The Last Days of Night(35)
No experiments are wasted.
—THOMAS EDISON
AGNES AND FANNIE Huntington lived in a two-story brownstone at Number 4 Gramercy Park. The block lacked Fifth Avenue’s old-money hauteur, and it boasted none of Washington Square’s ancestral mansions. Yet it made up for both by way of its high-art fashionableness. This was a street of a discerning, popular class: a group of people who’d worked for a living, but whose work had paid off handsomely. All in all, the collection of artists, writers, actors, and singers that lived within just this half-mile square was arguably the most impressive in America. The writer John Bigelow and the wallpaper dealer James Pinchot lived just down the street. The railroad man Stuyvesant Fish had recently bought a four-story at the corner and had the place remodeled, at considerable expense, by the architect Stanford White. The fourth-floor ballroom of the new Fish mansion and the marble staircase that led up to it were already the stuff of society-page legend.
The Huntingtons’ was the smallest house on the block. Its eight white window frames projected a classical simplicity, while the black iron railing that led Paul up the six front steps hinted, tastefully, at just the right amount of wealth.
Paul waited for the ladies in the tea room. His new hat, purchased only the day before, hung uselessly by the front door. The brightly patterned couch on which he sat was small, so he struggled to perch his oversized body upon it in a dignified manner. He crossed and uncrossed his legs as he waited, trying to find a position that didn’t make him look like a top about to tip over.
“Perhaps you’d prefer the armchair?”
Fannie Huntington was a small spear of black silk arcing across the Oriental rug. Agnes entered quietly behind her mother, the same impenetrably polite smile on her face as the last time he’d seen her. Paul tried to stop wondering what might lie behind it.
After they were seated, Paul thanked them again for agreeing to see him so promptly. As he had mentioned in his letter of the day before, he had changed his mind. He would be delighted to take on their case, if they could forgive his initial resistance, and if they still hadn’t found a suitable attorney. In Fannie’s curious look, he could tell that they hadn’t. Paul wasn’t sure why, but did not want to ask. Perhaps what they needed most from a lawyer was total discretion. In New York, that might be the only thing women of their class couldn’t purchase with ease.
He told them that his strategy on their behalf would be a simple one. He would write to W. H. Foster, manager of the Boston Ideals, informing him that the firm Carter, Hughes & Cravath now represented Miss Huntington in all matters. Paul would mention no other specifics. His role would be to cool tempers. Surely whatever unpleasantness had passed between Miss Huntington and Mr. Foster, he would politely suggest, would be better left a memory. No one had anything to gain by digging up skeletons.
Paul would issue no warnings. Those would come later, and only if absolutely necessary. “Only an amateur begins with a threat,” he said. He attempted to muster as much authority as he could while Agnes’s gray eyes seemingly searched his face for weakness. “One appears hysterical, and has nowhere to go from there. The most powerful threats are always left unspoken, as both parties know well the stakes of whatever it is in which they are engaged.
“One very helpful thing you have on your side is that you seek only to maintain the present state of affairs. He seeks to change them. As such, no action is, for us, victory.” It was not lost on Paul that this was essentially true of his other client as well. His expertise was to be in creative delays. He felt this was reasonable. Who had ever hired an attorney in the hopes of speeding a matter along?
When Paul was finished, Fannie poured milk into her tea. “And what compensation will you require for this change of heart?”
She was no fool. Paul named a sum that was less than half the typical rate. This seemed both to satisfy Fannie’s business sense and to arouse her suspicions.
“Additionally, I would like to ask one small favor in return.”
“What sort of favor might I do for you?” said Fannie.
“Not from you, Mrs. Huntington. From your daughter. And it’s not for me. It’s for George Westinghouse.”
Agnes gave a world-weary laugh. “I’m afraid I don’t perform privately anymore,” she said. “Part of my contract with the Met.”
“Actually,” said Paul, “it’s not that….I’d…well…I’d like you to take me to a party.”
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.
—BUCKMINSTER FULLER
JUST A FEW houses down from Agnes Huntington’s sat a four-story stone mansion that had, a few months before, been purchased by the actor Edwin Booth. Booth’s plan was not to make the whole of this Gramercy palace his home, however. Fitting himself into a small apartment on the top floor, he dedicated the rest of the space to the creation of a private club. A club for artists, he’d told the society pages of The Sun and The Times. A club more fashionable than the ones that served the haughty residents of Washington Square. The Players’ Club, he called it. All the leading lights of the Broadway stage and the New York literary beau monde had been invited to join. The weekly parties, it was well reported, were spectacular.
What went conspicuously unspoken in the press reports, but was frequently discussed by the gossiping New Yorkers who read them, was that Booth had clearly opened the club as a ploy to resuscitate his family’s good name, which his brother John Wilkes had sullied rather spectacularly two decades back. His plan was to present the court of public opinion with a new topic of conversation. His club would be exclusive. The fewer people he invited, the more would yearn to be. What went on inside would be the subject of tea-table gossip every week. The Booth name, then, might become synonymous with something—anything—other than the unseemly assassination.