by Judy Alter
"I know that," she said, and I thought I detected a note of bitterness. "And what has it brought you?"
"Happiness," I replied instantly, "and comfort." I waved my hands vaguely around the sumptuous parlor in which we sat, its furniture of English mahogany, its draperies of fine cut velvet, its rugs the rarest of Orientals.
"Comfort," she said, "but I don't know about the happiness, Mother. Anyway, it's not the kind of happiness I want for myself." And with that she put an effective end to the conversation by excusing herself and leaving the room.
I sat stunned.
By happenstance John came into the parlor, looking for a book he had misplaced, and found me sitting there like a statue. "Jessie? Are you all right? You look... well, like lightning has hit you."
I wanted to cry out and ask him, "Aren't we happy? Tell me that we are!" But instead I said quietly, "John, I'm going to take the children to Europe. Lily must broaden her horizons."
Most men would have asked what prompted this sudden decision, why I was so adamant, and a thousand other questions. To his everlasting credit John simply said, "Fine. I need to go on business; we'll all go together."
Chapter 18
We sailed in the late spring of 1869, John bound for Paris, and Lily, Frank, and I determined to see the Alps in Switzerland, after a stay in London to do some shopping. Poor Charley had been left behind, on a naval cruise as part of his training at the academy. But we had not been long in England when an irresistible invitation reached us: we were invited to Copenhagen for the wedding of the crown prince of Denmark and the princess of Sweden.
"The Alps," I told Lily, "have been there for a very long time and no doubt will still be there when we get around to them. But a royal wedding..."
Lily agreed placidly, showing neither hesitation nor enthusiasm. I hoped that the romance of a wedding might wear off on her and change her mind a little, though I might as well have wished for a sudden shift in personality.
Frank elected to stay with his father, and so Lily and I left for Copenhagen. Our first hint of the elaborate festivities came as our carriage drove into the city—flags flew everywhere, the blue and straw of Sweden, the cherry and white of Denmark. People thronged the streets, all in a festive mood. It was clear that this wedding was to be proclaimed a national holiday.
Soon after our arrival we attended a royal reception at which Danish nobility gathered from across the small country to welcome the bride. At special notice from the queen, I was given the honor of an escort by the minister of war and also had the privilege of visiting briefly with the king. When he asked how I liked the climate in Copenhagen, I forgot momentarily both my manners and the fact that he was king and so should not hear any criticism of his country. "You have no climate, sir, you have weather!" Fortunately, he laughed heartily.
As a married lady of some international respect, I was privileged to stand near the king and queen as people paraded past them—first the nobility and then the people of the country. The rule was that "any person of decent appearance" could pass through the gallery in which the reception was held; by so doing, the people themselves became part of the ceremony. I thought it a custom that would have been well suited to our own democratic company, until I remembered with a shudder the stories about President Jackson's open reception in the White House when he was inaugurated. Somehow Denmark had more mannerly citizens.
At length we passed from that gallery into another, where musicians played. This hall was lit by wax candles in Venetian glass holders; unfortunately, the wax ran over the holders and collected in small puddles on the floor. At the opening quadrille of honor, a portly middle-aged gentleman slipped and fell, knocking his head so badly that he was stunned and had to be carried out.
I danced cautiously with several noblemen who sought my hand and felt much like a queen myself, though I watched always for those small puddles of wax. In the midst of one dance, however, I was startled when the music came abruptly to a halt, and then, after a second's hesitation, the musicians broke into the national anthem.
The crowd parted as a little old woman, a fairy-godmother sort in yellow-and-white silk, made her way to the thrones. Her white hair was held by an ordinary cap, upon which sat a coronet of diamonds. Around her neck were strings and strings of necklaces—diamonds, rubies, pearls—so many that one could barely see the fabric of her dress. At least as many bracelets jangled on her arm, so that I thought she should have been quite weighted down by all that jewelry. She proceeded slowly forward, however, the crowd bowing in her honor, until the king came forward to greet her and escort her to a chair. She was, of course, the dowager queen, and I was most impressed with the respect shown her. I intended to tell John that our country could take strong lessons in manners from the Old World, if the Copenhagen court was any example.
Lily, being an unmarried woman, was not afforded the freedom at the reception that I was and had to stand with the young girls her age who were strictly chaperoned. Afterward I asked if she had enjoyed it, and she nodded vaguely and then, with more life than usual, recounted that one of the chaperons asked her to point out the American lady.
Lily nodded toward me.
"The one in the violet and white, with white hair?" the woman asked.
I winced as Lily told me this, to think that my hair was now totally white, though I was but forty-five years of age.
"She told me," Lily continued, "that you could not be the American. You were an English lady. When I asked how she knew, she replied, 'Her hair is fixed to fit her face, rather than to the latest style.' I told her," Lily said emphatically, "that I knew you were American because you were my mother."
I laughed aloud! "And what did she say then?"
"She said," Lily answered, almost shyly, "that my hair was not dressed in the latest fashion, either....She seemed to consider that a great compliment." Lily was apparently uncertain whether or not to take it in that spirit.
"Ah, Lily," I said, "we have been given a great treat—an inside look at royalty, at the lives they lead, the life...." My voice trailed off, for I wanted to say that it was the life we should be leading. Had John been elected to the White House, I would have brought just such grandeur, such formality to the presidency. It would, I knew, be something the country needed—something, I thought somewhat spitefully, better than the Lincolns' ill-fated gala.
"It was all a bit much, don't you think?" Lily asked, drawing me back to the present.
A few nights after the wedding—which surpassed the reception in grandeur but does not linger in my mind in the same way—we were invited to a dinner with the great storyteller, Hans Christian Andersen. I had expected someone rather magical and wonderful and met, instead, a man whose peculiarities made him seem like a spoiled child. It hurt his feelings if you smiled when he spoke or read, and he would not talk if you wore a color displeasing to him—pink, in particular, for he disliked "clothes the color of skin." At dinner, if he did not like his position or seatmates, he simply refused to speak at all.
But he was most interested in talking to us—fortunately, my gown was of a deep blue that evening—and hearing of his reputation in America. As long as I flattered him, he was extremely cordial.
After dinner he read to us from an unpublished story, "A Tale of a Thistle." Though he read in Danish, we had been provided an English translation and could follow easily enough. Afterward he gave me a small statuette of the match girl, and I told him, through a translator, that I would add it to my treasures at Pocaho.
From Denmark we made our way back through the Alps, but I had been away from John and Frank too long and was itchy to be with them again. John had hired a governess for Frank and then sent him off with friends to row on a picturesque lake, so his letters didn't mention Frank at all, and I gathered that father and son were not spending too much time together.
John's letters did mention more than once a young sculptress whom he'd met in Paris. "What do you think of this Vinnie Ream?" I asked Lily, who had als
o read the letters. It was, I thought with a twinge of regret, a sign of what our relationship had come to, that John's letters were addressed to "Dear Jessie and Lily," but I dutifully shared them.
"I think," she said, her eyes fixed out the window of the carriage, "that she is too young for Father to be so enthusiastic about. She is my age."
"Two years younger," I answered far too quickly, giving away just how much thought and attention I had devoted to Vinnie Ream.
"Here comes another village," she said, as though to distract me.
Almost immediately I heard the postilion on our carriage blowing on his brass horn. I had not figured out whether the horn was to warn away pedestrians and stray sheep—which would have made sense—or to announce our passage in some grand manner—which, I admitted only to myself, appealed to the same part of me that had been thrilled by the ceremonial approach to life in the Danish court.
On first greeting John my inclination was to demand right off, "Tell me about Vinnie Ream!" but instead I asked about the sale of stock in the Memphis and El Paso.
"Slowly," he said, "slowly. But I have a good agent, a Monsieur Probst, working on it for me. Your brother-in-law put me onto him." My brother-in-law was, of course, Susie's husband, Gauldreau Bouilleau, who had taken Susie first to India and then to Paris, where he was American consul. Now he was in France, doing I knew not what. "I barely have to worry about the railroad," John finished.
A little alarm sounded in my head, but John rushed on so quickly I had no time to listen to the warning. "Let me tell you about Vinnie Ream," he said. "She is a wonderful sculptor, just twenty-two years old, here in Paris with her parents to work on a bust of Lincoln—she was awarded the commission after his assassination. You must sit for her, Jessie. I've told her you would."
I wanted to hold up my hand and ask him to pause for breath. Inside I was thinking, Twenty-two? John, you are fifty six! But I knew that a young girl like Vinnie Ream would see him as worldly, famous, and wealthy; she would not know the John that I did. Aloud, I asked, "Have you sat for her, John?"
"Hours and hours," he answered guilelessly. "I am intrigued with her, absolutely intrigued. You will be too."
I went and put my arms around that dear white head. "Of course I will, John," I said. John was not having an affair with Vinnie Ream—I was as sure of that as I was of the sun and moon in the sky. He may well have, over the years, dallied with other women—the suspicion had often occurred to me, but I had never wanted to know and still didn't. But he had never been so open about another woman before, and that very openness gave me relief. John and I were only occasional lovers, but we were friends—and both relationships were intact, in spite of Vinnie Ream.
She was, as John said, a remarkable young woman with a great deal of talent. The late President had sat for her half an hour a day for over five months, she told me.
"With his busy schedule!" I murmured, feeling myself catty without intent.
She was as guileless as John. "Exactly what Mrs. Lincoln said," she replied, "but there was no changing the President's mind. I..." Her voice faltered. "I had almost finished the sculpture when he died. Now I must change it to make it appropriate—not a man at one time in his life, but the sum of that life."
I posed one afternoon and days later received by post a small and none-too-flattering bust. It would not go with the match girl among my treasures.
* * *
John was abruptly called back to America, and on but a few days' notice I left with him. Perhaps I was thinking it best not to leave him too long alone again and chose, therefore, leaving my children behind as the lesser of two evils. Lily was to supervise young Frank's education in the European manner, but that lasted only until war was declared between France and Prussia. Then, with great prudence, she saw to it that she and Frank were on the last passenger train out of Dresden and safely onboard the last German passenger steamer that crossed the Atlantic before the Franco-Prussian War.
We assembled again at Pocaho, a family reunited and, at least on my part, glad to be home again.
It was not long before John's railroad empire began to unravel like a frayed sweater when a thread is pulled. I had kept myself ignorant of his business affairs, yet his tragedies came as no surprise to me. Without looking I had seen the signs but refused to acknowledge them.
He entered my bedchamber one midmorning looking shaken. I was still abed, having adopted the habit of having a breakfast tray sent to me while I read the paper and then taking a short nap before facing the day.
"Jessie?" His very look startled me.
"Yes?" I swept the papers aside and made room for him to sit on the bed.
"Monsieur Probst has been arrested in Paris... and so has Susie's husband."
"Arrested? For what?" I had sensed in Paris that things were not right.
"They... misrepresented the whole thing. They claimed the railroad was transcontinental—"
"Transcontinental!" I interrupted. "Couldn't anyone with a sense of geography know that the very name—Memphis and El Paso—indicated it covered but a small portion of the southern route?"
John withdrew, looking offended. At length he said, "If you'll let me finish....It was to be transcontinental one day—you know that as well as I do. But Probst and Bouilleau didn't wait on the facts... and they let people assume that the government had guaranteed subsidies and backed the bonds."
"John!" I was truly horrified at the magnitude of this deception. "You... you didn't know."
"Of course not." His eyes, focused out the window, refused to meet mine. "I was preoccupied in Paris, and I trusted them—foolishly."
The thoughts that tumbled through my mind were not appropriate to utter at the moment. I couldn't accuse him, beaten as he was, of not having learned the lesson at Las Mariposas of trusting the wrong men again—particularly when one of them was his brother-in-law. Nor could I suggest, much as I longed to, that he should have paid less attention to Vinnie Ream and more to his business.
"There is a French warrant for my arrest too," he said.
"Well, if you don't go to France, they can't arrest you." Practicality seemed to me the first place to start. "What about the railroad itself?"
"We have laid only three miles of track... and graded twenty-five more." He whispered the words, as though reluctant to admit the magnitude of this mistake.
"When will more track be laid?" I asked.
"There is no money to lay more track," he whispered, still avoiding my eyes.
I was seeing my husband disintegrate before my very eyes, and the scene became so painful that I thought I should scream aloud—anything to make it end. When I spoke, the calmness of my voice surprised me. "Not unless, I assume, you invest more of our money in it."
Now he sank his head into his hands, and his voice was so low that I could hardly make out the sense of it. "We have no more money, Jessie. We can't pay our taxes... and the railroad is bankrupt."
My world tilted before me, and the safe walls of Pocaho seemed about to crumble before my eyes. "John, tell me... tell me that you have just misspoken. We cannot be penniless."
John had never been extravagant—he neither drank spirits nor smoked tobacco, he preferred a quiet evening at home with friends to gala parties, and he was inclined to wear the same clothes year after year unless I nagged him into buying himself new ones. But his simple habits were by choice, never necessity, and when I lived extravagantly—I had to admit that I had done so—he had seemed pleased, never worried nor critical. With a wrench I thought of our recent trip to Paris, my carefree shopping and the lavishness of the festivities in Copenhagen, which I had enjoyed so much.
For the first time in all the years of our marriage I did not go to him with my arms outstretched to comfort him. I simply could not do it. I would not censure aloud, but my heart knew that John had brought this catastrophe on us. In our previous defeats I had often thought him a victim. This time he could have averted tragedy.
Through that
long morning the rest of the story came out—a sordid tale of misplaced trust and carelessness. An investor had purchased the Memphis and El Paso in bankruptcy court and was forcing John out, as he had already been forced out of Las Mariposas. He had not only lost a fortune, he had no prospects of an income.
"Pocaho?" I asked.
"The tax collector was here yesterday, while you were out visiting. He has made a list of everything—from the Bierstadt to the stables and horses—and we cannot sell anything without accounting for it to him."
"The land in California?"
"We can sell that, and I have set it in motion."
"I want to go over those records with you," I said, rising from my bed. "And we must petition the government for payment for Black Point." After a ten-year hiatus I was ready to do battle again.
"It's not all my fault," he said. "There has been a panic in this country, you know." His tone was defensive.
I wanted to tell him not to whine. I knew that the collapse of Jay Cooke's banking firm had sent thousands of other firms—including a lot of railroads—into financial ruin. But that didn't excuse John... I couldn't even define what John had done as wrong, and I didn't want to. But I would not see us as yet another victim of the Great Panic of 1873.
Within the next months it all disappeared—first the land in California, then Charley's yacht and the horses, next the Humboldt book collection, and after that—tearing my heart out as it went—the Bierstadt painting of the Golden Gate. And, finally, Pocaho. We moved to a small rental house on Madison Avenue in the city, a dark and cheerless place, which under other circumstances I could have brightened with our personal things. Now I had none of those things left.
We had been the richest of the rich, and now we were paupers.
* * *
"What is this?" John's voice was cold, calm. Only his waving hand revealed his anger. In that hand he held a copy of the New York Ledger.
With a sinking heart I knew what it was, but I played the fool. "What do you mean?"
