New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [304]
“I’m sure it will be all right, William. Remember what happened in March.”
There had been some anxious days that spring. After a period of easy credit, it had suddenly emerged that several significant companies were in trouble. Then an earthquake had hit California, there had been panic selling in the market, and credit had become tight. The trouble had subsided, but all through the summer while she and the children were at Newport, rumbles had come up from the city as the market went up and down uncertainly.
She knew William took risks—plenty of people did—and this was not the first time her husband had suffered an attack of nerves; she didn’t suppose it would be the last, either.
“We’ll talk about it tonight,” she said. “I have to take your grandmother out now.”
She was wearing a hat with an ostrich feather round the brim, and a coat trimmed with fox fur as she stepped out of the house on Fifty-fourth Street. She had done very well in finding that house. It stood between Fifth and Madison, a little closer to the latter, just a few blocks below Central Park therefore, and close to the great mansions of the Vanderbilts on Fifth. But as it happened, the side streets here were even better than the avenue.
She’d sensed it at the time she was looking. The character of Fifth was about to change—not further up along the park, but here, at the great fashionable intersection of thoroughfares. And sure enough, within a few brief years of their purchase, the change had come.
Hotels. The St. Regis and the Gotham. Splendid hotels, to be sure, but hotels all the same, on Fifth at Fifty-fifth. Now a commercial building was going up on the block above. Rumor said that Cartier, the Paris jewelry firm, intended to be there. Nothing could be more elegant, but it was not a private house. The side streets were another matter, though; they would remain as residences.
A few doors down lived the Moore family. He was a rich lawyer, and they had a fine, five-story limestone townhouse, three classical windows wide, with a central entrance between railings and lamps, and a carved stone balcony at the piano nobile floor. The Master house was one of several big brownstones in the same block, with steps coming down over the stoop. Not so handsome, certainly, but impressive enough.
Rose kept a careful eye on the Moore household, using it as a yardstick. The Moores had nine servants in the house. William and Rose had six—a Scottish butler, an English nanny, the rest of the domestic staff being Irish. Twice a week, the children went across Central Park to Durland’s Riding Academy on West Sixty-sixth. It was with a sense of general satisfaction, therefore, that she started down the steps to the street.
If she had only known what old Mrs. Hetty Master had in store for her that day, she would have gone straight back into her house.
Instead of which, she smiled. For in front of her now, gleaming like the chariot of Apollo, was a new possession that marked the family out from even the richest in New York. As the chauffeur held the door for her, she stepped in.
“This is nothing to do with me,” she would exclaim with a laugh. “It’s my husband’s little madness.” His insane extravagance, certainly.
To say that William Master was a fanatic for the motor car would have been an understatement. The last twenty years had seen huge changes in the city: the quieter cable-car lines up Third and Broadway, the recent electrification of the El trains. Why, even the horse-drawn cabs were being replaced with motorized cabs with taxi meters now. Private motor cars, however, were for the rich.
Even so, there were quite a few makers to choose between, from the Oldsmobile curved dash, the first mass-produced car, to the more expensive Cadillac, named after the aristocratic French founder of Detroit, and the many models of Ford. William Master knew them all. He could discourse on the benefits of Ford’s top-of-the-line Model K, which would set you back an astonishing $2,800, over eight times the price of an Oldsmobile,