1876

by Gore Vidal

“General Babcock. I’ll send you my notes tomorrow. All very secret. Even the grand jury doesn’t know the whole story but I do.”

  “Babcock himself tried to open the safe?”

  “He and his friends in the whisky ring have stolen close to ten million dollars. He got his cut, of course. Oh, he’s in up to the eyeballs.” Jamie was drifting off: the sharpness of his first remarks was now succeeded by a slurring of words if not of thoughts.

  “The safe, what about the safe?”

  “Oh.” This brought him to. “Babcock used Secret Service men to break it open.”

  “But that’s illegal!” was the stupidity that came from me. The band was now playing Mexican music.

  “Oh, yes! Very illegal. And that’s the angle we want to play up. President’s private secretary uses members of the Secret Service to burglarize a safe. If that don’t touch Grant, nothing will.”

  Directly beneath us a dark girl was dancing on a table. Jamie whistled appreciatively. “Do you like that, Charlie?”

  I could no longer maintain the Polonius role. “Yes,” I said, “very much.”

  “It’s done.”

  And indeed it was done. Each of the doors on the opposite side of the corridor opened into a small bedroom. I found myself not only nervous as a boy but as abashed as anyone over sixty, overweight, overtired, is bound to be when confronted with a vivid black Irish girl with gentian-blue eyes and a full, very full, figure.

  “Well, you’re quite the gent, I see.” She gave me a smile as she started to remove her blouse. “So ring for some champagne, will you? Not for me, mind you, but Mr. Horner gets angry as can be if we don’t sell the client at least one bottle of his homemade champagne. The bell’s just there. Oh, these boots are killing me.”

  I rang for the champagne, which arrived an instant later. The old Negro waiter opened the bottle with a certain flair. I tipped him fifty cents (Jamie had instructed me in prices as well as in protocol. The girl was to get twenty dollars for which “she’ll do anything, Charlie!”).

  “Anything” proved to be not much of anything except that at my age the elemental ritual must be conducted with a slowness that in my youth would have been unthinkable. Fortunately, I have not the slightest inclination to brood over my youth, since poor young Charlie Schuyler is as dead as can be, buried beneath this heavy earth-falling flesh that I with such effort still manage to animate and keep from gravity’s final tug and fall, into earth.

  As Cathleen—her name—helped me dress, we spoke comfortably of this and that. Like so many girls in her situation, she dreams one day of owning a shop (the young Charlie once tried to set up such a girl as a dressmaker; and terribly failed).

  “But you have to be practical and money’s scarce these days. And I’ve hardly a penny now to go see the elephant.” (Whatever that means…the zoo?) “I had saved more than a thousand dollars, you know, and lost it all when Jay Cooke failed in ’73.”

  I burst out laughing, and was not, amazingly, short of breath. “Why, I was caught, too! And wiped out. Just like you.”

  “Poor soul!” We commiserated with one another. I found her extremely knowledgeable on finance. More so than I. But then, regularly, she sees a banker who is currently enthusiastic about a certain Ohio railroad stock.

  She congratulated me on my prowess. Apparently, “Half the gentlemen still haven’t recovered from the Panic.”

  “You mean their—uh, sexual performance is affected?”

  “Something tragical. They try. I try. We try. But it’s no good when you’ve lost all that money. I do pity men, sometimes.”

  Jamie was already downstairs waiting for me at the bar. Feeling uncommonly pleased with myself and with the fact that I was not in the least short of breath, I started down the narrow stairway only to come face to face with a ghastly creature from the past, William de La Touche Clancey. He is as hideous as ever, face now marked with the sort of distressing eczema that sometimes afflicts those suffering from tertiary syphilis. With him was a forlorn olive-skinned youth, Turkish or Hebrew, obviously well-muscled and eager—no, desperate—for Clancey’s money because only someone starving would rent himself to a creature so plainly diseased.

  It was my rare good fortune that I was not recognized. Have I changed so much? Hissing and honking endearments to the young man, Clancey tottered up the stairs.

  I found Jamie at the bar in the company of several swells. One or two looked familiar to me from restaurants, the theatre. One, in fact, I took for an Apgar (the fourth or fifth?) of the Nine Brothers. Would that it had been! But I was mistaken. I doubt if any member of that self-regarding fraternity would be seen in such a place where even I, a sort of Bohemian, ought not to be at my…no, that word no longer. I am tonight young again.

  Yet for gentlemen of almost any sort, it is more usual to frequent the quiet, rich establishment of one Josie Woods where all is discretion, serenity, anonymity—and very expensive. Most interesting of the city’s 3,300 brothels (Jamie’s figure, from the Herald’s copious file) is or was that of a Unitarian minister named Allen, whose Water Street establishment was not only as luxurious as that of Miss Woods but each of his comfortable home-like bedrooms was provided with a Bible conspicuously displayed. It has been my experience that religious Americans often prosper in this sort of business, but then most Americans from the hinterland are—or were during the thirties and forties—besotted with evangelical piety, drenched daily by itinerant preachers in the blood of the lamb.

  Jamie had had the discretion not to introduce me to his friends, though I suspect I was recognized. But then it does no harm to be thought still…vigorous.

  I confess to a slight swagger (I hope not waddle) as I took my place at the bar and ordered brandy, to revive the heart as well as take the taste of home-brewed champagne from my mouth.

  “Satisfactory, Charlie?” Jamie beamed at me like a depraved nephew out on the town, with a…depraved uncle.

  “Yes, Jamie. The dancing on the table was particularly inspiring. Even spiritual.” I improvised, amusing the swells. “It seemed that the girl’s boots were tapping out a message from the spirit world.”

  General laughter. “What was the message?” someone asked.

  “Buy Southern Ohio Railroad stock, which is now selling at par.”

  This got more of a reception than it deserved. But then a huge man with a diamond stickpin the size of a plover’s egg explained that Commodore Vanderbilt regularly communes with the dead Jim Fiske and other financiers through a pair of sisters whom he has set up in the brokerage business.

  I asked Jamie about Clancey in a low voice. “Does this place also cater for catamite fanciers?”

  “Well, it’s an open place. But I’m sure they make Clancey pay through his nose.” Jamie shuddered. “Disgusting old creature. Did you know that one of his sons is older than I am? and a member of the Union Club!”

  Apparently Clancey still publishes a weekly paper financed by his wife. “Some of it’s jolly funny. Clancey thought Tweed was the best thing that ever happened to New York, but then so did your friend old Bryant.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Ask the Kraut. Ask Nordhoff when you see him in Washington. He’s our correspondent there. First-rate man, too. And incorruptible, as Bryant discovered. You see, the Post was taking a retainer from Tweed and that crook Henderson who really runs the paper thought Tweed pretty fine, and when Nordhoff wouldn’t stop attacking City Hall, why, old Bryant gave him the sack. And we hired him.”

  I don’t think that this can be true. The worst Bryant might do would be to allow force majeure to take its course.

  In my sudden fleshly contentedness, am I sentimental and unrealistic? Otherwise why do I believe that if Bryant is not entirely honest, then there is no such creature in all the land? Obviously my critical sense has been deranged by this night’s triumphant pleasures. I want Bryant
to be what he ought to be, like our old friend and lover of justice William Leggett. Because of Leggett I have always felt that somewhere in this corrupt and canting American society there still exists in certain men a sense of what the good society must be.

  I think I am drunk. The tears are streaming down my face as I wait for the laudanum to take its effect.

  Three

  1

  THE FIRST DAY I have been able to sit up. A succession of doctors cannot agree amongst themselves exactly what it was that caused me simply to faint away the morning after my visit to the Chinese Pagoda.

  There is talk of strain of the heart. But then what heart is not so daily strained and, with the years, so pulled and stretched that it has no choice, in time, but to stop? Happily, mine continues on about its work. And this morning, as I sit up in bed, newspapers and periodicals strewn across the counterpane and a bright sun filling the room, I feel most hearty, ready for anything.

  But Emma is still concerned. “You ought not to get up just yet.”

  “If not now, never!” Broth for breakfast is most sustaining, and I wonder why one waits to be sick to be so well-nourished. “I’ve a full day. And we have a full evening.”

  “I don’t think we ought to go out. Not tonight.”

  “If we are not at her dinner party tonight, Mrs. Astor will be laughed at in the streets and Ward McAllister will be forced to return to California, in disgrace. We must maintain the ‘tong.’ ”

  While waiting for John to take Emma to the Metropolitan Museum and then on to lunch with yet another of the Nine Brothers, Emma and I examined carefully the New York Ledger’s version of my article on the Empress Eugénie.

  “It’s unrecognizable!” Emma finally exclaimed.

  “As my work. Or as the Empress?”

  “Both. It’s nothing but dress patterns, and how she does her hair.”

  “Well, I’ve been warned that only the ladies read in this country, and presumably they like dresses and hair…”

  “But they’ve got the dresses and the hair all wrong. Also, the Empress never did much care about clothes. She’ll be furious.”

  “I doubt if the Ledger will find its way to Chislehurst.”

  “But it will. You know her. She reads everything about herself.”

  “We must be brave, Emma. And hope the Empire is not restored in my lifetime, which means the next few weeks.”

  “Don’t, Papa!” There was real concern.

  Although I have suffered hardly at all from whatever it was that felled me so suddenly, I now realize how easy it is not to return from that swift sleep and so I have decided that Emma must be married as soon as possible.

  John arrived; was most solicitous. I wish he did not so deeply bore me. “You look in fine fettle, sir!”

  “That is where I hope to remain.”

  “Everyone’s reading your article in the Ledger.”

  “With disapproval? I know what your mother thinks of Paris.”

  “But there’s Faith. She revels in all that sort of thing.”

  The talk was Apgar-ish for a time; and then the two departed and I set to work on a study of Cavour, requested by Mr. Godkin of The Nation. He pays very little but after the rather—why, rather?—after the totally vulgar gush on the Empress I must remind myself (and the few serious readers in the country who admired Paris Under the Commune) that I still have my wits about me.

  I worked hard in bed until a light lunch was brought me—and the usual messages, including a packet of political information from Jamie. No one knows that I have been really ill. Emma tells them that I am simply, “under the weather,” an ominous phrase, whose origin is no doubt nautical.

  Gilder has sent me a number of books he thinks I should read. The new work by Mark Twain is all about a boy in a small town on the Mississippi. I cannot say that the doings of any boy quite seizes my attention. I suspect that this book is more in the line of William de La Touche Clancey. Thumbing through it, I did find some nice jokes, no doubt taken from the lecture hall. Yet, when it comes to raw Western vernacular, I much prefer the novels of Edward Eggleston, particularly The Hoosier Schoolmaster. Although a clergyman, Eggleston appears not to like Christianity, at least in its more wild evangelical frontier manifestations, and I can read him as easily as I do Balzac. I have also been fascinated by a writer named De Forest—a failure according to everyone in publishing. Gilder concedes the man’s talent, “but novels are for the ladies and his are much too brutal, too close to sordid life, too full of politics.” In other words too interesting and too real.

  The curious thing about this ongoing “aesthetic” debate between the romantic writers on the one hand and the realists on the other is that neither school achieves anything but romantic false effects. American realists feel that to describe the workings of a factory is somehow to be vivid and truthful, and to a point they are right. But when it comes to writing about the men and women in the factories and what they really do to one another, particularly at work or within marriage, these realists are every bit as romantic and unrealistic as the popular, busy women writers or even, to turn to the highest peak, that dark veiled lady of New England letters Nathaniel Hawthorne, who, faced with any truth about the way we are, swiftly evokes ghosts and haunted houses on those nights when silvery clouds cross a beauteous skull-like but, oh, so fictive moon.

  If I were more interested I would do something on the French realists, who are not much known here. Howells at the Atlantic seems well-disposed; he has even written on Turgenev. Yet when one reads his own easy lady-flattering fictions, one wonders if for all his intelligence he can ever cease to be the opposite of what he affects to admire. I have several times mentioned Flaubert’s L’Éducation Sentimentale as a novel that perfectly shows human life as it is—the undifferentiated drift down the years which most lives are—and yet the author is able to make every eddy in that slow progress glitter with some truthful light, so unlike the foolish jokes of a Mark Twain or the melodramatic romances of Hawthorne. I think particularly of Hawthorne’s last book where an age-old figure from the Roman catacombs encounters a present-day faun on the Campidoglio, a faun who must of course be destroyed, for the New England spirit requires that the natural be bent, banished, killed, even in moonlit dreams.

  I think that is enough literary criticism for one morning. In any case, I have no wish to convert these proud American writers, since each is convinced that the national literature is of the highest as he waits impatiently for the next consignment of new books from London.

  Now for Cavour. And some hard work.

  2

  FROM A LIVERY STABLE we hired a smart carriage to take us to Mrs. Astor’s, and then to pick us up at midnight.

  “That’s the time you always have to leave, sir, from Mrs. Astor’s.” The concierge at the hotel who makes such arrangements did not for a moment betray his excitement at launching two of the hotel’s guests to the very peak of Parnassus—if I have the right mountain. He also took quiet pleasure in showing us that he, too, was part of that great world, with a fair knowledge of who would and who would not be on the mountain’s peak, as well as the exact hour that we would sit down at dinner (8:00 P.M.) and by whom the dinner would be catered, if the party happened to be too large for the chef to manage on his own.

  Emma looked as if she had stepped down from a Winterhalter portrait at Schönbrunn: more Wittlesbach than Montijo empress. She wore the D’Agrigente diamonds, which are so cunningly reproduced in paste that only a jeweller with a magnifying glass could tell that they are false. I noticed with some pleasure that I am thinner than I was before the mysterious illness, and I think that we looked a most distinguished couple.

  At first I was afraid that we might not know which of the two identical Astor houses belonged to our hostess, but as Emma pointed out, if the sisters-in-law were to give dinner parties on the same e
vening, Fifth Avenue would be impassable. Incidentally, when I said that I hoped she would not be bored by the provincialness of American society, she shook her head fiercely.

  “Never bored, Papa. All that money is…well, like currents of electricity in those hideous rooms, and I am absolutely thrilled! I tingle all over. Your rich people here absolutely glow with money, like northern lights.” At times Emma can be surprisingly literary, despite a rather vulgar taste in fiction.

  As we were helped from the carriage by footmen in the Astor livery—dark-green plush coats, gold armorial buttons, red waistcoats, knee breeches and black silk stockings—a small crowd watched us, despite a light snow that had begun to fall. From the front door of 350 Fifth Avenue a red carpet had been prodigally flung down steps, across the sidewalk and into the gutter. We hurried inside.

  What looked to be a court chamberlain directed the ladies to their retiring or repairing room, the gentlemen to a cloakroom. Then, properly retired and repaired, Emma and I made our way solemnly down a long corridor to the great staircase. The house is larger and more impressive inside than its thin wedge of chocolate-cake look from the street would indicate.

  We passed through three enfiladed drawing rooms (two in blue, one in garnet) just as one did at the Tuileries. I was struck by the richness of everything and, in general, the good taste of the furnishings, though the pictures are not much good and the sculpture insipid. Nevertheless, the light from the splendid crystal chandeliers was reflected most magically in the many silver mirrors while everywhere there were fresh flowers—roses, orchids—and exotic plants, not to mention a proper conservatory just past the third drawing room. It is the perfect luxury to possess a complete tropical jungle in the midst of a freezing New York winter.

  Mrs. William Backhouse Astor née Caroline Schermerhorn alias the Mystic Rose stood beneath a large bad portrait of herself, receiving guests. At her side was Ward McAllister, very much in his element, and slavishly devoted to the mysteries of his rather full-blown rose. Mrs. Astor is not young (forty, forty-five?) and her dead-black hair is not entirely her own, whilst the body she has decorated with chains of diamonds and pearl moonbursts and a stomacher of emeralds that the Great Mogul himself might envy is entirely her own (the word “body” is the subject of that last small verb: jewelled qualifying clauses now drip from my pen just as real jewels hung, fell, swayed, glittered not only from the tall stout erect figure of Mrs. Astor but from all the other ladies present).