I was beginning to learn that Father was not the only force in my life. And as the carnage in Europe became more and more appalling, with each side sacrificing untold thousands of young men to capture or recapture a few yards of barbed wire, I started to wonder whether I might not one day rather face Father’s wrath than expose myself to it. At night, while Ellen snored mildly at my side, I lay awake, feverishly picturing the mud, the rats, the horrible dawn attacks after an overhead deafening barrage, the stooping rush over barbed wire to bayonet some poor German lad in the guts, or, more likely, to be bayoneted by him, the endless terror and the damp dark waiting, waiting, waiting. And when I slept at last my nightmares were worse. It was almost a relief when we heard the asthmatic gasping of our youngest and had to rise and rush to alleviate his pain.
As soon as Congress had declared war on the central powers, Colonel Roosevelt applied to President Wilson for permission to form his own regiment, in which Father naturally clamored to be included. Of course, the wild offer was turned down, but Father informed me that the Colonel was writing to General Pershing to take his sons Ted and Archie in the first shipments to France and that it might be possible to include me. I had, despite Ellen’s first objections, had some military training with Father at the camp at Plattsburg (I had put it to her on the grounds of simple preparedness for any eventuality), and I was now, in a grim mood of acceptance of my destiny, ready to give in to the paternal expectations.
But I faced a kitten who had turned into a tigress.
“Your father and his Colonel make me sick! I wish the President had sent both their superannuated carcasses to France to rot, instead of all the young men on whom our future depends! I’m telling you, Ambrose Vollard, that you are going to apply for exemption from the draft on the perfectly sound and valid ground that you have a large family and a sick baby to support. And that exemption will be granted without question. And not a single solitary soul, except for a couple of crazy Vollards, will either criticize you or think one jot the less of you!”
And that was it. I did what she told me to do. I had become a virtual automaton. My will was crushed.
If that was the ultimate act of cowardice, perhaps the ultimate act of courage lay in my telling Father to his face what I had done.
He said nothing, but his features turned to stone.
Mother intervened. “I think Ambrose is the only person who can be the judge of what he has done, my dear. His decision cannot have been an easy one.”
Father closed his eyes and bowed his head. There was another long silence. Finally he made the only comment on the matter he would make to me, then or thereafter.
“I don’t know how I am to face the Colonel.”
The year that followed, the last of the war, as it turned out, was for me quiet and dull. I was busy at an office badly depleted by men called to the service, and Ellen was, as usual, much occupied with the children, particularly with our asthmatic son, who fortunately was much improved. I was in no way criticized by friends for not being in uniform—there were too many in the same boat—but Ellen and I nonetheless rarely went out at night, content to spend our evenings reading or listening to the radio. Yet my underlying mood was one of consistent if mild depression.
Father treated me, when, as before, Ellen and I dined with him and Mother on Sunday nights, with the same gruff politeness he would have exhibited to any guest at his table. He inquired sympathetically about his grandchildren, sought my opinion politely about the wine he offered, inquired perfunctorily about my law practice, but it was noticeable that he never discussed the war with me. I had wanted no part in it; very well, I would hear nothing of it from him. In a way I was no longer his son. When word came of Quentin Roosevelt’s death, his plane shot down behind German lines, he mourned as if Quentin had been his son.
And, of course, I hated it. I may not have been given the white feather by the world, but I knew I deserved it in Father’s eyes, and was it not in Father’s eyes that I had my real existence? Could I never be free of my obsession? For what reason, now that I had become, inside his mind as well as outside it, the poor creature he had long denied I was, could I not be at liberty to go my own benighted way in peace?
Perhaps I would have, had he not died, shortly after the death of his beloved hero, the great Theodore, in 1919. Both men were worn and prematurely old at only sixty-one. The shock to me was such as to throw me into a kind of nervous breakdown, which might have necessitated my going for a time to a sanatorium, had not a stern talk with my mother formed the beginning of what looked to be a cure, or at least an alleviation.
As I have said, Mother had left my training largely to Father, but I had always known that she still kept an eye on me. Although she never openly challenged her husband’s standards, she seemed to live, resolutely if quietly, distinctly apart from them. Of course, the difference in gender explained some of this but not all. She represented to me, when I seemed to be swimming beyond my power of return, the fine, level, sandy beach to which I would be welcome if I could only get back to it.
One evening, calling on her alone, I felt impelled to confide in her all my misery. When I had finished and she gave me a long close look, I realized that I had broken a barrier.
“I have been waiting for you to tell me all this, my child. I haven’t ventured to talk basic truths with you until I was sure you were ready to listen. I have always known that you found your father’s principles hard to live up to, but I hesitated to interfere, because you acted so determined to work out your problem your own way, and how was I to know that it wasn’t the right way? For a man, anyhow. And besides, you seemed to be succeeding, and your father was always so proud of you, and you appeared so devoted to him. Was it a woman’s role to barge in and break this up? Mightn’t you both have resented it? And rightly, too? But now you present me with a different case. Your father preached one kind of courage. Maybe I can preach another.”
“Courage? Oh, not more of that, please, Mother!”
“Just listen, my dear. We can’t get around courage. It’s at the root of what’s wrong with you. Shall I go ahead?”
“Go ahead.”
“I warn you. This is going to hurt.”
“I’m ready. Shoot.”
“You avoided the draft for a perfectly valid reason. You were over thirty, with a family to support and a sick child. Very good. Nobody had a word to say against you, except, of course, your father. That’s the given, the donnée, as the French critics say.”
“And that is correct.”
“Except for one thing. Your family wasn’t your real reason. Your real reason was that you were afraid to go to war.”
I felt like a piece of ice under a steaming hot faucet. Soon there would be nothing left of me. It was all over. At last.
Mother waited for me to speak, but I didn’t, so she went on.
“And now comes the real lesson in courage. You must face the fact that you are a man who was afraid to go to war. It’s as simple as that. It doesn’t mean that you’re afraid of everything. You have been brave enough in other things. It means that you were afraid to be killed or mutilated in the most hideous carnage the world has ever seen. You shared that fear with countless others. Some overcame it; some didn’t. The world is made up of heroes and non-heroes. They are equally real. Go back, my son, to your real life and your real family, and live!”
I felt so immediately lifted up by this clear solution to the problem of a lifetime that I became greedy. How is it that, with salvation in sight, we double our demands for entry?
“Of course, it was easier for Father, wasn’t it?”
“What was easier?”
“Why, being brave. He was born brave, wasn’t he? He never knew fear. And if you don’t know what fear is, is it really so brave to face dragons? Mightn’t one be like Siegfried and even like it?”
Mother became very grave at this. “Oh, my Ambrose, lay not that flattering unction to your soul! No one is born fearless. Your father ma
de himself a hero by grit and will power. And don’t you ever dare to take it from him!”
I bowed my head in bitter but accepting silence. It was not only myself that I should have to accept; it was she as well. The man she really admired, the man she would always admire, was Father. That was what I would have to live with: that I could never compete in a woman’s eyes with a hero. Was I even sure that Ellen, deep down, didn’t share that feeling? No, I was not sure.
The Heiress
WHEN WALTER DIED, shortly after the atomic bomb that ended World War II, in the terrible course of which his exhausting diplomatic missions to allied and neutral nations had fatally weakened his old heart, several publishers tried to interest me in writing a widow’s account of our life in public affairs. But Walter had already published a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of his career as a foreign affairs expert and roving ambassador, in the foreword to which he had, with his usual graciousness, acknowledged his “never-to-be-forgotten debt to a wife and partner whose value to me in my hours of toil and rest can never be adequately expressed.” That is about all a consort of my era—and though I was a decade younger than Walter, I was born in 1880—can expect as a tribute to marital services that, like those of the bulk of my contemporaries, amounted to little more than a footnote to their husbands’ careers. That is not to say that Walter Wheelock was not a perfect gentleman, a faithful and devoted spouse, one who encouraged me in all my interests and hobbies. It was just the way things were. I was always aware—and I am sure he was, though it was never mentioned—that the only real boost he got from me in his rise to the top was the money for which he had married me.
If I had had children, I wouldn’t have written that. Why should I wish to hurt their feelings? But this memoir, which, if read at all, will be read posthumously in some historical archive, will have no value to anyone unless it is strictly true. So I may as well put it on the line, that it was widely accepted in my day, both here and abroad, that any ambitious and impecunious young man who elected to enter an unremunerative career, such as government, teaching, the armed forces or even the church, would do well to avail himself of a dowry. In Europe this was frankly spoken of as an accepted thing, but in New York, where persistent lip service was given—uptown, if not downtown—to romantic notions, it was distinctly muted. This was the cause of considerable confusion and much unhappiness to some of our young heiresses who wanted to be loved for themselves. In Europe they wanted only to be loved—it didn’t so much matter for what. All I can say for myself is that I was a bit more of a realist than my sisters and cousins. At least I got a good man. Perhaps a great one.
Who or what I was or thought I was, as a young girl, appears to be what today is called an identity crisis. I was and still am rarely mentioned in any social column without the added legend “a grandchild of Samuel Thorn.” That was and is, of course, also true of my siblings and of my first cousins on Mother’s side of the family, that cheerful, boisterous group of youngsters who in our youth stuck so harmoniously together in our neighborhood of brownstone mansions up and down Fifth Avenue. They were the offspring of Mother and her sisters: Sewards (that’s us), Hammerslys and Degeners, and of her brother, Samuel Thorn, Jr., almost a society of their own, united in friendly and loving awe of Grandpa and Grandma Thorn, smug and smiling in their immense chocolate-colored cube of a residence. You can see the latter today in my living room, in the conversation piece by Seymour Guy, facing each other complacently in opposite armchairs, hands in lap, surrounded by walls cluttered with academic canvases. Grandpa was known to the public as simply the richest man in the world.
Yet it was still important that I was not a Thorn; I was a Seward. Mother, of course, had been a Thorn, and we lived in a house adjoining Grandpa’s, waited on by a staff of fifteen, but I never regarded my branch as wealthy. Children look up the social ladder, rarely down, and we all knew, and fully accepted, that Grandpa was intent on establishing a dynasty in his name and that Uncle Sam had already received half his fortune and could look forward one day to receiving the rest, minus the settlements on his sisters, which, however small in relation to his own, would have been considered princely in any land of accepted primogeniture. We children learned exactitude in using the vocabulary of wealth. I never, for example, considered myself an “heiress.” That in our world denoted a dowry of ten million and up. Mother was an heiress, yes, but she had four children to divide an inheritance much diminished by Papa’s lavish spending. In my generation Uncle Sam’s daughters, Beatrice and Diana, were the real heiresses and could marry European dukes if they chose—or were chosen—while we other granddaughters would have to make do with humbler mates.
Not that I minded these distinctions. I have always been devoted to Beatrice, who found happiness in a second marriage, and to Diana, who survives to this day in a renowned and rather bristling virginity. But the situation was somewhat complicated by the fact that I was the one who was supposed to be Grandpa’s favorite. Yet I never ascribed this to personal merit, nor did I expect any compensation for the status. It was a role that had been handed me by a quixotic deity in the skies who might just as well have given it to any other grandchild. There was no cause for pride on my part or jealousy on anyone else’s. When I was told to run next door to Grandpa’s, where the smiling butler behind the bronze grille awaited me, because Grandpa wanted to show me off to his breakfast business guests, I would scurry into the dining room and raise my round little face to be kissed by a rotund, balding, thickly whiskered old gentleman with glinting piggy eyes and a smell of tobacco, and be called his “darling Aggie-Baggie.” I recognized it as a kind of charade of homely piety, and that once I was dismissed with a friendly little pat on my rump, the great man would totally forget me in the resumption of his business discussions.
That different adult males should play different roles in the family drama did not strike me as inconsistent. It was the way things were. Papa, for example, saw Grandpa, his father-in-law, through lenses not adjusted to the more general family view. He used to say—and he was never one to lower his voice or spare anyone’s feelings—that the “Thorn tribe” of my siblings and cousins tended to cling together because the reputation of Grandpa Thorn’s deceased father, to whom Papa referred unceremoniously as “that old pirate,” was still sufficiently odorous to keep the Knickerbocker families at bay, and that even the cloak of Seward respectability (we were dimly related to Lincoln’s Secretary of State) that Papa had provided for his own offspring would not wholly shield us from the snubs of Livingstons and Van Rensselaers. But looking back on that era, I can see that only the stuffiest of the old guard would hold themselves aloof from a crowd of good-looking and amiable youngsters who had money to spend and large country estates for congenial house parties. Even people who shunned Grandma’s receptions were happy to have their issue play with and ultimately marry her grandchildren.
But Papa never changed his mind, never altered a position once taken. I see him now in the solid marble bust so out of scale with the rest of my apartment. How the round eyeballs over the strong aggressive nose and flared nostrils seem to glare! From the richly thick wavy hair and tall formidable brow down to the pointed moustache and trim goatee and to the astrachan collar of his frock coat, it is only too clear that you are faced with the type of American orator or statesman of his day, as seen in those dreadful statues in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington. Except that Papa was not a statesman; he only dreamed of being one. He had been president of a street car company that went bankrupt because he would not allow the cars to operate on the sabbath, and he had managed, by the extravagance of his residences in town and country, to go through all of Mother’s money that was not nailed down in trust. But he had fought gallantly as a cavalry colonel in the Civil War, and as a leader of civic groups he had thundered impressively and ineffectually against the corruption of the age. It never occurred to any of his three daughters that he could be disobeyed or criticized. It did occur, however, to his only son.
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My brother, Otto, had none of Papa’s vigor or much of the joie de vivre of our cousins. He was tall and skinny and highly critical of almost everything. I’m afraid that he hated Papa, and that his feeling was richly returned.
“He thinks he’s such a god among men,” Otto would observe sourly to me. “But he’s really only a figurehead on the pedestal of Grandpa’s money.”
I, as the eldest daughter, was chosen to take the place of honor in Papa’s life that Otto declined. This only confirmed the childhood impression, already created by Grandpa’s favoritism, that my life was a series of sets before which I, like a professional monologist, was to enact certain prescribed roles. As the great Ruth Draper, whom I was later so to admire, would in one scene be an empty-headed debutante and in another the wife of a miner lost in a cave-in, so I had the different but equally factitious parts to play of the idolized grandchild and the adoring daughter. It wasn’t that I found the parts difficult to perform, but I was afflicted at times with the haunting sense that there was no Agnes Seward left of me when I had to run off stage into the wings.
One could argue, of course, that I was no different from Grandpa or Papa, who were also playing roles. Certainly Papa enjoyed responding to the image of the virgin priestess daughter who would love him more than she would any swain, who might indeed elect to remain permanently unwed to tend the paternal shrine, an Iphigenia, who in the Racine tragedy that I always detested, assents docilely to her father’s demand that she be sacrificed to bring winds to the becalmed Grecian fleet. But it was always evident to me that neither Grandpa nor Papa suffered from any loss of identity when the curtain dropped. They were only too visibly strong and definite characters in the “real world,” which the former dominated and the latter tried to.
Sometimes I would speculate that it was a matter of gender; that men were not acting, that off stage as well as on they were the same persons, that it was my own poor sex who had to learn our parts in the play that duplicated the lives of our masters. Yet even here there was an “out” for some fortunate ladies. I use the term “ladies” advisedly, for this “out” was evidently not available to humbler females. Mother and her sisters were “heiresses” and did not have to perform before the footlights; they could remain, serene and placid, in their big brownstones or Beaux Arts country chateaux, or migrate on set dates to distant villas appropriate to the changing season, and live for clothes and cards in overheated conservatories filled with palms and marble fauns. The sputterings of their sometimes irascible husbands dashed like spray against the rocks of their tranquillity; they were too confident that nothing the latter could do would undermine the eternity of solid support guaranteed by their father’s limitless fortune.
Manhattan Monologues Page 2
