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Authors: Wallace Stegner
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all one great window on the water side, and from its bluff overlooked the whole Upper Bay with its waterbug activity of tugs and ferries and barges. Governors Island, as I imagine that last day of December, would have floated like dirty ice out in the bay; the Jersey shore would have fumed with slow smokes.
The Doppler Effect is very apparent in my imagining of that afternoon. I hear it as it was now and as it is then. Nemesis in a wheelchair, I could roll into that party and astonish and appall the company with the things I know. The future is inexorable for all of them; for some it is set like a trap.
Thanks to the prominence of the people Augusta had introduced Susan to, I can find some of them in the histories of art and others in memoirs and reminiscences. The view from Columbia Street I have seen, but much obstructed and changed. As she saw it a hundred years ago there were no grimy warehouses thrusting up from the waterfront, there was no Brooklyn Bridge, no Statue of Liberty, no New York skyline. Somewhere I have read that in 1870 the tallest building in Manhattan was ten stories. But I am like the Connecticut Yankee who has foreknowledge of an eclipse. I know that in a few years the Roeblings, who will build Brooklyn Bridge, will buy the Walter house. I could depress young Dickie Drake, Augusta’s moody and poetic brother, with the story of the Statue of Liberty, for on its base will one day be inscribed a poem by a girl named Emma Lazarus, with whom Dickie will fall in love after he gets over Susan Burling, but whom he will not marry. She is Jewish. Augusta will write Grandmother all about it, and Grandmother, though she likes Emma Lazarus, will agree with the family’s judgment that such a marriage would not do.
So many things I know. Young Abbott Thayer, whom I have looked up in the art histories, was at that party, monopolizing a love seat in the second parlor with Katy Bloede, one of Grandmother’s Cooper friends. The Thayer painting I have here on the desk, the one called Young Woman from the Metropolitan collection, is undoubtedly Katy Bloede, the “typical tall, handsome, almost sexless female for which he was famous.” She was not quite sexless—she had serious “female troubles”—and Thayer will marry her shortly and paint her a hundred times. As Grandmother said, “Her face was his fortune.” When she dies young, Thayer will marry Emma Beach, currently playing the piano for a Portland Fancy in the other room.
Among those dancing was George Haviland, altogether the most sophisticated and charming man Susan Burling had ever seen. She admired his courtesy and his grace, though he was said to drink. She worshipped his beautiful young wife. Ah, there, George Haviland. In a few years you will blow your brains out, a bankrupt.
Or Elwood Walter, Jr., several times my grandmother’s escort in those years, a man she said gave her her first lessons in flirtation. A volatile, talkative, ugly, attractive man “capable of any sacrifice that did not last too long,” he will have a fate less predictable than Haviland’s. He will die in the sandals and brown robe of a Franciscan monk.
Or Henry Ward Beecher, the great man of that district, pastor of Plymouth Church, late thunderer of ferocious war sermons. He was sitting with an attentive group around him in the parlor off the dining room, and the boom of his voice filled the house when Emma Beach stopped playing and the dancers paused. “Born conspicuous,” Grandmother said of him, “the most naturally self-conscious man in the world.” His only mode of conversation was the monologue, and his version of the monologue was declamation. Many Friends disliked him for his bloody sermons. Women on Columbia Street told each other privately that he had been seen letting himself out of the Beach house, whose library he used as a sanctuary, at late and compromising hours. Grandmother disliked him for his sermons, thought the stories of his indiscretions mere
The Doppler Effect is very apparent in my imagining of that afternoon. I hear it as it was now and as it is then. Nemesis in a wheelchair, I could roll into that party and astonish and appall the company with the things I know. The future is inexorable for all of them; for some it is set like a trap.
Thanks to the prominence of the people Augusta had introduced Susan to, I can find some of them in the histories of art and others in memoirs and reminiscences. The view from Columbia Street I have seen, but much obstructed and changed. As she saw it a hundred years ago there were no grimy warehouses thrusting up from the waterfront, there was no Brooklyn Bridge, no Statue of Liberty, no New York skyline. Somewhere I have read that in 1870 the tallest building in Manhattan was ten stories. But I am like the Connecticut Yankee who has foreknowledge of an eclipse. I know that in a few years the Roeblings, who will build Brooklyn Bridge, will buy the Walter house. I could depress young Dickie Drake, Augusta’s moody and poetic brother, with the story of the Statue of Liberty, for on its base will one day be inscribed a poem by a girl named Emma Lazarus, with whom Dickie will fall in love after he gets over Susan Burling, but whom he will not marry. She is Jewish. Augusta will write Grandmother all about it, and Grandmother, though she likes Emma Lazarus, will agree with the family’s judgment that such a marriage would not do.
So many things I know. Young Abbott Thayer, whom I have looked up in the art histories, was at that party, monopolizing a love seat in the second parlor with Katy Bloede, one of Grandmother’s Cooper friends. The Thayer painting I have here on the desk, the one called Young Woman from the Metropolitan collection, is undoubtedly Katy Bloede, the “typical tall, handsome, almost sexless female for which he was famous.” She was not quite sexless—she had serious “female troubles”—and Thayer will marry her shortly and paint her a hundred times. As Grandmother said, “Her face was his fortune.” When she dies young, Thayer will marry Emma Beach, currently playing the piano for a Portland Fancy in the other room.
Among those dancing was George Haviland, altogether the most sophisticated and charming man Susan Burling had ever seen. She admired his courtesy and his grace, though he was said to drink. She worshipped his beautiful young wife. Ah, there, George Haviland. In a few years you will blow your brains out, a bankrupt.
Or Elwood Walter, Jr., several times my grandmother’s escort in those years, a man she said gave her her first lessons in flirtation. A volatile, talkative, ugly, attractive man “capable of any sacrifice that did not last too long,” he will have a fate less predictable than Haviland’s. He will die in the sandals and brown robe of a Franciscan monk.
Or Henry Ward Beecher, the great man of that district, pastor of Plymouth Church, late thunderer of ferocious war sermons. He was sitting with an attentive group around him in the parlor off the dining room, and the boom of his voice filled the house when Emma Beach stopped playing and the dancers paused. “Born conspicuous,” Grandmother said of him, “the most naturally self-conscious man in the world.” His only mode of conversation was the monologue, and his version of the monologue was declamation. Many Friends disliked him for his bloody sermons. Women on Columbia Street told each other privately that he had been seen letting himself out of the Beach house, whose library he used as a sanctuary, at late and compromising hours. Grandmother disliked him for his sermons, thought the stories of his indiscretions mere
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