Voyage Out: The Complete Series

Chapter 3

CHAPTER 3

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CHARLOTTE:

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LUCIA AND I WERE THE products of a privileged New York upbringing. If we had not been made acquainted with what this meant practically from our cradles, certainly we were conscious of it from the time we received our first admonishments that such and such was not the done thing for a proper young lady. It almost seems just as long ago that we were both, in one way or another, in revolt against our birthrights.

Lucia’s father, Victor Cabot Bernhardt, was in banking. He was a ruthless but genial man with a fine address and an impressive set of whiskers, who enjoyed the universal admiration, fear, power and envy conferred by an exemplary lineage, affluence and a formidable reputation unimpeded by post-war social unrest, labor struggles, or the Wall Street bombing of 1920. His Boston Brahmin bred wife Elizabeth, the fair complexioned, faultlessly elegant daughter of the St. Clairs of Boston, added much of the social luster to this reputation. The Bernhardts lived a rarefied existence, spreading their time between their C. P. H. Gilbert designed Fifth Avenue townhouse (no relation to the Gilberts of Long Island, of whom Volker Godeffroy’s wife was a member), furnished like the rest of New York’s elite by W. & J. Sloane, and the family estate in the village of Old Westbury (neighbors to Phippses, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Du Ponts, Winthrops, and Belmonts), the New York Yacht Club, the Oak Lounge and tea gardens of the Plaza Hotel, the Stock Exchange Luncheon Club, the Knickerbocker Club, the Union Club, the Brook Club, the Metropolitan Club, the Links, the Jekyll Island Club, the Zodiac Club, the hallowed lawns of the Maidstone Golf Club and Newport Country Club, the Newport Reading Room, the Tuxedo Club, the Somerset Club of Boston, the Metropolitan Opera Club, racing at Saratoga Springs, an ocean-front house in Palm Beach, a summer cottage in Newport, the old St. Clair family manse in Stockbridge, Massachusetts (settled on Elizabeth St. Clair by a fond great uncle who read classical Greek and Latin), the Opera and the parties thrown by their Upper East Side neighbors on Millionaire’s Row and Park Avenue (and even to venture further afield, when sufficient inducement was offered, to the wrong end of Madison Avenue), and the fulcrum of the most coveted deals on Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange. Lucia was a sturdy, quiet child, intelligent without arrogance or pride or pretense, unimposing in a myriad ways. Uncharitable society matrons had remarked that she might have been a changeling, exhibiting neither her father’s charisma nor her mother’s beauty. If she had been aware of such disappointment, if she thought her parents had ever shared these views, it had not seemed to touch Lucia or sour her nature. She remained amiable, dutiful, quietly herself.

Lucia and I came to know each other through the fine web connecting Old New York. The Elyots could locate a grand duke and a baronet somewhere along their sprawling family tree (considerably diminished by untimely illness, pioneering rashness, and wars) and were very distantly related by marriage to a branch of the Boston St. Clairs. My mother, along with her sister Meredith, had been to school with Elizabeth St. Clair and they had remained friends after their respective marriages. (Meredith Addison Elyot had set aside the idea of marriage following her brief engagement to a handsome young man from an old New Haven family, introduced to her at a garden party at the Piping Rock Club, who had turned out to be a scoundrel and had been forced—at gunpoint by the girl’s father, it was said—to marry a girl with no fortune or connections to speak of, leaving behind, a year later, a young widow with a baby son and debts all over Providence, Rhode Island. The ordeal and ensuing scandal revealed to the elder Miss Elyot inner reserves to add to her usual good humor, compassion, and sense of duty, and she sent a portion of her untouched dowry to the widow, grateful for the moral lesson and her own deliverance.) My father, a self-made man, originally an engineer by training, had counted amongst his acquaintance and business associates the magnates and industrialists who regularly featured in the pages of the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and the membership of the exclusive private members’ clubs. He was considered a lucky man to have won my mother’s hand, celebrating the ultimate union, in the eyes of New York, of wealth and social cachet following the grand tradition set by the Vanderbilts and Whitneys during the Gilded Age. Lucia and I were dispatched to the same school; our families mingled socially; we were taught to do all the things everyone else who counted in New York did, including displaying proper manners and comportment, spending summers together in Newport, Bar Harbor, Old Westbury, Oyster Bay, and the Hamptons (except those summers we stayed at Ithaca, the St. Clair family estate in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, for the excitement of the annual fireworks show), and thinking highly of ourselves above the rest of society.

Following the death of my father during the war in Europe (joining all of the male St. Clairs and my mother who, years ago, had passed giving birth to me), poor Aunt Merry was saddled with the role of being my legal guardian and joint custodian of the trust set up by my parents, which she shared with Uncle Nicholas, my father’s younger brother, who had been deprived of his chance at the glories of war by a pair of weak lungs which had never been quite the same after recovering from a bout of childhood tuberculosis, and Diego de Almadén, my late father’s best friend and fellow officer during the war. Any defects in my character, any failings in conduct, have been conveniently attributed to my liberal upbringing, sadly lacking the usual repressive parental constraints and civilizing influences, and my patrilineal antecedents who had not arrived on the Mayflower or Arbella. Such deficiencies, however, posed insufficient obstacle to the retention of my place in the Social Register or to my marriage prospects, for which I suspected that Aunt Merry gave daily thanks. I lived the same burnished life of grace and privilege, and when, on occasion, I misbehaved, I found that, like the other scions of Old New York and indeed of the first families of Boston, Virginia, Maryland and Old Philadelphia, I could do so with almost perfect impunity. (No one was completely immune from that favorite New York pastime of sharing the latest on dit of gossip and scandal.) I owed this virtually impervious suit of armor chiefly to the genteel dowry my mother had brought to her marriage to which my father, the moneyed intruder at the gates, had added the taint (still noted by sticklers) of parvenu lucre in the form of an immense fortune built on both sides of the Atlantic in commodities, manufacturing, property, construction, shipping, transport and railroads, amongst other investments. My youthful misconduct was not on the grand scale of heinous offenses by anyone’s reckoning (not anywhere near the scale of transgressive delinquency that fueled the hushed-up scandals which debilitated numerous family fortunes) but, unlike Lucia, I was a little slow to follow the dictates of what was or was not proper, and—poor Aunt Merry, forgive me—sometimes I thought I even enjoyed the notoriety of it. It seemed sometimes that it bore the tantalizing taste of freedom.

I had been surprised that Lucia was heading on the Grand Tour instead of surrendering and obeying a curt and direct parental edict to a advantageous society marriage of her father’s choosing. Her life had been planned beautifully, calibrated in an exquisitely orderly array, to her parents’ liking if not to her own. The years of her regimented young life and the experiences she had come through had, I thought, wrought a vein of independent spirit in her. I had, perhaps naively, expected Lucia to be resistant, impatient, ready to bolt even, not calmly willing to meet her future, to carry on with it dutifully, but I suppose all arguments paled against meeting with the intransigent will of parental collusion.

“Poor Lucia. Stuck with me again.”

“I suppose we shall have to grin and bear it.”

How sheltered we were in our stratosphere. Beyond the fine damask and rich red velvet swags, below the ornate decorative scrolls and gilt, outside the princely drawing rooms and mansion gates, underfoot, along the verge, in the undergrowth, the city rumbled and clattered and screeched with excavations, railways, thundering internal combustion engines, ash collectors, radio broadcasts, whistling policemen. Of course we knew about the outside world—we were sheltered, not ignorant. How exciting, scary and glorious it all seemed—the thrilling new automobiles, electricity, moving pictures, radio, jazz, speakeasies, suffrage and liberty, rising hemlines and silk stockings and racy cosmetics and cigarettes and cocktail parties and gin, the hard lives of the farmers and immigrants, the struggles of the new generation of working women, Charles Lindbergh’s first solo non-stop transatlantic flight, the indefatigable might of American industry, steam, railroads, construction, the Empire State Building, on 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, entering the “Race into the Sky” between the Chrysler Building and 40 Wall Street, competing for the distinction of the world’s tallest building, and to the lure of the gold rush on the Exchange, rising higher and higher each day to match New York’s soaring skyline; Astor, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Rockefeller, and their fellow gods sitting up on Olympus while their wives competed with each other over who had the grandest palaces, the most lavish gowns, jewels and dinners, the most elaborate entertainments, the most sought after parties...

From the comfortable armchairs of the women-only Colony Club at 564 Park Avenue, founded by Mrs. Jefferson Borden Harriman (daughter of shipping magnate Francis William Jones Hurst and wife of the New York financier), Mrs. John Jacob Astor (widow of John Jacob Astor IV), socialite Miss Anne Tracy Morgan (daughter of the late financier John Pierpont Morgan), and Miss Jessica Garretson Finch (the suffragist and educator), we read all about this curious polyphony in the newspapers and periodicals, and it was almost as if we stood at the club’s windows and saw this world sweeping by. It was not the view we saw taking afternoon tea in the sedate Palm Court at the Plaza; oh no, that gave on to a very different view indeed. Listening to the radio, glimpsing the world outside on the pavements, talking with Lucia after reading the business papers and journals and trying to make sense of it all, trying to reconcile a myriad of cross-currents—the unremitting optimism and exuberance and easy prosperity of this age (blessed by the patron saints of the Coolidge and Hoover Administrations), the speculative fever infecting the whole country, the Exchange which kept rising, up and up and up, defying gravity, the astronomical earnings per share ratios, poverty, discontent, and doom which were, well, somewhere out there—was an exercise which gave a completely different and altogether confusing view again no matter how many attempts we made.

One thing we knew for certain: the world was growing up and changing around us, expanding...and passing us by. We were on the threshold of our lives (our families assured us) but we were just two girls brought up in the sheltered nursery of Old New York with only a bit of wealth and decorative social prestige to recommend us. What place had we in this world? What use were we to it? What sort of lives were we preparing for?

“Look at the silver lining,” said Lucia.

“And what silver lining is that?”

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” replied Lucia. “Think of everyone else who has not the advantage—the luxury—of an education, a loving aunt, good health, and the heirdom to the Montrose empire.”

I did not tell Lucia that silver linings were not entirely dependable creatures.