Emily Post Read online

  CHAPTER 14

  EDWIN POST DIDN’T EXPECT HIS PARENTS AND EMILY’S TO BECOME best friends. But even his worst fears hadn’t predicted this disaster. In the spring of 1892, only months before the wedding, the Posts attended an exclusive engagement party given by Bruce and Josephine. The dining room at 12 West Tenth Street was perfectly configured for intimate groups of twelve. Among the guests saluting the young couple that evening were Pierre and Mrs. Lorillard, and Hop Smith and his wife—a lively, successful, culturally interesting group of people. The conversation seemed to flow smoothly at first, and the two young guests of honor began to relax. With that, the scene turned into a nightmare. Emily’s prospective mother-in-law and her father had taken an instant, visceral dislike to each other.

  The evening had actually gone wrong from the beginning, but Emily and Edwin were too nervous—or too young—to notice. Bruce had escorted a stiff Caroline Post to the dining room. He graciously paused to point out, proudly, the life-sized nude statue in the hallway. Emily had given him a reproduction of the Apollo Belvedere, he laughed, because “the sculpture reminds her of me.” The pious woman blushed furiously.

  More restrained attempts at social levity also fell flat. Frank Smith charmingly rehashed the stories of little Emily accompanying him to the Statue of Liberty construction site and begging to live inside the hollow statue, like the proverbial princess in a tower. Edwin’s father, H.A.V., then gallantly toasted such royal femininity, and others urged more fine wine upon the party, hoping to loosen things up. But the fervently devout Mrs. Post refused the alcohol and abstemiously drank a half glass of water instead. Apparently the water renewed her, because she suddenly turned to the architect and asked what he thought about the wonderful recent crusade to clean up the Tenderloin, the seedy red-light district in western midtown Manhattan. The newspapers, she gushed, said her Long Island neighbor Dr. Charles Parkhurst was set upon reforming the city government.

  Without a doubt, H.A.V. Post, whose charm was only slightly less than Bruce Price’s, had ended up with a formidable spouse. The Prices were working hard to get along with the difficult woman. But any gain was now canceled by her vacuous polemics in the name of virtue. Bruce Price followed libertarian principles, though the philosophy would give rise to a political party only after his death. The architect tended toward the socially liberal and financially conservative. He believed that the less government interfered in citizens’ business, both private and professional, the better.

  The tension at the dinner table became palpable. To his credit, Emily’s father tried to express his disdain for Mrs. Post’s beloved celebrity minister gently, but the devoted woman persisted in her avid support. To her, one’s position for or against Reverend Parkhurst’s crusade to clean up city hall said it all.

  As Bruce was wont to do when goaded by self-righteousness, he finally exploded—albeit carefully. “It is not men like me who support the vice in this or any other city,” he retorted through clenched teeth, adding that Dr. Parkhurst’s methods did more harm than good.

  How so? the good woman huffed, incredulous. By encouraging some people to feel better than others, holier than their neighbors, Bruce was said to have replied, adding, “I consider [Dr. Parkhurst] a blue-nosed busy-body, and if he ever came anywhere near me I’d feel tempted to kick him downstairs.”

  With that, Josephine firmly intervened, practically demanding her husband’s opinion of the Metropolitan Opera’s new box seats.

  The Prices’ other guests were not the sort to applaud the strong-handed tactics of a Charles Parkhurst either. A few months earlier, on a freezing winter morning in mid-February, the usually genial fifty-year-old minister had preached a fiery sermon in New York’s Madison Square Presbyterian Church, a blistering indictment of the city government. Asserting that Tammany Hall was run by a “a lying, perjured, rum-soaked, and libidinous lot,” he meant to derail its hellish evils. The parishioners were agog. Parkhurst, his imposing dark hair streaked with silver, was a society minister. He had recently served with J. Pierpont Morgan and Mortimer Schiff on committees fighting the hunger of Russian Jewry. His liberal Presbyterian parish was filled with upper-class citizens, including such aesthetes as Louis Comfort Tiffany. And he wanted these people to understand: their city had rotted at its core, and he planned to operate on the disease here and now.

  And that was the problem. Russia was one thing, Manhattan quite another. As city historian Lloyd Morris maintains, New Yorkers, for the most part, knew their city was “open,” and they liked it that way. “Cosmopolitan and pleasure-loving . . . many of them had no objection to leading a free-and-easy life in a free-and-easy town.” Bruce Price was typical of those upper-class citizens disgusted by the minister’s intrusion into what they considered private matters between consenting adults, whatever the subject. For the first time in the memory of the “average New Yorker,” no saloon in the Bowery, the outré area of lower Manhattan notorious for its sexual exoticism, was open after midnight, the old, neglected city law suddenly enforced because of the reverend’s exhortations. Under Parkhurst’s sway, for instance, the largely ignored strictures against bars doing business on the Sunday Sabbath were now enforced, if haphazardly. Not content with curbing alcohol consumption, Parkhurst had tried to close down the high-class brothels, institutions that Bruce’s social crowd assumed benefited everyone. Before long it seemed that the minister could locate sin on every city corner.

  The narrowness of Parkhurst’s vision offended Bruce Price, who would bequeath to his daughter his belief in a civic morality that didn’t infringe on others’ personal freedoms. The days when Parkhurst might have been seen as a liberator of oppressed women were still in the future; at this point, all he was doing was depriving certain deserving women of an income and their customers of pleasure, from the point of view of Bruce’s crowd. The 1880s and 1890s were, after all, the “golden age of free thought,” and the city’s elite did not welcome the kind of religious interference in civic affairs Parkhurst urged. What may not have been clear even to the Price family was the part that the South, the Old South of Bruce Price’s childhood, played in their values. Drinking, for instance (which Parkhurst distrusted), and, more importantly, the freedom to drink as one pleased (as long as one remained a gentleman) were considered God-given liberties. To the point of disaster, southerners believed themselves entitled to such escape from reality, and had done so even before the Civil War.

  A few months after the disastrous engagement dinner, as if Caroline Post hadn’t understood the depth of Bruce Price’s convictions, she aggravated the wound that was just starting to heal. Once again she threatened the nuptials with her passion for Reverend Parkhurst, this time while Josephine was addressing the invitations.

  As soon as Josie received Mrs. Post’s list, headed by the name Reverend Charles Parkhurst, she knew that this was another crisis threatening the wedding. Even the usually implacable Josephine was disgusted at Edwin’s mother, expressing to Emily her dismay before she told Bruce. “How can she?” she complained. “I don’t know what to do. You know how your father feels about that atrocious man. And Mrs. Post must know after what he said that night at dinner. He certainly made himself clear.”

  When Bruce got home and heard the news about Mrs. Post’s defiant gesture to include Dr. Parkhurst, he erupted. If that “damned bluenose” crossed his threshold, he’d shoot him, and then there would be a scandal, not a wedding. He finally played the age-old trump card: “I’m paying the bills” for the wedding, he reminded the Price women. No invitation was to go to the self-appointed potentate. Moral posturing was forbidden in this family circle.

  Apparently Mrs. Post conceded defeat, since the wedding went forward. Presents started stacking up, and Emily’s deft cataloging of wedding gifts in Etiquette years later hints at the haul she must have taken in. Fine pieces of silver should not be displayed next to poor imitations, she would explain, for fear of embarrassing someone. Colors should be arranged appealingly, imitation l
ace separated from the real, and duplicates thoughtfully spread out among the presents: “Eighteen pairs of pepper pots or fourteen sauceboats in a row might as well be labeled: ‘Look at this stupidity! What can she do with all of us?’ They are sure to make the givers feel at least a little chagrined at their choice.” Protecting well-meaning individuals from shame was more important than acknowledging their shortsighted judgment.

  Many years later, a middle-aged Emily Post would lament the ill-focused energies of the betrothed in her day. Instead of concentrating on the important stuff of intimacy, her generation had sought to avoid it, focusing on the gravy boats instead. “In nothing does the present time more greatly differ from the close of the last century, than in the unreserved frankness of young women and men towards each other. Those who speak of the domination of sex in this day are either too young to remember, or else have not stopped to consider, that mystery played a far greater and more dangerous role when sex, like a woman’s ankle, was carefully hidden from view, and therefore far more alluring than today when both are commonplace matters.”

  ON JUNE 1, 1892, Emily Bruce Price married Edwin Main Post. An Episcopalian church in Tuxedo, St. Mary’s, had been finished in 1888, but Emily got married at home. The wedding was held on the edge of Tuxedo Lake, at the family’s Rocklawn residence, Bruce’s favorite of the four Price family “cottages” he had built. (He gave his next favorite to Emily and Edwin as a wedding gift.) Bishop Whipple of Minnesota officiated, a concession to Mrs. Post: he was at least a member of her family, his son having married Mrs. Post’s sister. By this point, Bruce Price must have been mollified by new family connections as well: the New York Times noted that George Post was among the highly select guests.

  Emily had designed her wedding dress herself. She’d sent her sketches to Worth in Paris, who’d sewed everything on site, including the four bridesmaids’ gowns. She kept her drawings for years in one of the calfbound ledgers she used to enter personal accounts. Explaining whenever asked that she didn’t keep a diary—she wasn’t the introspective sort—she failed to add that she nonetheless recorded her days in fastidious detail.

  The bride had probably argued for a practical, local seamstress, but Josephine preferred the security of fine French fashion. Sending away to Paris turned out to be a mistake, however, for all the beauty it guaranteed. Promised the garments weeks earlier, Emily and Josephine received the package only two days prior to the big date.

  Sixty-eight degrees at eight A.M., near ninety degrees by the afternoon: the weather for the wedding guaranteed a soggy affair that first day of June, in spite of the lack of rain. Tuxedo Park was hardly cooler than Manhattan. The New York Times urged city workers and those within a hundred miles to use umbrellas for the unremitting sun. Even if Emily had been willing to switch to the gauze undergarments the newspaper recommended for women that day (and she wasn’t), the relief under her layers of silk and satin would have been minimal. Layers of material swathed the nineteen-year-old bride, the white mousseline de soie “and real old lace” surely ruined by her perspiration. Her high-necked corsage was trimmed with orange blossoms and a veil of point d’Alençon. Pale green mull (a fine muslin) draped the bridesmaids’ dance-length silk dresses. Straw-colored corsages with delicate hints of pink cast the entire scene as a Watteau, down to the triple-plumed leghorn hats. Edwin’s little brother Henry was the page, with his other brother, A.V.Z. Post, cousin Regis Post, and longtime friend Lyman Colt as attendants. When Regis married his cousin Caroline Post a few years later, he would placate Edwin’s mother, ensuring that Dr. Charles Parkhurst sanctified at least one Post union.

  Even more than with most weddings, it had been tense up to the last minute. The list of upcoming “country” nuptials that the Times published a week before Emily’s listed her bridesmaids as “four Baltimore belles,” friends and relatives from Emily’s past. But the wedding announcement a week later indicated a few quick and pointed substitutions. Bruce and Josephine’s Baltimore nieces, Sadie Price and Josephine “Georgie” Barrow, were still half of the equation. But two of Edwin’s sisters, Beatrice and the dour Nathalie Post, now served as peace offerings to Edwin’s mother, substituting for the two friends Emily had originally chosen.

  We can only imagine the bride’s irritation at the scene: perspiring profusely under the heavy fabric, irritated at her mother’s belief in superstition. The marriage could have taken place in early May, a predictably cool time. Decades later, recalling her unnecessary suffering vividly, she would advise modern brides that “the superstition that Friday and the month of May are unlucky, is too stupid to discuss.”

  But by June 5, 1892, a few days after the Price-Post nuptials in the country, no evidence remained of the rough patches. The New York Times descanted on the three most “important weddings in the country” that had occurred that weekend. From Hempstead, Long Island, to Tuxedo Park, socialites vied for first place. Some of the papers used nomenclature from Edith Wharton, speaking reverentially of the “country seat” of the bride’s parents. “Miss Bruce Price was the prettiest bride of the day,” the New York Times boldly pronounced.

  There was at least one wedding guest who would be convinced the rest of his life that no finer bride existed anywhere. If, as Emily later suggested, Bruce Price looked to others as if he had buried, not married off, his daughter, his sadness at losing his only child was matched by his pride in her exceptional character and her physical beauty.

  CHAPTER 15

  EMILY HAD PLANNED TO IMPRESS HER TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD spouse by re-creating Josephine and Bruce’s postnuptial trip to the Continent. The summer the Posts married, however, an epidemic of Asian cholera swept across Europe. Only because of stringent restrictions meant to dissuade even the most determined from traveling abroad did the scourge of 1892 largely bypass the United States. The couple reluctantly canceled their honeymoon voyage, whereupon they decided, with Emily’s prodding, to visit Savannah, Charleston, and, of course, Baltimore, instead.

  Proud of Edwin’s charm and good looks, Emily delighted in showing off her handsome husband. For his part, though mildly curious about the life that moved his usually practical bride to wax nostalgic, Edwin was more eager to trap the tasty sea turtles studding the Chesapeake than to pass the time with his bride’s southern relatives. Though everyone got along—Emily’s relatives embodied the gracious Old South in so many ways—Edwin found the men strangely reminiscent of Bruce Price, who intimidated him, while the women, with their learned cordiality, somehow made him feel he was in danger of looking like an untutored Yankee rube.

  Six weeks after their wedding, in midsummer, the couple returned to New York City to a rented apartment on Tenth Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, the same block as Emily’s parents. In early autumn, just after the bride finally finished hiring her house staff, she realized that she was pregnant. Now, along with mastering the routines of a flawless wife suitable for a man like her husband—so obviously making headway in the business world—Emily would have to marshal the resources to become a mother as well. In her ledgers, she painstakingly documented the world of a wealthy young matron, a job involving everything from planning the day’s menus to scheduling the servants’ days off. Though the upper-class women of the Gilded Age no longer needed to contribute to the household’s physical labor, as in the past, they had found another way to imbue their privileged lives with meaning: by directing the labor of others.

  Unfortunately, though their husbands depended upon such wifely resolve to manage their domestic lives, some of them, including Edwin Post, assumed their spouses could mature into their connubial roles while remaining the girls they had married. Emily had appealed to Edwin in part through her abilities on the amateur stage, her dramatic side promising hidden treats: actresses were sexual creatures—every man knew that. He had delighted in the sparkling, vivacious performances his bride had delivered ever since he’d met her that enchanted December night when she had occupied the center of attention. Clearly Emily Pr
ice had loved to show off, a trait Edwin appreciated. Now, as he uneasily observed several new mothers among their social circle, he began to worry that his wife would become tedious as her pregnancy progressed, boring instead of amusing him.

  In fact, Edwin and Emily had little in common from the start, a lack of connection that had become painfully evident to Emily as early as their honeymoon, after she had struggled to find topics of conversation on long train trips that seemed never to end. The relief she felt when surrounded by her always chattering Baltimore cousins was short-lived when she noticed their carefully arranged facial expressions, revealing more clearly than words their suspicion of this young man so different from Bruce Price.

  But now, back in Manhattan, Emily was determined to provide a satisfying home life for Edwin and their child, just like the one Josie had overseen as her daughter grew up. After consulting her mother, Emily established a routine whose morning ritual remained essentially the same throughout her life. She would be served toast and coffee in bed while she carefully reviewed her day’s list of chores and prepared written assignments for her servants. Then she dressed for the requisite afternoon socializing, summoning John, her personal equerry. Until her pregnancy showed, she often went shopping, usually at Altman’s or, less frequently, at Lord & Taylor’s. After lunching at Delmonico’s, she paid her social “at home” visits, directing John to deposit her card on the silver trays placed in the hallway entrances of those acquaintances whose “visiting day” it was, the network of socialites an important part of upper-class life. Visitors who were actual friends or who had been specially invited would be escorted into the study or parlor for tea.