It was difficult for an eighteen-year-old girl to see how it had come to this. Edie Minturn knew her father had been having financial difficulties. She had overheard gloomy words, like “reversal” and “setback,” flapping up like black carrion birds from the hushed conversations of the adults in the family. Edith knew, too, that business was bad all around. For three years, a deep recession had gripped the country, beginning on Wall Street, where brokerages failed, and continuing to railroad bankruptcies, crop failures and a slaking of the export business, what the newspapers had labeled the Panic of 1883. All around New York, two years later, millionaires were still hemorrhaging money.
This was not the first Panic of the century. Yet until now her father’s shipping concern had survived the sudden jolts and wild swings of the economy. This recession had a direct impact on the business of Grinnell, Minturn & Co. She knew it was ridiculous, but some petulant part of her couldn’t help but take the Panic personally. She had known one thing ever since she was a young girl on Staten Island, ever since she had known anything: 1885 was to be her year. A girl could not know beforehand the most important date in her life—the day of her wedding—but as soon as she could count, she knew the year of her coming out.
Coming out. Or making a debut, which had a grander sound. Two years before, when Edith’s older sister, Sarah, known to all as May, turned the magical debutante age of eighteen, she had beautiful shimmery things to wear while attending dancing class, paying calls, sweeping into the Metropolitan Opera.
But for Edith there would be nothing.
She stood at the window of the house her late grandfather had built, at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street, poised in perfect profile: wasp-waisted, a mass of dark hair, wide-set eyes that were deep blue, blueberry blue, “Minturn blue,” the feature she shared with her three pretty sisters and two brothers. The day dress she wore presented her well enough. Crimson with mandarin piping, the dress owed its effect to the snug cuirass bodice and the pert little bustle behind. But Edie knew the outfit was nearly worn out. She had taken the gown with her to London a year ago, when she and May had visited.
That was before the Panic brought down her father’s business.
Here she was in her grandmother’s lavish abode, surrounded by handsome furnishings and pictures from Europe, yet her family was consigned to living there because her father and mother could no longer afford a home of their own. She was not so impoverished that she had to go down to the sidewalk with her hand outstretched. But reduced in a different way: if her family could not afford the proper clothes, she could not attend the balls at which matches were made.
She knew herself to be absurd. Thousands were out of work, hungry, living on the streets, children begging. And here she was, staring out the window of a Fifth Avenue mansion, feeling sorry for herself. She knew she should not brood. “Do not sulk!” was one of her mother’s numberless admonitions. Self-pity was not becoming to a young lady and was not in keeping with the family spirit, which celebrated fortitude and energy, and respected things other than a fancy dress.
Edie held back the velvet drape with a pale hand. People on the Fifth Avenue sidewalk could see her in this second-story window, but she didn’t really care. Down below, carriages thronged the avenue. It was a Saturday, and the sidewalks were mobbed with black-hatted men and women beneath umbrellas; snow dusted the street and the gaslights were starting to come on. Everyone hurrying to get to the mercantile palaces of Ladies’ Mile.
She found herself brooding about diamonds. In the past few social seasons, as the precious stones flooded onto the market from new mines in South Africa, the price of diamonds had dropped. They were at once everywhere. Common shopgirls owned brilliants—small ones, but diamonds nonetheless. They studded not only jewelry but belt buckles, headdresses and hatpins. Infants wore gold buttons set with diamond chips. For any proper ball gown, diamonds were an essential grace note.
In her sorrow and petulance Edith suddenly thought of her younger brother Francis. Gone now, dead from diphtheria these seven years. Frankie died on Christmas Day, and ever since his passing Edie had been haunted by a sense of darkness that lurked just on the border of holiday celebrations. Since the time Edith was eleven, she and May had to help shoulder their mother Susanna’s boundless and very vocal grief. Every year since Frankie’s death mother and daughters exchanged solemn letters of remembrance on the boy’s birthday.
The thought of Francis brought her back to herself, to the idea of seriousness and purpose she felt developing within her, the legacy of Minturn steel she had inherited. Her brother Robert teased her with the nickname “Fiercely.” Her mother told her stories of her behavior as a little hellion on the beach at Staten Island, how different she had been from her sister May, how stubborn, how much of a handful. Where was her fierceness now? I will be better, she thought. I will put childish things behind me. She would pull herself up, scrutinize her Minturn soul and survive this “tragic inconvenience”—the formulation itself was silly.
But the nagging, persistent voice continued. I want white.
Every eighteen-year-old female in her set wished for white. They all saw themselves in a gown of the most dazzling, most arresting, most virginal alabaster white, floating down the grand stairway at Delmonico’s, say. White wasn’t just a color, it was a moral value. Despite the urgings of her better nature, Edith was beset by adolescent fancies of blue diamonds and white gowns, imparted, reinforced and hammered home for years by her female elders, Susanna in the lead.
One characteristic of such fancies: they did not allow for fathers with Reversals.
EDIE’S FAMILY RELOCATED to Manhattan from Staten Island in 1880, when she was thirteen, first residing in a generous house on lower Park Avenue. Early in 1884, they moved to 27 West 33rd Street, a fashionable location that stood just around the corner from the Astor mansions, whose denizens were waging a competition for who could stage the most brilliant parties. The successive changes of address, each a rung up the social ladder, served to elevate the family’s status and to increase Edie’s desirability as a potential bride.
Manhattan spun with activity. New amusements were popping up. In 1887, Madison Square Garden would become a pleasure mecca of theaters, restaurants and equestrian events. For girls like the Minturns, there would be dancing parties and the lessons that preceded them, classes at home in French, deportment, and piano.
Largely, though, who they were was what they wore. The Minturn women commissioned their wardrobes from dressmakers who attended them at home. By the turn of the century, however, like most of their peers, they began to patronize the grand department stores of Manhattan, emporia that stocked everything and offered an ideal venue to admire and be admired as well. The girls existed simply to be admired—that was their vocation, at least until the year they married. It was a style of life they shared with all the other young ladies they knew in New York, one that took quite a bit of diligence, because the standards of female beauty were so exacting.
The daughters of Robert and Susanna Minturn based their lives around physical embellishment. Each season the family summoned the seamstress to replace the gored sleeves of their gowns with ever larger and lacier “legs of mutton,” as the all-important arm coverings of the era were known. The hats of fashion-forward Edie and her sisters increased in circumference until their wearers nearly staggered beneath the fantastic, elaborately veiled, ostrich-draped confections. Under the dictates of successive fashion trends, the Minturn girls cinched their waists into the tiniest hourglasses, then learned how to squeeze into a polonaise bodice. When it came to be the style, they made sure that their “pouter pigeon” bosoms drooped at the perfect angle, a look named for the eponymous bird’s penchant for distending its crop to maximum fluffiness.
It was the Age of James, the Age of Wharton, and either Henry James or Edith Wharton could have quite naturally placed the behaviors of the Minturn girls into one of their novels. Wharton describes the period of Edith Minturn’s debutante quandary as “the Age of Innocence,” and Wharton herself came of age in the same period. Of course, the Age of Innocence is not an irony-free designation, as none could ever be from the nuanced pen of the “angel of devastation,” as James labeled Wharton.
Throughout the work of both writers we get glittering, telling glimpses of the elaborate balls in which the spirit of the age, for better or for worse, can best be located. These extravagances commanded the interest of all of society, and would weigh heavily on the mind of a girl like Edith, observing the activities in which her older sister took part. Ball-going constituted a requirement for the elite, the prime see-and-be-seen experience of the time. The culture of display was always grand, ostentatious, ritualized—and exhausting. The usual ball began precisely at midnight, when 250 women and men known in gilded New York as “the fashionables” poured down the grand staircase to the main ballroom of the mansion, hotel or restaurant that hosted the party.
Here is Wharton describing the setting that the suddenly unhoused Edie Minturn wished to take part in, with the horrifying prospect of appearing unfashionably dressed at the ball: “Couples were already gliding over the floor beyond: the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments of the young married women’s coiffures, and on the glitter of highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glacé gloves.”
Or James: “The rooms were filling up and the spectacle had become brilliant. [The ball] borrowed its splendor chiefly from the shining shoulders and profuse jewels of the women, and from the voluminous elegance of their dresses.”
The guests would sample a buffet of viands and fine wines. They might waltz to the strains of a seventy-piece orchestra and refresh themselves with sweet frozen delicacies, some made from lake ice shipped down from Saratoga. Participants would have practiced their steps for weeks, studying ballroom manuals in order to deliver a competent performance. If the occasion was a “fancy-dress ball,” then tulle and velvet, rouge and powder cloaked the identities of many of the men present, since such dances provided ample opportunity for no-holds-barred cross-dressing.
And finally the time would come for the centerpiece of any exclusive ball, be it in Manhattan, Newport or the Berkshires: the cotillion. The leader of the dance functioned as a combination square-dance caller and high school principal, coaxing participants through a series of fixed geometric patterns. All the sophisticates knew by heart a number of classic sequences, such as the “ladies’ chain” or the “two-hand turn.” Other figures were more intricate, challenging and potentially humiliating for anyone who fumbled the steps. A single dance could stretch to fully two hours, leaving participants in a virtual trance state. As dawn began to streak the windows, the presentation of lavish favors lightened the mood, and well-heeled guests who were in need of nothing at all could count on taking away a tidy cache of jeweled stickpins, enameled watches or gilt cigarette cases. The Gilded Age indeed.
In Manhattan, the debutante ball evolved as the preliminary introduction of the young lady to society, but in the 1890s, the ball was complemented in popularity by private teas at home. Girls making their debut would appear at formal dances known as Patriarch Balls, where attendance was by invitation only, or at equally prestigious subscription dances, supplemented by frequent opera-going and other opportunities to see and be seen. The Charity Ball in early February capped off the season, signaling the onset of Lent and a more low-key approach to socializing.
Coming out meant more than mere display; it meant assuming the set of coded behaviors that allowed the members of the tribe to recognize one another.
The debutante ball was a necessary but not sufficient element of the overall process, which covered the entire eighteenth year of a female’s majority. It stretched over several distinct social seasons—the fall season, the Christmas season, the spring season, the Lent season. The whole proceeding marched forward inexorably, ticking like the escapement of some massive, socially engineered pocket watch. Families such as the Minturns accepted without question the cultural imperative of this parade of events, which trained young women to assume their place in society.
Much of the training dictated tribe-specific modes of behavior. There were dancing lessons, at which students would grapple with the labyrinthine series of steps that comprised the typical cotillion. More seriously, young ladies would be cautioned about indecorous conduct and inappropriate dress, about the importance of safeguarding one’s honor.
The Victorian etiquette expert Abby Buchanan Longstreet, on the meaning of the social debut: “It is the barrier between an immaturity of character and culture, and an admission of the completion of both. Previous to this event, a young girl is not supposed to be sufficiently intelligent to be interesting to her elders among her own sex, and certainly not worldly-wise enough to associate with gentlemen.”
Calling and card-leaving held an intense importance to the protocol of the debut, with rigorous, unspoken guidelines for their execution. Mothers and daughters (in this case, Edith, even in reduced circumstances, and Susanna) spent hour upon hour visiting their neighbors and acquaintances, usually for no more than fifteen minutes apiece. (The exchange of cards, sniffed Longstreet, was “simply ornamenting the barren wastes of speechlessness.”) Any debut mandated a calling list that might consist of five hundred names. The flood of visits and letter-writing reached proportions so epic that secretaries were hired to manage the procedure.
The glorious finale to the whole endeavor, of course, was the successful nuptial announcement, an affirmation of all the previous preparations. One scholar described the debut process as “a sort of prolonged crisis, resolved finally by a marriage.”
What would happen if something went wrong? Edie had taken the dancing lessons. She and Susanna could make their way through the season of calls and card-leaving as they were expected to. But examining, selecting and purchasing coming-out clothes was itself a major part of the process, as essential to any well-bred young lady as the bridal trousseau. The all-important debutante costume, consisting of layer upon layer of chiffon, white tulle or satin, with fresh flowers and sparkling jewels adding grace notes, was for the moment unaffordable.
She had to make do with cotton.
EDITH MINTURN HAD been born into wealth and the moral obligations that accompanied it. Her paternal grandfather, Robert Bowne Minturn, rode the wave of one of the great transportation revolutions of the nineteenth century. The fifty-vessel fleet he built with Grinnell, Minturn & Co. not only made him one of the success stories of antebellum New York City, it allowed him the resources to focus attention on the rights of people who didn’t possess his advantages. The clipper ships of the eighteenth century were ragingly fast and stunningly handsome—the Concordes of their day. Besides building the stone mansion on lower Fifth Avenue in 1847, where his moody granddaughter stood at the window on the eve of her coming out, Robert Bowne Minturn bankrolled the largest and most magnificent clipper ship in the United States, Flying Cloud. Forever after its launch, the Minturns would be known as the family that owned Flying Cloud. As Edie would be known as the granddaughter of the man who put the ship in the water.
Here’s Flying Cloud sailing out of New York harbor on her maiden voyage in June 1851: “She passed down the bay . . . and went dancing into the broad Atlantic,” reported the New York Tribune. “There was a stiff, steady wind, and the beautiful vessel, almost hid by the cloud of canvas which she spread, seemed to glide through the waters.”
The overnight millionaires on the West Coast, their fortunes made from gold and speculation, demanded provisions such as whiskey, sugar-cured hams and brandied peaches. Grinnell, Minturn & Co. raced other shipping firms to satisfy their needs. The difficulty was the route, a treacherous 120-day trip down the Atlantic seaboard, around Cape Horn and up the Pacific Coast to San Francisco. Flying Cloud, built for $1.6 million in present-day dollars, made history when it arrived on the Barbary Coast after 89 days on the water.
Tall as a Fifth Avenue mansion, with a rock maple keel and soaring masts, carrying ten thousand yards of the heaviest canvas and a gold-and-cream horn-blowing angel for a figurehead, the full-bodied vessel must have made a striking contrast when it entered San Francisco Bay. Crews racing off to make their fortunes in the gold fields had abandoned hundreds of ships to molder in the harbor, rendering it a spooky, nautical graveyard.
West Coast citizens marveled at the freshness of Flying Cloud’s cargo. “Just think of eating butter in San Francisco on the heel of summer, that was made in New York in May,” ran one newspaper editorial, “and you will feel that the Flying Cloud has indeed ‘walked the waters like a thing of life.’” A further distinction of the voyage was the gender of the ship’s navigator, the wife of the captain, who successfully brought the vessel through storms and over shoals to its West Coast berth.
New Yorkers celebrated Flying Cloud’s return following the record-breaking journey, its name splashed in ornate gilt across the bow and its blue-and-white swallowtail pennant flying. Spectators jammed Battery Park. Fans thronged the Astor House, the most famous hotel in America, to view an exhibit of Flying Cloud’s sea-scarred lashings and seizings. There was even a souvenir logbook for dignitaries, courtesy of Grinnell, Minturn, just like the real thing but printed in gold letters on white silk.
Owning the fastest clipper ship in the world brought prestige and glamour to the firm, but trade was not the only interest of Edie’s grandfather. Another part of the business consisted of fetching thousands of victims of the Irish potato famine, the passage often paid with their last pennies, to make new lives in America. In the company of his outspoken wife, Anna Mary Wendell, Robert Bowne Minturn had set himself to remaking the world for the better. That meant speaking out for the rights of immigrants, becoming a benefactor of the Freedmen’s Association and helping to establish the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor.
Minturn also built a model apartment house for one hundred poor African-American families in what is now New York’s Chinatown. The apartments boasted features that were rarely found in tenements, including sitting rooms, fireproof walls and well-ventilated living spaces. At a time when the urban poor were sleeping on rags and burning manure chips for warmth, taking steps to remedy squalid conditions represented an extraordinarily munificent project.
Of course, the edification and pleasure of Robert Min- turn’s family would always come first. Edith’s father, Robert Junior, grew to see foreign travel as a luxurious commonplace, which makes sense for the scion of a shipping magnate. If Junior suffered from asthma or was troubled by gastric upset, Anna and Robert would pack up the eight kids and half-dozen servants and depart on a healing sojourn in Switzerland, say, or the Far East. In May 1848, the couple set off on an education-minded trip, an eighteen-month grand tour of England, France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Jerusalem and Egypt, with children in tow. Robert Junior, Edith’s father, was in his impressionable teens at the time.
That trip would irrevocably alter the lives of the Minturn descendants, including Edith—of all Manhattan dwellers, really. Upon the family’s return, Minturn père invited some of his associates to his Fifth Avenue mansion to discuss establishing a grand park in the center of Manhattan, modeled on the Bois de Boulogne, Hyde Park and other green and public spaces that had impressed him on his tour of Europe. The progressive firebrand Anna took the lead in persuading the couple’s peers that there was nothing the city lacked so much as a large, verdant area for walking and driving, not only to serve as a playground for the rich but to lift up the poor, improve public health and provide jobs in its construction.
The island of Manhattan had not yet become a densely built cityscape. In Anna’s view, swaths of available acreage existed, at present underused by populations of squatters. In the words of a history published by New York’s Real Estate Association, Central Park’s original denizens “lived off the refuse of the city, which they daily conveyed in small carts, chiefly drawn by dogs.” Among the more arcane activities of these squatters was the nineteenth-century trade of “bone boiling,” which produced a byproduct used in sugar refining. The eight-hundred-acre Central Park was born by legislative fiat in 1853, and the squatters were removed, an effort in part initiated by Edith’s grandmother Anna.
After returning from their overseas odyssey, Robert Bowne and Anna Minturn settled in a summer estate they named Locust Wood, twenty miles north of Manhattan in the hamlet of Hastings-on-Hudson. Robert took charge of plantings and grounds himself, designing the cobblestone gutters along the winding carriage roads as if they were works of art. Minturn even turned his leisure into a charitable endeavor when he joined other gentlemen in organizing the New York Horticulture Society, which promoted landscape design and rural improvement. Locust Wood stayed in the family for a number of years beyond the death of the elder Minturn, making a breeze-cooled spot for Edith, in young adulthood, to spend the warm weather months with her parents and siblings, when they were not on Staten Island.
Edith’s father, Robert Junior, proved himself exceptional at an early age when, not ten years after his family’s grand tour, he wrote a book titled New York to Delhi. A recent graduate of Columbia University, Robert was sent abroad once more for the sake of his health, and afterward set down five hundred pages of richly detailed description of his adventures. Critics praised the memoir, saying it heralded the awakening of a promising literary talent, but it was the last published work for Minturn, who turned his attention, as his father and grandfather had before him, to building ships and sending them across the sea, enterprises that rewarded him with the level of profit needed to keep his growing family in style.
LIKE HER PATERNAL grandparents, Edith’s grandparents on the maternal side, Francis Gould Shaw and Sarah Blake Sturgis, were both inheritors of mercantile wealth. They left Boston, where Frank’s father was one of the richest citizens, and rejected their ancestors’ commercial interests to settle on a farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, out of a kinship with the socialist community of Brook Farm. Literary celebrities who gathered at the home of Frank and Sarah included such names as Thoreau, Emerson, Marga- ret Fuller and James Russell Lowell. At dinner parties, Sarah stood and recited Shakespeare and Milton by the page.
The abolitionist and writer Lydia Maria Child effused over the couple in her correspondence. “I love Frank and Sarah Shaw, partly because they are very good looking, partly because they always dress in beautiful clothes, and partly because they have many fine qualities,” she wrote. “Moreover, they are very free from sham, for which they deserve the more credit, considering they are Bostonians and are rich.”
The Shaws relocated to Staten Island when their children were small in order for Sarah to be treated for a vision ailment by Dr. Samuel MacKenzie Elliott, a renowned ophthalmologist. When not restoring the eyesight of luminaries, Elliott was both a charismatic abolitionist leader and a speculative builder. Over the years he erected dozens of houses in Elliottville, on the island’s north shore, which he made available to his antislavery followers. The enclave became known as a secure stop on the Underground Railroad. Frank and Sarah built a residence that cost $80,000 to construct, using a healthy inheritance from Frank’s father. This was the house where Edie Minturn would be born and raised, from where she journeyed to the shore to dodge her mother’s beach parasol.
While all of the Shaw children would grow into accomplished adults, perhaps the most impressive was handsome, popular Robert Gould Shaw. Shaw came of age during the Civil War, and took on the job of commanding the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the first regiment of African Americans formed in the state. Mourned and lionized in the wake of his death in 1863, at the head of his regiment, while leading a charge on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, Robert Gould Shaw was, in the words of John Greenleaf Whittier, “the very flower and grace of chivalry.” Emerson would also extol the man in verse, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens would honor him and the 54th Massachusetts in a bronze bas-relief on the Boston Common. His reputation undimmed by the passage of time, Shaw and his regiment would be featured in the 1989 film Glory.
Only slightly less powerful in the family mythology were Susanna’s three sisters, though two of them were perhaps better known for their husbands’ accomplishments than their own. One, Anna, wed a columnist named George William Curtis, a fiery speaker who delivered up acerbic editorials for Harper’s magazine. Sister Ellen married Major General Francis Channing Barlow, one of the youngest generals of the Civil War, who later, as a lawyer in New York, would spearhead the breakup of the Tweed Ring.
But the aunt to whom Edith was closest as she was growing up was Josephine Shaw Lowell. Josephine’s early life was tinged with tragedy when her husband, Charles Russell Lowell, nephew of the man of letters James Russell Lowell, perished in the war. His nickname, “Beau Sabreur,” meant “handsome swordsman,” owing to his zesty and dashing character. His death came in 1864, at the battle of Cedar Creek, on the same day that his commission as brigadier general was signed. After taking a bullet to the chest that would eventually prove fatal, the scrappy war fighter had himself strapped to his horse so that he could lead one last cavalry charge against the Confederate lines.
Josephine, known to all in the family as Effie, triumphed over the loss to spend forty years pioneering social reforms for poor children and women. She was the best-known female philanthropist of her day, in an era when women were beginning to attack some of the ills of society. In 1913 she would become the first woman New York would honor with a civic monument, the Josephine Shaw Lowell Fountain in Bryant Park.
Edith Minturn grew up at Aunt Effie’s feet, hearing stories of Effie and Susanna knitting mittens for the front and tirelessly repacking boxes of donations for Union soldiers. Effie gave Edith the sense of being part of something bigger, the fight for racial and social justice.
Progressives such as Josephine Lowell worked to improve the problems wrought by industrialization. The United States now had great cities and had tamed its frontier, but troubles plagued some Americans still. Reformers at first focused on women’s rights and temperance, then on child labor, government corruption and other issues, driven by the belief that man was capable of improving social conditions. How common was it for industrialists and financiers to engage in philanthropy? Not all the rich made an attempt to cure society’s ills, but quite a few did.
Wealth married to social responsibility. But in the years following Emancipation, abolitionism receded as a cause around which progressives could be rallied. The offspring of the well-matched Shaw and Minturn families, including Edie and her siblings, found themselves as concerned, perhaps, with fashion trends as they were with political banners.
Aunt Josephine was the family’s moral compass, and it was she who escorted the two eldest Minturn girls to Europe in the spring of 1884, when they were in their late teens, on a trip that would combine sightseeing and visiting with relatives. May, at nineteen, and Edie, two years younger, were the closest of any of the Minturn siblings. They often attended events together, traveled and paid calls together. Now, as a special experience made possible by the success of their father’s business, they would go to Europe together. Aunt Josephine had her own daughter Lottie in tow. The Minturn filles were given an inside view of English society by a collection of family relations who had married into the gentry.
Susanna wrote long, chatty missives to her daughters every day. In a letter of April 4, 1884, she admonished them to behave like proper young misses: “Be sure to talk low in England—& don’t giggle—& don’t procrastinate! When you go to Aunt Susie’s wear your grey dresses—they are so becoming and lady-like.”
When they left London for Paris after a month of family visits, they should set their minds to assembling a wardrobe of pretty things, Susanna exhorted. Summer dresses both white and colored at Bon Marché in Paris for themselves, as well as thick wool coats and hats and cotton jumpers to ship home for their baby brother, umbrellas and Bibles as gifts for their sisters, caps to have made up for Grandma and, if they could manage it, a Shetland wool shawl for their mother (“Not very fine, as I want it for use”). Money for these purchases regularly arrived in London, with constant offers of more if they needed it.
Susanna also directed her daughters to take every opportunity for sightseeing (“after all the shopping is over”), in order to experience the grand historic places in England. They were to do the same in Paris—if they risked a visit there despite a raging cholera epidemic—or in Scotland and Italy if Aunt Effie deemed the French trip unwise. “I hope you can get over to the Continent,” Susanna wrote. “You need not go to Paris at all, but could get to Genoa by way of the Rhine.” London, Paris, Genoa and Rome were must-see stops on any upper-crust tour.
There was good news from the home front, too. Bob, the family’s idolized eldest son, collected his undergraduate degree from Harvard that spring and joined the firm of “Mr. Morgan.” “Altogether I’ve blossomed into a very remarkable person,” Bob wrote. “So much so in fact, that I quite long to appear at Hastings in an alcoholically befuddled condition in order to destroy at one blow the good repute in which I now stand and put an eternal seal on the lips which have been shouting in chorus ‘How perfectly splendid.’”
Susanna slipped in some worrisome news as well. Robert Minturn had been working too hard, becoming weak and rundown. But sojourns up the river to Hastings, “playing on the piazza with Baby,” indulging in croquet games with Mildred and Gertrude and peaceful walks to town were amazingly curative.
“He looks pretty well again and seems brighter,” wrote Susanna.
The news from home did not improve for long. Over the course of the summer, as Edie and May gaily toured Europe, business at Grinnell, Minturn & Co. began to fall off. Robert and Susanna struggled to keep up appearances, but it became clear the family needed to drastically cut its expenses. Susannah found herself explaining staunchly to her progeny that come fall, economics dictated that they move into a smaller house. The new place was really very sweet, and the important thing was that they were all healthy and would be together.
It is hard to give up on “dear home,” but we must not mind it. When I look back & think how I cared nothing at all about our dear home after our darling little Frankie died, & wanted never to see it again, for a long time, & then look round at all our dear ones (except Frankie) still with us after so much illness, I cannot help but feel most thankful that it is really the house that we have to give up & not one of our dear ones who make our home. So let us all give the house up as cheerfully as we can, with grateful hearts for all our blessings.
The girls returned from Europe to a family thoroughly chastened by the reversal of fortune. Family lore would attribute the worst of the crisis to a nameless “agent in Havana” who absconded with sums of the firm’s money. Perhaps this was but a simplified version told to the children to help them make sense of the situation.
Edith and May were immediately packed off to Canada. The family tried to make the best of their situation, with father and mother referring brightly in their letters to all the interesting experiences their daughters must be having in Quebec. (“How would you like to live in Quebec? Is it cheap? And free from hay fever? These are the two questions I shall always ask in the future!” wrote Susanna.) But the girls must have felt themselves banished from New York City, with Edie’s debut into society essentially on hold.
Then Susanna wrote to Canada with more bad news. It turned out the family could not afford even a small house of their own. The Minturn brood would now shoehorn themselves into the residence of Robert’s parents at Fifth Avenue and 12th Street. It was humiliating: at age forty-nine, after a successful career in international shipping, Robert was moving back in with his mother.
Susanna emphasized to her children that the women of the house, Robert’s sister Bessie and his mother Anna, considered themselves put upon for having to help their down-on-their-luck relations. The feathers of the grand dames should definitely not be ruffled any further. “One must just give up all hope of making any of the rooms pretty with our own pretty things,” wrote Susanna. “It is only in giving up all personal wishes that we can get on, & make the thing work. Of course I am very sorry, but there is no help for it. Perhaps in another year we can have a small house of our own.” The family “must make the best of it,” Susanna continued, “and only be thankful we are not living in an old dirty boarding-house.” The girls must be glad for a home “offered to us kindly and generously.”
In an almost cruel note, Susanna sought to find a silver lining in the dark cloud hovering over her daughters: “I fancy, in this case, that as soon as it is known Papa is no longer a rich man, the attentions [of young men] will drop off naturally. This is one advantage of not being well-off, for then a girl knows when attention is really to be valued.”