by Tom Murphy
It amounted to a complete social boycott by all the ladies of San Francisco.
More than a hundred men came to the party, but only half a dozen of them brought women, and the women, more often than not, were not wives or daughters.
She and Brooks stood in the great foyer, underneath the sweeping curve of the main staircase. They stood flanked by rose trees in white tubs, stood close together in the candlelight, stood smiling, greeting, shaking hands.
And before the first twenty guests had arrived, Lily could see the pattern forming. “There seems,” she whispered to Brooks through her most dazzling smile, “to be an epidemic in the town that attacks only women.”
A man in San Francisco, Lily knew all too well, could go anywhere, and with anyone, and never make a scandal. He could go gaming or whoring or to the races. He could break laws and keep mistresses and be roaring, rampaging drunk and disorderly from dawn until dusk and no one would lift an eyebrow.
It was left to the womenfolk to preserve the sanctity of the hearth, the morality of the family circle, the standards of Queen Victoria. And, Lily thought with a bitter grin, that is fust where they are tonight, the good ladies of San Francisco. They are at home, upholding their damned standards. She looked anxiously at Brooks, wondering how it would affect him. For herself, Lily cared not a jot for the approval or scorn of the righteous matrons of the town. For her family, for the man she loved more than life itself, that was another matter. They stood by the staircase for an hour, until most of the guests had arrived. Then Brooks turned to her, smiling his most dazzling smile, and said, “I, for one, intend to have a very good time at our party. How about you, Mrs. Chaffee?”
“I could have a good time,” she said with a laugh that came more from her head than her heart, “in the bottom of a mineshaft at midnight, if you were there, Mr. Chaffee. How about a glass of champagne?”
Hand in hand, they strolled out into the glittering throng.
The night seemed to last years. Lily tried to remember who had accepted and who had not. The mayor, she knew, had promised to come but was nowhere to be seen. In the most scandal-ridden town in America, she thought bitterly, we are too scandalous for his Honor.
Lily moved among the guests, her head held high, a smile never far from her lightly rouged lips, afraid of nothing, laughing, charming, the perfect hostess.
It was a tribute to her performance that even Brooks thought she was having a good time.
The wine and the food and the flowers were perfection. Lily danced, Lily talked gently to the shy and listened attentively to the loquacious, introduced strangers to each other, who were also strangers to her. And she looked at her guests very carefully, wondering exactly why they had come, and what they had said to the wives who were so militantly and so successfully boycotting the occasion. They all seemed to know Brooks, and to like him, as why should they not? Many of these men were no doubt business partners to some degree of the many and widely flung parts of Chaffee Produce, or the Chaffee real-estate interests, or maybe they simply hoped that some of the wealth and glory that were so vividly in evidence tonight in the Chaffee mansion might come their way, seekers of crumbs from the banquets of the great.
And Lily found herself feeling sorry for the few ladies who had come, for they were either too ignorant or too insignificant to have been caught up in the general snubbing. To these females, Lily extended herself, and was her most witty, her kindest, showed them the upper floors of the great house, discussed the furnishings with an expert’s appreciation, for indeed Lily had become something of an expert during the months of building and furnishing.
Fergy came with an actress friend, a dark little thing with a pretty face and snake’s eyes. But she was a woman, and decently dressed, and Lily was glad to have her. Fergy himself was flushed with wine but on his best behavior. Lily had forbidden reporters, and she extracted from her brother a promise to keep his silence about the party when next he saw his journalist pals. But she knew very well that there could be no counting on such discretion from the hundred-and-some other men in the rooms.
San Francisco would have a great laugh at her expense tomorrow, her expense and Brooks’s. Lily could hardly have felt more pain had she been publicly flogged in Golden Gate Park, and her pain was deeper, more intense because she felt it on his account more than her own. To have brought this on him, to have my sins come home to roost at last. She moved through the gardens, smiling, chatting, sipping champagne. And every sip tasted bitter as hemlock, and every smile cost the earth.
It was past three o’clock when the last candle flickered out and the last carriage crunched down the drive.
Hand in hand, Brooks and Lily walked up the curving staircase to their bedroom suite on the second floor. Slowly silently, they moved down the wide hallway. In their bedroom, Lily moved mechanically to the window. Servants were extinguishing the last of the fairy lanterns on the terrace. The gas jets of San Francisco’s street-lights were still alight, and lights still shone in some of the houses of the town.
Lily stood there for a moment, saying nothing, for there seemed to be nothing to say. Brooks came up behind her and put his hands on the silky skin of her shoulders, and bent his head to nuzzle gently at the lovely curve where her slender neck resolved itself into the delicacy of her shoulder. His voice was a hoarse whisper, loud in the silence of a gathering dawn.
“You’re far, far better than all of them put together, my Lily, my Lily, my love. Never forget that.”
“Ah, poor Brooks, you had such fine hopes, and now where are they? I truly don’t care, my darling, but that you wanted it thus, not a damn do I care for the lot of them, ’tis you and only you I care for, and always have, and always will.”
“Damn her.”
Lily didn’t have to ask whom he meant: the sheepish, lopsided grin on Stanford Dickinson’s face had confirmed every suspicion and magnified every fear.
“Now do you understand why I so love the ranch?”
“I never doubted your reasons, Lily, but I never dreamed of anything like this, such small-mindedness, either.”
“’Tis because there isn’t a small-minded bone in your body. Don’t worry, my darling, they aren’t going to get the best of Lily Cigar. I won’t run, far from it. If it’s San Francisco you want, I will stay here and work and fight and do whatever I have to do until they come crawling up Nob Hill on their knees to us.”
He laughed then, and Lily smiled in the darkness. It couldn’t be that bad a wound if he could laugh thus already. And in that secret smile was a promise: she’d do what she said, and do it well, and quickly. Tomorrow wasn’t a moment too soon to begin, either.
Lily turned in his arms and kissed him, and the night and their love closed around her, warm and reassuring and throbbing with passion.
45
Lily found the key to all the drawing rooms of San Francisco in the pages of the daily newspapers she had always scorned.
On the morning after their party, Lily slept very late.
It was past eleven when she woke, and Brooks was gone. Lily rang for her maid, ordered breakfast in her bedroom, and asked for the morning editions of the town’s four best-read newspapers.
The party was mentioned in every paper, but only one had the nerve to hint at the snubbing that was the most vivid memory of that night for Lily and Brooks.
Lily’s self-imposed program of educating herself included much reading, but few newspapers. Politics interested her very little and gossip not at all, and these seemed to be the two singularly unattractive rocks upon which the popular press was founded.
But now, like an attacking general gathering intelligence, Lily read every page of every paper with burning attention.
What she saw in those flimsy pages was an enormous thirst for culture.
The bawdy, brawling, strike-it-rich little mining town was desperately anxious for the approval of its older, more polished counterparts back East and abroad. Anything to do with serious painting, sculpture, and especially mus
ic was coveted and revered out of all proportion to its possible artistic worth.
Lily smiled as she formed a plan, for the city’s thirst for culture and respectability was very like her own.
The difference was one of degree and of publicity: while San Francisco needed, in fact demanded, public approval in the eyes of the world, Lily would hardly blink an eye if all the world outside her family moved to China tomorrow morning.
But Brooks wanted San Francisco, and San Francisco she would get him.
Lily sat luxuriously on a chaise longue, uncharacteristically lazy this fine June morning, and schemed. And as she schemed, Lily’s good spirits came back to her, and she found herself, all alone in the big bedroom, laughing out loud. San Francisco, indeed! She’d give her husband Mamie Dickinson on a silver platter.
Brooks saw the humor in it too.
“It’s quite simple,” Lily said over a quiet supper, just the two of them alone that night. “Who leads the cultural life of the town can also lead its social life. If I—we—have access to some conductor or opera star that Mamie Dickinson has not, then she must come to us or be ostracized.”
“So you will go lion-hunting?”
“Not for love of the lions, my darling, but for love of you. With your permission.”
“Granted and granted. And the day I see Mamie Dickinson and her gang cross this threshold, I will…”
“Build me my cottage on Lily’s Hill?”
“Of solid silver, if you like.”
“And possibly spend some time with me there?”
“My darling, I am with you wherever I go. But yes, and as much as you like.”
She looked at him and wondered at her luck. “I won’t hold you to your word, my darling, because the time I would want is forever.”
Lily knew that the cultivation of San Francisco’s uppermost social circle would take time and willpower. In fact, it took more than a year, and the cost to her spirit was incalculable, for the prize was nothing she cared for in the least. The values of these women were so shallow as to be transparent and what Lily saw very clearly through the transparency was fear and jealousy and bitterness. In their own cruel way the dowagers of the city were easily as insecure as Lily had ever been, and once she realized that, they became fair game for her plans. In the meantime she forced herself to endure small afternoon concerts in the second drawing room, now equipped with a fine rosewood grand piano and an antique harp and renamed the music room.
Now Lily used her brother’s connections with the press, and suddenly her musical afternoons were mentioned, and favorably, in the newspapers and the details of the mansion were described with wonderment Lily chose her guests with care and shrewdness, and steeled herself for the refusals that often came. But slowly, painfully, the little afternoons acquired a certain small fame. The Chaffees gave no more large parties, but only small and meticulously organized dinner parties, often including visiting business acquaintances of Brooks’s, and sometimes people connected with the opera house. The Chaffees’ table became famous for the quality of its food and wines, and for the selectivity of the guest list. Slowly, slowly. Conquest by conquest Lily built up a circle of lady friends who saw no scandal in accepting her magnificant hospitality.
Still, she bided her time.
Then, one day in the spring of 1877, Lily saw a small item in one of Brooks’s New York papers, and she knew the time was ripe.
Mamie Dickinson looked at her reflection in the huge gilded mirror that was the most striking feature of her bedroom in the gray mansion on Rincon Hill. What she saw did not please her.
The gown had arrived from Paris only last week, and was the very pinnacle of fashion, but the gown did not please her. Her jewels were famous for their size and rarity, vast rubies and diamonds vaster still, but the jewels, tonight, seemed to glitter for their own amusement, and they did not please her.
No more did the sardonic expression on the cheerful damned face of the cad she’d married please Mamie, cad he was, and bounder! The fact that Stanford Dickinson was one of the richest, and handsomest—and most fickle!—men in all of California did not please Mamie at all this night, for he fairly gloated.
That she, Mamie Dickinson, unquestioned leader, arbitress and setter of trends for all of San Francisco, should be obliged to dance attendance on a whore! And not only was Lily Cigar notorious for having been a whore, but for having been the particular favorite whore of Stanford Dickinson himself!
Lily might be forgiven her past, but not—at least not by Mamie—could she ever be forgiven her cleverness.
It was nothing less than diabolical.
There was no question of not going to the concert: all of San Francisco would be there, and not to go might imply not having been invited. And not having been invited meant your star had fallen, or, worse, had never risen at all.
Mamie frowned at the Paris satin and Venetian lace, at the rubies and diamonds, at the past and the future.
The tables had been fairly turned, and this night might mark the certification of Lily Cigar Malone Chaffee as the new leader! And with Mamie right there, helpless, watching. Well, Mamie thought, maybe not helpless, not altogether. She wasn’t dead yet, nor the battle over.
And the worst thing was, Mamie had no idea how this vulgar little upstart had pulled it off.
How did one get the world-famous Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson to travel all the way to California and give one very private recital, “just for a few friends” as the handwritten note had suggested? Nilsson was the toast of New York, of London, of Paris, of anywhere and everywhere. Everywhere but San Francisco. A tour was rumored, but not until next season, if it happened at all. And yet, here she was, staying with the Chaffees, singing for the Chaffees “and just a few friends”!
It was intolerable. Not that Mamie hadn’t tried to organize another boycott. The good Lord knew she’d tried. But even He seemed to have turned against her.
When Mrs. Hitchkok Coit had flatly told Mamie she had every intention of going, and even been so presumptuous as to laugh out loud at Mamie’s gently offered suggestion of their getting up a theater party that night, Mamie knew it was all over. If Mrs. Hitchkok Coit was going, then they’d all be going, traitors all: the senior Coits would surely be there, Jim Lick beyond a doubt, the Reeses, and W. C. Ralston, the lot. Damn! The simple fact of it was that Mamie dared not to conduct her boycott alone, for it might fail, and to fail might be to risk losing her authority once and for all. No, better far to infiltrate the enemy camp. Who knew what mischief might not be worked from within?
But it was a small and insufficient satisfaction. Mamie frowned as she descended the staircase. Stanford held her wrap.
“You’re getting fat, Stanford.”
His reply was couched in laughter.
Lily stood so close to Brooks that she could feel the warmth of him. They stood at the foot of the great staircase, receiving their guests, and the guests came in matched pairs now, with a woman for nearly every man, and the women glittering in all their finest, jewels sparkling under the light of the uncountable candles, and with another kind of sparkle in their eyes, caught up as they were in the glow of expectation, to hear the famous Christine Nilsson, who had never sung in California, who might never sing here again!
Lily smiled and shook hands, waiting for the moment she knew must come.
And it came.
There was no roll of drums. No angels sang or trumpets blared, but there, walking slowly through the door, walking up the three marble stairs, across the foyer, coming right to her, there were Stanford and Mamie Dickinson.
Lily looked at the woman who had caused her so much misery, and there was no triumph in her glance. How sad it must be for her, Lily thought, forcing herself to smile, to say the words of welcome, for this is all she cares for in the world, playing this silly game, and she has lost, and in public.
“It is kind of you to come, Mrs. Dickinson,” said Lily softly, “very kind indeed.”
T
he woman’s lips quivered into a simulation of a smile; then she quickly walked on. Stanford kissed Lily heartily.
“Congratulations, my dear!” was all he said, and all he had to say.
Soon all the hundred guests had arrived and had been served with champagne. The music room was banked with white flowers, almost as if for a wedding. The rosewood piano had been elevated for the occasion onto a specially built platform at the far end of the room, hastily constructed but made attractive by being covered with an old Persian carpet in soft shades of ivory and rose. After forty-five minutes of party talk, Lily sensed a restlessness in the crowd. She went to the small library where Christine Nilsson was waiting, and led her into the room.
There was a ripple of anticipation, then a hush. Lily didn’t have to signal for silence, the silence was waiting for her as she mounted to the platform, leading Madame Nilsson by the hand.
Lily looked at her guests and smiled. All of San Francisco was here: the hundred richest and most distinguished people that it would be possible to gather under any roof in town, for any reason. She bowed her head slightly, as if searching for words, then spoke in a low, clear voice.
“We thank you for coming. Madame Nilsson has been kind enough to offer to sing for us, and unless we can persuade her to alter her tour program, this may be the only time she ever sings in California. I give you Christine Nilsson, in her famous aria from Gounod’s Faust…Marguerite’s jewel song!”
There was applause, murmurs, more applause. Nilsson smiled, turned to her accompanist, and nodded. Then, standing very straight, with her striking single-braid hairstyle inspired by Marguerite, all twined with daisies, Christine sang in a voice as sweet and pure as meadow flowers: “Ah, je ris de me voir si belle en ce miroir…”
Lily had stepped down from the platform. She stood next to Brooks and held his hand. The silence in the big room was a physical thing, and Nilsson’s voice rippled over it with unforgettable clarity and grace. Lily squeezed his hand. It was going to be a success!
