1876 (18 page)

Certainly I shall keep to myself the fact that by accident last summer, I met Senator Conkling at Mrs. Sprague’s apartment. He was standing in the front doorway just
before
teatime, saying good-bye to her. She made the presentations in such a hurried, flustered way that had I not recognized from newspaper cartoons the tall, rather stout Adonis of Republican politics, I might have thought her caller some sort of overdressed professional man, like the Empress’s friend and dentist Dr. Evans.

“It is a fascinating game.” Sanford puffed on his cigar. “I think about it sometimes for myself.”

“Politics?”

“Yes. If you have the money and the feel of the thing, why, it’s as simple as can be. It would take me maybe two hundred thousand dollars to buy a seat in the Senate. Conkling paid a bit more for his seat but then New York’s more prosperous than Rhode Island.”

“But why would you want it? After all, don’t men go to the Senate in order to acquire the sort of money that you already have?” ,

Sanford laughed. “Good point! I suppose it’s to see if you can get the top prize. Become the president. After all, that’s worth having for itself, isn’t it?”

“I can’t think why. As far as I can tell, our presidents have almost no function, except perhaps in wartime.”

“But they are
there
!
Don’t you see? Now, when you worry about corruption—”

“Mr. Sanford, I promise you that I have not lost a moment’s sleep at the thought of a bribe given or received.”

“Sir, I know your writing. I know who your friends are. You’re shocked by all this. But how else can you run a country where half the people don’t even speak English and everybody’s in a scramble to get his share of the pie? I’ll tell you something,” he told me. “Personally, I’m like you. I don’t like anything about this so-called democracy. I’d like a well-run country with honest people in the government, the way they have in Prussia ...”

“A tyranny?”

“If that’s the only way to clean things up, make things ran right, well, I’d accept that.”

“With yourself as the tyrant, naturally.”

“Oh, I’d accept
that
in a flash!” He laughed to show that he was not joking.

“Mrs. Sprague has true ‘tong.’ ” My other ear was duly filled with the sound of McAllister’s voice; he had heard a magical name and responded in character. “Whenever I hear New Yorkers say there is no society at Washington, I say, why, you have never been to Mrs. Sprague’s for New Year’s Day nor seen her enter a room, any room, with her hair done in braids like a coronet, and those marvellous jewels. Gone now, I should think. They are flat broke, don’t you know? the Spragues.”

This last item was added as if it were a charming detail of the poor woman’s regalia.

McAllister then gave me a recipe for terrapin, “taught me by a Maryland darkey,” involving a good deal of cream and butter. He also asked me if I had noticed how Americans of the same class say “sir” to one another whereas in England only servants say “sir.”

“But we do say ‘sir’ in England. To royalty.” I was benign.

Tears came to McAllister’s eyes. “Some years ago, just as I was being presented to the Prince of Wales, the very instant he heard the ‘Mac’ part of my name,
he turned away
.”

I consoled McAllister as best I could until the evening ended at the mystical and roseate hour of midnight.

In the garnet drawing room Mrs. Astor stood, dark and commanding. As her guests filed past, they touched her hand as though it were an idol’s, and certain to bring good luck.

I received the touch; so did Emma. “We hope to see a great deal of you while you are in New York.” The sentence was, as it were, not said but passed.

McAllister immediately proposed, “The next Patriarchs’ Ball?”

“Yes.” So Queen Elizabeth might have raised from obscurity to the splendour of an earldom a common border Cecil, or Louis XIV with a nod of his wig bade a courtier to join him in the country at Marly and rich preferment.

The Sanfords said good-bye to us in the foyer. I find her entirely sympathetic but cannot warm to him. If he would only stick with a single performance, perhaps I could bear him more easily. But the constant shifts from plain-spoken man of the people, all hideously self-made, to thoughtful Darwinist and social historian is rather more than I can take.

After we got home I said to Emma, “I hadn’t known you joined the Sanfords for lunch.”

“I should have told you.” Emma was contrite. I was already in my dressing gown before the fire, getting ready to make these notes. Emma was still in her evening gown, still Winterhalter though her face looked grey and tired, and I noted with the eye, I fear, of a realistic writer rather than with the loving gaze of an adoring father that, when tired, the lines on either side of her lower lip become deep and threaten one day to forge dewlaps like her mother’s, like mine.

“At the last moment I couldn’t face another excursion into Apgar-land and so I telegraphed the Sanfords ‘yes’ having already said ‘no.’ ”

“Was it amusing?”

“The Belmonts are easy. Not at all American.” Then Emma spoke analytically of tonight’s guests. I waited for her to get round to Sanford but she did not.

“I like Mrs. Sanford.” I made my move.

“So do I.” Emma seemed enthusiastic. The old coals in the grate suddenly fell in upon themselves; a brief rush of flame and Emma’s face was rosy, young again. “But I don’t think she must have an easy time of it.”

“With
him
?”

Emma nodded, staring at the flames; slowly she removed paste rings. “I have the impression he overpowers her. Forces her to do things she would rather not.”

“Like go to Mrs. Astor’s?”

“Worse, I should think.”

“Worse? How?” I was intrigued, but Emma was not in the mood to play our usual game of penetrating the disguises people wear. “A philanderer?” was the most obvious attempt I could make to compel her attention, but Emma only smiled.

“I shouldn’t think he had that sort of energy.”

“What an astonishing thing to say! That is an energy few men lack. And Sanford’s not yet forty.”

“I don’t know, Papa.” Emma shifted to French. “I just said the first thing that came into my head. Perhaps he has a hundred mistresses. I wish him joy.”

Emma kissed my cheek, I kissed her hand: our old ritual.

“Did he apologize for the flowers he sent you?”

“They were never mentioned. The vulgar have their own kind of tact, Papa.” Then she was gone.

I cannot think why I allow Sanford to disturb me. I suppose it is because he has made it perfectly clear that he means to seduce Emma. Thank God, he has no chance if her mind is made up elsewhere, as I believe it to be in Apgar-land. Also, I suspect that Emma is not by nature amorous. She is too cool, too cautious, too possessed of a sense of the ridiculous ever to let go. I could imagine her turning from a drunken mad husband like Sprague to a man of power like Conkling, but I cannot imagine that she would ever allow herself to become involved with someone like William Sanford, a married man without glory or charm, only money. That would be out of character. Completely out of character. Yet why am I so alarmed? I do not really believe in heredity as much as I do in the ordinary circumstances that shape a life, but there is no doubt that Emma and I have in our veins most curious blood. I am the illegitimate son of Aaron Burr, and though I do not much resemble in appearance or character that elusive, marvellous, amoral man, I do sometimes see, staring at me from beneath Emma’s beautiful level brows, the eyes of Aaron Burr, absolutely intense and entirely resolute—the eyes of a world conqueror. At such moments, she is as strange and magical to me as he was in life, as he is in memory.

THE GREAT DAY BEGAN with a snowstorm and a telegram from Governor Tilden, asking me to come see him at five o’clock, in order to talk before the dinner party.

Emma and I studied the message carefully and decided that she was not included at this meeting. “I’ll come on alone for dinner.” There seemed no alternative, since there is no one she could go with except the Bigelows, and they would simply walk around the corner from their own house in Gramercy Park.

At exactly five o’clock I arrived in Gramercy Park to find the air filled with a fine snow that the north wind with a most un-American fairness was trying to deposit on everything equally. The gas lamps had already been lit (because the Governor was in residence?) and their small pale halos hung in the middle air like so many purgatorial angels.

A servant showed me into an upstairs study, very much the sort of bookish retreat one would expect a wealthy lawyer with literary tastes to assemble. Seated in front of—that New York rarity—a wood fire (how sick I am of the smell of burning anthracite) was the imposing figure of a man in his fifties with short-cut dark hair and a somewhat belligerent face. As I entered the room he was entirely concentrated on reading a sheaf of papers.

When my presence was detected, the man sprang to his feet; took my hand in his and slowly crushed it. “I’m Comptroller Green, Mr. Schuyler. The Governor’s resting just now. Will you take tea? Something stronger?”

Something stronger was brought me. Mr. Green took nothing. “We’re still at work on the Governor’s speech to the legislature next week.” He struck the sheaf of papers with his fist. “This ought to set them on their ear!”

I did not ask whose ear would be set on, but assumed that he had the Republicans in mind. I drank Scotch whisky; spoke blandly, “Certainly the whole country will be listening to the Governor.”

“Just what I tell that staff of his! Oh, they are ...” But Green decided he did not know me well enough to give me his view of the Governor’s staff.

“You are the comptroller of—New York City?” A foolish sort of question (though I made it sound a statement), for such men think the whole world knows them.

Green nodded gloomily. “No doubt for my sins in an earlier life. Last job in the world I wanted. But the Governor insisted. So I am heir to the Tweed debacle.”

My magpie brain retains from the thousands of lines of newspaper print I feed it each day all sorts of odd useful facts. “Andrew H. Green” appeared in bold black letters behind my eyelids. The
Sun
.
No, the
Herald
, I proceeded to read aloud from the newspaper in my head, “And of course we all hope that from the comptrollership you, Mr. Green, will become a reforming mayor.” I let the editorial extrude smoothly, as though I had never for a day left Manhattan Island and its affairs.

Green flushed agreeably. “Well, there’s been talk, but I don’t think an honest comptroller of the city’s finances is apt to be very popular with the bosses in the wards.”

“Then let us hope you move on with the Governor to Washington.”

“There is a lot of hoping but nowhere near enough organizing.”

“Our friend Bigelow—”

“Does what he can.” A slight edge to the voice, and I felt at home—at court again. It is all like a dim provincial version of the Tuileries, where grown men and women used to spend their days and nights plotting to arrange, as if by accident, five minutes alone with the Emperor on the stairs, in a garden, anywhere that the imperial quarry might for an instant be snared and used in order to rise in the world.

Green has been a law partner and intimate of the Governor for, he told me, thirty-three years. “A long time, isn’t it?” Green shook his head at the idea of a century’s third. “I was just a boy of twenty-one when I went into his law office. I thought then that he was the most brilliant man I’d ever met. I still do. He—is like an older brother to me.”

I was pleasantly surprised that the somewhat chilly—even forbidding—Tilden could instill such ardour in an associate. Tilden is plainly a more complicated man than I first thought those pleasant days in Geneva when I simply saw the precise lawyer, the ruthless politician, the monomaniac—a word I have several times heard people use when referring to him. Certainly, once he has got hold of a subject, he does not easily let it go until he’s shaken all the life from it, like the terrier I saw chew to bits rat after rat the other afternoon in a so-called pit just back of City Hall.

One of the doors into the study was opened by a tall young man, carrying a small valise. “The Governor’s resting fine, Mr. Green.”

“Thank you, Ben. You know your way out.”

“Yes, sir.” The young man nodded politely in my direction, acknowledging the presence of a gentleman whilst emphasizing his own position so much further down the long American social ladder.

When the lad was gone, Green identified him as “a very good giver of massages. You see, I can’t get the Governor to exercise properly. He likes to ride, but nothing else, and who can ride in this weather? So naturally his blood just accumulates in the veins, which is very unhealthy. I tell him that he should be massaged every day, but I know for a fact that when he’s at Albany he never stirs from his desk. Not that he isn’t in the very best of health for a man of his age,” Green suddenly added, realizing that the condition of a presidential candidate’s body is far more important than the contents, if any, of his mind.

“Andy!” The familiar, rather feeble voice sounded from the next room. Green excused himself and joined his chief. I looked about the room. Family portraits, law books, a statuary group of a soldier fallen in the late war, head cradled in the lap of a grieving friend. I found myself wondering, idly, where the Governor kept his collection of erotic literature, which I learned about, quite by chance, from a bookseller in London; apparently the Governor has been secretly collecting lurid works for many years. Thus bachelors amuse themselves.

Green re-entered the room so silently that I started guiltily, as if I had been caught at some indiscretion by examining even in a desultory way the life-like figures created by the celebrated John Rogers. “I gave that to the Governor. If you like, you can go in. He’s resting, of course ...”

A single lamp on a table beside the bed illuminated what at first appeared to be an emaciated corpse—at least the lower part looked wasted away, for Tilden’s legs as outlined beneath the single sheet that covered him are as thin as a crane’s. The rest of him is more in the usual scale. Although a year younger than I, he seems to me to be very much my senior.