Front Page Affair

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Front Page Affair Page 13

by Radha Vatsal


  He smiled, nodded, and moved on. Kitty wouldn’t have minded prolonging their conversation, but she didn’t know how, and clearly, he wasn’t good at small talk either, or he had no interest in her.

  She turned to watch him from the corner of her eye—he spoke to a friend, a stocky older man, then he seemed to glance her way. She instinctively avoided his gaze and pretended to be absorbed in a flyer from the previous night’s show.

  “What Miss Addams Learned about Peace in the War-Torn Nations—Hear It from the Eminent Emissary First-Hand!” the flyer said.

  A woman behind Kitty spoke a few words in German. Kitty glanced over her shoulder. The speaker was a buxom, raven-haired beauty with sapphires cascading from her ears. When Kitty searched for him again, the personable young man had disappeared.

  “Er müsste längst da sein.” He must be late, the woman said to her companion.

  Kitty couldn’t help listening in to the conversation. The woman had a piercing voice, and hearing German spoken aloud brought back a rush of nostalgia for her days in Switzerland.

  “Es ist eine lange Reise aus Washington,” the woman’s companion replied. “Vielleicht hat Herr Doktor Albert seine Plan geändert.”

  Kitty caught her breath. Did the man just say that Herr Doctor Albert might have changed his mind because it was a long trip from Washington?

  The woman asked him to check at the ticket booth downstairs.

  “Ja gerne,” he replied.

  “I’ll be right back,” Kitty said to her startled father and his business associate, who were deep in conversation. She followed the German-speaking gentleman.

  She kept her eyes trained on the back of his head, determined not to lose him. He wore black tails just like every other man in the place, and she hadn’t seen his face.

  He made his way to the central staircase; Kitty noticed the pleasant-looking young man heading downstairs as well, a few paces behind him.

  “Capability!” Amanda emerged out of nowhere with a girlfriend on either arm. “I’ve been looking for you.”

  “I’ll be right back—I left something at the front door.” Kitty couldn’t afford to stop, but Amanda and her friends barred the way.

  “Not so fast.” Amanda smiled. “Not before I’ve introduced you to Miss Hibben and Miss Nicholls.”

  Kitty had no choice except to curtsy.

  “Miss Hibben and Miss Nicholls will be joining me at the YWCA training.” Amanda turned to her friends. “I’m trying to convince Miss Weeks to join us too.”

  “Please excuse me.” The foreign gentleman had disappeared from Kitty’s sights. She edged past the ladies and raced down the staircase, not caring what they or anyone else might think of her.

  She reached the bottom of the stairwell, out of breath, but the foyer was empty. There was no one near the ticket booth, and even the pleasant-faced young man had vanished.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Sunday morning brought extras with the news: cartoons, fashions, reviews, and queries. Kitty set aside “Doings and Sayings in the Real Estate World” and “Riverside Regatta Well-Patronized” and smiled at an advertisement in Apartments and Automobiles: “The Tires That Fell Off Looked like Goodyear Tires—at First.” She browsed through the photograph pages, which featured the lavish interiors of the New Bankers Club of America at 120 Broadway that had completed its renovations to the tune of six hundred thousand dollars, an amazing sum of money.

  “Where did you run off to during the intermission last night?” Mr. Weeks asked, neatly cracking the top from his soft-boiled egg.

  “I lost my handkerchief.”

  “Must have been a pretty important handkerchief.”

  “Grace embroidered it for me.” Kitty quickly finished her cereal. “I’d better get back to work.”

  “Preparing for the Morgan interview?”

  “Yes.” She took the napkin from her lap and dropped it onto the table. “By the way, is it true that Mr. Morgan loaned the British government one hundred million dollars to support its war efforts?”

  “His bank did. Why do you ask?”

  “I’d like to understand why he supports England.”

  “The family has connections there. Morgan spent years running the bank’s London branch while his father dominated the American business scene.”

  Kitty returned to her rooms and finished “Her Recreation” before continuing on to “Her Future,” Anne Morgan’s final chapter.

  Miss Morgan began feistily, observing that “the problem now facing the American girl is her utter inability to realize that her future can only be a logical development of her present.”

  A few pages later, she declared that the average girl has “the tools of reading, writing, and arithmetic…placed in her hands with such blunted edges that they are of little value, and the basic qualities of accuracy, concentration, thoroughness, and ambition are conspicuous by their absence.”

  Industry could only be improved when employer and employee worked side by side to reach a common end, “thus bringing about an additional financial return as well as a larger opportunity for development of the individual.”

  Kitty wondered what Miss Morgan’s brother would make of that proposition.

  Although eight million American women had entered industry, Miss Morgan claimed that girls still believed that “woman’s duty is not to work, but simply to exist until such time as she can find someone who will work for her and support her parasitic existence. The harder her struggle the more she considers marriage as an ultimate goal where she can rest from her labors.”

  Too true, Kitty thought. Then again, not everyone had the freedom and courage to buck expectations and remain unmarried like Miss Morgan and her cohort.

  Grace looked in. “Mr. Weeks asks if you’ll join him in the study.”

  “In a little while,” Kitty replied. She reached the end of the chapter and then jotted down questions based on her notes. She would review and memorize them, but first, she took a break and went to see her father.

  “Are you done?” he said. “How was it?”

  “Stranger than I expected.”

  “In what way?”

  “I agree with much of what Miss Morgan says, and then I find some of her points strange. For instance, she says that girls should have the courage to remold the circumstances in which we find ourselves, rather than seeking different problems elsewhere. And that we should have self-control and self-discipline so that we can take our place in the general scheme of the universe.”

  “A little self-control and self-discipline never hurt anyone,” Julian Weeks said with a smile.

  “She’s forty-one and unmarried, Papa. She’s traveled all over the world and does whatever she wants, and yet she advises girls to embrace the domestic feeling.”

  “And that’s what you object to?”

  “I don’t see how she can make such a strong case for domestic life when she hasn’t followed that path.”

  “There are some women,” he replied, choosing his words with care, “who prefer to fulfill their domestic obligations in the company of other women.”

  “Do you mean the Versailles Triumvirate?”

  “That’s right.” It was the term the press used to refer to Miss Morgan’s living arrangement in France, where she had kept home with the theatrical agent Miss Elisabeth Marbury and Miss Elsie de Wolfe, now a well-known interior decorator.

  “If she can live a carefree life, why do the rest of us have to settle down and marry?”

  “You don’t want to marry?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “The point is that she has millions at her disposal in the bank, and most women don’t.”

  “That’s not fair,” Kitty said.

  “To whom?”

  Kitty sprang to Anne Morgan’s defense. “To her, as a matter of
fact. She didn’t have to write this book, and she didn’t have to dedicate herself to public service.”

  “You could be right.” Julian Weeks picked up his papers.

  The telephone rang, and Mr. Weeks picked it up. “It’s for you, Capability,” he said. “Amanda Vanderwell.”

  “Really?” Mrs. Vanderwell never allowed Amanda to chat on the phone on Sundays. She thought it went against the spirit of the Sabbath.

  “Is everything all right, Amanda?” Kitty said, speaking into the mouthpiece.

  “You’d better sit down. You’re not going to believe this.”

  “What is it? Are you engaged?”

  “Hardly.” Her friend’s voice was dry. “Remember Hotchkiss, Mrs. Basshor’s secretary?”

  “Of course, I spoke to him yesterday.”

  “Well, one of Mama’s friends called this morning. It seems that Hotchkiss has gone and killed himself.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Excuse me, Amanda.” Kitty turned to her father. “Do you mind if I take this outside?”

  He noticed her stunned expression. “What’s wrong, Capability?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute.” She went to the foyer, picked up the receiver, and heard him hang up his line. “Are you sure?” she said to her friend.

  “Certain as the day I was born. He didn’t come to work this morning. So of course Bessie Basshor was distressed.”

  “He works seven days a week?”

  “It seems so. Anyhow, she sent her chauffeur to his place in the Bronx. He had to break down the door and found Hotchkiss lying in the bathtub. The poor fellow was in his dress clothes, his shoes on and everything. He had slit his wrists. Apparently”—Amanda’s voice shook—“the water was red with his blood.”

  “Oh my goodness.” Kitty pulled up a chair and sat down. “Have the police been called? Do they know why he did it?”

  “I think they have. I wanted to telephone you earlier, but I didn’t get a chance. Bessie’s fallen to pieces, so Mama has gone over, which is why I’ve been able to reach you. Do you think there could have been foul play?”

  “Foul play?” Kitty struggled to make sense of things. What had Hotchkiss been so upset about when they spoke yesterday?

  Amanda asked, “Maybe he knew who killed Hunter?”

  “They’re saying the stable hand shot Mr. Cole.”

  “Well, that can’t be it then.”

  “Thank you for telling me, Amanda.” Kitty hung up the line.

  Throughout the day, she recalled snippets of her interactions with the secretary: how flustered he had seemed at the party, the gossipy manner in which he filled her in on all the guests. Meeting him in the silver-papered foyer to Mrs. Basshor’s apartment. His conversation with her at the Sentinel. And finally, their telephone conversation yesterday.

  Why hadn’t she paid more attention? She had been so preoccupied about preparing for her interview that she couldn’t recall exactly what he’d said.

  He had told her that he was finished. What did that mean? Was it significant that he whispered it just as Mrs. Basshor called his name?

  She pictured him fully clothed and floating in the bathtub in his own blood and screwed her eyes shut to drive away the image.

  Had he left a note? Did he suspect that Mrs. Basshor might fire him? What could be worse than that?

  The first thing that popped into Kitty’s mind was that Mrs. Basshor had killed Hunter Cole and that the secretary was trying to protect his mistress. But she dismissed the thought at once. Someone would have noticed if the hostess had gone missing.

  Kitty stared distractedly into her closet and finally chose a white pleated dress paired with a bolero-style velvet jacket to wear the next morning. She wrote down her questions and memorized key paragraphs and phrases from Anne Morgan’s book.

  Tomorrow’s interview had lost some of its luster.

  She arrived at the Sentinel the following day less rested and more agitated than she ought to have been, but Miss Busby didn’t seem notice.

  “Turn around. One more time.” She put Kitty through her paces, scrutinizing her apprentice like a maître de ballet examining his prima ballerina.

  “I like it.” She nodded in approval at Kitty’s choice of outfit. “Attractive yet no-nonsense. Just the right balance.” She unscrewed her bottle and downed a spoonful of Rowland’s.

  They went over Kitty’s notes, with Miss Busby muttering under her breath and making corrections. “I don’t know about suffrage,” she said, pausing at one of Kitty’s notes. “It’s controversial.” Then she changed her mind. “Feel her out. If she’s willing to reply, you can try asking.”

  They spent half an hour practicing Kitty’s entrance and delivery. How she must talk and present herself. What to do if she forgot a question—ask for a glass of water. “Don’t panic. It will come back to you,” Miss Busby said. “And in the meantime, you will be surprised how much people talk to fill in the silence.”

  The clock on the editor’s desk showed it was half past nine. “Are you ready?”

  “I am now.” Kitty felt like she was on the way to the gallows.

  “Remember that you’re from the Sentinel.” Miss Busby clapped her on the back. “Hold your head high.”

  She accompanied Kitty downstairs and hailed her a cab. Just as Kitty was about to climb in, the editor reached into her purse and handed her a dollar for the fare.

  “Thank you, Miss Busby,” Kitty said.

  The cab merged into the traffic.

  Fifteen minutes later, it pulled up at the corner of Park Avenue and Sixty-Second Street beside a five-story marble-and-brick building with a mansard roof and pillared facade still partially covered by scaffolding. The Colony Club was a ladies-only establishment, of which Miss Morgan was a founding member. Kitty had heard that in order to join, one had to be either fabulously wealthy or fabulously accomplished.

  “Are you Miss Weeks?” A businesslike woman hurried down the stairs. “I’m Daisy Rogers, Miss Morgan’s secretary. Unfortunately, Miss Morgan has been detained, but I can give you a tour of our new premises while you wait.”

  Kitty eagerly accepted the offer.

  “Mind your step,” Miss Rogers said as they entered a vast circular entrance hall. She gestured to a door to the right and smiled. “A kennel purpose-built for our members’ dogs. They will be cared for here while their mistresses are within.”

  Four arches opened onto different sections of the facility. One was a members-only sitting room paneled with wood flown in from London.

  “We’re a bit of an experiment,” Miss Rogers said. “This is the first clubhouse in America—in the world perhaps—built especially for ladies. There are those who wonder why we need so much more space, but we had no choice, really. The old location on Madison just wasn’t large enough to accommodate everyone. All thirteen floors here—”

  Kitty couldn’t hide her surprise. From the outside, it seemed there were just five or six.

  “I know.” The secretary seemed pleased. “Appearances can be deceiving. We have thirteen levels inside—each catering to our members’ needs and desires.”

  Wide-eyed, Kitty followed the secretary into a one-and-a-half-story ballroom, complete with a retractable stage on one end and a balcony for the orchestra on the other. Above it was a seventy-foot lounge, a suite of card rooms, public and private dining rooms, and private dressing rooms for members who didn’t wish to stay overnight.

  “Do you happen to know how the club was founded?”

  “No.” Kitty shook her head, overwhelmed not solely by the opulence—that was commonplace—but by the fact that all this had been built as a female-only enclave.

  “About ten years ago,” Miss Rogers told her, taking the stairs up, “Mrs. J. Borden Harriman wanted to come to the city for a few days to run errands. The problem was that she
had nowhere to stay. The Harrimans were renting in Newport while their town house was being renovated, and Mr. Harriman didn’t approve of ladies taking a room at a hotel by themselves. Mrs. Harriman realized then and there that what was required was a woman’s club, a place where ladies could spend the night, have parcels delivered, make telephone calls, and receive guests. She applied to Miss Morgan, and Mr. Pierpont Morgan put up the first ten thousand dollars on the condition that they find nine others to contribute equal sums. That bought the place on Madison Avenue. And now, ten years later, we’ve grown to need a million-dollar building.”

  They passed two floors of sleeping and sitting rooms en route to a gymnasium equipped with the latest equipment. Members could book private rooms for manicures, hairdressing, or individual sessions with fitness instructors; they could play a game of squash at the squash courts, then step into the express elevator—which Kitty and Miss Rogers did—and drop down six floors to arrive at the edge of a sparkling underground marble swimming pool. It was the deepest indoor pool in the city, Miss Rogers said, at sixty feet long and twenty feet wide. Another section was devoted to special treatments usually found only in the best health spas in Europe.

  The door to the elevator opened, and a messenger looked in to tell them that Miss Morgan had arrived. Kitty and Miss Rogers went back upstairs to wait for her on the third floor loggia, where a flock of pink flamingos, painted by the muralist Robert Chanler, soared across a vaulted ceiling. Live macaws and a marble fountain designed by Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney would complete the scenery closer to opening day, Miss Rogers whispered.

  “Do you know what one of the members said to me the other day?” The secretary stood at attention. Sensing her anticipation, Kitty began to feel nervous once again.

  “She told me,” Miss Rogers went on, “that it wasn’t the facilities that mattered to her. What she liked best about the club was being able to telephone her husband at the eleventh hour and tell him that she wouldn’t be coming home for dinner.”

  A set of double doors swung open, and a crisp voice called, “I’ll see you later, Elsie.” Moments later, a surprisingly tall, broad-shouldered woman strode forward to greet Kitty.

 

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