When Emily called upon ladies whose company she enjoyed (their houses dotting Gramercy Park and even the newer enclave of Murray Hill), she usually stopped for the traditional twenty-minute face-to-face. Even these women were not among her closest friends—such formal calling hours were not required for them—and so she and her hostess stuck to a fairly routine list of subjects: the weather, current fashions, new menu items at Delmonico’s, recent (noncontroversial) national or world news. By late afternoon Emily was back home, where she spent the remaining hours before dinner (hosted by the Posts half the week, the other times by their friends) reviewing her wardrobe for the next day, her final task being to ensure that her jewels were in ballroom condition. If the Gilded Age men were pushing themselves ever faster to make more money, their wives were expected to find conspicuous ways to spend it. Emily would later lament, “Men had not enough time and women had too much, so that they had to keep busily trying to find means, the former to save and the latter to squander it.”
For a while, she found her new role as mistress of her own domain satisfying. This is what she had been trained to do all her life, and now she intended to show how well she could do it. Especially proud that her invitations were sought by the A list among the city’s elite, she noticed that dinners at the Post home were seldom refused in favor of a competing offer. Emily knew that Edwin was eager to seem a social lion, and to her great satisfaction, their joint commitment to his success allowed the newlyweds to function as a team.
Emily’s most important contribution to the couple’s elaborate dinner parties was to purchase the finest specialties of the period, above all, duck and terrapin, the kind her husband had hunted on the couple’s honeymoon. Terrapin, the ubiquitous society meal of the Gilded Age, had become a symbol of haute cuisine several years earlier when Delmonico’s had first dared to serve the exotic reptile, the third-most-expensive item on the menu at $2.50 per meal ($55 in today’s terms). Emily didn’t understand the fuss; she had grown up eating this variety of freshwater turtle, popular in the South long before it appeared on northern tables. Upton Sinclair, approximately Emily’s age, remembered how the Baltimore community accepted his grandfather, an unfashionable Methodist, only because of his infamous terrapin suppers. Terrapin soup, terrapin steaks, and terrapin appetizers: you were in trouble if you couldn’t stomach its taste, privately held to emulate stringy beef—once you removed the sherry it swam in.
Luckily for Edwin, duck, the other requisite of the well-set table during the 1890s, was a meat he knew well. Only half joking, he measured his manhood by how many ducks—and what kind—he bagged during shooting season every weekend that he spent on the Post family boat. Knowing that most of the imported terrapin Emily and her parents served actually arrived packed in ice from Maryland motivated him to conscript the duck, at least, into Yankee territory. The fowl, however, proved yet another southern specialty after all, a further reminder of fine cuisine below the Mason-Dixon Line. As Emily gently explained, highborn southerners were expected early in life to carve a canvasback with finesse, an art “once considered necessary to every gentleman.”
Emily herself liked simple foods, but she knew she would have to put aside her preferences in order to serve what Edwin, as well as their guests, expected. Luckily, a copy of the cookbook written in 1889 by Delmonico’s chef, Alessandro Filippini, was among the gifts she had received following her debut. The Table detailed the dishes the restaurant had been serving to society for years. Now Filippini’s meals could be replicated by society’s cooks, at home. In spite of her preference for plain fare, Emily would depend for decades upon Filippini’s elaborate menus for entertaining, her copy growing tattered over the years. His seven-course Thanksgiving feast, with minor variations, served as the model for the countless winter dinners she hosted, including her first Christmas as a wife in 1892. Flinching just a little from the gruesome routine she was outlining for the cook, she read aloud:
Take live terrapin, and blanch them in boiling water for two minutes. Remove the skin from the feet, and put them back to cook with some salt in the saucepan until they feel soft to the touch; then put them aside to cool. Remove the carcass, cut it in medium-sized pieces, removing the entrails, being careful not to break the gallbag. . . . Cook for five minutes, and put it away in the icebox for further use. Put in a saucepan one pint of Espagnole sauce and half a pint of consommé. . . . Boil for twenty minutes, being careful to remove the fat, if any; add half a pint of terrapin and boil for ten minutes longer. Then serve with six slices of lemon, always removing the bouquet.
Edwin made his own contribution to the holiday meals. Over the past few years, he had become a true connoisseur of wines, and now he seized any opportunity to impress Emily’s parents with his knowledge. His elaborate collection earned him respect not only from Bruce and Josephine but from their friends as well. Regrettably, Emily herself was never interested in alcohol—except for championing the nation’s right to drink it in the face of Prohibition. In later years, she wrote briefly in Etiquette about the best temperature (warm, she said) for serving wines, provoking an otherwise sympathetic reader to lament, “She must have wasted a lot of time in France if this passage is the sum of her lore about wine.” It was.
CHAPTER 16
FOR SEVERAL MONTHS INTO HER PREGNANCY, EMILY CONTINUED patronizing Delmonico’s, the stalwart haven for her friends as well as the site for formal occasions—or for relaxed meals where children learned good table manners. Its safe, friendly atmosphere liberated women from the chaperones that proper society had required just ten years earlier. On Saturdays, when the crowd of businessmen weren’t eating their lunches there, Emily’s feminine clique could gather for the Gilded Age version of brunch. Omnipresent newspaper reporters decoded the diners’ status by what they ordered: Emily’s caste predictably requested oysters, scrambled eggs with truffles, filet mignon with béarnaise sauce, and toasted muffins. The respectable middle class preferred roast beef, mashed potatoes, and ice cream. Pretty, reputable unmarried women ordered quail on toast and a small bottle of champagne, their much-touted independence belittled by the married crowd whenever a nearby gentleman picked up their tab.
The restaurant’s customers rarely graced the popular, crowded oyster palaces suddenly sprawling across the city: Delmonico’s guaranteed a fresh supply of the best of the popular mollusks—no small matter when the Western world’s second-largest city (only London was more heavily populated) was consuming a million oysters each day. The nationally famous gourmet Samuel Ward, Edwin’s favorite tutor in things culinary, was rumored to have depleted the restaurant’s entire supply himself one afternoon.
With one sip, Sam Ward could identify both a wine’s provenance and its vintage, and his dinners were among the most celebrated in Washington and New York. He would eventually serve as the prototype for Edith Wharton’s Lovell Mingotts, who, in The Age of Innocence, presides over an extravagant dinner, his concentration on the most minute details of the menu meant to indict an overly fastidious set of people whom Wharton thought polluted society. For now, Edwin’s wife held her counsel, not telling her husband that she failed to share his enthusiasm for fine food, and that she thought people like Sam Ward, regardless of their pedigree (he was the elder brother of Julia Ward Howe), vulgar.
To people like Emily’s conservative mother, it seemed that vulgar excess was the favorite currency of the day. On March 13, 1893, William Waldorf Astor’s opulent thirteen-floor Waldorf Hotel on Fifth Avenue, at the site of today’s Empire State Building, opened its doors to the exceptionally well-heeled. Four years later William’s jealous cousin John Jacob Astor IV responded to the challenge by building his own hotel, the Astoria, its additional four stories ensuring that, temporarily, it dominated the family power struggle. But in spite of the new competition from the hotels’ restaurants, Delmonico’s remained New York’s premier place to eat, in large part due to the decades of loyalty it had bred among Emily’s crowd. If a sense of foreign luxury was what
you sought, you ate at the new fancy restaurants, where you were coddled if you were part of the privileged class and snubbed if you weren’t. If elegance that didn’t have to shout was more your style, you chose Delmonico’s.
EMILY WAS TOO FAR along in her pregnancy to attend the marriage ceremony of Sadie Price, her absence making the wedding wardrobe she passed down to her favorite cousin all the more poignant for both her and the bride. That spring, in “the most fashionable wedding” held in Baltimore “in recent years,” Sadie pledged her troth to the handsome, notorious playboy Archibald Pell. Accompanied by her father, lawyer Benjamin Price, she met her bridesmaids at the door of the Grace Protestant Episcopal church at twelve-thirty on the dot. Of course—this was Baltimore—the young ladies carried gardenias, the dense perfume of the lustrous white petals headily spiraling through the church air. To Emily’s great joy, Archie Pell’s business interests dictated that her cousin would be moving to Manhattan.
Though the Posts themselves would be relocating soon as well, they would still be able to get easily from their new neighborhood to Sadie’s home. To their families’ initial shock, Emily and Edwin had decided to move to Dongan Hills, an attractive but simple suburb on Staten Island. By this point, Emily had come to realize that as much as she worshipped Tuxedo Park, its ceremony demanded more than she was up to these days. Wryly, years later, she would recall, “Tuxedo was the most formal place in the world. Nobody ever waved or hello-ed or hi-ed at Tuxedo. You bowed when you shook hands. . . . [F]irst names were considered very bad form. You might be Johnny in private, but you were Mr. Jones in public. There were only five men in Tuxedo who called me Emily, and then never in formal Society.”
On Staten Island in 1893, the pace was slower and more relaxed, the expectations not so overwhelming, the afternoon at-homes far fewer—a perfect rhythm for a woman with child. In addition, Emily expressed to a few close friends her desire to escape the elaborate entertaining that held New York and Tuxedo Park social life in its thrall. That was exhausting for her to contemplate now; she was ambivalent, as well, about sharing her changing shape (however elaborately disguised) and dramatic new status as an expectant mother with the people who had nurtured her as their local princess. She always disliked being seen at less than her best.
Horse-drawn vans and local ferries transported the Posts’ furniture from their Manhattan apartment to their undistinguished but still attractively homey neighborhood. Emily proudly considered herself frugal in light of what she deemed her modest five-bedroom rental, where, in addition to her little family, three house servants would live. An attached stable boarded the Posts’ three horses, and the rooms above the stalls housed a groom and coachman who would double as an odd-job man. On most days, a gardener joined the staff as well.
Contrary to her later recollection that she knew no one when she moved to Staten Island, census records show that several of Emily’s Baltimore relatives had moved to the island over the last few decades. Furthermore, Benjamin Price’s wife visited the island frequently, bringing Sadie’s sister Marie with her. Finally, Marion Price, one of Bruce’s favorite siblings, had offspring living in New Brighton, Staten Island, a few miles from Dongan Hills. Such family members, Emily included, routinely appeared in coverage of the island’s social events during the years that she and Edwin lived on the island. Given her love of the Baltimore clan, the Dongan Hills residence must have offered security, tranquillity, and companionship to an anxious young bride in need of all three.
UNDENIABLY, STATEN ISLAND played an insignificant part in New York City’s sophisticated urban rhythms. When Emily first told Josephine about the move, her mother was bewildered. Everything her daughter needed was close at hand: Tuxedo Park even had its own resident doctor now, a recent Columbia graduate. The community paid Dr. Edward Rushmore the equivalent of $35,000 a year in today’s currency, compensating for the modest salary by providing him with free lodging over the town drugstore. With the park’s small two-horse wagons on perpetual duty, all Emily would have to do was pick up the phone for immediate service: Tuxedo, Pierre Lorillard was quick to boast, already had a universal telephone service, unusual for such a small organization.
Responding to Josephine’s near panic, Emily explained that she’d already employed an obstetrician. Dr. Kinnaird had lectured on childbirth at New York Hospital, but when Emily told her mother that the new specialty was very scientific, Mrs. Price retorted that it sounded like another fad to her; midwives, after all, had been around for centuries. Who needed an “obstetrician”? she sniffed. What finally convinced Josephine was Emily’s promise to install a telephone in her new house so that she could call her Manhattan doctor as soon as she went into labor. Dr. Kinnaird would immediately take his one-horse brougham to the South Ferry, where he would catch a boat—they ran regularly—to Staten Island. There Edwin would meet him for a quick two-mile trip to reach the mother-to-be.
But Emily really won the argument when she pointed out the ease with which Edwin could get from Dongan Hills to Wall Street. After that, Josephine put up no resistance. She enjoyed her son-in-law’s company immensely, his interests far closer to her own than her daughter’s had ever been. He was eager to join the successful young bucks increasingly in the public eye, such impatience much to his mother-in-law’s approval. Edwin and Emily had married when society was undergoing a transition from promoting rich, idle men-about-town to a model where even the wealthiest sought self-worth from their jobs. Josie’s easy alliance with Edwin, all the more obvious compared to his stiff relationship with Bruce, only inured the young wife further against her husband’s charms. Josephine was not the parent Emily admired.
Not only Josie but Edwin himself had needed to be convinced of his wife’s plan. He believed in the power of the right address, and his family had a long-established social history on Long Island, not Staten Island, where he’d never even had reason to visit. The Posts had been living on the South Shore for nine generations. Emily reminded him, however, that a decade before the Civil War, southerners (including the Price family) had started building what were often grand houses overlooking the Narrows, in order to escape the summer heat at home. More recently, Commodore Vanderbilt had furthered his fortune by ferrying passengers from Whitehall Street, at the southern tip of Manhattan, to Richmond, the Staten Island loading site. The Vanderbilt ferries ran at frequent intervals around the clock, making the trip pleasant and efficient. It took only an hour for commuters like Edwin to get to Wall Street each morning.
In truth, for Edwin, anything would be better than spending the summer at Tuxedo Park. He found its mise-en- scène absurd: the gamekeepers; grown men as property guards, walking around in Tyrolean costumes; the artificially stocked lake. It was all humiliating to a real sportsman like himself. And Emily was right: this new residence made for a better commute as well.
In no time at all, Edwin began to consider keeping a boat moored nearby, though—or maybe because—he knew his wife would dislike the idea. Once he had gotten over his initial disappointment at Emily’s disregard for the water, he had realized it might work to his advantage. Early on, he’d stopped trying to entice her to join him at sea, realizing that now he could always escape home life when it threatened to suffocate him
Even if he knew what he himself wanted, Edwin had little idea what made up his twenty-year-old wife. His feelings for her were based mostly on pride of possession; he had no interest in the actual contents of the elegant package. Replicating his father’s failure to confront his unhappiness in the face of Caroline McLean Post’s controlling behavior, he unwittingly set up his own marriage on a fault line. He neglected to notice that his wife and their relationship would benefit from a very different dynamic. Like his mother, Emily was strong and commanding. But unlike Caroline, she was funny and open to change. In the nostalgic haze cast by the passage of time, it is tempting to believe that the Edwin who loved Emily’s type and the debutante who never got over her feelings for her handsome prince should have ma
de a go of it.
By the time Emily wed, the women’s suffrage movement and other feminist causes had begun exerting a national influence. Today, the solutions promoted by those early leaders seem as oppressive as they were liberating. A league of thousands of professional women, called the “new abolitionists,” had sought to ban both abortion and contraception beginning in about 1860, because the members believed that the need for birth control stemmed from men’s selfish impulses. These women, the well-regarded temperance leader and reformer Frances Willard among them, associated unwanted pregnancies with men who lacked a proper regard for women. If society would apply a uniform standard of acceptable sexual behavior, so that men and women “respected” each other equally, unwanted babies would not be born. Nor, of course, would married couples have much sex.
Around the time the Posts married, society marriages had privately begun to implode. Soon they would be blowing up publicly as well. Occurring on the heels of the Newport divorces of Mrs. Jennie Fosdick and Mrs. Henry Turnbull, the collapse of the marriage of Commodore Vanderbilt’s grandson consumed the gossip sheets of 1887. The separations were often inspired by the women’s unhappiness at what their unions had—or hadn’t—wrought, the expectations not even voiced, let alone met. Most people believed that the rash of uncoupling was just a bizarre cultural glitch and that the world would soon right itself. Little did they understand that this was only the beginning.
CHAPTER 17
THE SUMMER OF 1893 WOULD PROVE A LESS THAN IDEAL TIME FOR Emily to have her first baby. Edwin was preoccupied all the preceding winter with playing the market, certain it was about to collapse, with spoils going to those clever enough to bet on the right side. His confidence incited him to gamble more than Emily liked, especially given his father’s predilection for unwise speculation. But her husband, believing that any money he lost would be more than compensated for by his next win, loved the rush that followed a wager on the right stock. He saw himself as a wise cosmopolitan, though his spouse feared he wasn’t self-aware and that his confidence was ill-placed.
Emily Post Page 13
