The birth had been an easy one. Dr Schwarz had called it a mechaieh, a happy relief, like a sneeze. Little Kay was dark-haired, crimson-faced, and weighed 6lb 6oz. Effie sat in her room in her French lace nightdress, surrounded by roses and carnations and orchids, and held Kay in her arms with the feeling that at last she had begun to discover what it was that she wanted out of her life. She gave an interview to Collier’s saying why she had decided to go through with the birth and why she had decided not to hide herself away. The magazine was a sell-out, and very few copies remained, but part of the interview read: ‘A man can father an illegitimate child with scarcely any shame or scandal whatsoever, if at all. I see no reason why it should be any different for a woman. It is my daughter who is important to me, no matter what anybody thinks. Yes, I am a Christian and I am going to bring my daughter up as a Christian; and, no, I don’t want my daughter to bring any babies into the world if she’s unmarried. I hope she never finds herself with that choice to make. You can’t tell me that God disapproves of the birth of my daughter, because you have only to look at her to understand what a beautiful and precious being she is. Yes, I intend to go back to work when I can. Working for a Wall Street bank is just as vital in time of war as making uniforms, or munitions, or directing traffic. Part of the reason I came to America was because I knew that I could help to defeat Germany if I worked on Wall Street. Another reason is that I hoped to find equality of opportunity here, between men and women. I may not have the right to vote, but I have the right to work.’
Dougal came to see Effie at the clinic three days after Kay was born. He brought her no flowers. He wouldn’t even sit down beside her bed, and he showed no interest in going down to the nursery to take a look at Kay.
‘You’re angry with me?’ Effie asked him.
‘This hasn’t done the bank any good,’ he snapped, ‘We’ve lost millions of dollars of business from the South; and from all of the Catholic brokers we dealt with in Boston. I guess the only people who have really stuck by us are the Quakers.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Effie. ‘I didn’t have anything to do with all the publicity. It just happened.’
Dougal thrust his hands into his trouser-pockets and went to the window. ‘Well,’ he said, after a while, ‘I guess it wasn’t really your fault.’
There was a lengthy silence between them. An orderly outside was sweeping up the corridor and whistling Over There. Effie said, ‘What’s wrong, Dougal? It isn’t just the baby, is it?’
Dougal said, ‘No,’ and there was a catch in his voice.
‘It’s May?’
He nodded. ‘Yes. She’s left me. She says if I can’t leave Mariella, then it’s all over between us.’
‘So what are you going to do?’
Dougal stared at her. ‘Do? I’m probably going to go home and get drunk.’
‘Do you think that will do any good?’
‘No,’ said Dougal. ‘But what else is there?’
Effie didn’t know what to say to him. He seemed to be so stunned; so incapable of coping with what was happening to him. He was like a man who has been struck on the head with a half-brick during the riot of his own life; a boxer who knows that he is supposed to go on but is too punchdrunk to understand why.
He stayed by the window for a while; but then he came over, and took her hand. He said, ‘You mustn’t think I’m angry about the baby. I’m not. I’m pleased that it all went well. I wanted to come and visit you earlier, but I guess I couldn’t face it, what with May and everything.’
‘I wish I could help you,’ said Effie, and meant it.
Dougal gave her a wry smile. ‘I wish you could, too.’ He kissed her cheek, and then buttoned up his jacket ready to leave. ‘There’s one thing,’ he said. ‘I’ve opened up a trust fund for Kay. She won’t be able to touch it until she’s twenty-one; but by then it should have increased to well over quarter of a million dollars, at the present rate of interest.’
‘Dougal …’ said Effie, in surprise. ‘Thank you.’
‘It’s nothing,’ he shrugged. ‘I might as well leave something to somebody. Better than nothing to nobody, huh?’
The day before she went home – Wednesday, 1 August 1917 – Effie received one more unexpected visitor. It was Mariella, very fussy and agitated and impressed with herself for having made the trip into New York alone and without Dougal’s permission, wearing a flouncy pink summer dress and a wide hat with pink flowers and a pink veil. She knocked quickly and nervously, and came into the room as abruptly as if someone had pushed her in.
Effie was breastfeeding Kay, and Mariella was rather flummoxed by that. She said, ‘Oh! I’ll go!’ But Effie said, ‘Don’t be so silly. Sit down. She’s having her elevenses, that’s all, before I take her home.’
Mariella put down her purse and her parcels. She had been shopping downtown, and at her milliner’s (who usually sent her hats out to Long Island by mail) for a rolling-front mushroom suit hat, in blue. She said, ‘I hope you don’t mind my calling like this. I came to see you specially, as a matter of fact. It doesn’t look like it, does it, with all this shopping? But I couldn’t pluck up the courage to come here directly. I thought you might be tired of visitors. The newspapers, and the magazines and everything.’
‘It’s lovely to see you,’ smile Effie. Kay, temporarily satisfied with the first fullness of breastfeeding, was falling asleep, and Effie had to squeeze her breast until the milk dripped from her nipple, and tease it against Kay’s lips.
Mariella said, ‘I’ve heard that if you tickle their feet …’
Effie laughed. ‘She’ll wake up again in a minute.’
Mariella watched Effie for a minute or two, biting her lips, and then said, ‘I think you’ve very brave, you know, having your baby like this.’
Effie wiped her breast with a soft cloth, and eased it back into her Armorside nursing corset, with its embroidered top, and its non-rusting steels, and then buttoned up her shirtwaist dress. ‘The newspaper stories were something of a surprise,’ she said. ‘I just thought I could have her quietly.’
‘I adore babies,’ said Mariella. ‘Do you mind if I hold her?’
‘Not at all. But be careful she isn’t sick all over your dress. She has a nasty habit of doing that when you least expect it.’
Effie finished dressing while Mariella held the baby in her arms, and gently hushed her and cooed her into sleep. It was a clear amaranthine morning outside, and nothing seemed further than war or distress or agony. Echoing in the sunlight, a military band marched down Fifth Avenue, two blocks away, playing When Johnny Comes Marching Home. Mariella said, That’s the Second Infantry Division. I saw them earlier.’
‘God preserve them,’ said Effie, quietly.
Mareilla said, ‘Dougal didn’t come home this weekend.’ She tried to be matter-of-fact, but her voice betrayed her strain and her uncertainty. ‘I, er … he said he might be late on Friday night … but, well, he didn’t come back at all.’
‘Did you know that May has left him?’ asked Effie.
Mariella was startled that Effie could speak about Dougal’s affair so openly. Most of her friends, if they knew about it, referred to it obliquely, to save her feelings. She was holding Kay and so she could do nothing but stare back at Effie with tears suddenly springing from her eyes and say, ‘He’s so unhappy. I know he is. I want to make him happy, I’d do anything to make him happy, but he won’t let me. I can’t bear to see him so upset. It’s wrecked him; and the terrible thing is that it’s wrecked me too.’
‘Mariella,’ said Effie, as soothingly as she could, ‘this could be your chance to start your marriage all over again, from scratch.’
Mariella shook her head, fiercely and miserably. ‘He doesn’t love me,’ she said. ‘He hates the very sight of me.’
‘What are you going to do?’ Effie asked her.
Mariella was silent for a moment, and then carefully handed Kay back to Effie, as if she couldn’t trust herself with her. Kay be
gan to snuffle and cry.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ Mariella whispered. ‘I suppose if I had any sense at all, I’d kill myself, but I can’t. I’m too much of a coward, and I love Dougal too much.’
Effie rocked Kay in her arms, and looked down at Mariella with sympathy and unhappiness. She knew that she wasn’t responsible for Mariella’s plight, but at the same time she wished desperately that there was something she could do to help her. Anything which helped Mariella would help Dougal, too; and perhaps, if his marriage difficulties were overcome, he would regain some of that verve and energy and sheer Dougalness which he always used to have before.
The door opened, and Kitty came in with an embroidered traveller in pink silk for Kay and a white summer coat for Effie. ‘I’m not interrupting?’ she asked.
Effie said, ‘No, that’s all right, Kitty. Hold baby for me, will you, while I finish dressing?’
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
During the years in which Kay grew from a baby to a toddler, and from a toddler to a self-possessed young lady of five years old, Effie worked longer and longer hours at Watson’s New York; sometimes sitting in her office with coffee and sandwiches until ten or eleven o’clock in the evening, with the starry lights of the financial district blinking off one by one, floor by floor, while she recorded memoranda on her Edison talking-machine, and wrote page after page of reports. It became a standard quip by any employee who wanted to impress his colleagues that he had been burning the midnight oil that, ‘I saw Miss Effie leave.’
In May 1918, while baby Kay was trying to toddle her way from one chair to another in Effie’s apartment, blonde and curly and already extravagantly pretty, American soldiers joined the war at Montdidier, and American boys found out what it was like to fight for democracy. In July, as Kay sat on Effie’s lap and puffed at the single pink candle on her first birthday cake, the US infantry helped the British and the French to hold back the Germans at Château-Thierry, only a few miles from Paris. And on 26 September 1918, a snappy Thursday when Effie was having lunch at La Table restaurant on 55th Street with Bernard Baruch from the War Industries Board, American troops took over the Meuse-Aroonne front and joined in the Allied thrust which at last broke the Hinderburg Line and sent the Huns into retreat.
Effie and Bernard Baruch both ate grilled sea bass, and salad. As they ate, the biggest battle in US history was taking place, involving one and a quarter million Americans, of whom 120,000 were killed.
Bernard Baruch picked his teeth behind his hand and earnestly told Effie, ‘I have 28,000 factories all joined together in one war-production trust. Can you imagine that? Twenty-eight thousand! A trust like that, even J. Pierpoint Morgan never dreamed of. He would have gnashed his teeth! I never saw the American people so magnificent before; and I hope to God that I never have to see them so magnificent again.’
Effie smiled, and discreetly raised her hand to the waiter to bring her the check. This luncheon was being paid for by Watson’s New York; and apart from that she was growing tired of Mr Baruch’s company. To be a successful banker, you had to know what was about to happen next year; not what was happening now, or what had happened last month. Bernard Baruch talked of nothing but war-time production and military contracts, when Effie was doing her best to envisage what would happen when the war was over.
Already, through reading dozens of newspapers and magazines, and talking to everybody she met, Effie had begun to feel that most Americans were still pining for those good old days when they had been isolated from international responsibilities, and free from world affairs. There was a curious contradiction of feelings in New York, and an even more curious contradiction in Washington. There was no doubt that many Americans were still intoxicated by the patriotic call to arms, and by the great ideals of ‘peace, freedom, capitalism, and democracy’. They still wanted to avenge the Lusitania. But, there was also an undercurrent of deep impatience. A year had passed (the whole of Kay’s one-year life) and still the war wasn’t over. The mothers and fathers of the Middle West were hankering to have their boys back, and more than that, they were hankering to have their innocence back. There was a strong feeling that America ought to be America again, a far-sighted nation of clear principles, faded overalls, and hot high summer evenings over the farms and villages and small stations of Indiana, and Iowa, and Illinois. Effie travelled by train throughout the summer of 1917 to St Louis, and Chicago, and Indianapolis, taking Kay, and Kitty, and Kay’s new English nanny Burgess with her. She talked to bankers and industrialists and farmers; engineers and dam-builders and shop-assistants. And from each one of them, she received one more piece of the jigsaw which, when she put it all together, was to give her a unique understanding of what Americans actually wanted. At the time, she called it ‘smalltownitis’; but the writer Thomas Wolfe described it more eloquently for her in the 1930s, at a dinner party given by Scribner’s to celebrate the publication of Look Homeward, Angel. The small Middle Western town,’ he told her, with a long ash dangling from his cigarette, ‘is the centre of the universe, the soul’s picture, the earth’s pivot, the eternal place where all things come and pass, and yet abide forever and will never change.’
Effie said to Bernard Baruch, ‘Do you think we’d be thwarting the war effort if we cut this luncheon short, and you ordered me a cab? I mean, right now?’
Baruch blew out his cheeks. ‘What’s the matter, Effie? Aren’t you feeling good?’
Effie said, ‘I don’t think America’s feeling good.’
Unlike Dougal, who had spent every one of his sixteen years in America embroiled in the financial community, making contacts, making friends, and trying to find new inventions and fledgling industries to put his money into, Effie went out immediately and made herself known not just to bankers and brokers but to small-city folk as well, grain farmers in Kansas and insurance brokers in Omaha. She was sensitive to her own feelings in a country which approved of her only cautiously; and because of that she was unusually sensitive to what Americans really wanted to make out of their lives, and what they wanted to do with their earnings. While Dougal stayed in New York to manage the major foreign investments, and to delegate to Dan Kress and Walter Leuchauser the issue of major securities, Effie initiated, among other banking projects, a Watson brokerage company which enabled small investors to buy stocks in big industries like railroads and shipping and steel and coal, and even a brokerage company of her own (which Dougal irritably refused to endorse) which assisted women to buy stocks on an instalment plan.
She called the women’s stock-buying company ‘Yellow Jonquil Inc.’, after the flower which America’s suffragettes were using as their symbol in their fight to win the vote. She advertised in Woman’s Home Companion, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Secret, Popular Finance, and even Love Story. The advertisements were written for her by the handsome and outrageous George Washington Hill, son of the president of the American Tobacco Company, who was a drinking pal of Dougal’s but rapidly became one of Effie’s closest friends. The line he came up with was, ‘Earn His Admiration’ and the drawing beneath it showed a Gibson-type girl holding up a share certificate while her clean-cut husband gazed fondly and uncritically into her eyes. In the first year, Yellow Jonquil turned over $7 million worth of heavyweight stocks.
On 11 November 1918, while Kay was still fast asleep, and Effie was sitting up in bed with a cup of China tea, looking over the first architect’s sketches for the house she wanted to build on Long Island, not far from Dougal’s estate, the Germans surrendered unconditionally to the Allies in the railroad car of Generalissimo Foch. An hour later, Effie’s telephone rang, and Jack Milward from the War Industries Board said, ‘Miss Watson? It’s all over. The Germans have signed the surrender.’
That day in New York was extraordinary. Huge crowds gathered in the streets, shouting and cheering. Flags flew everywhere, and the sky whirled with hats, fireworks, and shreds of paper. Traffic was almost at a standstill. The war was actually over, and
everybody was determined to celebrate. In eighteen months, it had cost 130,000 American dead, and over forty-two billion American dollars.
Effie spent the day in the office, intense and reserved, talking on the telephone to bankers and brokers all over the United States. If they had taken the day off, she called them at home. She said to Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, ‘I think we’re probably going to have a depression at first; but then business will start to boom.’ Lodge, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and a ferocious Republican, doubted if anything could boom under Wilson’s stewardship. That man would only have to look at a dollar-bill, and it would shrivel up like a wilted lettuce-leaf.’ But he promised to do what he could to help Effie in the House, and to vote in favour of any measure which might keep the banks free from government meddling, and ‘not unduly hampered’ by the Reserve Board or the Treasury.
The years immediately following the war were years in which Americans frantically tried to find their small-town selves again, to burrow back under the bedclothes. They were years that were unfairly hard on the men whom Americans had chosen to lead them. Woodrow Wilson collapsed under the strain of trying to persuade a hostile Senate to support his idea of a ‘League of Nations’ – especially after France and Britain had furiously rejected his belief that harsh revenge on the Germans would only encourage them to go to war again ‘within the next generation’. Warren Gamaliel Harding, elected in 1920 on promises of nostalgia and ‘normalcy’ and a return to old-time America, collapsed and died from the strain of trying to oversee a relentlessly corrupt administration of rich and rascally down-home friends. It was only when ‘Silent Cal’ Coolidge was elected in 1922, with the slogan that America ought to ‘Keep Cool and Keep Coolidge’ that a sense of genuine self-satisfied Americanism began to return – and with it a boom in national confidence and business.
Effie had already anticipated the boom. She had sensitively divined from her travels around the Middle West the new dreams that people were dreaming: of luxury kitchens, and cars, and radios. She had invested over $40 million of Watson’s money in automobiles, drive-in motel chains, luxury bathroom appliances, hotels, realty, steel, and oil. The day that Coolidge beat Bob La Follette by fifteen million votes to eight million, she bought $2 million of preferential stock in Willard Oil, of Forth Worth, Texas, and exclusive rights to an oil-bearing salt dome in Sun Butte, Wyoming.
Lady of Fortune Page 46
