Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  If Edie’s family occupied a somewhat less formidable fortress, it did pride itself on a generously dimensioned, English-style country house cushioned by emerald lawns and gardens, reached via a long, gracious driveway. Less dramatic than the Stokes place, a mile away, but more dignified, and surrounded by dignified neighbors. A solid house, now long gone. Also, living year-round on the island did not have the cachet of a house in Manhattan and a seasonal abode a ferry ride away, but it was still quite desirable. When it came to the traditional values that held the Minturns together, family ties and a sense of refinement trumped tennis sets and bowling alleys. Edith’s mother, Susanna, had grown up in the house with her high-minded, well-off parents and her four brothers and sisters. Susanna would never stray far from the family womb; she purchased her childhood house as a newlywed from her father and mother, who moved nearby. This mansion signified the unity and pride of the tight-knit Minturn clan.

  A series of professional portraits from 1885, taken after the Staten Island residence had come to an end, suggests the air of genteel privilege that had always permeated the Minturn household. The photographer James Breese captured Edith and her three sisters, a quartet of snowy-gowned teenagers gathered around a piano beside a towering potted plant and a bust of Venus on a pedestal. May, Gertrude and Mildred all have pretty faces, but ingénue Edith stands out with her sweet, fine features.

  The refinement of the girls’ upbringing in their surroundings, the lessons in music and French, the shopping trips and visits from the dressmaker, all formed intimacies that would keep them close for years to come. That the Minturns hired this photographer at all telegraphed their class, their connections and their taste. Breese, a member of New York’s artistic elite, inhabited a circle that included John Singer Sargent, the architect Stanford White and the artist Charles Dana Gibson.

  High society of the sort to which the Minturns and the Stokeses belonged had blossomed in the post–Civil War era, when millionaires multiplied and New York became the place to see and be seen. The self-appointed social arbiter Ward McAllister coined the term “the 400” as a way of categorizing the haves of the era—in the most literal sense, he used it to mean the number of notables qualified to be guests in society matron Caroline Astor’s ballroom.

  McAllister died in 1895, but his legacy lived on with increasing numbers of nouveau riche New Yorkers, who resided on Fifth Avenue and took their status-conscious summer vacations in huge Newport, Rhode Island, mansions. Some of the 400 were New York’s “Knickerbocracy,” sometimes termed Patriots, old New York families whose roots stretched back to New Amsterdam, while others had made their money much more recently, but altogether they were the people who felt at ease with their fellow swells. Both the Minturns and the Stokeses qualified as part of the 400, though neither family made society dinners and balls the center of their lives as some families did. And Staten Island was largely off the social radar, which set these families apart.

  Between Edith and Newton, the first touch would be only a glancing blow. Christ Church stood in the center of Elliottville, on Bard Avenue, the same street as the Minturn home. On Sundays both families attended the Episcopal services, with Anson Stokes leading his older children on a foot march through the woods, a mile hike from the heights of New Brighton. There Newton Stokes first encountered Edie Minturn. She sat at right angles to him, the pews of the two families positioned cater-cornered, so he saw her not from behind but in profile.

  It would not be the first time that a match was begun in a liturgical setting. And it indicates more than anything that the Minturn and Stokes families swam in the same waters. Aristocrats in postbellum New York formed an extended family, sharing marriages and schools, churches and cemeteries. They maintained the same rituals and customs, with a sense of identity that was made up of the refinement of the clothes one wore and the grandeur of the houses one inhabited. The Metropolitan Opera, opened in 1883, was their shared back yard.

  Thus, a match between two children of the best families involved a feeling of destiny that revolved around tribal traditions much more than individual romance. Cued by markers of wealth and privilege, members of the upper class recognized (and thus married) each other with unerring alacrity. Still, church-crossed might rank just below star-crossed in the lovers’ lexicon.

  By the 1880s, the rustic enclave of northeastern Staten Island had grown less exclusive and, for those who prized exclusivity, less desirable. The Minturns fled first, in 1880, then the Stokeses, in 1886. The deciding factor for each was the explosion of popular resorts around St. George, which exercised a powerful lure for Manhattanites, louche and luxe both, now that ferry service had grown more dependable. The Staten Island Amusement Company produced athletic contests and beauty pageants, as well as an enterprise enticingly titled “The Fall of Babylon Show.”

  The adults became disenchanted with the enchanted woods much sooner than did the children. Newton recalls hearing his mother wax indignant over the “rough element” that was ruining “their” island, blighting the paradise that rightfully belonged to them. Moving from New Brighton to New York City full time, the families would leave the Fall of Babylon behind. It was a good thing, considered Helen Stokes, because it would now become more convenient to expose the children properly to the social opportunities and dancing lessons that honed a person entering society.

  Newton and Edith obediently followed their parents. The rural, green-golden childhood years had come and gone. But the abundance, refinement and elegant privilege they had always known, even in the wilds of Staten Island, would switch to a new venue. For now, Newton and Edie would see each other only occasionally, at teas, balls and dinners, demure functions that placed formal etiquette firmly over personal interaction. The love born as childish affection under a seaside sun would have to wait its turn.

  2. Flying Cloud

  It was difficult for an eighteen-year-old girl to see how it had come to this. Edie Minturn knew her father had been having financial difficulties. She had overheard gloomy words, like “reversal” and “setback,” flapping up like black carrion birds from the hushed conversations of the adults in the family. Edith knew, too, that business was bad all around. For three years, a deep recession had gripped the country, beginning on Wall Street, where brokerages failed, and continuing to railroad bankruptcies, crop failures and a slaking of the export business, what the newspapers had labeled the Panic of 1883. All around New York, two years later, millionaires were still hemorrhaging money.

  This was not the first Panic of the century. Yet until now her father’s shipping concern had survived the sudden jolts and wild swings of the economy. This recession had a direct impact on the business of Grinnell, Minturn & Co. She knew it was ridiculous, but some petulant part of her couldn’t help but take the Panic personally. She had known one thing ever since she was a young girl on Staten Island, ever since she had known anything: 1885 was to be her year. A girl could not know beforehand the most important date in her life—the day of her wedding—but as soon as she could count, she knew the year of her coming out.

  Coming out. Or making a debut, which had a grander sound. Two years before, when Edith’s older sister, Sarah, known to all as May, turned the magical debutante age of eighteen, she had beautiful shimmery things to wear while attending dancing class, paying calls, sweeping into the Metropolitan Opera.

  But for Edith there would be nothing.

  She stood at the window of the house her late grandfather had built, at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, poised in perfect profile: wasp-waisted, a mass of dark hair, wide-set eyes that were deep blue, blueberry blue, “Minturn blue,” the feature she shared with her three pretty sisters and two brothers. The day dress she wore presented her well enough. Crimson with mandarin piping, the dress owed its effect to the snug cuirass bodice and the pert little bustle behind. But Edie knew the outfit was nearly worn out. She had taken the gown with her to London a year ago, when she and May had visited.

  That was befor
e the Panic brought down her father’s business.

  Here she was in her grandmother’s lavish abode, surrounded by handsome furnishings and pictures from Europe, yet her family was consigned to living there because her father and mother could no longer afford a home of their own. She was not so impoverished that she had to go down to the sidewalk with her hand outstretched. But reduced in a different way: if her family could not afford the proper clothes, she could not attend the balls at which matches were made.

  She knew herself to be absurd. Thousands were out of work, hungry, living on the streets, children begging. And here she was, staring out the window of a Fifth Avenue mansion, feeling sorry for herself. She knew she should not brood. “Do not sulk!” was one of her mother’s numberless admonitions. Self-pity was not becoming to a young lady and was not in keeping with the family spirit, which celebrated fortitude and energy, and respected things other than a fancy dress.

  Edie held back the velvet drape with a pale hand. People on the Fifth Avenue sidewalk could see her in this second-story window, but she didn’t really care. Down below, carriages thronged the avenue. It was a Saturday, and the sidewalks were mobbed with black-hatted men and women beneath umbrellas; snow dusted the street and the gaslights were starting to come on. Everyone hurrying to get to the mercantile palaces of Ladies’ Mile.

  She found herself brooding about diamonds. In the past few social seasons, as the precious stones flooded onto the market from new mines in South Africa, the price of diamonds had dropped. They were at once everywhere. Common shopgirls owned brilliants—small ones, but diamonds nonetheless. They studded not only jewelry but belt buckles, headdresses and hatpins. Infants wore gold buttons set with diamond chips. For any proper ball gown, diamonds were an essential grace note.

  In her sorrow and petulance Edith suddenly thought of her younger brother Francis. Gone now, dead from diphtheria these seven years. Frankie died on Christmas Day, and ever since his passing Edie had been haunted by a sense of darkness that lurked just on the border of holiday celebrations. Since the time Edith was eleven, she and May had to help shoulder their mother Susanna’s boundless and very vocal grief. Every year since Frankie’s death mother and daughters exchanged solemn letters of remembrance on the boy’s birthday.

  The thought of Francis brought her back to herself, to the idea of seriousness and purpose she felt developing within her, the legacy of Minturn steel she had inherited. Her brother Robert teased her with the nickname “Fiercely.” Her mother told her stories of her behavior as a little hellion on the beach at Staten Island, how different she had been from her sister May, how stubborn, how much of a handful. Where was her fierceness now? I will be better, she thought. I will put childish things behind me. She would pull herself up, scrutinize her Minturn soul and survive this “tragic inconvenience”—the formulation itself was silly.

  But the nagging, persistent voice continued. I want white.

  Every eighteen-year-old female in her set wished for white. They all saw themselves in a gown of the most dazzling, most arresting, most virginal alabaster white, floating down the grand stairway at Delmonico’s, say. White wasn’t just a color, it was a moral value. Despite the urgings of her better nature, Edith was beset by adolescent fancies of blue diamonds and white gowns, imparted, reinforced and hammered home for years by her female elders, Susanna in the lead.

  One characteristic of such fancies: they did not allow for fathers with Reversals.

  EDIE’S FAMILY RELOCATED to Manhattan from Staten Island in 1880, when she was thirteen, first residing in a generous house on lower Park Avenue. Early in 1884, they moved to 27 West 33rd Street, a fashionable location that stood just around the corner from the Astor mansions, whose denizens were waging a competition for who could stage the most brilliant parties. The successive changes of address, each a rung up the social ladder, served to elevate the family’s status and to increase Edie’s desirability as a potential bride.

  Manhattan spun with activity. New amusements were popping up. In 1887, Madison Square Garden would become a pleasure mecca of theaters, restaurants and equestrian events. For girls like the Minturns, there would be dancing parties and the lessons that preceded them, classes at home in French, deportment, and piano.

  Largely, though, who they were was what they wore. The Minturn women commissioned their wardrobes from dressmakers who attended them at home. By the turn of the century, however, like most of their peers, they began to patronize the grand department stores of Manhattan, emporia that stocked everything and offered an ideal venue to admire and be admired as well. The girls existed simply to be admired—that was their vocation, at least until the year they married. It was a style of life they shared with all the other young ladies they knew in New York, one that took quite a bit of diligence, because the standards of female beauty were so exacting.

  The daughters of Robert and Susanna Minturn based their lives around physical embellishment. Each season the family summoned the seamstress to replace the gored sleeves of their gowns with ever larger and lacier “legs of mutton,” as the all-important arm coverings of the era were known. The hats of fashion-forward Edie and her sisters increased in circumference until their wearers nearly staggered beneath the fantastic, elaborately veiled, ostrich-draped confections. Under the dictates of successive fashion trends, the Minturn girls cinched their waists into the tiniest hourglasses, then learned how to squeeze into a polonaise bodice. When it came to be the style, they made sure that their “pouter pigeon” bosoms drooped at the perfect angle, a look named for the eponymous bird’s penchant for distending its crop to maximum fluffiness.

  It was the Age of James, the Age of Wharton, and either Henry James or Edith Wharton could have quite naturally placed the behaviors of the Minturn girls into one of their novels. Wharton describes the period of Edith Minturn’s debutante quandary as “the Age of Innocence,” and Wharton herself came of age in the same period. Of course, the Age of Innocence is not an irony-free designation, as none could ever be from the nuanced pen of the “angel of devastation,” as James labeled Wharton.

  Throughout the work of both writers we get glittering, telling glimpses of the elaborate balls in which the spirit of the age, for better or for worse, can best be located. These extravagances commanded the interest of all of society, and would weigh heavily on the mind of a girl like Edith, observing the activities in which her older sister took part. Ball-going constituted a requirement for the elite, the prime see-and-be-seen experience of the time. The culture of display was always grand, ostentatious, ritualized—and exhausting. The usual ball began precisely at midnight, when 250 women and men known in gilded New York as “the fashionables” poured down the grand staircase to the main ballroom of the mansion, hotel or restaurant that hosted the party.

  Here is Wharton describing the setting that the suddenly unhoused Edie Minturn wished to take part in, with the horrifying prospect of appearing unfashionably dressed at the ball: “Couples were already gliding over the floor beyond: the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments of the young married women’s coiffures, and on the glitter of highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glacé gloves.”

  Or James: “The rooms were filling up and the spectacle had become brilliant. [The ball] borrowed its splendor chiefly from the shining shoulders and profuse jewels of the women, and from the voluminous elegance of their dresses.”

  The guests would sample a buffet of viands and fine wines. They might waltz to the strains of a seventy-piece orchestra and refresh themselves with sweet frozen delicacies, some made from lake ice shipped down from Saratoga. Participants would have practiced their steps for weeks, studying ballroom manuals in order to deliver a competent performance. If the occasion was a “fancy-dress ball,” then tulle and velvet, rouge and powder cloaked the identities of many of the men present, since such dances provided ample opportunity for no-holds-barred cross-dres
sing.

  And finally the time would come for the centerpiece of any exclusive ball, be it in Manhattan, Newport or the Berkshires: the cotillion. The leader of the dance functioned as a combination square-dance caller and high school principal, coaxing participants through a series of fixed geometric patterns. All the sophisticates knew by heart a number of classic sequences, such as the “ladies’ chain” or the “two-hand turn.” Other figures were more intricate, challenging and potentially humiliating for anyone who fumbled the steps. A single dance could stretch to fully two hours, leaving participants in a virtual trance state. As dawn began to streak the windows, the presentation of lavish favors lightened the mood, and well-heeled guests who were in need of nothing at all could count on taking away a tidy cache of jeweled stickpins, enameled watches or gilt cigarette cases. The Gilded Age indeed.

  In Manhattan, the debutante ball evolved as the preliminary introduction of the young lady to society, but in the 1890s, the ball was complemented in popularity by private teas at home. Girls making their debut would appear at formal dances known as Patriarch Balls, where attendance was by invitation only, or at equally prestigious subscription dances, supplemented by frequent opera-going and other opportunities to see and be seen. The Charity Ball in early February capped off the season, signaling the onset of Lent and a more low-key approach to socializing.

  Coming out meant more than mere display; it meant assuming the set of coded behaviors that allowed the members of the tribe to recognize one another.