Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (10 page)

 
          
I
nodded.
“In a plaid frock and embroidered pantalettes?”

 
          
“Yes,
something of the sort. Well, when Louisa and her parents died, I suppose the
pictures went to old Miss Raycie. At any rate, at some time or other—and it
must have been longer ago than you or I can remember—the old lady inherited
them with the Tenth Street house; and when
she
died, three or four years ago, her relations found she’d never even been
upstairs to look at them.”

 
          
“Well—?”

 
          
“Well,
she died intestate, and Netta Kent—Netta Cosby—turned out to be the next of
kin. There wasn’t much to be got out of the estate (or so they thought) and, as
the Cosby’s are always hard up, the house in Tenth Street had to be sold, and
the pictures were very nearly sent off to the auction room with all the rest of
the stuff. But nobody supposed they would bring anything, and the auctioneer said
that if you tried to sell pictures with carpets and bedding and kitchen
furniture it always depreciated the whole thing; and so, as the Cosbys had some
bare walls to cover, they sent for the whole lot—there were about thirty—and
decided to have them cleaned and hang them up. ‘After all,’ Netta said, ‘as
well as I can make out through the cobwebs, some of them look like rather jolly
copies of early Italian things.’ But as she was short of cash she decided to
clean them at home instead of sending them to an expert; and one day, while she
was operating on this very one before you, with her sleeves rolled up, the man
called, who always
does
call on such
occasions; the man who knows. In the given case, it was a quiet fellow
connected with the Louvre, who’d brought her a letter from Paris, and whom
she’d invited to one of her stupid dinners. He was announced, and she thought
it would be a joke to let him see what she was doing; she has pretty arms, you
may remember. So he was asked into the dining-room, where he found her with a
pail of hot water and soap-suds, and
this
laid out on the table; and the first thing he did was to grab her pretty arm so
tight that it was black and blue, while he shouted out: ‘God in heaven! Not
hot
water!’”

 
          
My
friend leaned back with a sigh of mingled resentment and satisfaction, and we
sat silently looking up at the lovely “Adoration” above the mantelpiece.

 
          
“That’s
how I got it a little cheaper—most of the old varnish was gone for good. But
luckily for her it was the first picture she had attacked; and as for the
others—you must see them, that’s all I can say…Wait; I’ve got the catalogue
somewhere about…”

 
          
He
began to rummage for it, and I asked, remembering how nearly I had married
Netta Kent: “Do you mean to say she didn’t keep a single one of them?”

 
          
“Oh,
yes—in the shape of pearls and Rolls–Royces. And you’ve seen their new house in
Fifth Avenue?” He ended with a grin of irony: “The best joke is that Jim was
just thinking of divorcing her when the pictures were discovered.”

 
          
“Poor
little Louisa!” I sighed.

 
          
  

 
          
The ’Fifties.

 
          
In
the old New York of the ’fifties a few families ruled, in simplicity and
affluence. Of these were the Ralstons.

 
          
The
sturdy English and the rubicund and heavier Dutch had mingled to produce a prosperous,
prudent and yet lavish society. To “do things handsomely” had always been a
fundamental principle in this cautious world, built up on the fortunes of
bankers, India merchants, ship-builders and ship-chandlers. Those well-fed
slow-moving people, who seemed irritable and dyspeptic to European eyes only
because the caprices of the climate had stripped them of superfluous flesh, and
strung their nerves a little tighter, lived in a genteel monotony of which the
surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underground.
Sensitive souls in those days were like muted key-boards, on which Fate played
without a sound.

 
          
In
this compact society, built of solidly welded blocks, one of the largest areas
was filled by the Ralstons and their ramifications. The Ralstons were of
middle-class English stock. They had not come to the Colonies to die for a
creed but to live for a bank-account. The result had been beyond their hopes,
and their religion was tinged by their success. An edulcorated Church of
England which, under the conciliatory name of the “Episcopal Church of the
United States of America,” left out the coarser allusions in the Marriage
Service, slid over the comminatory passages in the Athanasian Creed, and
thought it more respectful to say “Our Father who” than “which” in the Lord’s
Prayer, was exactly suited to the spirit of compromise whereon the Ralstons had
built themselves up. There was in all the tribe the same instinctive recoil
from new religions as from unaccounted-for people. Institutional to the core,
they represented the conservative element that holds new societies together as
seaplants bind the seashore.

 
          
Compared
with the Ralstons, even such traditionalists as the Lovells, the Halseys or the
Vandergraves appeared careless, indifferent to money, almost reckless in their
impulses and indecisions. Old John Frederick Ralston, the stout founder of the
race, had perceived the difference, and emphasized it to his son, Frederick
John, in whom he had scented a faint leaning toward the untried and
unprofitable.

 
          
“You
let the Lannings and the Dagonets and the Spenders take risks and fly kites.
It’s the county-family blood in ’em: we’ve nothing to do with that. Look how
they’re petering out already—the men, I mean. Let your boys marry their girls,
if you like (they’re wholesome and handsome); though I’d sooner see my
grandsons take a Lovell or a Vandergrave, or any of our own kind. But don’t let
your sons go mooning around after their young fellows, horse-racing, and
running down south to those d——d
Springs
, and gambling
at New Orleans, and all the rest of it. That’s how you’ll build up the family,
and keep the weather out. The way we’ve always done it.”

 
          
Frederick
John listened, obeyed, married a Halsey, and passively followed in his father’s
steps. He belonged to the cautious generation of
New York
gentleman who revered
Hamilton
and served
Jefferson
, who longed to lay out
New York
like
Washington
, and who laid it out instead like a
gridiron, lest they should be thought “undemocratic” by people they secretly
looked down upon. Shopkeepers to the marrow, they put in their windows the
wares there was most demand for, keeping their private opinions for the
back-shop, where through lack of use, they gradually lost substance and colour.

 
          
The
fourth generation of Ralstons had nothing left in the way of convictions save
an acute sense of honour in private and business matters; on the life of the
community and the state they took their daily views from the newspapers, and
the newspapers they already despised. The Ralstons had done little to shape the
destiny of their country, except to finance the Cause when it had become safe
to do so. They were related to many of the great men who had built the
Republic; but no Ralston had so far committed himself as to be great. As old
John Frederick said, it was safer to be satisfied with three per cent: they
regarded heroism as a form of gambling. Yet by merely being so numerous and so
similar they had come to have a weight in the community. People said: “The
Ralstons” when they wished to invoke a precedent. This attribution of authority
had gradually convinced the third generation of its collective importance, and
the fourth, to which Delia Ralston’s husband belonged, had the ease and
simplicity of a ruling class.

 
          
Within
the limits of their universal caution, the Ralstons fulfilled their obligations
as rich and respected citizens. They figured on the boards of all the
old-established charities, gave handsomely to thriving institutions, had the
best cooks in
New York
, and when they travelled abroad ordered statuary of the American
sculptors in
Rome
whose reputation was already established. The first Ralston who had
brought home a statue had been regarded as a wild fellow; but when it became
known that the sculptor had executed several orders for the British aristocracy
it was felt in the family that this too was a three per cent investment.

 
          
Two
marriages with the Dutch Vandergraves had consolidated these qualities of
thrift and handsome living, and the carefully built-up Ralston character was
now so congenital that Delia Ralston sometimes asked herself whether, were she
to turn her own little boy loose in a wilderness, he would not create a small
New York there, and be on all its boards of directors.

 
          
Delia
Lovell had married James Ralston at twenty. The marriage, which had taken place
in the month of September, 1840, had been solemnized, as was then the custom,
in the drawing-room of the bride’s country home, at what is now the corner of
Avenue
A
and
Ninety-first
Street
, overlooking the Sound. Thence her husband
had driven her (in Grandmamma Lovell’s canary-coloured coach with a fringed
hammer-cloth) through spreading suburbs and untidy elm-shaded streets to one of
the new houses in Gramercy Park, which the pioneers of the younger set were
just beginning to affect; and there, at five-and-twenty, she was established,
the mother of two children, the possessor of a generous allowance of pin-money,
and, by common consent, one of the handsomest and most popular “young matrons”
(as they were called) of her day.

 
          
She
was thinking placidly and gratefully of these things as she sat one afternoon
in her handsome bedroom in
Gramercy
Park
. She was too near to the primitive Ralstons
to have as clear a view of them, as for instance, the son in question might one
day command: she lived under them as unthinkingly as one lives under the laws
of one’s country. Yet that tremor of the muted key-board, that secret
questioning which sometimes beat in her like wings, would now and then so
divide her from them that for a fleeting moment she could survey them in their
relation to other things. The moment was always fleeting; she dropped back from
it quickly, breathless and a little pale, to her children, her house-keeping,
her new dresses and her kindly Jim.

 
          
She
thought of him today with a smile of tenderness, remembering how he had told
her to spare no expense on her new bonnet. Though she was twenty-five, and
twice a mother, her image was still surprisingly fresh. The plumpness then
thought seemly in a young wife stretched the grey silk across her bosom, and
caused her heavy gold watch-chain—after it left the anchorage of the brooch of
St. Peter’s in mosaic that fastened her low-cut Cluny collar—to dangle
perilously in the void above a tiny waist buckled into a velvet waist-band. But
the shoulders above sloped youthfully under her
Cashmere
scarf, and every movement was as quick as a
girl’s.

 
          
Mrs.
Jim Ralston approvingly examined the rosy-cheeked oval set in the blonde
ruffles of the bonnet on which, in compliance with her husband’s instructions,
she had spared no expense. It was a cabriolet of white velvet tied with wide
satin ribbons and plumed with a crystal-spangled marabout—a wedding bonnet
ordered for the marriage of her cousin, Charlotte Lovell, which was to take
place that week at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie.
Charlotte
was making a match exactly like Delia’s
own: marrying a Ralston, of the
Waverly Place
branch, than which nothing could be safer,
sounder or more—well, usual. Delia did not know why the word had occurred to
her, for it could hardly be postulated, even of the young women of her own
narrow clan, that they “usually” married Ralstons; but the soundness, safeness,
suitability of the arrangement, did make it typical of the kind of alliance
which a nice girl in the nicest set would serenely and blushingly forecast for
herself.

 
          
Yes—and
afterward?

 
          
Well—what?
And what did this new question mean? Afterward: why, of course, there was the
startled puzzled surrender to the incomprehensible exigencies of the young man
to whom one had at most yielded a rosy cheek in return for an engagement ring;
there was the large double-bed; the terror of seeing him shaving calmly the
next morning, in his shirt-sleeves, through the dressing-room door; the
evasions, insinuations, resigned smiles and Bible texts of one’s Mamma; the
reminder of the phrase “to obey” in the glittering blur of the Marriage
Service; a week or a month of flushed distress, confusion, embarrassed
pleasure; then the growth of habit, the insidious lulling of the
matter-of-course, the dreamless double slumbers in the big white bed, the early
morning discussions and consultations through that dressing-room door which had
once seemed open into a fiery pit scorching the brow of innocence.

 
          
And
then, the babies; the babies who were supposed to “make up for everything,” and
didn’t—though they were such darlings, and one had no definite notion as to
what it was that one had missed, and that they were to make up for.

 
          
Yes:
Charlotte
’s fate would be just like hers. Joe Ralston
was so like his second cousin Jim (Delia’s James), that Delia could see no
reason why life in the squat brick house in Waverly Place should not exactly
resemble life in the tall brown-stone house in Gramercy Park. Only
Charlotte
’s bedroom would certainly not be as pretty
as hers.

 
          
She
glanced complacently at the French wall-paper that reproduced a watered silk,
with a “valanced” border, and tassels between the loops. The mahogany bedstead,
covered with a white embroidered counterpane, was symmetrically reflected in
the mirror of a wardrobe which matched it. Coloured lithographs of the “Four
Seasons” by Leopold Robert surmounted groups of family daguerreotypes in
deeply-recessed gilt frames. The ormolu clock represented a shepherdess sitting
on a fallen trunk, a basket of flowers at her feet. A shepherd, stealing up,
surprised her with a kiss, while her little dog barked at him from a clump of
roses. One knew the profession of the lovers by their crooks and the shape of
their hats. This frivolous time-piece had been a wedding-gift from Delia’s
aunt, Mrs. Manson Mingott, a dashing widow who lived in
Paris
and was received at the Tuileries. It had
been entrusted by Mrs. Mingott to young Clement Spender, who had come back from
Italy
for a short holiday just after Delia’s
marriage; the marriage which might never have been, if Clem Spender could have
supported a wife, or if he had consented to give up painting and
Rome
for
New York
and the law. The young man (who looked,
already, so odd and foreign and sarcastic) had laughingly assured the bride
that her aunt’s gift was “the newest thing in the Palais Royal”; and the
family, who admired Mrs. Manson Mingott’s taste though they had disapproved of
her “foreignness,” had criticized Delia’s putting the clock in her bedroom
instead of displaying it on the drawing-room mantel. But she liked, when she
woke in the morning, to see the bold shepherd stealing his kiss.