1876

by Gore Vidal

  “This is going to be a rare treat.” Jamie kept repeating, but though he tried to keep secret the nature of the “rare treat,” we both knew what it would be since the newspapers had written of nothing else for some days.

  Although the theatre was only a block or two from the hotel, we had to wait more than half an hour as each of the long line of carriages in front of us stopped and deposited its contents at the new Park Theatre (a mere shadow of the old, despite the blazing calcium lights and the enlarged proscenium arch).

  “It’s Oakey Hall of course!” I said the moment we joined the line in front of the theatre. “It’s his opening night.”

  “I read of no one else in the papers but I still don’t know who Oakey Hall is.” Emma reads our newspapers with a swift but often uncomprehending eye.

  “Most gorgeous creature! Isn’t he, Schuyler?” Since Jamie has become sole proprietor of the Herald and I his special Washington observer, he has dropped the “Mister” and the “sir” with which so respectfully he addressed me all his life. Well, times change.

  “He’s never come my way.” I turned to Emma. “He was mayor of New York. And a part of Tweed’s ring. For several years they’ve been trying to put him in jail, too.” Incidentally, Tweed is rumoured to be safe in Mexico.

  “But Oakey stays out of the clink because he never stole so much as two bits.” Jamie is personally fond of Hall, who is, everyone agrees, a considerable charmer as well as the best-dressed man in New York (whatever that must be). As mayor, he not only stole money but delighted in the title “the King of Bohemia.” He has always been something of a scribbler as well as a lawyer; journalists love him as a glamourous brother.

  “He has written a play. I read that much in the press.” Through the steaming glass of the carriage, the bright marquee lights illuminated the title, The Crucible, elsewhere identified as a play “leased and managed” (but actually written as well) by Oakey Hall, who is, also, to the delight of New York, the leading actor.

  I felt the old excitement as I once again set foot in the foyer of an American theatre. My first such occasion in New York since 1837, when quite another Park Theatre played to quite a different audience, now for the most part gone to join the majority.

  I was happy to see that even in the harsh glare of the calcium lights Emma looked ten years younger than her age as she made a tour of the lobby on Jamie’s arm; everyone’s eyes were upon her, although half the leading actresses of the city were at the theatre, not to mention any number of gallant ladies of fashion.

  Jamie was greeted jovially by the swells; amongst them was Commodore Vanderbilt’s middle-aged heir, to whom Jamie deferred. Mr. Vanderbilt looks to be a dim sort of man, and it is said that his father (who may never die) has not much confidence in “young” William’s ability to carry on the New York Central Railroad and the rest of the old man’s huge stolen empire.

  Why is it that I so much admire the Bonapartes but detest these money-grubbers? Scale, I suppose. The Bonapartes wanted glory. These folk just want money for its own sake. Only lately have they begun, nervously, to spend money in what they take to be a splendid manner by accumulating works of art, by building mansions. I wonder if one of them will prove to be a new Augustus: finding New York brownstone, he will leave it marble.

  I was stopped just before the curtain rose by what I took to be an actor. This bold-looking man’s fringe of hair was long at the back, whilst his moustaches would have looked appropriate attached to a Mexican general; he wore a leather frontiersman jacket like Davy Crockett and carried in one hand a Mexican cowboy hat known as a sombrero.

  “Mr. Schuyler, your admirer, sir! We met in London, don’t you remember?”

  The voice was resonant and resolutely Western. “Surely if we had met, I could hardly forget it, sir.” I, too, was resonant.

  Of course we had never met but it made no difference. Yes, it was Joaquin Miller, one of the horde of Western writers that the English delight in showing off to one another. Socially Miller was a great success in London a few seasons ago. I am told that on occasion he would smoke three cigars simultaneously, claiming that all real Californians smoked three at a time. One memorable evening he got down on all fours and snapped at the ankles of the delighted young ladies. From time to time he publishes volumes of manly verse.

  I was polite, flattered even that he would take notice of a fellow “actor” who is not only so much older but booked into (let us belabour the metaphor) an entirely different kind of theatre. Emma was also much taken with him whilst Jamie made good-natured fun of him. Apparently Miller is used to being the butt of jokes.

  A number of people presented themselves to us. I was particularly taken by a tall ruddy-faced man in early middle age, elegantly dressed and with a most gracious manner. “We met for an instant at the Century, Mr. Schuyler. I’m sure you wouldn’t recall. You were with Mr. Stedman. I’m right glad to meet you again, sir.”

  I pretended to remember him; was struck by his literary manner. As we took our seats (the curtain was an hour late), Jamie told me that my admirer was the collector of the port of New York, that extraordinarily powerful and lucrative post from which my long-dead friend and now glorious legend Sam Swartwout stole more than a million dollars. Let us hope that General—yes, another general—Arthur will be either bolder or more discreet.

  General Arthur told me that in college he had read and particularly enjoyed my little book Machiavelli and the Last Signori I was overwhelmed. In the old days collectors of the port knew nothing except how to add and subtract—mostly the latter.

  The play was, for me, a perfect joy. The former mayor of New York is a dapper creature who wears—or wore—an odd drooping pince-nez, sports—or sported—a distinctive moustache. I change tenses because near the end of this astonishing play, the former mayor, in the interest of absolute realism, shaved off his moustache for a prison scene and left off wearing his pince-nez.

  The result was disastrous. In the earlier acts Oakey Hall had been confident, even convincing. Now he lurched near-sightedly about the stage, running into furniture, whilst his voice became curiously indistinct as the tongue, attempting powerful consonants, sought in vain for the counterpressure of that thick overhang of moustache which had for so long made effective his usual speech.

  I was weeping with laughter as he, poor man, wept with self-pity, wearing a Sing Sing prison uniform a size too large for him. Needless to say, the brave actor-author was given a standing ovation, and were I still Gallery Mouse for the Post, what a notice I might have written for tomorrow’s paper!

  Delmonico’s proved to be crowded. Many of those who had been at the theatre had also made reservations for supper. In fact, we arrived at the same time as the manager, young Charles Delmonico, who respectfully greeted us outside the front door.

  “Well, Charles, what did you think?” asked Jamie, perfectly willing to keep us standing on the pavement as an arctic wind roared west across Union Square. Emma gasped with cold. The polite young Delmonico hurried her inside as he answered Jamie, “I think Oakey was probably a better mayor.”

  Of the three Delmonico restaurants, the one at Fourteenth Street and Union Square is certainly the most fashionable. The carpeting is thick. The lamps are richly shaded. How important it is to see the food plainly, yet not to see or to be seen too closely by those one dines with! Damask curtains comfortably contained the warmth but not the heat that one so often gets in overcrowded poorly ventilated eating places.

  I would dine every day at Delmonico’s if I could afford it. But one cannot dine there for less than five dollars (four courses and a single bottle of claret).

  The Delmonico family was originally from Ticino in Switzerland, and I have by now come to know well the autocrat of this dynasty, Lorenzo (the uncle of Charles), a man my age with a constant cough and wheeze made no better by the cigar that is never out of his mouth even when, most elegantly, he l
eads the ladies to their tables.

  As we crossed the main dining room to Jamie’s special corner, Ward McAllister rose from a table, and greeted us ceremoniously.

  Jamie took Emma on to our table, as McAllister whispered into my ear, breath smelling disagreeably of port. “She wants you for Wednesday. For dinner! You and the Princess.”

  “Who?” My voice is sometimes overloud. Although my hearing is good, I am prone to the characteristic booming voice of the deaf because of the blood’s most disagreeable habit of pounding against my eardrums, deafening me.

  “The Mystic Rose!” He hissed the magic phrase into my ear. “Shall I say you will accept? She will then make the invitations. I am her scouting party, don’t you know?”

  “With pleasure, of course. You are kind. So is she. I mean she.” I babbled; withdrew.

  Jamie and Emma were quoting lines from the play and laughing. But when I sat down, Jamie was curious. “I didn’t know that you knew old puss.”

  “It’s hard not to know him.” Emma answered for me.

  I turned to Emma. “Apparently the Mystic Rose would like us to come for dinner on Wednesday.”

  “I hope you said ‘No.’ ” Emma was superb.

  “Of course I said ‘No,’ Emma, but it came out ‘Yes.’ ”

  “Most awful old creature.” Jamie grimaced. “I’d stay away if I were you. Boring. Boring. Bill Astor’s not bad. But he won’t be there. Drunk all the time.”

  “Stop it, Jamie!” Emma was again the Parisian schoolgirl giving sharp lessons in manners to the young barbarian from New York.

  “No. I think I’ll just start it, Emma!”

  We supped indiscreetly but well. The lobster salad is a specialty of the house and it is as good as any dish I’ve ever had at Paris (paprika somehow makes the difference). Canvasback duck followed, enclosed in a savory aspic. One gets this notable bird so often at important dinner parties that for the gentry it has taken the place of the American eagle. Terrapin is another Delmonico specialty that I am learning to like. But I shall never take pleasure in what everyone regards as the chef’s peculiar triumph, ice cream with truffles. On the other hand, Delmonico’s produces an iced coffee that I cannot get too much of; half cream and half coffee and well sugared, the concoction is kept near-freezing until served in a frosted glass.

  It is now two in the morning, and for some time the terrapin has been warring with the canvasback duck, whose eagle-like beak tears at my Promethean liver. Yet my pulse is normal and there is no pounding in my ears. Obviously Colonel Burr’s prescription for good health and a long life was right: the discharge of the seminal vesicles as often as possible. Tonight I have added at least a month to my life’s span.

  Emma was taken home, and I was taken on. At first I was reluctant. “I’m much too old for this sort of thing.”

  “How do you know what sort of thing I have in mind? Come on. Be a sport, Charlie.” The boy has now come to treat me as a contemporary. I suppose that I should be pleased. Certainly, I must allow him a degree of beard-tugging since yesterday’s agreement between the Herald and me: a thousand dollars for each piece written during the four months preceding the Republican Convention. One long article a week would mean $16,000 by the time my tenure of office ends. Not bad!

  Incidentally, the Ledger’s version of my Empress Eugénie will be published Saturday. I read the slips with some dismay. They have hacked everything about, trying to “improve” my poor work by adding a number of detailed descriptions of the Empress’s clothes in what they take to be my style. The result is horrendous, and deeply humiliating.

  When I suggested that I write a companion piece on the Princess Mathilde, I was told that no one in the United States has heard of her. But The Last Days of Napoleon III has been accepted. The only problem is that I know nothing about the poor man’s last days except that he had a most difficult time with his prostate and bladder. I suppose I can concoct something Ledger-esque. After all, I saw enough of the Emperor over the years to be able to describe, with a sob in my prose, his poignant coda.

  I cannot say that the coldest night in New York’s memory is the best night to go aprowling with a man young enough to be my son but old enough not to get as drunk as Jamie does most nights. Unfortunately, my appetite had been morbidly whetted by the Five Points. I am drawn to prostitutes, obscure rooms, the rattle of ill-tuned pianos, the red-tasselled boots of “dancing female waiters,” as they are advertised in the Herald. From his very own newspaper, Jamie is able to find out exactly who is where and what they are doing.

  Jamie’s driver knows his master well. Without a word exchanged, he headed west across Fifth Avenue; the street was a sheet of ice. A number of sleighs were to be seen even at that late hour.

  We were headed, as Jamie said, sobering up somewhat, “to the Chinese Pagoda, where they’ve got the most beautiful creatures you’ve ever looked at. They know me,” he added, as if I needed that reassurance.

  We came to Sixth Avenue, which is now to New York what the Five Points used to be. In the daytime, from Fourteenth Street to Twenty-third Street, the avenue is in perpetual shadow from the Elevated Railway. At night the Elevated’s shadow makes absolutely dark the street or “jungle,” the word most used by vivid journalists. And I must say that the pillars of the Elevated do suggest sinister trees, perfect hiding places for gamblers and whores, for thieves and murderers, as well as for those who would play with them or be played by them, the victims ending, often as not, on a rag heap, to be cut up by the “street rats” who sell the remains for fat, for bone, for hair.

  The street was empty, the night frosty. Our carriage clattered beneath the silent Elevated Railway. In certain windows lamps gleamed, bowls of tinted red or blue glass with the owner’s name in white, Flora, The Pearl, Amazon. Thus the prostitutes advertise.

  We stopped at a tenement. In the absolute darkness, there was no sign of life. We got out. The coachman addressed Jamie. “Do you have your pistol, sir?”

  Jamie nodded and tapped his greatcoat. “And you?”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll wait right here. The usual place.”

  An alarming exchange.

  Jamie rapped on the tenement’s door. A grilled window was uncovered. A murmured exchange. Then we were admitted to a loud, bright, smoky hall where a band played Offenbach as a line of girls in cancan costumes danced; each girl wore red-tasselled boots. For some reason they are de rigueur in this sort of place. As a means of identification? or simply some manager’s vice?

  A large well-dressed ape of a man greeted us warmly; addressed Jamie cryptically, “Pearls but not diamonds. Rubies possible. This way, gentlemen.” He led us to a plain wood stairway at the back. Feeling most uneasy, I followed them upstairs to a long corridor with a series of doors at close intervals on either side.

  Our guide opened one of the doors and ushered us into a box from which we could observe everything that went on below from behind a dusty velvet curtain.

  “Just give me the eye, Mr. Bennett. I’ll be down there.” The man pointed to a place near the stage where the girls were dancing; and left us.

  “Well, Charlie, what do you think?” Jamie’s drunkenness comes and goes; just as his speech becomes slurred and incoherent and the body starts to sag and be ill-coordinated, he will suddenly pull himself together, force the alcohol from his brain and appear for a time to be sober. The cold journey from the theatre had no doubt cleared the head which now he proceeded again to muddle with champagne from a cooler.

  “Very elaborate,” I said neutrally. “Nothing like it when I was young and living here.” I must stop referring to my great age and how far back I go in time. After all, I must still convince publishers that I have the strength to drive pen efficiently across paper.

  I looked down at the dancers below. Not at the girls on the stage but at the girls who were dancing with the rough sorts: fresh-looking young wome
n despite painted faces.

  At the end of the room farthest from the stage was a long, crowded bar.

  “Expensive place, the Chinese Pagoda. Not that there’s anything Chinese about it. They don’t let just anybody in either. You’ve got to be a proper rake like me or a successful murderer for hire like Iron-man down there.” He pointed to the bar, where there were at least twenty candidates for Iron-man.

  “Now if you see anything you like, it’s on me.” Jamie waved graciously at the crowd beneath us.

  “I fear…” Oh, I feared at Polonian length. Actually, despite the heavy dinner, I was slowly getting into the mood of the place. For the first time, let me confess shamefully (an adverb invariably chosen to please lady readers, but men—if any read—may substitute for “shamefully” “dēlightedly”), I felt that I was again in my New York, the world of the Five Points of forty years ago when Leggett and I would prowl like figures from the Arabian Nights, getting to know the good brothels of the region as now I am obliged to learn the Cabinet of General Grant, the legal victories of Governor Tilden.

  A waiter-girl came to see if we wanted anything. Blond, blue-eyed and but recently from the country, she seemed terrified (did Jamie prefer the frightened “virginal type”?). “Another bottle, Polly. You are Polly?”

  “Dolly, sir.”

  “The same! And more of the same.” She took the bottle. “And my love to Polly, Dolly.”

  Jamie roared at his own wit and then said, suddenly, most seriously, “There was a safe out there, you know, filled with all sorts of incriminating documents. They broke into it.”

  “What, dear boy, are you talking about?”