Front Page Affair (11 page)

Chapter Seventeen

“What do you think?” An hour and a half later, Kitty told Amanda what she had learned.

Amanda examined her reflection in the mirror and wrinkled her nose. “Too feminine.” She returned the swatch of Liberty's fabric to the Altman's salesgirl. Then she said to Kitty, “How can Hunter's death have anything to do with a horse being put down?”

“I know.”

“You're confused and clutching at straws.” They strolled toward a bank of elevators.

Kitty hadn't told her friend about her trip to the Tombs. Amanda had been shocked enough that she drove up to the country club by herself. “You'll get a reputation,” she had warned.

“Where to, miss?” The elevator operator held open the door.

“World bazaar,” Kitty replied. At Altman's department store, she was on home turf. She knew the giant emporium, which occupied an entire city block, like the back of her hand. The trick was in understanding the logic to how the store displayed its merchandise: impulse purchases, like cosmetics, gloves, notions, small wares, and also men's apparel, were placed on the street level; ladies' ready-to-wear, millinery, lingerie, mourning, and other specialty items occupied the middle floors; the topmost levels sold items that warranted a special trip, like home goods or the world bazaar; and groceries and discounted wares were buried in the basement.

“I'm glad we're here.” Amanda linked her arm through Kitty's as they stepped out into a pavilion of colorful stalls. “And I'm glad Mama said I could join you.”

“I am too.” Kitty had wanted to run her thoughts by someone, and besides, she had to buy at least a couple of items, or else her father would never believe that she had spent her entire day shopping.

• • •

Kitty returned home by three as promised. She planned to bathe and then study for a couple of hours before the concert. The telephone rang as soon as Kitty put down her parcels.

Grace picked up the line. “It's for you, Miss Kitty,” she said after a moment.

Kitty pressed the instrument against her ear.

“Miss Weeks?” It was Mrs. Basshor's secretary. “I must speak to you. This is urgent.”

“How did you find my number, Mr. Hotchkiss?”

“I asked the operator. You're the only Weeks on the west side of Manhattan, so I thought it must be you.”

Kitty checked her watch. “I don't have much time, Mr. Hotchkiss.”

“Please, Miss Weeks.”

She could sense the anxiety in his voice. “Go ahead.”

“Did you talk to Mrs. Cole?”

“I did, and she told me that she went to the powder room for a few moments during the fireworks.”

“I see. And you didn't happen to say anything about me? That it was I who told you that she went missing?”

“No, I did not.” Time was ticking away. Kitty wished the secretary would stop beating about the bush.

“I think she found out somehow.” He sounded distressed. “She suggested as much when I saw her at Mr. Cole's funeral. I accompanied Mrs. Basshor to Connecticut.”

“Well, I can assure you that I never said anything.”

“I appreciate it, Miss Weeks.”

Kitty heard Mrs. Basshor calling in the background. “Hotchkiss,” she trilled in an insistent tone. “Hotchkiss.”

“I'm finished,” Hotchkiss whispered. “Finished.”

“I don't understand, Mr. Hotchkiss. Did Mrs. Basshor find out that you came to see me? Will you lose your job?”

“It's much worse than that.” The line went dead.

The secretary's woes weren't her problem, Kitty told herself as she hurried back to her rooms. She asked Grace to bring in a cup of tea and raced through chapter 2, “Her Responsibilities.”

“The girl must be a link in the chain of life… A woman's appeal…is supposed to be an emotional appeal. Let us accept the fact and glory in it. Let us train our girl's quick instincts and emotional reaction to be the biggest and best force in the community…”

Kitty scribbled notes furiously. There was much to discuss here.

“The eighteenth century brought to the world a deeper and better understanding of the rights of man; the nineteenth century has carried the message on; but it remains for the twentieth century to develop a new interpretation of the
duties
”—Kitty paid special attention to the phrase—“
rather than the rights of woman
.”

She began the third chapter, “Her Recreation,” in which Miss Morgan described “developing the limited, class-conscious, or group-conscious girl into the socially conscious woman” and discussed the work of the National Vacation Committee, one of the branches of the Woman's Department of the National Civic Federation, in meeting the recreational needs of self-supporting women and girls. Kitty was halfway through the passage detailing how a fund had been created to help city girls rest from the stresses and strains of their everyday life when Grace knocked on the door.

“Mr. Weeks wants to know when you will be ready, Miss Kitty.”

Kitty left her pencil in the book to mark her page. She would have liked to finish the section today. She washed her face, did her hair, and changed into a pearl-gray dress with lace around the neck and at the cuffs. Then she joined her father for a light supper before Rao drove them to the concert.

• • •

Carnegie Hall thronged with New York's finest. In a recent bit of busywork for Miss Busby, Kitty had counted the number of families who provided foreign addresses to the Summer Social Register, and compared the figure to the same time last year. In 1914, nine hundred families had left for Europe by May; this year, only two hundred had gone away by the beginning of June, and by the looks of it, the rest were here this evening.

On her way up to her seat, Kitty caught a glimpse of Mrs. Basshor in conversation with her friends, Poppy Clements with a man Kitty assumed was her husband, and other faces that looked familiar but she couldn't name—she must have seen them in the papers.

Kitty and Mr. Weeks took their places; she unfolded her mother-of-pearl opera glasses and scanned the crowd. Unlike her father, Kitty didn't care too much for classical performances and would much rather spend the concert watching people.

She spotted Amanda in a box diagonally opposite. Amanda wore a pretty sea-foam-blue gown, Mrs. Vanderwell was dressed in dark brown with a string of pearls around her neck, and Mr. Vanderwell sat beside them staring vacantly off into space and fanning himself with a program.

Kitty watched Amanda laugh and flirt with the two young men in the row behind her. She envied and admired the expert way in which her friend seemed to deflect their comments and managed being the center of attention. Kitty found that she became tongue-tied on the rare occasions when she was introduced to an eligible bachelor. The supreme self-confidence of the New York City man unnerved her, as well as his assumption that the world revolved around Manhattan, with a few forays to Harvard or Yale, Groton or Andover. She never knew what to say, and the harder she tried, the more stilted she sounded.

The orchestra started to tune up, and the lights dimmed. Kitty put away her glasses and glanced at the program: Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, followed by Haydn's Concerto in D Major for Violoncello and Orchestra, then an intermission.

She wished she could have brought along Miss Morgan's book and read while they played, but even if the light had been sufficient, that wasn't the proper thing to do. She would have to sit through it all. She closed her eyes and dozed off. It had been a long day.

Mr. Weeks nudged her awake when the pieces ended. “Tired?” he said.

She smiled. “Who knew that shopping could be so exhausting?” She followed her father out, glad to stretch her legs.

“I say.” A business associate approached Mr. Weeks.

“I didn't expect to see you here, Schweitzer,” Julian Weeks replied and introduced the man to Kitty. “Are we settled, then?”

“Good to go, Mr. Weeks.”

Kitty felt someone jolt her arm.

“I beg your pardon.”

She found herself staring into friendly brown eyes framed by a pleasant face.

For a moment, Kitty thought she might have seen the man before, but she couldn't put her finger on the occasion.

“I hope you're all right,” he said.

It had been just the slightest of bumps. “I'm fine, thank you.”

He smiled, nodded, and moved on. Kitty wouldn't have minded prolonging their conversation, but she didn't know how, and clearly, he wasn't good at small talk either, or he had no interest in her.

She turned to watch him from the corner of her eye—he spoke to a friend, a stocky older man, then he seemed to glance her way. She instinctively avoided his gaze and pretended to be absorbed in a flyer from the previous night's show.

“What Miss Addams Learned about Peace in the War-Torn Nations—Hear It from the Eminent Emissary First-Hand!” the flyer said.

A woman behind Kitty spoke a few words in German. Kitty glanced over her shoulder. The speaker was a buxom, raven-haired beauty with sapphires cascading from her ears. When Kitty searched for him again, the personable young man had disappeared.

“
Er müsste längst da sein.
” He must be late, the woman said to her companion.

Kitty couldn't help listening in to the conversation. The woman had a piercing voice, and hearing German spoken aloud brought back a rush of nostalgia for her days in Switzerland.

“
Es ist eine lange Reise aus Washington
,” the woman's companion replied. “
Vielleicht hat Herr Doktor Albert seine Plan geändert.
”

Kitty caught her breath. Did the man just say that Herr Doctor Albert might have changed his mind because it was a long trip from Washington?

The woman asked him to check at the ticket booth downstairs.

“
Ja gerne,
” he replied.

“I'll be right back,” Kitty said to her startled father and his business associate, who were deep in conversation. She followed the German-speaking gentleman.

She kept her eyes trained on the back of his head, determined not to lose him. He wore black tails just like every other man in the place, and she hadn't seen his face.

He made his way to the central staircase; Kitty noticed the pleasant-looking young man heading downstairs as well, a few paces behind him.

“Capability!” Amanda emerged out of nowhere with a girlfriend on either arm. “I've been looking for you.”

“I'll be right back—I left something at the front door.” Kitty couldn't afford to stop, but Amanda and her friends barred the way.

“Not so fast.” Amanda smiled. “Not before I've introduced you to Miss Hibben and Miss Nicholls.”

Kitty had no choice except to curtsy.

“Miss Hibben and Miss Nicholls will be joining me at the YWCA training.” Amanda turned to her friends. “I'm trying to convince Miss Weeks to join us too.”

“Please excuse me.” The foreign gentleman had disappeared from Kitty's sights. She edged past the ladies and raced down the staircase, not caring what they or anyone else might think of her.

She reached the bottom of the stairwell, out of breath, but the foyer was empty. There was no one near the ticket booth, and even the pleasant-faced young man had vanished.

Chapter Eighteen

Sunday morning brought extras with the news: cartoons, fashions, reviews, and queries. Kitty set aside “Doings and Sayings in the Real Estate World” and “Riverside Regatta Well-Patronized” and smiled at an advertisement in Apartments and Automobiles: “The Tires That Fell Off Looked like Goodyear Tires—at First.” She browsed through the photograph pages, which featured the lavish interiors of the New Bankers Club of America at 120 Broadway that had completed its renovations to the tune of six hundred thousand dollars, an amazing sum of money.

“Where did you run off to during the intermission last night?” Mr. Weeks asked, neatly cracking the top from his soft-boiled egg.

“I lost my handkerchief.”

“Must have been a pretty important handkerchief.”

“Grace embroidered it for me.” Kitty quickly finished her cereal. “I'd better get back to work.”

“Preparing for the Morgan interview?”

“Yes.” She took the napkin from her lap and dropped it onto the table. “By the way, is it true that Mr. Morgan loaned the British government one hundred million dollars to support its war efforts?”

“His bank did. Why do you ask?”

“I'd like to understand why he supports England.”

“The family has connections there. Morgan spent years running the bank's London branch while his father dominated the American business scene.”

Kitty returned to her rooms and finished “Her Recreation” before continuing on to “Her Future,” Anne Morgan's final chapter.

Miss Morgan began feistily, observing that “the problem now facing the American girl is her utter inability to realize that her future can only be a logical development of her present.”

A few pages later, she declared that the average girl has “the tools of reading, writing, and arithmetic…placed in her hands with such blunted edges that they are of little value, and the basic qualities of accuracy, concentration, thoroughness, and ambition are conspicuous by their absence.”

Industry could only be improved when employer and employee worked side by side to reach a common end, “thus bringing about an additional financial return as well as a larger opportunity for development of the individual.”

Kitty wondered what Miss Morgan's brother would make of that proposition.

Although eight million American women had entered industry, Miss Morgan claimed that girls still believed that “woman's duty is not to work, but simply to exist until such time as she can find someone who will work for her and support her parasitic existence. The harder her struggle the more she considers marriage as an ultimate goal where she can rest from her labors.”

Too true, Kitty thought. Then again, not everyone had the freedom and courage to buck expectations and remain unmarried like Miss Morgan and her cohort.

Grace looked in. “Mr. Weeks asks if you'll join him in the study.”

“In a little while,” Kitty replied. She reached the end of the chapter and then jotted down questions based on her notes. She would review and memorize them, but first, she took a break and went to see her father.

“Are you done?” he said. “How was it?”

“Stranger than I expected.”

“In what way?”

“I agree with much of what Miss Morgan says, and then I find some of her points strange. For instance, she says that girls should have the courage to remold the circumstances in which we find ourselves, rather than seeking different problems elsewhere. And that we should have self-control and self-discipline so that we can take our place in the general scheme of the universe.”

“A little self-control and self-discipline never hurt anyone,” Julian Weeks said with a smile.

“She's forty-one and unmarried, Papa. She's traveled all over the world and does whatever she wants, and yet she advises girls to embrace the domestic feeling.”

“And that's what you object to?”

“I don't see how she can make such a strong case for domestic life when she hasn't followed that path.”

“There are some women,” he replied, choosing his words with care, “who prefer to fulfill their domestic obligations in the company of other women.”

“Do you mean the Versailles Triumvirate?”

“That's right.” It was the term the press used to refer to Miss Morgan's living arrangement in France, where she had kept home with the theatrical agent Miss Elisabeth Marbury and Miss Elsie de Wolfe, now a well-known interior decorator.

“If she can live a carefree life, why do the rest of us have to settle down and marry?”

“You don't want to marry?”

“That's not the point.”

“The point is that she has millions at her disposal in the bank, and most women don't.”

“That's not fair,” Kitty said.

“To whom?”

Kitty sprang to Anne Morgan's defense. “To her, as a matter of fact. She didn't have to write this book, and she didn't have to dedicate herself to public service.”

“You could be right.” Julian Weeks picked up his papers.

The telephone rang, and Mr. Weeks picked it up. “It's for you, Capability,” he said. “Amanda Vanderwell.”

“Really?” Mrs. Vanderwell never allowed Amanda to chat on the phone on Sundays. She thought it went against the spirit of the Sabbath.

“Is everything all right, Amanda?” Kitty said, speaking into the mouthpiece.

“You'd better sit down. You're not going to believe this.”

“What is it? Are you engaged?”

“Hardly.” Her friend's voice was dry. “Remember Hotchkiss, Mrs. Basshor's secretary?”

“Of course, I spoke to him yesterday.”

“Well, one of Mama's friends called this morning. It seems that Hotchkiss has gone and killed himself.”