An Embarrassment of Riches

by Margaret Pemberton

  He spun away from her, abandoning all thoughts of love-making. Furious he stabbed the button that summoned Teal saying savagely, ‘Don’t ever lecture me again! The slums that you visited today are only slums because they’ve been fouled by the dissolute Irish savages who inhabit them! Any improvements would be an absolute waste of time and money!’

  He stormed into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. She made no attempt to follow him. He was wrong and he was incapable of seeing that he was wrong. He was as ignorant and bigoted and uncharitable as Kieron said Lord Bicester was. She sat down on the edge of the high bed wondering what to do next. Presumably they would go down to dinner in a little while, in which case she should ring for Miriam and bathe and change. But she didn’t want to ring for Miriam. She didn’t want to see anyone. She wanted to make Alexander understand about poverty; she wanted them to be in agreement about what must be done; she wanted them to be friends again.

  From beyond the closed bathroom door she could hear him speaking tersely to Teal. Perhaps he wouldn’t want to dine at home after the quarrel they had just had. Perhaps he would go out leaving her to cope with the vast array of servants alone.

  She thought back to the words he had used about the Irish. He called them dissolute savages. It was a term coined in ignorance for she was sure that he had never met anyone Irish, other than herself. Her white-hot anger began to ebb. She understood very well the way he had been brought up, cocooned by vast wealth against any of the realities of life. Although he hadn’t said so, she knew very well that he had never once stepped into any of the city’s slum areas. If he did so, and saw for himself the appalling conditions that existed there, then he would begin to think differently.

  There was a hesitant knock at the door and she crossed the room and opened it.

  Miriam gave a deferential bob. ‘Do you need me, madam? You hadn’t rung and …’

  ‘No, I’ll ring when I do so, Miriam.’

  Her mind was made up. Despite all the terrible things that Alexander had said, she was going to make friends with him. Unless she did so, the chasm that had so suddenly sprung up between them would grow wider and deeper and might, in the end, prove to be unbridgeable. The prospect of such a divide between them filled her with sick horror. It would be the end of all the love and laughter between them. The end of the carelessly happy camaraderie that had so united them during their months at Tarna. No matter what the cost, she wouldn’t allow that to happen. Alexander wasn’t by nature conscienceless and uncaring. He had been conditioned from childhood to disregard the poor and to regard the thousands living in misery on Karolyis-owned land as being none of his responsibility. She would use the passion that existed between them to bring them as close mentally as they had become physically.

  The jade doorknob on the door leading to the bathroom began to turn. Feverishly she began to unbutton her dress.

  He stepped into the room, his hair sleeked gleamingly with bath-water, a towel around his waist.

  Her eyes held his. Silently she stepped out of her dress.

  He stopped short, his pupils widening fractionally in stunned surprise, and then darkening with sudden heat.

  As she began to undo the buttons on her chemise he said loudly, so that his voice carried into the bathroom and adjacent dressing-room, ‘I shan’t be needing you any further, Teal.’

  Seconds later there came the sound of the servants’door opening and then closing.

  Her breasts spilled free of her chemise, the nipples rose-pink and silky.

  He unloosened his towel, letting it drop to the floor, closing the space between them in swift, urgent strides.

  Later that evening both Charlie and Henry came to visit them: Charlie in order to discuss with Alexander the bare-faced cheek of an invitation he had just received and that he assumed Alexander had also received, from the nouveaux riches Vanderbilts; Henry, because he was mildly concerned as to what Alexander’s reactions might be to the social slights proferred him at the funeral.

  ‘An invitation to a Vanderbilt birthday party, for land’s sake!’ Charlie exclaimed indignantly, not sprawling on the sofa quite as much as he usually did out of respect for Maura. ‘How does the old devil have the cheek? He’s been trying to get his name on a Schermerhorn guest list for years without succeeding and now he’s behaving as if it is on our guest list and is issuing his own invitations accordingly!’

  ‘Times are changing,’ Henry said, not sounding at all happy about it. ‘By the time this confounded war is over it’s going to be impossible to keep families like the Vanderbilts in their place. Too many Old Guard families are being reduced to penury while families without acceptable backgrounds are coming into fortunes. Society is going to have to begin bending its rules in order to accommodate them.’

  Coming from Henry this was heresy of the highest order. Charlie stared at him, hardly able to believe his ears. ‘You can’t mean it. Men like the Commodore in Schermerhorn and Roosevelt drawing-rooms?’

  Henry nodded, aware that the conversation was veering towards dangerous ground. Charlie was a bonehead and he wouldn’t put it past him to begin recalling that Cornelius Vanderbilt was the son of a common farmer. Once down that road, the spectre of Victor Karolyis’s peasant origins would loom large and the evening would be ruined.

  ‘Needless to say, neither you nor Alexander will be attending so we can talk about more interesting matters,’ he said, wondering what subject would be within Maura’s scope. She was obviously fiercely intelligent, but a girl of her nationality couldn’t possibly be expected to know anything about the war or American politics, and so the burning questions of the day would just have to remain undiscussed.

  ‘The finest hunter I ever possessed came from Ireland,’ he said, certain that anyone with Irish blood in their veins must be at least passingly knowledgeable about horse-flesh. ‘I told Alexander that he should make a visit to the Irish stud-farms …’

  Alexander wasn’t listening to him. He was staring at Charlie, appalled. Vanderbilt was issuing invitations for a birthday ball and he hadn’t received one. It beggared belief. If all the haut ton had been hopefully invited, and from Charlie’s account they had been, then it could only mean that he hadn’t been invited because Vanderbilt considered him to be no longer a member of the city’s social élite. Vanderbilt, for God’s sake! A man who once worked his father’s farm for the cash wage of a hundred dollars a year. A man who, as a youth, had even been snubbed by John Jacob Astor.

  He was seized with the fierce desire to vomit. His father’s passionate concern about Karolyis social standing no longer seemed pathetic and irrelevant. The Commodore was easily in his seventies and had been a self-made millionaire ever since he had been a young man. Yet still people like Charlie and Henry remembered his origins and socially cut him Even the Astors, now third generation, were plagued by anecdotes of how old John Jacob had eaten peas with his knife and if it hadn’t been for a couple of astute marriages, they, too, would have found entry into any sort of decent society impossible. That Karolyis had done so had been because of a similarly astute marriage. It had been a marriage that silenced any gossip about Victor Karolyis’s peasant origins and now, because of Alexander’s own marriage, these origins were beginning to be remembered.

  He looked across at Maura and it was as if he had been thrown a life-line. After their urgent, abandoned love-making she was so radiant with happiness that she seemed to fizz. She was wearing a dress of pale lemon silk, cut fashionably low and in the light of the many chandeliers her glossy dark hair shimmered and shone. He grinned across at her, remembering how she had cried out in pleasure beneath him, how she had answered kiss for kiss, intimate caress for intimate caress. She was everything that he could possibly want in a woman. She was daring, exciting unpredictable, intensely passionate. He dismissed the Commodore from his mind and not once, all evening, did he think of Genevre.

  ‘I don’t want hand-outs from your husband’s fine friends,’ Kieron said harshly.<
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  They were standing at their usual meeting-place on the corner of East 50th Street.

  Even though it was now the end of September it was still unbearably hot. The baby was beginning to make its presence felt and Maura felt queasy and unusually tired. She turned her back on the labourers toiling on the site of the cathedral and said with as much patience as she could muster: ‘It isn’t a hand-out. Henry Schermerhorn needs someone to oversee his New York stables and you’re the very best man he could possibly have.’

  Kieron wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. He was sweaty and his boots were filmed with dust. The only employment he had managed to get for himself had been labouring on a building site similar to the one they were standing by and he was due back there in fifteen minutes.

  ‘A glorified head stableboy is a bit of a come-down for a man who’s been a factor,’ he said tautly.

  ‘I know.’

  She didn’t mind his seeming ingratitude, the last thing she wanted was for Kieron to be grateful to her for anything. And she could understand his bitterness. In Ireland he had been used to responsibility. The tenants on the estates he had factored had looked on him with respect. In their eyes he had been a man of consequence. In New York, no-one looked on him with respect. He was a Paddy. He wasn’t expected to be capable of anything other than the most menial of jobs.

  ‘You won’t be Henry’s stable-overseer for long,’ she said encouragingly.

  He looked across at her, an eyebrow rising.

  ‘Henry has always wanted to breed his own horses. He has money enough and I’ve told him that it’s about time he realized his dream. When he does so and I think he’s going to do so very soon, then he’ll need someone to manage it for him.’

  ‘And what makes you think he’s going to light on me?’ Kieron asked, his good humour returning under the onslaught of her fierce optimism.

  ‘He’s going to know immediately you begin working for him that you’re a man who is magic with horses. He already knows that you’ve factored for two of Ireland’s greatest landlords. And he knows that he can trust you, for I’ve told him that he can.’

  He pushed his cap even further backwards on his thick hair, not knowing whether to be grateful to her, or annoyed. The last thing he wanted was to have anyone doing him favours. He wanted to make his own way in America and not be beholden to anyone, not even Maura. Yet he also desperately wanted to be free of the ceaseless noise and choking dust of the building site. If Henry Schermerhorn employed him as an overseer for his New York stables then at least life would be tolerable again. If he became manager of a stud-farm, then life would be very heaven.

  ‘If you accept Henry’s offer you’ll be doing me a great favour,’ Maura said, knowing very well that it was pride that was making him hesitate. ‘I don’t know anyone else in New York apart from yourself and the O’Farrells and their friends. If you left the city to look for work elsewhere I would miss you.’

  Her voice was soft and smoky, her sincerity such that his throat tightened. He felt a rising in his crotch. He would miss her too, goddammit. For the hundredth time he wondered how he could have been so carnally unaware of her when they had been back home in Ireland. There must have been a moment when any man with eyes in his head would have realized she had changed from being a child and had grown into a dazzlingly desirable woman; when any eejit with an iota of sense would have realized that the blood ties between them were not so close as to make marriage an impossibility.

  He kept his eyes fixed firmly on the traffic plunging up and down the avenue. ‘Then I’ll take it,’ he said, not trusting himself to look at her.

  ‘Wonderful!’ She squeezed his arm in exultant affection, wishing she could tell him that Alexander had also offered to find him employment. That she couldn’t do so was Alexander’s fault.

  His response to her request that he immediately force Mr Belzell to effect improvements in his tenements, had been to do absolutely nothing. And Kieron knew it. He would no more accept a job from Alexander than fly to the moon, and if he knew that she had even raised the subject of such a thing she would very likely never see him again.

  ‘I have to be getting back to work,’ he said, wondering if there was another woman in the city who, clad in finery, would have squeezed his sweaty and dust-covered arm.

  ‘I’ll walk with you a little of the way.’

  ‘And have that creation follow us?’ he asked, the corner of his mouth crooking into a smile.

  Maura looked towards the waiting Karolyis landau with a surge of exasperation. Alexander had been appalled by her suggestion that she dispense with it on occasions and had given the coachman strict instructions always to wait for her. He was doing so now at a discreet distance. The black postilions were minus powdered wigs and the blue velvet bows had been removed from the squabs, but even in Fifth Avenue the landau was still highly distinctive. In lesser streets it would be embarrassingly so.

  ‘Yes,’ she said determinedly ignoring it.

  They began to walk down East 50th Street. ‘Have you heard about the Citizens’Association that has been formed?’ he asked, his arm still burning from the pleasure of her touch.

  ‘No.’ She was immediately interested. ‘Have the tenants banded together? Are they going to bring pressure on the landlords to improve conditions?’

  He said drily, ‘It wouldn’t matter how many tenants banded together, their complaints would never carry any weight.’

  ‘Then who has banded together?’ she asked curiously.

  ‘A group of highly respected citizens. It seems that at long last a handful of them have realized that if the city is to be spared annual outbreaks of typhoid and cholera, something has to be done about conditions in the slums.’

  ‘Then there will be legislation?’ It seemed too good to be true.

  ‘Maybe. It depends on the integrity of the association’s members.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ She was bewildered. ‘If they are forming an association in order to improve conditions, how can their integrity be in doubt?’

  They were nearing the site he was working on and he slowed to a halt, not wanting to expose her to the speculative glances and vulgar remarks of his fellow workers.

  ‘Some of the founding names are more than a little suspect. Franklin H. Delano for instance, and John Jacob Astor III.’

  ‘Astor? But he’s nearly as big a landlord as Alexander!’

  ‘And every bit as bad,’ Kieron said brutally. ‘It’s my guess he’s pitched in and joined the Association in order to look after his own interests.’

  She had flinched at his remark about Alexander. She said now, determined to see the best side possible of what had happened, ‘But he may not be. He may be genuinely sincere about making improvements, and if he is, then where he leads, the other big landlords will have to follow.’

  He looked down at her. Her hair was loose and heavy in the nape of her neck, caught in a fine silk-netted snood. Her dress was of cream silk, the V-neckline edged with ruffles, a score of mother-of-pearl buttons running from the point of the V to her waist. Flounces edged her tight-fitting sleeves revealing delicately boned wrists. Despite the vitality she always exuded there was a heart-stopping fragility about her and he hated himself for what he was about to say.

  ‘Including Alexander?’

  Her eyes held his unwaveringly. ‘Yes.’

  When she had married she had hoped that Alexander and Kieron would become friends. Instead they could barely utter each other’s name in a civil manner. Alexander loathed and detested her continued meetings with Kieron and only permitted them with the deepest reluctance, Kieron regarded Alexander as an oppressor of the poor, no different from the hated absentee landlords of Ireland.

  More than anything else in the world she longed to prove Kieron wrong. She said now, passionately; ‘Alexander will want to be a member of the Citizens’Association, and not for the reasons you ascribed to Astor. What you don’t understand, Kieron, is that Alexande
r has never seen poverty. When he has, he won’t hesitate to bring about change and improvements.’

  ‘And when will that be, sweetheart?’ Kieron, asked wryly, well aware that she had been trying to get Alexander to visit the tenements for weeks, and without success. ‘This week? Next week? Sometime? Never?’

  ‘Soon,’ she said fiercely. ‘I promise you, Kieron. It will be soon.’

  ‘Never!’ Alexander exploded vehemently.

  It was a Monday night and they were about to leave for a concert at the Academy. It would have been the first time she had been and Alexander had left her in no doubt as to the importance of the occasion.

  ‘Society will have to come to the Karolyis box to pay their respects to you,’ he had said forcefully. ‘It would be absolutely unthinkable for them not to do so. And when they have been forced into doing it once, the next time will be easier. By the end of the month this whole farce of being ostracized will be over.’

  ‘Never!’ he repeated, as Teal obsequiously held out his opera-cloak and hat for him.

  ‘Just once,’ she pleaded tautly.

  She had long since ceased to regard Teal’s or Miriam’s presence as a bar to their personal conversations. Alexander always behaved as if they did not exist and she had soon learned that if they were to have any conversation when they were preparing to go out anywhere, then she would have to do likewise.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be the Bowery. We could go to Five Points. There are tenements built upon Karolyis land at Five Points …’

  ‘There are tenements built upon Karolyis land in every goddamned area you wish to name!’

  He snatched his opera hat from Teal and she saw that his initials were embroidered in gold on the dull silk of the lining.

  It was true. Although she hadn’t been able to persuade him to visit the tenements, he had agreed to verify whether or not he was Belzell’s landlord, and he had also asked for a full listing of all real estate in his name. The list had been staggering. Countless blocks of tenements, thousands of residences, a host of hotels, scores of commercial buildings, miles of waterfront property, acres of vacant lots, all Karolyis owned.