Gore Vidal - Empire

Caroline had been warned that no proper young lady could ever be seen alone in Peacock Alley. But as she was there to meet a gentleman, she would not be alone for very long; and so she took pleasure in the interest that she-and her Paris Worth gown-aroused, as she proceeded from lobby to Palm Court, all eyes upon her progress. So, she decided, animals in the zoo watch their human visitors. Certainly, the notion that it might be she who was on display in the monkey house, and the fleshy ladies on their divans and the stout gentlemen in their armchairs were the human audience, she found perversely amusing; also, she noted, in their general grossness, the New York burghers were more like bears than monkeys: upright and curious, dangerous when disturbed.

Just ahead of Caroline, two by no means fleshy girls were walking, arm in arm, like sisters. Were they, she wondered, prostitutes? Worldly ladies had told her that even in the most splendid-or particularly in the most splendid-of New York’s extraordinary hotel lobbies, businesswomen patrolled. But now with the invention of the Waldorf-Astoria, it had become fashionable not only for respectable women but for grand ladies to be seen, properly escorted, in hotel lobbies and even, though this was very new, to dine in a hotel restaurant, something unknown to the previous generation. In a fit of charity, Caroline decided that her dark suspicions about the “sisters” in front of her were simply that, and that they were indeed, like herself, young ladies curious to see and be seen.

Two-thirds of the way down the Alley, John Apgar Sanford sprang to his feet; promptly, his head vanished in the fronds of the palm tree that shaded his chair. “Are you hiding from me?” asked Caroline, delighted.

“No, no.” Sanford emerged from the fronds, his thin curly hair in disarray. He shook her hand gravely; he had her father’s small mouth-were they second or third cousins?-but the rest of him was all his own, or an inheritance from ancestors not shared with Caroline. At thirty-three he lived with a chronically ill wife in Murray Hill. “I’ve made a reservation in the Palm Garden. How was your trip?”

“When not terrifying, very dull. There is no middle way on a ship. How wonderful!” The Palm Garden was a wonderful jungle of palm trees set in green Chinese cachepots. From the high ceiling crystal chandeliers were all ablaze though it was daytime. Noon on a tropical island, thought Caroline, half expecting to hear a parrot shriek; then heard what sounded like a parrot shrieking but was merely the laughter of Harry Lehr, young, fair, fat and damp; he was leaving the Palm Garden in the company of a thin elderly lady. “You’re expected,” he said, clasping Caroline’s hand. “At five sharp.” He looked at Sanford appraisingly. “Alone,” he added; and was gone.

“That… cad!” Sanford had turned the color of Murray Hill brick. Caroline took his arm protectively; and together they followed the headwaiter to a table set in front of a gold-velvet banquette for two, on which they could sit side by side, close enough to be able to speak in low voices, far enough apart to emphasize the innocent decency of their relationship in the eyes of that considerable portion of the great world, having tea in the Palm Garden. Much more opulent than Paris, Caroline noted; but also more coarse. “Why is Mr. Lehr a cad?”

“Well… I mean, look at him.”

“I have looked at him. I have also listened to him. He is a bit on the fantastic side. But very amusing. He’s always been kind to me. I can’t think why. I’m not yet fifty. Or rich.”

“What- where are you expected at five? Of course, it’s none of my business.” Sanford suddenly stammered. “I’m sorry. But I thought you were just off the boat. I mean, he seemed to be expecting you.”

“I am just off the boat; and I haven’t seen Mr. Lehr since spring; and, yes, he always seems to be expecting you, and so I shall have tea with him. That’s all.”

“At Mrs. Fish’s?”

“No. At Mrs. Astor’s. When he mentions no name like that it is always Mrs. Astor. The Mystic Rose, as they call her. But why a rose? Why mystic?”

“Ward McAllister called her that. I don’t know why. He was court chamberlain before this-this little brother of the rich, as they call his sort.” Tea was brought them, followed by liveried waiters, bearing cakes.

“Well, he makes me laugh, which is probably his function in life. I suppose he makes Mrs. Astor laugh, too. Hard to imagine.”

“I shouldn’t think she’d feel like laughing in here.” Sanford placed a thick envelope on the table between them. “This used to be Mrs. Astor’s ballroom, the one that McAllister said could only hold four hundred people, the only people who mattered socially, he said. Another little brother.”

“I thought the hotel was all new?”

“The hotel’s new. But half of it’s built on the site of Mrs. Astor’s old house, and half on the site of her nephew’s house.”

“Ah, of course! I remember. They hate each other. Oh, the raging passions of the Astors! I can’t get enough of them. They are like the Plantagenets. Everything on such a monstrous scale, like this hotel.”

Caroline knew all about the rivalry between nephew and aunt. The nephew, William Waldorf Astor, was oldest son of oldest son; this meant that he was the Astor and that his wife was the Mrs. Astor. But upon his father’s death, his aunt had declared herself the Mrs. Astor, causing her niece much pain, not to mention confusion, as invitations were constantly being sent to wrong addresses. William Waldorf then declared war on the Mystic Rose. He tore down his house, which was next to hers, and put up a hotel. Unable to bear the presence of a hotel’s shadow on her garden, the Mystic Rose persuaded her husband to tear down their house and put up a second hotel. Though uncle and nephew were also at war, they were sufficiently practical to see the advantage of joining the two hotels into a single unique monument to the fierce passions of their turbulent family, and so they styled the result, somewhat uneasily, the Waldorf-Astoria.

“Now everyone can sit in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom.”

“Everyone certainly does.” Sanford was sour; but then his mother was an Apgar, a self-regarding old family whose brown-stone rectitude and gentility were forever grimly opposed to the white marble vulgarity of the buccaneer rich whose palaces now extended not only up Fifth Avenue to Central Park but also to the west, where, not long ago, one enterprising millionaire had discovered, to everyone’s astonishment, the Hudson River; and so the Riverside Drive was now a place where the new rich could build their palaces, and live in a rural, riparian splendor, like so many upstate Livingstons with the marvelous amenity of the nearby Columbus Avenue elevated train, which could get them to any part of Manhattan in a matter of minutes. “The world is very much changed,” said Sanford, now all Apgar.

“I wouldn’t know.” Caroline was enjoying everything about the Waldorf-Astoria. “The only world I know is now.”

“You are young.”

“That is the problem, isn’t it?” Caroline indicated the envelope, flanked by a chocolate torte and a blond, pale, damp cake, reminiscent of Harry Lehr’s face.

Sanford nodded; opened the envelope; withdrew some documents. “I have gone on appeal. There are the documents in question. They are… well, I’ll leave them with you. Read them carefully. I’ve also obliged Mr. Houghteling to produce the Colonel’s earlier wills, for comparison. In every will that I know of, each of you was to inherit his half of the estate at the age of twenty-one. But in the last will…”

“Father appears to have written a seven instead of a one.” At first Caroline had thought it some sort of joke; then she realized that the Colonel must have, by mistake, written a French one. Now, for the first time, she was able to examine a copy of the will. “Surely if I’m not to inherit until I am twenty-seven, then the same condition-that is, the same confused cypher-must apply to Blaise, who is only twenty-two.”