that sort of thing. When their son was born, he’d hoped it would draw them closer.
Little Gorham. Most of the people one knew had nicknames. If you were John, you became Jack. Henry was Harry, Augustus was Gus, Howard was Howie, Winthrop was Win, Prescott was Pres. That’s what people called you, people you knew, that is. But young Gorham, for some reason, had just stayed Gorham.
Then Julie had told him she wanted a divorce so she could marry a doctor, from Staten Island, for God’s sake. Not that he had anything against Staten Island. The island borough of Richmond, as it officially was, had not been connected to any other borough by a bridge yet, so it still retained the rural, almost eighteenth-century character that Manhattan Island had entirely lost. The views across the water were pleasant, but it was inconvenient to go all the way out there to collect his son for the weekend.
Julie and Gorham were waiting for him at the terminal. Julie was wearing a new coat and a small felt hat. She looked good. He hadn’t fought any of her demands for money when they divorced. It wasn’t worth the hassle. She’d sold the apartment and, as the doctor she married had a handsome house already, she had plenty to spend on herself.
On the way back, he put his arm around his son and pointed things out to him. Gorham was five. He was fair-haired and blue-eyed like both of his parents. Children resemble various relatives at different ages, but for the moment at least, Gorham looked like his father. Charlie knew his son needed him, and he did his best for the boy.
“Are we going to a show tonight?” Gorham asked.
“Yes. We’re going to South Pacific.”
“We are? Really?”
“I promised.”
A huge smile appeared on the little boy’s face. “South Pacific,” he murmured.
He was awfully young for it, but for some reason he’d set his heart on seeing the show, so what could you do? Some years back, when Charlie had first heard that James Michener’s book was being adapted into a musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein, he had wondered how it would work. Well, half a dozen smash hit songs and nearly two thousand performances later, he had his answer. Even now, he’d had to pay double price to a scalper for the seats he wanted tonight. He hoped after all this effort that the little boy would enjoy it.
While his son contemplated the treat ahead, Charlie’s mind wandered back to the meeting he’d had with the girl.
The photography collection was important to him. He’d been very fond of Edmund Keller. During the Depression Keller had not only been a good friend, but he’d even got him some lecturing assignments at Columbia that had provided some extra income. It had come as a hell of a shock when Keller told him a couple of years ago that he had cancer.
“Charlie, I want you to be the guardian of my father’s photographs. There’s no one in the family who’d know how to deal with this. If you make any money out of it, then you should take a fee and pass on the rest to my estate. Would you do that for me?”
The collection was magnificent. A small apartment in a building up on Riverside Drive, near Columbia, served as an office and storage space, and Charlie often liked to work up there. He’d made an approach to the gallery a little while ago, and the owner had come to see the collection and agreed on a show. Charlie would arrange the publicity.
He’d been decidedly frustrated when the owner had suddenly handed over all the arrangements to some girl who’d only just started there. Reluctantly, he’d given her the portfolio he’d brought with him, and let her take a look at it.
But instead of looking through it and making the usual polite noises, the girl had gone through the photographs, staring so intently through her glasses at each one that, for a few minutes, he wondered if she’d forgotten him.
“These ones,” she pulled out half a dozen of the later photographs, “these could be early Stieglitz.”
She was right. New York’s legendary photographer and art entrepreneur had produced some beautiful work, around the turn of the century, after his return to New York from Germany, that was close to Theodore Keller’s. “Did they meet?” she asked.
“Yes. Several times. I have Keller’s diaries.”
“We should mention that.” She pulled out an earlier shot, of men walking up the railroad beside the Hudson River. “Great choice,” she said. “Amazing composition.”
They started to talk about Keller’s technique. They kept talking. After an hour he’d said, “I have to be in Midtown after this. Shall we go to the St. Regis?”
He wondered if she’d turn up at the opening of the show at the Betty Parsons next week.
At the Manhattan ferry terminal, he found a taxi. Soon they were going up the East River Drive, and crossing to First Avenue. As they passed Forty-second Street, he pointed out the big new United Nations building on the right, overlooking the water. He liked its clean, modern lines. Gorham stared at it, but it was impossible to know what the boy was thinking.
“The River House is just up from here,” Charlie remarked. “Your grandmother has a lot of friends in that building.” Maybe the grandest apartment building in the city. But of course, little Gorham had no idea what that meant.
Charlie had always supposed that his son would live in the same world. Assumed it really. Until Julie went off to Staten Island. Could you breathe the spirit of the great, daring city out on Staten Island? Maybe. It was one of the Five Boroughs, after all. But would his son really understand? Would he know which were the best buildings on the Upper East Side? Would he know all the restaurants and clubs? And the intimate sights and smells of Greenwich Village, the grainy texture of Soho? Moments like this made Charlie realize how much he loved Manhattan. And it gave him a terrible pain, and sense of loss, to think that he might not be able to share the city with his son.
They turned left on Forty-seventh Street. As they crossed Lexington, Charlie pointed south. “Grand Central Station’s just down there,” he said. Gorham was silent. They reached Park Avenue and turned north. “When I was a boy,” said Charlie, “there were railway yards here. Park Avenue wasn’t so nice then. But the railway lines are all under the ground now, and Park Avenue looks pretty neat, don’t you think?”
“Yes, Dad,” said the little boy.
There was something else, he realized, that he wanted to convey to the boy. Something deep and important. Beyond the magnificent houses and apartments, the teeming life of the streets, the newspapers, theaters, galleries—the huge business of the place. What he needed Gorham to understand—what his son was heir to—the thing that really mattered—was the New Yorkers’ indomitable spirit.
Even the Depression hadn’t really brought the city down. Three giants had saved it. FDR, the president of course—and the good old Dutch name of Roosevelt was as New York as could be. It took the guts and daring of a New Yorker, Charlie reckoned, to push the New Deal through. Second, from the early thirties, right through to ’45, New York’s tiny, feisty Mayor La Guardia—a Republican technically, but a New Dealer all the way—had
run the most honest administration the city had ever seen, and championed the poor through all those painful years. Third, and no less dramatic in his own way, that brutal giant Robert Moses.
No one had ever seen public works on the scale Commissioner Moses undertook. Those massive bridges—the Triborough, from Long Island to Manhattan; the beautiful Whitestone, from Long Island to the Bronx. A slew of public parks. Above all, the huge roadways that swept the ever-growing traffic round New York’s boroughs. With these titanic projects, Moses had brought countless millions of federal dollars into the city, employing thousands.
Some people said there was a cruelty about Moses and his methods. They said his big Long Island expressways avoided the great estates of the rich, but devastated the homes of the poor; that he only cared about the flow of motor cars, and ignored public transport. They even said the new highways created barriers, physically separating black neighborhoods from the public parks.
Charlie wasn’t sure. New York’s public transport was pretty good, he reckoned, and in this new age of the motor car, the city would have come to a standstill without the new roads. The criticism about the parks and the black neighborhoods might be true, but the layout of the roads was magnificent. When he drove up the West Side’s Henry Hudson Parkway, which swept one gloriously along the great river all the way past the George Washington Bridge, Charlie could forgive Moses almost anything.
The question was, he thought, as they pulled up at his mother’s building on Park, how was he going to explain all that to his son?
The white-gloved doorman took them to the elevator, and Rose was waiting for them at her apartment door. She might be over eighty, but she could have passed for sixty-five. She welcomed them warmly and they all went into the living room.
It was a nice apartment. According to the way they counted these things in the city, it had six rooms. Living room, dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a maid’s room off the kitchen. The three bathrooms weren’t counted. Respectable enough for a widowed lady, but not quite what a family like his should have. Charlie would have preferred an eight—that gave you another bedroom or library and a second maid’s room. The rooms got bigger too, with an eight. When they’d been married, Charlie and Julie had had an eight, though not on Park.
Of course, if he’d gone into Wall Street, if he’d made money like some of his friends, Charlie might have got one of the big apartments on Park or Fifth by now. Ten rooms, fifteen. They were huge, really like mansions, with four or five maids’ rooms for your staff.
Charlie had an apartment on Seventy-eighth and Third these days. Not far away from his mother. Seventy-eighth was a good street, and the apartments had big living rooms like artists’ studios, so it was quite interesting for a single man. It didn’t have a doorman, though. One really should have a doorman.
Rose was good with children. She showed little Gorham photographs of his grandfather and great-grandfather. The boy liked that. There were pictures of the Newport house as well. Things to remind the little fellow where he really belonged.
At noon, they went out and took a taxi across to the Plaza Hotel. In the Palm Court, they were ushered to a table. He could see that Gorham was impressed with the Palm Court.
“Sometimes I walk over to the Carlyle,” said Rose. “But I like coming here. It’s nice being near the park.”
She picked at a salad while her grandson, having dutifully eaten a fishcake, tucked into a chocolate eclair. They talked about the school he’d started at.
“When you’re older,” Rose said, “you’ll go to Groton.”
Julie hadn’t given any trouble about that. They’d all agreed. To be precise, Charlie recalled, his mother and his ex-wife had agreed. He just had to pay the bills. He’d have liked Gorham to go to one of the day schools in the city, but you couldn’t do that easily from Staten Island, and having the boy live with him, or his grandmother, assuming she was alive by then, seemed a bit difficult.
“Did you go to Groton, Dad?” the little boy asked.
“No,” said Rose, “but he probably should have.”
It was a fine place of course. The Massachusetts boarding school was closely modeled on Cheltenham College in England, and its Latin motto said it all: “Serve God and Rule” Charlie translated it. Muscular Christianity. Episcopal, of course. Good, sound education, nothing too intellectual. Plenty of sport. Cold showers. Like the rulers of Britain’s empire, the owners of America’s great fortunes mustn’t get soft.
“He’ll meet the right sort of people there,” Charlie said cheerfully. Roosevelt, Auchincloss, Morgan, Whitney, du Pont, Adams, Harriman, Grew … People with names like that went to Groton.
“Wasn’t there somebody called Peabody there?” asked Gorham.
“Yes, Gorham.” Charlie smiled. “He founded it. He was headmaster there for fifty years. Well done.”
“It’s not Peabody, dear,” said Rose. “It’s pronounced Pee-bdy.”
“Oh, Mother,” said Charlie with a shrug. “At his age …”
“Pee-bdy,” said his mother firmly.
It amused Charlie how old money in America had somewhat adopted the English custom of leaving verbal traps for the socially unwary. Old money pronounced certain names in ways that discreetly separated them from the rest. There were other words, too. The modern custom of referring to a man’s casual evening dress as a “tuxedo,” or even worse a “tux,” was definitely considered vulgar. Middle-class America said “tuxedo.” Old money said “dinner jacket.”
“Mind you,” said his mother quietly, “I hear Groton let in a black boy.”
“They did,” said Charlie. “A couple of years ago. Good thing.”
“Oh well,” his mother murmured, “at least it wasn’t a Jew.”
Charlie shook his head. There were times when you just had to ignore his mother.
When they came out afterward, Gorham saw one of the pretty little horse-drawn hansom cabs standing by the corner, and asked if they could go for a ride. Charlie glanced at his mother, who nodded.
“Why not?” said Charlie.
It was a pleasant ride. First, they went down Fifth Avenue. His mother was her usual self. As they passed Bergdorf’s elegant department store, she explained to Gorham: “That used to be the Vanderbilt mansion.” A couple of minutes later, as they approached the High Gothic front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, she said sadly: “This used to be all private houses. Now it’s just churches and stores.”
Yet in fact, Charlie realized, they were actually coming to the true, spiritual center of Midtown. And it wasn’t the cathedral, important though that was. No, Manhattan’s spiritual center lay opposite the cathedral, right across the street.
How well he remembered those long years, all through the thirties and beyond, when one looked across Manhattan to see the huge tower of the Empire State Building, the great symbol, dominating the sky. But the symbol of what? Failure. Eighty-eight floors of offices—which couldn’t be let. People did rent them eventually, but right through the Depression years, it was known as the Empty State Building. And you’d have thought others would hesitate to build more office blocks at such a time.
But not if you knew New York, or the Rockefeller family.
Just before the crash of ’29, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had leased twenty-two acres on the west side of Fifth Avenue to build a complex of art deco office buildings and an opera house. After the crash, the opera house had to be abandoned. But that didn’t stop Rockefeller executing the rest of the project. Single-handed, the richest family in the world developed not one but fourteen office towers, with roof gardens and a central plaza, creating the most elegant street space in the city. Its delightful central court doubled as an open restaurant in summer and small ice rink in winter. Toward the end of a decade of building, some of the construction workers, one December, decided to put a Christmas tree in the plaza.
Rockefeller Center was a triumph. It was big, it was elegant, it was rich. It was created by New Yorkers who refuse
d to take no for an answer. Even the Depression couldn’t keep them down. That was it, Charlie thought. That was the point of New York. Immigrants came here penniless, but they made it all the same. God knows, the first Astor had come with almost nothing. It was the tradition, going right back to those hard, salty East Coast sea captains and settlers from whom he and his son descended. Rockefeller was a titan, like Pierpont Morgan, or President Roosevelt—princes of the world, and with the New York spirit, every one.
“That’s Rockefeller Center,” he said to his son. “They kept on building it right through the Depression because Rockefeller had money and guts. Isn’t it fine?”
“Yes,” said Gorham.
“A New Yorker can never be beat, Gorham, because he gets right back up again. Remember that.”
“Okay, Dad,” said the little boy.
The cab took them round, up Sixth and back through Central Park. It was really very pleasant. But as they came back to where they’d started, Charlie couldn’t help reflecting upon one, inescapable truth. They’d just taken a horse-drawn hansom, like tourists. Tonight he’d take Gorham to a show, somewhat like a tourist. And tomorrow he’d have to take him back to Staten Island.
And then his son spoke.
“Dad.”
“Yes, Gorham.”
“When I grow up, I’m going to live here.”
“Well, I hope you will.”
The little boy frowned, and looked up at his father solemnly, as if he had not quite been understood.
“No, Dad,” he said quietly, “it’s what I’m going to do.”
Charlie arrived at the gallery quite early, but Sarah Adler was already there.
The Betty Parsons Gallery was on Fifty-fifth Street. It had only opened in 1946, but it was already famous. Partly, no doubt, it was Betty’s character. Born into old money, she’d followed the prescribed path, married young and respectably. But then she’d rebelled. She’d gone to Paris, and set up house with another woman. In the thirties she’d lived in Hollywood, and been a friend of Greta Garbo. Finally, an artist herself, she’d set up her gallery in New York.