Emily Post Read online

  At four A.M. each of the next two days, the hunters ate a hearty breakfast; their shooting was abbreviated on Sunday so that they could return to town. Edwin commented in the log before he left that he was “broken hearted at having to leave hunting. Adios!” Until a week before the wedding, the prospective groom spent most of his nonworking hours on board, sometimes helping the cook fix the very early breakfast in order to bag more ducks, racheting up the day’s tally toward the grand total killed that season.

  Perhaps his fiancée had already admitted that she had no interest in sailing. If so, it would have been another point in her favor, Edwin might have thought: he valued his time alone with his friends, and would have been relieved that Emily was not one to seek pleasure through the pastimes her husband held in such esteem. Instead, she preferred what to him were boring cultural events. On April 23 she participated in a celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday in another Manhattan socialite’s home. One woman read an essay she’d written about Ophelia, others recited poetry, and Emily played the banjo—all in all, a feminine soiree typical of the times. A week later, she attended a luncheon given by a widowed family friend, Mrs. Algernon Sullivan, in honor of her niece. Mr. Sullivan, a prominent lawyer, had founded the New York Southern Society. Emily was expected to be Bruce’s link to the Price family’s southern roots whenever the occasion arose, an assignment that relieved her of the more tedious wedding details, which were happily assumed by her mother.

  For the popular, busy nineteen-year-old, the months leading up to her marriage became a time of uncharacteristic introspection. Until now, she later realized, “she had always . . . taken herself and her world for granted.” Her life was so carefully and thoroughly arranged by others that “there had been little time and no encouragement” to think “about herself.” Instead, she had learned from watching her mother that “if you broke the rhythm [of life,] failed to do what the others expected of you and at the moment they expected it, you failed them. And yourself.”

  Realizing that he was about to lose his only child to irrevocable adulthood, her father had decided to have Emily’s portrait painted, choosing someone from the Prices’ own social and professional circle. Through Hop Smith, Bruce had become acquainted with the painter Rosina Emmet Sherwood, the daughter-in-law of etiquette writer Mary Sherwood, the matriarch of the well-known New York Sherwood family. Bruce and Josephine already knew Mary slightly. She had written a detailed social guide called Manners and Social Usages that had been invaluable to the family through Emily’s debut, and now would serve as her wedding’s bible.

  No amateur, Rosina Sherwood had studied with William Merritt Chase in New York and at the Académie Julian in Paris. Her reputation was soaring, in spite of her “soft” subjects of mothers and children. Rosina, or “Posie,” as her friends and family called her, painted alongside Hop Smith at Chase’s building on Tenth Street near Sixth Avenue, not far from Emily’s home. The atelier was a kind of commune, occupied by a close-knit group of student artists as well as long- established professionals. Chase was also expanding on what Hop had tried a decade earlier: along with such students as Rosina Sherwood and her sister Lydia Emmet, the professor would put the east end of Long Island on the map by choosing a location on its south fork, Shinnecock, as the site of his plein air movement, his protégés painting beside him in the healthy sea breezes off the Atlantic Ocean.

  Cousins of Henry James’s, the Emmet sisters—Rosina Emmet Sherwood, Lydia Field Emmet, and Jane Emmet de Glehn—were the Brontës of their day, though far more privileged. The three young women possessed prodigious talent, which they’d been encouraged to develop. Rosina was married and helping support her family with her portraiture. Eventually consisting of five children, the Sherwood clan would include the Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert Sherwood. Rosina was the first professional woman Emily had known, a woman who combined marriage, motherhood, and a career, living in three worlds simultaneously and finding her life quite manageable for all that. Here was someone from a good family who seemed to have everything a woman might want, in late-nineteenth-century terms: a good husband, contented children, a productive and lucrative career, her family honor and genealogy undisturbed, if not enhanced, by her work.

  Years later, while Emily Post was writing Etiquette, Rosina Sherwood’s son Robert and his writer friends, including Alexander Woollcott and Dorothy Parker, were routinely meeting at New York’s Algonquin Hotel. According to one close observer, the “Vicious Circle,” as they mockingly called themselves, “received women on a more truly equal footing than any other group in the Nineteen-Twenties.” Rosina Sherwood would raise a son who had been shaped by his mother’s nascent feminism, the seeds of which were at least planted in Emily Post as well.

  As she painted, her subject a captive audience, Rosina Sherwood suggested to Emily that she might do well to reflect upon her own life. Was a nonstop whirl of parties and vacuous entertainment really the best use of her obvious intelligence? “You are in a dream world now. But some day you are going to wake up,” she said. Her advice unsettled her subject, and the resultant portrait—a tense, unrealized young woman—made Emily’s father uncomfortable enough to complain.

  Because Bruce was unsure that the painting was perfect, he sent several of his office staff to assess its likeness before he agreed to accept the finished product. When one of them voiced criticism, he then promptly dispatched important artist friends to view the painting. It was admired by all. Upon their judgment, he relented, writing to Rosina of his deep emotions concerning his daughter.

  “I hasten to say all this from a sense of perfect happiness in the possession of a treasure that in my heart has always given me pleasure,” he wrote, “so that all that I said about the background was only the worrying of a soul distressed over very poor criticism. Of course I am impressionable and anything said about or against an idol of mine upsets me.” After explaining how he had subjected the portrait to impartial review, he concluded, “I think it was mean in me to say what I did. I congratulate you first on your work, second on your proper sense of it. With sincere regards, very faithfully yours, Bruce Price.”

  More than Bruce Price could ever know, Rosina Sherwood’s gentle query to the society girl as she posed for that portrait remained, decades later, a pivotal moment in Emily’s memories. The timely discussion between the “woman artist” and the society girl tucked into the back of Emily’s mind the realization that she had choices. On the eve of becoming an adult, of being under her parents’ thumb no longer, Emily was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up. As if being a wife wasn’t a complete identity.

  Several decades later, Virginia Woolf would recall the stifling expectations that, upon their marriages, women of Emily’s social class inherited. In 1931, Woolf spoke to the London National Society for Women’s Service, where she discussed how her generation of women had been forced, finally, to kill off the infamous “Angel in the House,” from a maudlin Victorian poem describing the ideal, long-suffering wife and mother. Much of the struggle Woolf described was awaiting Emily, though she had only a glimmer, through Rosina Sherwood, of its grip. “You who come of a much younger and happier generation may not have heard of her—you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House,” said Woolf. “. . . She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. . . . Above all—I need not say it—she was pure. . . . In those days—the last of Queen Victoria—every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room.”

  Because she had been left an inheritance, Woolf explained, she could afford to be brave and not “depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. . . . Had I not killed her she would have killed me. For, as I found . . . you cannot review even a novel without h
aving a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women.”

  To a large extent, Emily Price’s class and Josephine’s provincial beliefs about women had inured the girl to the increasing eruptions of sexual politics. Amid seismic changes for women, Emily’s marriage was contracted on conventional grounds. She expected—and for the most part, assumed she wanted—the same life, more or less, that her mother had sought with Bruce. In a way, Emily got trapped on a cusp of social history: she married Edwin in 1892, just as her eyes were starting to open. Though she would never use such aggressive language, she would nonetheless come to share Woolf’s conclusion: “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”

  THE POST FAMILY coffers may have been depleted, but Edwin Main Post came from the bluest of blood, its worth on the stock market notwithstanding. The Posts were an old Dutch family with an impeccable pedigree. They had enough money to get by, even if they relied on the inheritance of their matriarch, Caroline McLean. Edwin’s father, H.A.V. Post, had been born in New York City ten years before Bruce Price. After being wounded at Antietam, Henry moved to Cincinnati as a partner in the business of the day: manufacturing railroad supplies. In 1870 he returned to New York City and established businesses in Manhattan, eventually becoming a railroad banker. He even formed a steel firm. Yankee through and through, the good colonel and Baltimore’s Bruce Price were unlikely to have had much in common, though if they had met under circumstances in which Bruce was less invested emotionally, a friendship might have ensued. H.A.V. Post, after all, sought fraternity even more fervently than Bruce Price did. He gathered his male friends onto the Macy every weekend he could escape his overbearing wife. He cherished his small yacht and would keep it no matter how his finances decayed. Ten years after Emily wed his son, H.A.V.’s little crew would honor the hearty gambler’s even temper:

  To our gallant Colonel Henry Post

  We offer up this simple toast:

  “May all his days be full of joy,

  May drinking cocktails never lag,

  May power reign and fishing please,

  And may he always have a breeze.”

  H.A.V.’s marriage to the wealthy, stern Caroline Burnet McLean produced seven children. Edwin was born in the middle of the brood, in Cincinnati on January 6, 1870, just before the family moved from Caroline’s home to reclaim H.A.V.’s roots in the city. The daughter of General Nathaniel McLean, Caroline was even more proud of her paternal grandfather, Justice John McLean of the United States Supreme Court. He was one of the two judges who dissented from the high court’s decision in the Dred Scott case, believing that slavery defied and defiled the American Constitution. Most of all—predictably, given her personality—Caroline was impressed that she was a direct descendant of Oliver Cromwell.

  It was undeniable that Edwin brought interesting family members to Emily’s table, as if making up for the only child’s own dearth of local relatives. Edwin’s older brother, the charming A.V.Z. Post, would be Edwin’s best man. One of society’s finest and most popular cotillion leaders, Van Zo, as he was also called, was a man who did things his own way: in 1900 he was, by profession, a civil engineer, living with his parents at 140 West Seventy-seventh Street in Manhattan, along with his sister Nathalie. Apparently too busy to think about a wife until he was much older, he was an eclectic, wildly talented man. His novel of 1913, Diana Ardway, would prove so popular that it was made into a movie, his fencing talents prodigious enough to land him on the U.S. Olympic team. At sixty-five years old, he married for the first time; Nathalie Post was the only sibling who would remain single throughout her life, while the others made illustrious matches and, in some cases, successful careers.

  Emily thrived under her brother-in-law’s attention; the charmer made everyone feel special, and now that she was part of his family, Van Zo’s efforts doubled. “Angel sister!” an undated note he sent to Emily begins. His most recent play, in Provincetown, has closed after two performances. “With such a record no N.Y. theatre would let us in, so I just pocketed a ten thousand loss and am sailing for Paris . . . by Deutschland. Thanks for your good cheer and good advice, which I repent me of not following!!! Do hope to show you my studio, 65 Boulevard Arago soon?” He signed the letter “Affectionately.”

  There was also cousin Regis Post, who would become even closer to Edwin when, a few years after the Price/Post wedding, he married one of Edwin’s sisters, Caroline. The Post-to-Post merger would last for twenty-seven years (though they were officially separated for nine of them). Finally Caroline filed for divorce, citing as the cause Regis’s “misconduct with servants” in Manhattan, Puerto Rico, and the Post family home at Bayport, Long Island. Closer to Edwin than to any of his other relatives, Regis would become the governor of Puerto Rico while still a young man, enjoying his job immensely until 1919, when his marriage and good fortune had both clearly dissolved.

  There were certainly enough Post cousins traveling the social circuit, frequenting Tuxedo Park as well as the other fashionable watering spots, for Bruce and Josephine to see up close that most of the family seemed respectable and well behaved. Even Uncle Edward A. Post, living on an “inherited income” as he raged against those claiming his pig farm for their graveyard, divided his time almost equally among the best watering holes in the country.

  But it was the estimable George Browne Post, H.A.V.’s cousin, who was the crown jewel of the Post family. About ten years older than Bruce, he had attended the University of the City of New York (later renamed New York University), then studied architecture under the famous Richard Morris Hunt—favored among the high-society set—who designed his friend Cornelius Vanderbilt II’s the Breakers. Just as he was making a name for himself, Post had been forced to switch gears and learn to fight, joining the Union Army at the outbreak of hostilities, promoted from captain to colonel in 1867. Three years later, as Bruce Price cast his lot with Josephine Lee down South, George Post reentered the civilian workforce in New York City.

  In quick time, Edwin’s relative had become one of the world’s premier architects, one they all heard about in Baltimore. He was an engineer before he was an architect, almost a requirement in the early days of skyscrapers. His Equitable Life Assurance Society building would be the first office building to use elevators; his World Building and St. Paul’s were both the tallest structures in New York at the time of their construction. His New York Stock Exchange still stands, its inventive use of steel supports reminders of how Post earned his fame. He would win commissions for the Times, the Post, New York Hospital, the Williamsburg Bank, the campus of the City University of New York, and major Gilded Age houses. His Western Union Building, the first office structure to rise to ten floors, was a prototype of buildings to come, twenty-five years before the great age of the skyscraper. By 1890, his World (or Pulitzer) Building, with twice that number of floors, would be the city’s tallest structure, launching, some would claim, New York City’s skyscraper age. The building would be demolished some fifty years later to expand the automobile entrance to the Brooklyn Bridge.

  The bride must have believed herself bestowing a daughterly blessing upon Bruce Price. She would show her father that she was marrying well after all, in spite of his reservations about Edwin’s financial reliability—and something else, though he admitted he couldn’t say quite what. Her father was just nervous at the thought of losing her, Josie had reassured their daughter. Now Emily would set his mind at ease, linking him to George Post, who would soon be her family too. Maybe she couldn’t be an architect herself, and perhaps Bruce would always rue the son he had lost. But Emily could present her papa with a therapeutic consolation prize. The attendance of the near celebrity at the Tuxedo Park wedding was the finest gift Edwin gave his bride, and the greatest solace she could offer to her bereft father. George Post’s frequent presen
ce on the Macy even redeemed her too frequent weekends spent at home alone.

  AN INTELLIGENTLY CONTRACTED marriage in the Gilded Age could address two separate but equally compelling needs. A smart union would benefit everyone, accommodating both income and bloodlines, in this instance, the Prices’ financial endowment (through Josephine’s legacy), and the Posts’ breeding. One enabled the future; one traded on the past. A perfect mix.

  Edwin’s family tree was deeply rooted and abundantly limbed. Emily later implied that it sometimes felt as if the generations of Posts were endless. Edwin Post’s family had a summer home on Long Island’s South Shore, where the various branches had been living for nine generations, intermarrying with all the other English families of the mid-seventeenth-century migration. The funds, versus the bloodlines, are less clear, at least in regard to the resources of Edwin’s parents. Mrs. Post’s money was clearly the major support. She let nothing stand in the way of her needs or her children’s, whether she wanted to rent the finest cottage in Newport for the season or to take her two eligible daughters abroad after their debuts, presumably to expand their wardrobes or enlarge their prospects of snagging a title.

  Henry Albertson Van Zo Post contributed his old Dutch name and his family lineage to the marriage—along with his good looks and great charm. Soon after Edwin and Emily’s wedding, he declared bankruptcy. Nonetheless, the irrepressible H.A.V. kept buying and selling railroad companies, subsidized by his wife’s money, until he died. Bruce Price’s intuition had been right: this family was unstable.