1896

“She has shown it to me, my dear boy, your gift!—she has it hanging in the library at Windermere. You prove yourself quite the tactician.”

Mrs. Belmont was speaking of the aquarelle Franklin had made for Mrs. Newcombe—“Ellen” to him now—or more precisely, she was speaking of what the aquarelle indicated: his genius for the business of wooing, the little gifts and asides, the doting touch, the planted detail. Or to put it another way: his talent for deceit, for duplicity, the treachery of his smiles and—lately—of his kisses. But he chose to misunderstand her.

“You are too flattering of my watercolors,” he said and he inclined his head in a little bow, as if accepting Mrs. Belmont’s flattery all the same. “They are poor things. Though genuine expressions of my affections.”

“Ah!” said Mrs. Belmont knowingly.

He had spent the last month learning to ride a bicycle. The accompanying humiliation—how he had smiled the whole time!—had been for him the figure of his surrender, the compact to which he affixed his name, the covenant (oh, he could go on!) by which he sold his life as the Free Young Man, and put on the Uxorious Harness. The whole time he had kept up a cheerful dim-wittedness (it was, after all, her dead husband’s bicycle he was learning to ride: there was an indecent metaphor somewhere there, by god!), had even apologized profusely to Mrs. Newcombe’s footman—poor Hobbes!—who had had to run alongside him those first few days, steadying him as he pedaled, Hobbes with his stiff collars knocked awry and his beautifully polished shoes scuffed. They had kept at first to the walkways of Windermere, then when that grew tame had ventured out onto Bellevue and Ochre Point, until finally as his chef d’oeuvre they had bicycled out to Ocean Drive in the buffeting wind, lunch-basket strapped to Mrs. Newcombe’s machine, the two of them in their bicycling outfits, seagulls laughing overhead, the occasional carriage or trap passing, everyone hooting hello to everyone.

The aquarelle he had made of that day—and which was now hanging in the library at Windermere—had been of the breakwater where they had had their lunch. He had used a good deal of yellow ochre that the day might appear golden, the breakwater jutting into the sun-spangled water, and two figures—a man and a woman—out at the very end of the jetty, seated facing away from the viewer, the silver surf threatening to souse them, the distance and their postures making it impossible for the casual viewer to identify them—they were merely an emblematic couple—but that of course was the beauty of the gesture: she knew who it was who sat there in intimacy, in the exquisite gold of the moment. (The damned bicycles he couldn’t help putting in—like the devil in a medieval panel—an infernal suggestion in the lower left.)

“You should not minimize your achievement in painting,” Mrs. Belmont went on to say. They had stopped at a little gazebo that sat quaintly on the grounds of Belcourt.

“My achievement?” he said with a wry look. He merely painted charming scenes, he said, gave them round to friends.

But the remark was but a prelude, for she went on to wonder (all the time appearing to be spontaneous, to be thinking out loud): Could he not collect together fifteen or twenty of his pictures—she would lend him her own Angel in a Snowstorm, as would (she was sure) Mrs. Newcombe her Lovers upon the Jetty—and could they not persuade the Athenaeum to mount a show of his work? Did not Mrs. Newcombe sit on the board of directors? Ah: there was an idea! They could get up a fund-raiser for the Redwood Library, a charity event, champagne and cakes to be served, all proceeds benefiting etc. Better make it twenty pictures.

He saw what she was after, the tentacled Monster. He was, as he had said that first day to Ellen, a flanking action in Mrs. Belmont’s war, and this show of his paintings would be yet a further advance. How the woman worked! Miss Alva Smith of Mobile, Alabama! (He called her that from time to time, when he was being the dear bad boy.) When she had first married into the Vanderbilts, they and their dirty railroads were not included among the Four Hundred. Yet she had worked it so, induced her husband to build a fabulous mansion on Fifth Avenue (Franklin had twice been inside), and then let it be known that she would be giving a masquerade ball that would surpass any other such affair. She had planted delightful rumors, little anxieties, and when expectation had reached a frenzy had said, alas, she could not invite Mrs. William Astor’s daughter since Mrs. William Astor had yet to call on her in her new home. And that had been that. Mrs. Astor had come like the Pope to Napoleon, and Napoleon had lifted the crown off Mrs. Astor’s head and lowered it onto her own. Now with her divorce and her remarriage to O. H. P. Belmont (who was forever away riding his horses and sailing his yachts and shooting his guns), she meant to destroy the world of the Four Hundred. Or at least to so remake it in her own image—season it with suffragettes and artists and the Political Equality League (with the occasional moneyed divorcée sprinkled in)—that it would be unrecognizable to Old New York. Was not the twentieth century just around the corner?

Well! he did not mind! If he was a profiteer in this war, if she promoted him for her own reasons—Franklin Drexel with his looks and his charm and his watercolors—that suited him. If it meant he must assemble his ink drawings and his aquarelles—she was already telling him to make a list of those to whom he had given pictures: she would prevail upon them—then so be it. Such a public show (it was unclear to him whether it was for the benefit of the Redwood Library or the Athenaeum: what the devil was the difference anyway?), such a show would have the double-barreled virtue of assigning him an identity as both artist and as a member of the benefactor caste. It would be yet another golden light in which to allow Mrs. Newcombe to see the fineness of his features.

Mrs. Belmont asked him now whether he would be at the pavilion ball ten days hence. They had started down the long drive toward the gilt-tipped gates that opened onto Ledge Road. He was, he supposed, being dismissed.

“Mrs. Newcombe will be going, I know,” he temporized.

“Then you must be of my party. There will be a passel of us. Strength in numbers.”

He inclined his head, acknowledging her generosity, accepting. “I believe,” he said after a minute, “her father will be there.”

“Mr. Ryckman?”

“He’s coming up from New York.”

At which she raised her brow. “To meet you?”

He equivocated. “I’m told it has been the old gentleman’s custom to spend some time each summer at Windermere with his daughter. And of course, his grandchildren.”

“He’s coming to meet you,” she said in her blunt way. “Depend upon it.”

He let that pass, said instead that he believed there were, in these matters, always fathers with which to contend.

“He may not,” he pointedly intoned, “be coming to affix his signature to the deal.”

She waved him away. “Mrs. Newcombe is a grown woman. She has two children. She is not a debutante. She does not need her father’s approval.”

For once—in his manner, in his speech, in his thought—he was the sober one. “He is the kind of man, I’m led to believe, who will have made inquiries.”

She turned a clouded face to him. What was he saying?

“He will no doubt have discovered that I am—” he let the possibilities hang dangerously, deliciously, in the air—“that I am not of your . . . of Mrs. Newcombe’s set. That I am—” he wielded the term like a bludgeon—“what is commonly referred to as a ‘remittance man.’”

“You are an artist.”

“Is Mr. Ryckman such a great lover of art?”

She pursed her lips as if she saw how that line led to an unpleasant check. “Let me work on him. Mrs. Auld and I. And I believe he is an acquaintance of Mrs. Lydig’s husband.”

“Ah!” he intoned with a grateful bow of his head. “But let me first find out which way the wind blows. Let me meet Mr. Ryckman, see if he is immune to my particular charm.” And he smiled at her, clicked his heels like a Prussian officer. “I shall report back.”

“If you think so,” she said.

“I would prefer—” and he paused, as if thinking through a delicate point—“I would prefer that Mrs. Newcombe believe that she has won me on her own. That it is a matter between the two of us. A matter exclusively of the heart. If that’s not possible, there will be time for you to bring up the horses and cannon.”

They had come to the gates. She stopped and extended her hand to him, and when he shook it, held on to him meaningfully. She turned her pugilist’s face up to him.

“I must say, my dear boy, I did have my doubts about you.”

“How so?” he charmingly wondered.

She had not been convinced, she said, of his determination, of his ability to set his shoulder to the work that must be done. She lifted her face, seemed to smell the breeze as if it were the smell of one of her successes.

“In short,” she said, “I was not sure you possessed the instinct to—” and she paused as if in search of a word, or perhaps to judge him one last time—“the instinct to go in for the kill.”