The Wages of Fame Page 4

  “I wish you men would stop worrying about our nervous systems,” Caroline said. “Where did you get that silly idea? Who has the babies of this world? Just because you fight an occasional war and have more muscles doesn’t mean you have a monopoly on steady nerves.”

  “You’re probably right,” George said. “Come to think of it, I’ve never seen my mother nervous about anything. I think I’ll vote in favor of the iron horse.”

  “I didn’t realize you were already involved in the family business.”

  “Only on large matters—and my vote doesn’t carry a great deal of weight. But my grandfather and uncle feel I should get involved—since I’ll eventually be responsible for the whole works.”

  “In the meantime, are you going to study law like your friend Sladen?”

  George shook his head. “My brain doesn’t work that way. I hate arguments. I’ve been thinking of becoming a poet.”

  “Can a man make a living at that?”

  “I don’t have to make a living. I can exist quite comfortably for the rest of my life without doing any serious work. Our mills and ironworks are run by competent managers. But it seems reprehensible not to try to contribute something to Young America’s achievements.”

  Young America was the slogan of the hour. Everyone saw the country as a huge, energetic twenty-year-old. “Have you written any poetry?” Caroline asked.

  “Reams of it. But Sladen’s convinced me it’s wretched stuff. I think your cousin Jeremy agrees with him but he’s too kindhearted to tell me.”

  “I’d love to see it.”

  “Would you really? I think of you poetically all the time. In fact, the moment I saw you on the steamboat dock, some lines from Wordsworth’s ‘Phantom of Delight’ leaped into my mind.”

  Softly, with the shining Hudson River for a background, George recited:

  “A lovely Apparition, sent

  To be a moment’s ornament;

  Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair;

  Like Twilight’s, too, her dusky hair.”

  The chugging engine reached the end of its circular line. George helped Caroline off the car. “I prefer the later lines in the same poem,” she said. “Where the poet recovers his common sense and sees:

  “A Being breathing thoughtful breath

  A Traveler between life and death;

  The reason firm, the temperate will,

  Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill.”

  George smiled and trumped this subtle rebuke:

  “A perfect Woman, nobly planned,

  To warn, to comfort, and command.”

  “I’m not at all sure I need to be warned—or commanded,” Caroline said.

  George avoided an argument. In the distance a band had begun playing Viennese waltzes. He led Caroline to a dance floor laid out beneath chestnut trees glowing with the reddish gold of autumn. They glided out on the floor, in step to the sinuous music.

  “I have a confession to make—which may annoy you even more than my Wordsworth eruption,” George said. “That night, as I lay in bed hoping to dream of you, a stanza from another poem leaped into my head. I make no attempt to explain it.”

  With a half smile, George recited:

  “I saw pale kings and princes too

  They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci

  Hath thee in thrall!”

  Caroline abruptly stopped dancing and said, “I have a confession to make in return. I’ve often imagined myself as the heroine of that poem. Without an iota of remorse.”

  “I don’t understand where, or how, you’ve acquired this wonderful pride. I admire it but I don’t understand it.”

  “From loneliness, Mr. Stapleton. You can’t imagine the things a person can acquire from loneliness.”

  “But you have brothers—”

  “A person can be lonely in the most crowded house.”

  They spent the rest of the afternoon discussing the poems that Caroline had found especially consoling in her years of loneliness. George Stapleton returned to Columbia babbling apostrophes to her beauty, her intelligence, her sweet sad pride. He put John Sladen in such an atrocious mood, Jeremy Biddle feared an outbreak of violence. He hastily decreed a new rule in the contest. Henceforth they would escort Caroline in a group. That way, the two rivals could watch each other in action and make sure no sinister advantages were being taken—while he, the complaisant third, acted as umpire.

  Caroline was consulted and she readily agreed to the proposition, which was put to her as an economy measure. In the meantime, Sally Stapleton had been introducing her to a number of her friends, and they soon collected a half dozen couples who were usually ready to join them for a party. This agreeable group, which John Sladen dubbed the Golden Horde because they were all rich, became the nucleus of their social lives for the winter.

  Like all wealthy New Yorkers, as soon as the snow fell, the Golden Horde hauled their family sleighs out of their barns. Soon scarcely a weekend passed without an expedition up . Manhattan Island into the country behind teams of fast horses, followed by skating on Van Cortlandt’s pond in the Bronx or some other body of frozen water. The frères trois insisted on Caroline’s joining them in the Stapleton sleigh, sitting with George on the way out and John on the way back.

  John Sladen and Jeremy Biddle were not good skaters. The latter had a bad leg, broken in a fall from a horse when he was fourteen. Growing up a poor boy in New York’s lower wards, John had found little time to skate. He had gone to work at the age of eight or nine, running errands for tenants in his mother’s boardinghouse. As he grew, the cost of new skates was usually beyond his mother’s pinched exchequer.

  George Stapleton skated with such effortless ease, he seemed to have been born on the tricky blades. Caroline, growing up in the country with a pond on her parents’ farm, was almost as good. As a result, John and Jeremy, after wobbling around the ice for a half hour, often retreated to the fire to watch George and Caroline, Fenimore Gardiner and Sally Stapleton, and the rest of the Golden Horde zoom around the ice with the abandon of a lifetime on skates.

  “I’m beginning to dislike this en masse idea of yours, Jeremy,” John said one day in mid-December as they watched George and Caroline doing beautiful figure eights on Van Cortlandt’s pond. “It makes me doubt your neutrality in this contest. I keep coming off as second best—on skates and in conversation. Half of these simpering scions won’t even speak to me.”

  “They fear your sharp tongue and dislike your democratic politics, my friend,” Jeremy said. “If you lower your voice and moderate your opinions, you’ll be as popular as anyone.”

  “What if that offends some essential part of my soul?”

  “If you hope to practice law in New York, you’re looking at a slew of prospective clients out there.”

  “You’re beginning to disgust me, Jeremy.”

  Jeremy was more than a little upset by this remark. He tried to tell myself it was part of the difficult task of being a third. But he was still brooding a half hour later when George Stapleton led the Golden Horde in another winter ritual—a retreat to a warm tavern, where they consumed quantities of hot flip before a roaring fire.

  Someone produced a mandolin and called on George for a song. “Do you know ‘The Minstrel’s Lament’?” George asked.

  The musician struck a few chords of this familiar song and George began singing some new verses he had written for it. He gazed boldly at Caroline, who lay on one elbow before the fire, smiling at him.

  Who can resist the beauty of those eyes

  Not I. Not I.

  Who can resist those lovely arms—

  That promise happiness beyond the world’s alarms?

  Not I. Not I.

  It was mediocre poetry but George had a fine tenor voice. He went on to annotate the beauty of Caroline’s hair, lips, skin and soul. Soon the rest of the party was joining him in his chorus, murmuring, “Not 1. Not I,” to their women. John Sladen stood with his arm on the mante
lpiece, gazing gloomily down at Caroline. For a moment Jeremy felt sorry for him. But he soon discovered almost as much pity for himself—as he watched Fenimore Gardiner sighing “Not I” to Sally Stapleton. For the first time Jeremy began to doubt the value of being a third.

  FOUR

  A WEEK LATER, THE FRÈRES TROIS invited Caroline to a college Christmas party at the North American Hotel and discovered she had accepted a dinner invitation for that night—from Fenimore Gardiner! At first they imagined that nothing less than civil war had broken out in the Stapleton household on Beekman Street. George was dispatched to make a reconnaissance and returned with semigood news. His cousin Sally claimed to be “not in the least angry” about Fenimore’s sudden shift in ardor. Angelica Stapleton said she was relieved, because she thought Fenimore rhymed all too well with bore.

  Jeremy promptly invited Sally to the Christmas party and found her as agreeable as her cousin George, with the added attractions of a pert nose, winsome eyes, and an excellent figure. John Sladen paid no attention to her whatsoever, leaving Jeremy in possession of the field. He thought he was progressing nicely until Sally consumed a glass of wine. Then she confided to him her secret opinion of Caroline and John Sladen.

  “They’re made for each other,” she said. “Two of the most unscrupulous egotistic individuals I’ve ever encountered. I don’t believe they have an iota of honest sensibility in their souls.”

  “I thought you’d be denouncing Fenimore Gardiner,” Jeremy said.

  “He was simply marking time with me, waiting for something more spectacular to appear over the horizon.”

  Jeremy found it hard to fathom Sally’s wrath at John Sladen and Caroline Kemble. He decided the first half could be attributed to John’s cold-blooded decision to ignore Sally. Caroline was more of a puzzle. Having no sisters, he did not have a clue about the way women related to each other. He launched a cautious question about Caroline’s conduct.

  “She hasn’t made a single friend among the girls I’ve introduced her to,” Sally said. “Every one of them has found her the most insensitive creature they’ve ever seen. She treats me as an object of pity.”

  “Pity?” Jeremy could not believe it. Sally was hardly Caroline’s equal in beauty. But she was far from unappealing to his eyes. “Has she said anything to lead you to this opinion?”

  “She doesn’t have to. It oozes from every look, every word she speaks. She advised me on what to wear to this party! Imagine? Three months ago she didn’t have a decent dress to her name until Aunt Stapleton bought her a wardrobe. Then she returned some dresses she borrowed from me with a remark about finally having something nice to wear.”

  Jeremy was getting a first glimpse of the impact Caroline had on other women. It would take him somewhat longer to realize how deeply John Sladen had wounded Sally with his on-again off-again attentions a year ago.

  Sladen was far more rattled by Fenimore Gardiner’s sudden pursuit of Caroline. “I begin to think your beautiful cousin is a fortune hunter at heart,” he growled at Jeremy.

  Jeremy defended Caroline’s right to accept an invitation to dinner from any eligible bachelor. “It seems to me this freedom is a natural right under the tenets of democracy,” he said. He got nothing for his sarcasm but unintelligible growls and curses.

  On New Year’s Day, 1828, Caroline joined the frères trois and Sally made a fifth for a round of visiting at the homes of the Stapletons’ numerous friends. This old New York tradition, inherited from the Dutch, made the first day of the year into a saturnalia for some. But sensible people did not drink everything that was poured into their glasses at every house. Jeremy noticed John Sladen was not following this judicious policy. Jeremy had seen John drunk in the past and knew the symptoms. He became more and more morose—and argumentative.

  At the Gardiners’ home on St. Paul’s Park, a lovely green enclave surrounded by the houses of Schuylers, Hamiltons, Stuyvesants, and other old New York families, Fenimore Gardiner almost broke arms and legs shouldering through the crowd to greet Caroline the moment they came in the door.

  “And Sally darling,” he added, kissing her hand as well.

  “Tell me, Fenimore, are you related to that new novelist Jim Fenimore Cooper?” John Sladen asked.

  “His full name is James Fenimore Cooper,” Gardiner replied in his patronizing way. “I believe we’re distantly related. I happen to be a member of his Bread and Cheese Club.”

  “I’ve heard you were the model for his woodland hero, Natty Bumppo,” John said.

  “I’m flattered—but I fear I have none of the forest skills Mr. Bumppo has in such abundance,” Gardiner said. “Miss Kemble, my mother said she would like—”

  “The name Bumppo is a code, Gardiner,” John continued, his face expressionless. “Mr. Cooper is a student of phrenology, the science of head shapes. Natty Bumppo stands for a particular kind of man, with a head that leaves the brain peculiarly compressed. He’s incapable of thought.”

  “My dear sir,” Gardiner said. “You seem to be insulting me in my own parlor.”

  “I believe this house belongs to your parents, Gardiner. That’s typical of the Bumppo personality. He’s fitted only for the rude communism of the forest. I’ve investigated your law practice. It consists almost entirely of notes to pretty women.”

  “I admit a predilection in that direction,” Gardiner said. “Now, Miss Kemble, may I—”

  “Gardiner,” John said in the same cutting voice. “Isn’t it clear by now I want to fight you? You’ve trifled with the affections of Miss Stapleton, a woman I greatly admire—and you’re doing the same thing with Miss Kemble, a woman I happen to love.”

  “I must ask you to leave my house, sir!” Gardiner said. “Mr. Stapleton, Mr. Biddle, please escort your friend Sladen from these premises before I summon a constable. We have one on call on days such as these, for the very reason Mr. Sladen represents. Some with pretensions to being gentlemen cannot hold their liquor.”

  “I’m sorry to admit that Mr. Sladen has had too much to drink,” George Stapleton said. “But I fear he’s expressed sentiments that Mr. Biddle and I thoroughly share. Happy New Year to you and your estimable parents, sir.”

  George was almost as drunk as John. He turned to Caroline, who was looking somewhat dazed, and Sally, who could scarcely conceal her delight. “Ladies, I hope you’ll continue to accompany us on our holiday round?”

  “Of course,” Sally said.

  Caroline accepted Jeremy’s arm and they followed the others out the door without saying a word. But in the Stapleton coach she said several dozen.

  “Was that diatribe part of a carefully conceived plan?” she asked. “Am I to despise all three of you, or only one?”

  “There was nothing planned about it,” John said. “I’ll write him a letter of apology tomorrow.”

  Caroline’s anger mounted as the carriage lumbered through the crowded streets. “You think you own me? Is that it?” she cried, turning on George Stapleton. “Because your mother bought me a wardrobe?”

  “The voice of truth—and friendship—forced me to speak,” George said.

  “Take me back to Beekman Street. I’ve had enough of your wonderful New Year,” Caroline said.

  They obeyed her, leaving Sally Stapleton marooned until Jeremy volunteered to escort her to calls on several friends on her personal list. They had a good time together until she brought up the subject of Caroline on the way home.

  “They’re both in love with her, aren’t they,” Sally said. “George and John.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “How awful. I don’t think she’s capable of loving a man—or even a child. She loves no one but herself.”

  “I hope you’re wrong.” Jeremy simply could not believe Caroline was the supremely egotistic being that Sally saw.

  Back at Columbia, Jeremy found John Sladen and George Stapleton both drunk, facing each other with pistols in hand on opposite sides of George’s bedroom. “Stop!” J
eremy shouted.

  They ignored him and pulled the triggers. The hammers clicked on empty chambers. “We’re rehearsing the inevitable denouement of our tragicomedy,” John said. “I’ve made it clear to Stapleton here that if he persuades Caroline Kemble to marry him, I intend to challenge him. I consider it an act of friendship—giving him a fighting chance to kill me. If she becomes engaged to Fenimore Gardiner, I intend to shoot him in the street like the swine he is.”

  “I’ve made it equally clear that I’ll welcome the challenge,” George said thickly. “He’s embarrassed Caroline before half of New York. The best and only thing to do with such a piece of social vermin is remove him from the scene.”

  “You’re both talking total idiocy!” Jeremy shouted. He snatched the pistols out of their hands and locked them in a cupboard in his room. He told John to go to bed and gave similar orders to George. While they enjoyed the slumber of the ossified, Jeremy lay awake staring into the future. It looked as dark as the New Year’s night.

  In the morning he persuaded his two friends to shake hands. But he could see that the precarious truce he had arranged with his en masse socializing was shattered. John and George began pursuing Caroline with a grim persistence that left no room for third-party benevolence. Jeremy decided they could both go to hell and began pursuing Sally Stapleton.

  Two or three days a week, John conspired to meet Caroline as she walked back to Beekman Street from Miss Carter’s Female Seminary. Frequently he brought her a book he had just finished reading—such as Virginian John Taylor’s weighty tome, Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States. This was the literary eruption that had begun the revolt against conservative supremacy in America. John urged Caroline to pay particular attention to Taylor’s dissection of the nature, origin and consequences of aristocracy. “He’s the supreme champion of free institutions in America,” he said. “He proves that aristocracy leads inevitably to stifled souls, to wretched oppression, to the destruction of spiritual and finally political liberty.”