The Gilded Years (23 page)

“Anita! I have the most perfect idea!” said Lottie all of a sudden, spraying up ice like a hockey player. Anita looked at her with amusement. She knew that Lottie Taylor never shared her ideas while standing still.

“What is it?” she asked. She was starting to feel more confident that she could mend things with Porter. If Lottie was so sanguine about life, then why shouldn’t she be?

“Let’s go to New York!” Lottie said. “Just you and me. Or
you and me and Caroline and Belle. Mother is in and out of the city house, as it’s the season, and Father is in Tennessee for months at a time. They won’t be a bother, and John is up at school. There’s nothing terribly exciting going on here this month, as the third hall play isn’t until February. You promised when we started rooming together that you would come down to New York, and now is the right time. It will cheer you up, I just know it will. And if you do meet mother, it will prepare you for the tornado she will surely be at commencement. Do say yes. Please!”

New York. A weekend at the Taylors’ house. It was the kind of idea Frederick would have forbidden Anita to even consider, but she dismissed him from her thoughts, grabbing Lottie’s arm and letting herself be pulled across the ice.

“I would love to go,” she said. “And let’s bring Caroline and Belle, too. The Gatehouse group in New York, what a wonderful idea.”

A
nita had been to New York City twice before, both times as a guest at another Vassar student’s home, and it had left a deep impression on her. She already knew she wanted to live there one day, not just pass through as a visitor. But nothing could have prepared her for the golden New York City of Lottie Taylor.

The new year had brought even more wealth to the Taylor family, as Clarence Taylor had been recruited to work on an expansion of railroads through Tennessee and the Carolinas, now a part of the Southern Railway company. He was headquartered in Charleston, but the money he was amassing with the speed of the locomotives shooting across the hills was being sent straight up to New York to Lottie’s mother. A woman obsessed with appearances, and particularly the appearance of her palatial Fifth Avenue residence, Mina Taylor was just as quickly taking the wealth and turning it into rooms full of paintings, sculptures, custom-made furniture, and other fin-de-siècle luxuries. If she wasn’t already a fixture of the
New York Times
’ society columns for her dinners or connections, she was well aware that her latest acquisitions were always good for a few inches. Her home also gave her an occupation in the absence of her
husband and children: as patron and friend of some of the best artists, architects, and interior designers in the country.

The Taylors’ home—fit for a European royal or the American equivalent, a magnate with humble Pittsburgh origins—occupied half a New York City block. Anita’s whole house would have fit inside Mr. Taylor’s bedroom, a matchbox dropped inside a railway station. But she had resolved not to fret about such things. Since their little group decided to make the trip down, she had read descriptions of Lottie’s home in past issues of the
Times
archived in Vassar’s library, and she felt fully prepared to keep her composure. Caroline had seen more of the world than most people would in their lifetimes, while Belle had grown up amid moneyed ease in Fredonia, New York. They will be impressed, Anita thought, but they certainly won’t appear rattled, and I won’t, either.

After a two-hour train ride down the east side of the Hudson and a short trot along the busy city streets, their hansoms pulled through the towering iron carriage gates in front of the Renaissance-inspired Taylor house on Fifth Avenue. When the horses were still, several maids rushed out to help the girls with their luggage. Though they would be staying just three nights, Anita, Belle, and Caroline had packed enough for a weeklong trip, anxious about being able to dress correctly. At school, modest, simple dress was encouraged, so Anita’s homemade wardrobe had never caused many problems, but on outings away from campus it did. Anita lacked suitable clothes for even the most casual occasion spent in New York society, but Lottie had taken to dressing her like a paper doll, so in the end she was the best supplied of the three.

The enormous house, which the three guests tried their best not to gawk at, had been designed by the much-in-vogue
architect Richard Morris Hunt. It boasted four square chimneys and a Florentine exterior, though it had a French Renaissance–style roof. Mixing architectural styles may have been frowned upon in Paris or London, but it was au courant in New York as the turn of the century loomed. And while Lottie often referred to her family’s Fifth Avenue home as a cottage, the house was just over seventeen thousand square feet in size.

“I have never in all my years entered a home this way,” said Caroline as the driver helped her down from the hansom and she stepped onto the granite-paved driveway. “It’s so regal, it might just ruin me for life.”

“It’s almost as much fun as tumbling through a window,” said Lottie. Anita knew that Lottie far preferred slipping inside the windows of Main after a night lying on the roof than coming into her own home through the front door, but now she couldn’t imagine why.

The girls walked into the dramatic hall where the Taylors’ guests were greeted, a two-story atrium with Tuscan columns of forest-green Connemara marble imported from Ireland. On the towering walls hung four paintings on canvas by New York’s most fashionable decorator and painter, James McNeill Whistler. The furnishings were handmade in the style of Louis XIV, and on the farthest wall from the entry door hung Mina Taylor’s two prized Gobelin tapestries, purchased three years before in Paris. Even with the room’s finery surrounding them, Anita, Caroline, and Belle first craned their necks and looked up. Above them, turning the gray light of day into a stream of greens and yellows, an expanse of intricate stained glass was bolted into the high ceiling. Anita bit her lip to keep her jaw from dropping in wonder.

“Who is home, Mr. Eaton?” Lottie asked the butler, who
had greeted her with practiced respect. A woman in a servant’s uniform ran up behind him and collected the girls’ coats, hats, and gloves, moving without a word toward the drawing room.

“No one, I’m afraid,” he responded, though the house was clearly filled with servants. “Did you not notify your mother of your arrival, Miss Taylor?”

“I did not. I wanted it to be a surprise,” she said, leading her friends through the massive room.

“And that it will be,” Mr. Eaton said, nodding to another servant to remove what was left of the girls’ luggage. “I’m afraid the flowers are a day old,” he added, motioning to a large arrangement of crisp white roses and purple angelonia on the hall’s entrance table. “They’re to be changed in the next hour. And if you had alerted us you were arriving, we would have sent the carriage to meet you at the station. Your mother would be appalled if she saw you stepping out of a hansom from Grand Central.”

“She would have fainted,” said Lottie. “There has never been a woman more worried about appearances than my dear mother. Luckily she has me to appall her around the clock.”

While Belle and Caroline peeked around corners, looking into the drawing room with its panels of sculptured relief, gilt, marble-topped tables, and Belgian tapestry-covered chairs, Anita stood back and watched Lottie. An expert observer, Anita had acquired much-needed layers of confidence over the years by quietly studying women who knew how to command a room.

“You may bring those to the third floor,” Lottie called out to the maid who had taken their coats, gloves, and hats. “We will be staying in the east chamber and the park room. And we may want to use the plunge bath this afternoon. Please see that it is heated properly.”

“
Everything in this house is always heated properly,” said Mr. Eaton. “Have you been away so long that you forgot your mother’s ways?” He smiled at them only with his eyes, his mouth straight as a pin.

“I must have blocked it all out on purpose,” Lottie said. Lottie had told them on the train down that to help the house run properly, her father employed three parlor maids, a linen maid, a scrubbing maid, a separate laundress, four footmen, a porter, and two chefs along with a butler to oversee them all.

The group watched as the butler withdrew, and when they were alone in the drawing room Caroline cried out, “This house!” Anita looked at her with relief, pleased that Caroline had shown her feelings and that she had managed to hold back.

“It’s beautiful,” said Belle. “It must be the most magnificent house in New York.”

“It’s not,” said Lottie, pointing to a window.

“Is that the Vanderbilt mansion in the distance?” asked Caroline, following her gaze.

“Two blocks down on the opposite side,” said Lottie. “It’s hard to miss, with those extravagant gates and the stench wafting over from the stable. Even their thirty-seven servants can’t seem to control that.”

The four girls moved to the windowed alcove to look at Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s house more closely. It had been a frequent topic in the papers in 1893 when the favored grandson of the Commodore had destroyed his large town house to make room for the block-long, ninety-thousand-square-foot residence.

“They have it all there,” said Lottie. “A five-story entrance hall, a two-story ballroom, a fireplace by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a mosaic by La Farge, a Moorish smoking
room, and one hundred and twenty-seven other rooms besides. It’s the biggest house in New York City and the second biggest in the country after George Washington Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate in Carolina.
That
place is just too much. It’s downright Brobdingnagian.” She stood shoulder-to-shoulder with her friends and surveyed what they could see of the monumental house. “If this one ever burns down, my mother, a long match, and her envy will be to blame. Sometimes I think her thoughts alone could cause it to carbonize.”

“Have you been inside?” asked Anita, squinting to catch a glimpse through the far-off upstairs windows of the house.

“Only once,” Lottie admitted. “But I haven’t forgotten a thing.”

The house they were standing in hadn’t been built until 1886, and Lottie had spent her childhood in a less lavish, though far from humble home many blocks down the avenue. Neither she nor her mother ever shared that fact with new visitors. But it was a futile precaution, since everyone who paid attention to such things had read about the construction of the Taylor mansion, of the eleven bathrooms and porcelain tubs with platinum-plated fittings, the indoor swimming pool, the art gallery and music room with a handmade Italian piano and a crystal chandelier, the high-speed elevator, the speaking tubes and bells and the ballroom with its white marble mantel and wainscoting nearly as tall as Lottie was. Still, the Taylors comported themselves as if they had all been born in the house and lived there among generations of family ghosts.

It was after the building of the Taylor mansion and many other impressive homes on Fifth Avenue that Cornelius Vanderbilt II had built a house so colossal that no one else could afford to outdo him.

“Come, let’s
change our dresses and then ride through the park,” said Lottie, backing away from the cold window. “There’s no use coming to New York if one doesn’t see the city. I also heard a rumor that Nettie Aldrich is in town, and she would love to hear the Vassar gossip, I’m sure.”

“Nettie DeWitt Aldrich?” asked Belle. “I’ve heard stories of her at school. Let’s do call on her.”

After they had changed out of their traveling clothes, their skirts muddy from the weather, the girls were helped into the family coach by the Taylor staff and set off through and around Central Park, as much to be seen as to see the lively city. In the summer they would have been paraded in an open carriage past a line of oglers, but as it was nearly freezing outside, they were safely enclosed as they headed to the park’s East Carriage Drive. At four o’clock they started slowly down Fifth Avenue, with Lottie naming the occupants of each house and recounting what lay behind the limestone façades, even if she hadn’t been inside herself.

Finally, Lottie directed the coachman to take them to Nettie’s family home farther up Fifth Avenue. A long twenty blocks later, the girls were all gathered in the DeWitts’ foyer on the corner of Seventy-Ninth Street and Fifth. The DeWitt residence was not nearly as large as the Taylors’, but at ten thousand square feet, it still qualified as grand. Elevating the family’s status even further was the presence in their drawing room of not one but two oils by Ferdinand Roybet, an artist also collected by Mrs. Astor.

“Misses Louise Taylor, Anita Hemmings, Belle Tiffany, and Caroline Hyde Hardin to see Mrs. Nettie Aldrich,” said Lottie to the maid who opened the door. The three others stood behind her in the foyer waiting, as Nettie was alerted of their visit. The servant returned quickly and nodded to the group to follow her. Before they had taken more than a
few steps, she paused and said something under her breath to Lottie, who promptly exclaimed, “Goodness, my mother is here! Of all the things.”

She turned and gave her friends a warning look. “Well, this was certainly not planned, but I’m afraid you will be meeting my mother momentarily, the one and only Mrs. Mina Taylor. Keep your wits about you.”

The girls murmured that it was a lovely chance coincidence and followed Lottie into the main parlor, which was half the size of the Taylors’ palatial room.

The first to jump up and greet them was Nettie, her black hair piled onto her head like a nesting animal, in line with the latest New York fashion. Her maid had even taken to collecting the stray hairs from Nettie’s brush to create a tangled doughnut of natural hair that she embedded into her employer’s mane for added volume. The finished effect was certainly dramatic.

“Lottie! Aren’t you the most wonderful surprise?” said Nettie, walking over to her friend. Lottie and all the Vassar girls still wore their hair parted in the center and arranged tightly on the crowns of their heads, a more old-fashioned look, but one favored by college women. “And Anita!” Nettie added, embracing her. When she pulled away, she greeted Belle and Caroline. “A pleasure to meet you both,” she said warmly.