Emily Post

by Laura Claridge

  The American Surety Building at 100 Broadway, still in the heart of the city’s Financial District today, quickly became a popular and fully tenanted success. For one year, it would be the tallest building in the world. Bruce Price’s skyscraper, dug deep into the ground the same year his daughter’s marriage was getting off to an earnest, well-intentioned start, would, according to the New York Times architecture critic, “set a new standard of clarity of composition, lavishness of classic detail, and careful refinement.”

  Bruce was the right man for the right job at the right time, and his daughter beamed with pride at the plaudits he earned. As soon as she was able, she spent hours at the construction site, watching the skyscraper take its final shape—just as she had tagged along with Bruce as a girl. Years afterward, Emily Post would acknowledge the role successful adults play in a child’s development: “That children, whether small or grown, admire [their parents’] actual achievement, is not even to be questioned,” she asserted, still in awe of her gifted father decades later.

  CHAPTER 18

  EDWIN WAS SPENDING MORE TIME THAN USUAL WITH HIS OWN FATHER these days, probably to escape the demanding newborn at home. When the weather was even marginally warm, the Macy log records an average of two or three days a week that would find him on the water with family or friends. By March 1894, he was shooting so well that an early spring weekend caused him to crow: “Red letter day,” followed by “another clear delightful day,” enabling him to take home a “bag of 69 birds for the two days.” Growing giddy from his success, Edwin quoted Coleridge in the ship’s log: “a painted ship upon a painted ocean,” he wrote, assuming that anyone reading the entry would understand the allusion to “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

  He loved the Macy. But this was his father’s boat, not his. And it was not a boat built for speed. Everyone around him seemed to be moving up, as if the Dutch word yacht itself conferred instant class as well as the implication of astonishing new fortunes. By 1890 yachting was the Gilded Age’s premier activity for the rich, and the owner of a yacht was assumed to possess “really big money.” Edwin’s crowd might be nervously finessing the current economic climate, but most of them had no trouble building on their net worth.

  If yachting was society’s most expensive sport—and Edwin’s passion—it was among Emily’s least favorite activities. The annual cruise of the entire New York Yacht Club to Newport each August was the year’s highlight for the rich. Members jostled for the fleet’s best positions, and Edwin was calculating stock market earnings that would enable him to join them. His aspirations cast a cloud on Emily’s vision for leisurely family summers. She found the yacht culture ostentatious, if only because it seemed built upon greed and competition—unlike, for instance, that of the Knickerbocker Club and its kin. Emily assumed that underneath his bluster, her blueblooded husband sympathized with her view and that at some level, his boyish enthusiasm aside, he agreed with her assessment. Such confidence was dangerously ill-placed.

  That spring, at least, her determination to take a positive view of her life seemed justified when Pierpont Morgan gave his daughter Juliet a cottage at Tuxedo as a wedding present. The two longtime friends would share motherhood and marriage—however poorly the latter served them both—through the years. Juliet had requested that the bishop who presided at Emily’s wedding, a relative of the Hamiltons as well as the Posts, return from Minnesota to preside at her own nuptials. Unfortunately, Reverend Whipple seems to have functioned as a bad-luck talisman. Juliet Morgan Hamilton would divorce, though her husband would hold on strategically until his illustrious father-in-law was long dead and the estate settled, with William Hamilton himself as one of the will’s executors.

  But for now, as radiant a bride as Emily had been, an equally exquisite Juliet Morgan walked down the long aisle of Manhattan’s Protestant Episcopal Church, overcrowded with three thousand guests from Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, and London. Her white satin dress was trimmed with point lace ruffles on the bodice and skirt, and a crown of diamonds fastened her lace veil, which hung delicately over her train. Elaborate masses of lilies and Jacqueminot roses filled the vestibule, while rare tropical palms crisscrossed the chancel, white ribbons trailing the plants at the front of the church. Perfume had become the habit among well-bred women, but it was utterly superfluous in this setting: the luxuriant scent of hothouse flowers enveloped the guests and wedding party both.

  SHORTLY AFTER THE MORGAN WEDDING, the New York Times ran a full-page article that touted Emily’s more modest environs, noting, “Staten Island Has a ‘Boom.’ ” The enthusiastic headlines continued, bubbling awkwardly: “Its many attractions coming to be appreciated. General Movement this spring towards the island—People Going where they can get more for their money than in this city—pretty homes at reasonable rents.” Until now, only Staten Islanders had thought they inhabited New York’s “most attractive suburb.” But the depression of the past few years was affecting the stock markets as well as the ordinary citizen these days. Manhattanites realized they could get a larger house with more property for much less money if they lived on Staten Island, and they’d still be within minutes of Wall Street. Admitting he’d been dubious when told to explore the mass exodus to Staten Island, the Times reporter was so impressed by what he saw that he wondered why everyone wasn’t relocating to this heretofore hidden paradise.

  Emily had reason to be proud: her instincts had proved right, and she had picked a good home for her family. Her choice felt especially fortunate now, since she was pregnant again. She wasn’t worried about her husband’s occasional frivolity, just privately disappointed. If her father was the pillar of reliability, her husband, she’d already realized, might prove a bit less stable, less straightforward in his personal and work ethics—and less aware of the prize he had in Emily. She consoled herself by deciding that at the very least he was working hard. Edwin was a partner with his own father at H.A.V. Post’s Railroad Equipment Company, itself an unstable business. Still, he was always frenetically brokering deals on the side.

  His wife took care to work as hard as her husband did. But if Edwin noticed his wife’s exhaustive and exhausting contributions to their lives, his appreciation goes unremarked; though he expected kudos at home for his financial acumen, his wife was just doing her job, the details of which she faithfully recorded in her daily log. For the next five years, Emily’s ledger highlights her earnest, unceasing efforts to be the proper society wife Edwin expected—and that she had assumed she wanted to be as well. But for a woman accustomed to following the rhythms of an only child all her life, at times her schedule seems to have allowed her no breathing space.

  Emily understood that a millionaire in the making needed a wife and a life that would elicit envy and curry favor with other magnates. She worked so hard to fill the role she had signed on for—polished wife and nurturing mother—that she became, in modern parlance, overextended. When she’d had only her husband to think about, it had been challenging enough. Now, parenthood and a pregnancy besides pushed her too hard and she found herself much more irritable than usual.

  It’s difficult to be sure how much energy, psychic or physical, Emily spent on mothering. Society mothers in the Gilded Age often hired wet nurses and spent little time with their children on a daily basis. In addition to their domestic duties, society women were obligated to drive up and down Fifth Avenue every day during the season, exquisitely bonneted and veiled, wrapped in fur whenever the temperature dropped. At the very least, a retinue of baby attendants allowed Emily more leisure time—however circumscribed by the chores of a lady—during her second pregnancy than most women enjoyed then or do now.

  In any case, pregnancy allowed her to read without guilt, begging off daily visiting obligations and other social events whenever she felt like it. Ouida, the pen name for a society woman who turned out popular romances, was one of Emily’s frivolous pleasures during her months of confinement, a time she was allowed and ev
en expected to seek the lighthearted. But there were other novels dear to the expectant young mother as well. Her two favorite authors were Mrs. Humphry Ward and Frank Hopkinson Smith, her “Uncle Frank,” whose latest book, A Day at Laguerre’s, was receiving strong early reviews. A robust, warm story based on Hop’s life and travels abroad, it clearly reflects its author’s liberal good nature.

  Emily’s ledger sometimes deviated from reporting on her activities in favor of ruminating about child rearing. Treating the emotional highs and lows of her days as if making an inventory of kitchen supplies, she also considered mistakes that wounded her as well as her child: “I started to spank Ned. . . . The more I hurt him, the more determined he became not to obey. . . . I will never spank him again.” She was worried about her mothering. The countless hours she spent daily on preparing her wardrobe, supervising the servants, and tending to whatever tasks the household presented left her unsure that she, not the nannies, knew best; perhaps they were the greater influence on her child’s development.

  THAT AUTUMN, EMILY again didn’t attend the Tuxedo ball, her socializing temporarily diminished. Edwin, however, spent more time away from home than ever, energetically mixing with chaps who could forward his career. He found himself enjoying his forays into the men’s clubs almost as much as his time on the bay. Almost, but not quite: very little could compete with the savory smells of the four A.M. breakfasts he anticipated throughout his workweek. As in the previous year, at least two weekends a month all season, according to the Macy’s log, Edwin went out with family or friends on the Great South Bay. He was bagging so many ducks that it was impossible to give them all away.

  While her husband hunted, Emily’s father prepared to finish the American Surety skyscraper—making its creator a hero. Though still in progress, the nearly completed building—and Emily’s father—were touted in the press almost daily, and Bruce’s name was cited even more often than usual in the social pages. At times it seemed that any excuse to hail the architect would do. Two days before Christmas, he attended the annual Virginia eggnog party at Delmonico’s, held for the “New-Yorkers, late of Dixie land,” who were “known collectively as the Southern Society.” Among the attendees—the Polks, Fishes, Olneys, Calhouns, Churches, and Potters, some of the finest old families from the South—Bruce Price’s name figured prominently. Here was a man who could gracefully maneuver between past and present, such flexibility among the greatest gifts he would bequeath his daughter.

  Named after Emily’s father, Bruce Price Post was born on February 9, 1895. Emily and Edwin’s second child entered a well-managed household, though it is unclear if it was ever a happy one. An evocative formal portrait of a slender and shapely young mother, due to her prolonged postpartum recovery thinner than she’d been before her pregnancy, shows her in a high-necked dark voile-and-satin gown, a white fringe of lace over the front, an angular navy blue hat pulled close on her head. A depressed, almost sad expression grazing her hooded eyes guaranteed that spectators in real life would keep their distance. In contrast, an insouciant Edwin was appreciating his legroom these days. A well-thumbed snapshot divulges a handsome young buck lying in a hammock on the Posts’ Tuxedo Park porch, legs splayed open as he sleeps. His riding boots are still on, as if he can’t totally relax in this rarefied environment.

  CHAPTER 19

  AS THE CENTURY WOUND DOWN, THE PROMISE OF CHANGE INEVITABLY implied by a fin de siècle dovetailed neatly with late Gilded Age ennui, a merger that would further loosen Victorian holds on the fairer sex. The right to participate fully in the laws of the nation was important to most upper-class women. “We have got the new woman in everything except the counting of her vote at the ballot box,” Susan B. Anthony said in 1895. “And that’s coming.” Outspoken feminists were not the only ones marching: society women were often at their sides or, if at home, sponsoring teas for suffrage.

  A strong contingent, nonetheless, did not support the efforts to place the softer sex in the public’s eyes, including Juliet Morgan, who disapproved of her younger sister Anne’s public works. Two contrasting visions clashed as the decade waned. Josephine, for instance, fettered by insecurity over her anthracite heritage, still felt the need to prove she was genteel. A strong, independent woman in charge of the family’s finances, she was nonetheless contemptuous of forward ladies who took public credit for their accomplishments. She agreed with the etiquette spokeswoman of her generation, the Post family friend Mrs. John (Mary) Sherwood, who had recently declared, “Society is going to the everlasting bow-wows.” It was bad enough that the bicycle was threatening the city’s morals. Even worse were the appalling, aggressive, noisy socialites such as Mrs. Belmont, Mrs. Fish, and Mrs. Vanderbilt—the very kind of women who gave society a bad name.

  As Anne Morgan had proved, some society women were willing to be pioneers, in spite of the ridicule they had to suffer. More women of all ranks joined the feminist cause daily, even if they failed to name it thus. Increasingly liberal ideas toward gender coincided with reconceived notions of racial differences. On June 15, 1895, New York’s governor signed civil rights legislation, the Maltby Act, into law. The next day, three “Negro gentlemen” set out to test their liberation by visiting three restaurants. They were refused seating each time. Finally, at Delmonico’s—though with scenes of nervousness and disapproval—they were politely served, the momentous event documented by excited reporters. From comments Emily made ten years later, she would have disapproved of the discomfort the scene created, and would undoubtedly have glossed over the real issue of skin color.

  COMFORTABLE WITH THE STATE of her family finances and proud of her quick adjustment to motherhood, Emily turned her attention to moving back home. Edwin’s investments were paying off, and so the Post family left Staten Island for Manhattan, where, with help from Emily’s in-laws, they bought a handsome row house at 217 West Seventy-ninth Street.

  The Posts’ financial assistance, predictably, came with obligations. In lieu of spending much time in Tuxedo or traveling abroad during the unseasonably hot weather, Emily had to consign most of her vacation to Babylon, an enclave of old families who, as she saw it, were obsessed with the water. But the children could go swimming there so easily, as well as accompany their father on the Macy, and Emily reluctantly admitted that the South Bay Post family residence made sense just now, especially since it allowed her children to escape the dangerous heat wave reaching almost to Tuxedo as it blanketed Manhattan. During the nine days that the temperature rose above ninety degrees, 420 people died in the city. Hundreds of dead horses were left to rot on the streets, dying faster than they could be collected. Because of the weather, the Posts stayed in Babylon until the end of the summer.

  Finally, sequestered back at Tuxedo Park for the fall season, Emily felt her relief short-lived: Edwin was working even longer hours than he had last spring. To make matters worse, he explained that such exertion earned him the right to use his rare leisure hours taking the Macy out on the already chilly bay—this season without his children. According to one of his typically effusive log entries, when a man stepped aboard the Macy, “all his cares in the world vanished.” Though Emily failed to acknowledge the Macy in her otherwise meticulous records, the rest of the Post family practically revered the fifty-foot-long sloop. Considered luxurious for its day, it was furnished with one coal stove in the galley, a second coal stove for winter, and a toilet (or head, according to the proper nomenclature of the sea). Emily could have been put to good use on the boat: if ever a sport called for her skill at inventory, this was it, at least the way the Post men treated their weekend voyages. Long lists of every species of duck they bagged fill the ship’s log, complete with Edwin’s talented, playful caricatures of all mates on board.

  At least Emily was not expected to serve duck dinners all season. Her infrequent social appearances throughout the winter, coupled with vague references Ned later made, suggest that she probably had both a hysterectomy and a gallbladder removal before the y
ear was over. The Roosevelt Hospital doctors were amazed at her eagerness to learn everything, from understanding medical procedures to the way prescriptions were compounded. Her boundless, intelligent curiosity earned their respect, and after her recovery she was invited into the operating theater to sit with the medical students. In gratitude for the first-rate care, the ex-patient subsequently established a weekly hospital visit, a routine lasting for several years: as a volunteer, she read mail to and wrote letters for patients, sometimes even directing her driver to deliver the correspondence to the invalids’ friends and family.

  By early March the following year, fully healed, the young matron found herself tending to corporeal matters again, this time as part of the tight inner social circle at Tuxedo Park. James Powell Kernochan, a constant presence at Tuxedo (he was married to Catharine Lorillard, Pierre’s daughter), had been rushing down Fifth Avenue to the Waldorf for a meeting of what was still New York’s most exclusive social organization, the Patriarchs. (Though steadily diminished in numbers over the years, the Patriarchs lumbered on, a vestige of the past.) Kernochan, crossing the street without looking, was knocked down and killed by a carriage driven by the banker George F. Baker’s daughter, a friend of Emily’s. Tuxedo was in an uproar: Baker and Kernochan were both among its premier residents. The tragedy hastened the Patriarchs’ collapse, with only eleven of the fifty members attending the next month’s meeting. Those present voted to disband the formerly august club.

  After caring for her bereaved friends, Emily announced that she needed a vacation, a trip to Europe. She, Edwin, and their sons (toddler Bruce was already one and a half ) took the Teutonic across the Atlantic. The boys’ beloved French nanny, Melanie, carted the children to her family’s farm in Normandy. Emily meant for this trip to revivify the romance of her husband’s courtship; she wanted Edwin to see her again as the girl he had desired so badly the night of her debut. She was sure that if she worked hard enough, she could rekindle his interest. As they visited mutual friends and relatives in England, France, Germany, and the grand Austro-Hungarian Empire, she would further impress him by teaching him about great European art and architecture, repeating the lessons her tutor Bruce Price had taught her. She meant to win her husband’s heart all over again or perhaps, she reluctantly allowed, even for the first time.