A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth Read Online Free PDF

Mother's friends? That they were unattractive, unappealing? Certainly not. He only meant that, to them, the game of sex was over. They had attained what they had wanted: in most cases, a husband, often successful and frequently faithful, and children, largely by this time adult and usually good enough citizens. To describe these ladies: they inclined to be large and strongly built, rarely stout, well dressed but not too stylish, accustomed to deference from those who served them, and with good formal manners that placed their interlocutor on an exact par with themselves, if not sometimes a trifle lower.
    They left all business matters entirely to their husbands, assuming that everything that went on "downtown" was as strictly honorable as in their own pure lives. They ran their sometimes large households with commendable efficiency and sat conscientiously on meritorious charitable boards. They had a good deal of free time in which to visit each other, to read, to go to the theatre, to hear music, to play cards, to visit museums. Most of them were more cultivated and interesting than their husbands, but they all were aware that their lot in life was easier than that of most of their fellow men and were not inclined to rock boats. They would have been angered to be called snobs.
    They wore little jewelry but what they did was very good. Mrs. Clarance Pell, whose husband was the longtime president of the Racquet Club, wore a jangling bracelet of small gold racquets, each representing one of his championships. My mother used to say it was the envy of every social climber in New York.

    The lady I have called Rosette, an excellent housekeeper, was twice widowed and used to boast: "Well, at least I have made two men very comfortable." I doubt you would have heard such a remark from Mother's other friends. To them the husband was merged in the family; the children got equal attention. Mother, who had a way of carrying domestic concerns to extremes, went so far as to assert, hearing of F.D.R.'s polio: "Eleanor must have been glad it wasn't one of the children." But that was just Mother.
    None of Mother's friends had jobs, but there were some like Mrs. Alsop, who were very active in politics, or Ruth Draper, who triumphed on the stage. I liked how one of them defined the words "My rod and staff": "My rod is my church and my staff is my money." Frances Perkins, the first woman to hold a post in a President's cabinet, was known to some of them and admired by all. But she was not an intimate, though she belonged to a tightly knit ladies' discussion group of which Mother was a leading member. F.D.R. at a cabinet meeting was known to have thrown this smiling question to his secretary of labor: "What will they think of
that,
Frances, in the Junior Fortnightly?"

    Suppose a lady of this order did not find a husband or did not choose to have one. Well, if she happened to be an heiress, it didn't matter. A Frenchman visiting New York was supposed to have observed that it couldn't harbor a really worldly society because it contained so many rich old maids who in Paris would have been married by force. And indeed, he had quite a list: the Misses Anne Morgan, Ruth Twombly, Julia Berwind, Anne Jennings, Helen Frick, Edith and Maud Wetmore. Less richly endowed but still independent virgins might lead social lives not dissimilar to that of their married friends, depending for affection on loving nephews and nieces, but if really poor they were doomed to act as companions to ancient and long-surviving parents. Indeed, this latter was often considered their sacred duty, even where funds existed for a paid companion.
    Suppose the lonely female, even if well to do, was—hush, hush—a lesbian? The term was little used; a preferable one was "horsey." Such matters were better locked in the closet. The particular one in our lives I shall call Aunt Daisy, though she was not related, but a dear friend of the family. She was a large, imposing woman,