Voyage Out: The Complete Series

Chapter 2-1

CHAPTER 2

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LUCIA:

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THE GRAND TOUR—A SEASON in Europe—had not been my idea.

It was not that I had ample reasons to be so satisfied with my life that the prospect of a Grand Tour holiday would prove to be an abhorrent punishment. It was not that I was so parochially-minded as to be disdainful of travel, or so well-traveled at that, as to be suffering from ennui at the mere thought of further motion. It was simply...unexpected.

What I had been expecting was a quiet summer to approach, perhaps my last, spent, as was the family custom, at Ithaca, the old St. Clair home in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, on Lake Mahkeenac, set amongst the Berkshire Mountains. The airy flirtations and frivolities of the New York marriage circuit with their weighty ramifications had wearied me and made me wistful for the vacations to Ithaca and nearby Boston, driving up the avenue, past the gatehouse and Frederick Law Olmstead gardens, and seeing the beautiful white mansion rise from the foliage of Japanese maple trees, lush green in the spring and coppery gold in the autumn. I had been looking forward to those tangerine and violet sunsets, deep magenta twilights, and rosy dawns through the festooned lace curtains of the bay windows. I had longed for the oasis calm of the greenhouses (flourishing with lilies-of-the-valley and fruits and vines grown from cuttings taken in 1870 from Hampton Court, a gift from the Boston Lymans following a visit to their country estate, The Vale, in Waltham) hidden at the end of the back lawn next to the old carriage house, for the serene evenings under the cool of the willows to the muted strains of someone practicing a musical instrument somewhere in the house, the enchantment of a viola at dusk, or contemplating the moonrise while mother’s old phonograph crooned softly about faded romances to the darkness; the Gorham Martelé silver vases filled with welcoming bouquets (which held no hidden message or deeper meaning other than to proclaim their beauty) scenting the rooms on the days of arrival; the teas and parties that asked merely for enjoyment in the present without need for thoughts of the future; the days which were purely one’s own, with no daunting social engagements or pressing calls to attend; flowers, parties, light-heartedness, coming home in the early hours of the morning from grand parties at the Berkshire Cottages in the neighboring summer resort town of Lenox and watching the ripples across the Housatonic River and Stockbridge Bowl; walks at eventide along the sand dunes on deserted shores; the streets of Boston lined with old trees that in the summer made cool mottled patterns on the pavement and glittered after the rain like a sky hung with starry diamonds; waltzing in the moonlit sunken garden with Nate before he had changed; long afternoons spent in the Beaux-Arts architectural beauty of the courtyard and rooms and Guastavino vaulted halls and arcaded galleries of the Boston Public Library designed, like Symphony Hall on Massachusetts Avenue, by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead, and White (seeking out the literary nutrients that I would ordinarily have found, if I had been in New York, in the library at Montrose) and meandering through the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts and the rooms at the nearby Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum filled with the works of Titian, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael, Botticelli, Manet, Degas, Matisse, Whistler, and Sargent; evenings at the theater and opera and the Union Oyster House on Union Street; sailing on Stockbridge Bowl and Boston Symphony Orchestra radio broadcast concerts and picnics on the banks of the Charles with pockets filled to the brim from the “Confectioner’s Row” candy counters, swimming and cycling and reading and painting and listening to music, hours of lazy, drifting leisure. I was loath to sacrifice those pleasures for a few hectic weeks abroad, living out of steamer trunks and persuaded to show interest in useless souvenirs and unwanted suitors. I felt, when I was told of the Grand Tour, that my roots were being pulled out.

Once, Charley—a younger, less worldly, bored Charley—had pushed away the pile of books spread over the picnic rug (pickings from the latest shipment that would eventually find its way back onto the shelves of the great walnut-paneled library at Montrose) and mused: “We are told that, on account of our youth, we should want to suck the marrow out of life, but what does that really mean beyond the immediate gratification of a few pleasures—beyond merely the thrill of being naughty, and not very naughty at that—the consequences of which, by the by, may or may not blight our futures?”

I had shrugged in answer. What was there to say? The future seemed too adult, too oppressively certain, too distant a notion to bear considering just yet. That was the way I preferred it. It was easier to put these things out of one’s mind, to be an ostrich.

Charley had sighed and looked away at the waves in the lake. “I wish I knew what I wanted with my life,” she said softly, almost as if to herself.

I envied and admired Charley for still dreaming of choices, for believing in the attainability of those beautiful mirages.

Several years later, Charley had dragged me to the Colony Club, the women-only private social club in its reincarnation on Park Avenue—not for its architecture (designed by Delano & Aldrich in the Neo-Georgian style), nor for its beautifully appointed interiors (designed by Elsie de Wolfe, otherwise known as Lady Mendl), two-story ballroom, basement squash courts and swimming pool and spa that connected via an express elevator to a gymnasium on the fifth floor, nor for the social milieu of a membership filled with the wealthy elite of New York (belonging to both the Colony Club and the Equal Franchise Society made it convenient and socially acceptable for ladies to advocate for suffrage, join public rallies agitating for the vote, and then pop into the club, or the Colony afterwards on the corner of Madison Avenue and 61st Street, only a block away from the Colony Club, for luncheon in luxurious air-conditioned comfort with Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, McCormicks, Whitneys, Wideners, Astors, Morgans, and the various socialites who came from the same stratum of New York such as Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers)—but to share her awe and excitement at everything that was happening outside the windows. The Colony Club was where Charley drew out newspapers and spoke of ideas and debates and rallies, where she pointed out to me the infinitely thrilling, hopeful possibilities already germinating into the future, the whirlwind that was the changing world and times: the construction sites with billowing steam shovels and pounding pile drivers...screeching elevated trains...the cluster of electronics shops blaring music in Lower Manhattan’s “Radio Row”...the excavation of massive holes in the ground, sprouting skyscrapers...ice cream men and talkies and flashy automobiles and waves of working girls with their perky hair and slapdash fashions and easy manners and jaunty independence...the neighborhoods changing with the faces of new immigrants and social reforms...poverty and protest rallies against the robber barons...the titans who continued to dream the American dream of endless prosperity, who believed that the rising Exchange would keep rising and the world their oyster, and their wives that it was one grand party after another...

“But you know this better than I, don’t you, Lucia?” Charley’s face had lit up with such bright, exhilarated hope. “You can smell it in the fumes that choke the air, can’t you? You can taste it between the pages of the Wall Street Journal and the cheap dailies, in the numbers on the Exchange and the commercial gossip and the finances that you chew up and digest so well like the performing monkey that your father never shows off because he claims the credit for himself. You can see it, too, everywhere, can’t you?”

I did know. I did see this brave, exciting new world. But it was not for us. Not Old New York, gripping for dear life onto its traditions and affluence and power. Not for me.

It had often struck me as needlessly cruel that courtship and marriage should be wrapped up and gifted to biddable, impressionable young girls as romance and love and beautiful destiny when in reality it had always been about a mercantile transaction. For women, it had always been about survival. Alva Vanderbilt had remarried for love, becoming Alva Belmont and joining the mink brigade as an ardent suffragist, but only after she had battled Mrs. Astor and conquered the Four Hundred elite of New York, and purchased an English duke (and a loveless marriage) for her daughter Consuelo.

I would not have minded a battle if I had been, as Charley had sometimes put it, my own man. But we all knew our places, we all had a role to play in the great machinery of Old New York. If there was not order in the cosmos, there would be chaos.

Charley would not have a bar of it. She read the leaden precepts and, passionately and disrespectfully, begged to differ. Whose right was it to say who did the bending and who did the accommodating? But there was only one of Charley on one side and the rest of Old New York on the other. Not all of us could afford to declare, breathing fire: “I won’t be the pawn that knows its place, the one who always toes the line, no.” Not all of us could look Old New York defiantly in the eye and dare it to try.

Thus, destiny beckoned with a merciless gaze. My future would not be mine alone to master—I had very nearly accepted that outcome—but to meet the day where I had to go forward and court the means by which those shackles would come... It felt like a bitter winter chill had come early to Boston Common. I had been wrong to think that Ithaca could bestow a balmy respite, that I could ever be truly ready to face it.

In short, I had been less happy than a girl ought to have been about a season traveling in Europe for pleasure (before things got too excitable on the Continent), but my mother was determined I would make the most of this opportunity and be thus enriched. She noted what an exciting adventure lay ahead of me—for the culture and scenic beauties and art as much as for the social intercourse and potential marriage prospects—and insisted on giving me her prized Asscher diamond necklace, a wedding gift from my father, for the grand occasions where a young lady, in whose veins ran Bernhardt blood and who was descended from the St. Clairs of Boston, had to be appropriately adorned.

“Think of this as an extended version of the trip you have made several times over the past few years to see the Hartleys,” my mother said.

“I wasn’t on show then to be sold to the highest bidder like cattle.”

“Lucia, don’t be crude. Finding a suitable husband is incidental to this trip. Would you rather a candidate be chosen for you?”

“Is that what will happen if I come back empty-handed?”

“Darling, it is unattractive to scowl. We must face the facts. This is New York. You have what is considered a distinguished heritage. Your father... You are of marriageable age, Lucia, you cannot avoid the outcome. Whatever hopes you have had, you must be realistic and prepare for possible disappointment. Life is not always as rosy as the romantics would have you believe nor necessarily as harsh and intractable as the suffragists paint it. You must be practical and carve a life out of the limited prospects and freedoms allotted to you.”

“I understand, mother.” It was simply one more vicissitude to weather. I was not yet ready to accept it but I understood.

“It is not a criminal sentence. We have put the Nate Knowle business behind us. Come along, Lucia, no need to still be droopy about the mouth. This is starting afresh—new hunting grounds.”