New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [328]
He’d been invited to lunch by Hetty Master. The old lady must be over ninety now, he thought, so he didn’t want to disappoint her. The last time they’d met had been at his father’s, a week ago. The discussion had been all about the extraordinary goings-on with these girls in the garment industry. Perhaps she wanted to talk about that. He really didn’t care. When he’d satisfied the old lady, he was going to walk round to his father’s and stay for dinner.
Fifth Avenue was sedate on Sundays. He passed the red-brick facade of the Metropolitan Museum, and continued down the long strand where the palaces of the millionaires gazed at Central Park. In the Fifties, he crossed to the west side of the street to avoid a crowd of people coming out of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. At Forty-second, he noted that the new library with its magnificent classical facade was almost complete. But it was not until he got all the way down to Twenty-third, where Broadway made its great diagonal cut across Fifth, that Edmund Keller smiled with pleasure.
There it was: the Flatiron Building.
There were some tall buildings uptown these days, but it was only when you got to the Flatiron Building that you entered the realm of the real skyscrapers. The Flatiron Building, however, was one of a kind. Over twenty floors high, on a triangular groundplan at the intersection of the two great boulevards, and looking at Madison Square, it was one of the most elegant landmarks in the city. The narrow corner offices were especially prized.
Edmund Keller liked skyscrapers. He supposed it was natural that commercial and financial men in the crowded world of Wall Street should try to get the maximum use out of the sites their offices occupied, which meant building up. In the last twenty years, the development of iron girder construction had meant that the weight of buildings no longer had to be carried by their walls, but could be cheaply and effectively carried by huge networks of steel. Back in the Middle Ages, medieval builders had been able to raise soaring buildings using pillars of stone and complex frameworks of wood, but these structures were massively expensive. Steel construction, by contrast, was simple and cheap.
Yet it was also in the spirit of the age, he thought, that the mighty business titans of America should send their buildings soaring into the sky, so that they could look out, like eagles, upon the vast new continent. And if the summits of the buildings were like mountain tops, he foresaw that the avenues between them would soon be great canyons, down which the daylight would come striding, bold as a giant.
From the Flatiron Building to Gramercy Park was a short walk, not even five blocks. As the butler opened the door, the buzz of voices told Keller that he was to join quite a large company. He did not see that, behind him, a silver Rolls-Royce was drawing up by the curb.
As Rose caught sight of Edmund Keller, she nodded to herself. She’d managed to keep him at a distance quite effectively so far. Once, he’d come round to call at the house during the afternoon, and she’d told the butler to say she was “Not at home.” It was standard social procedure, and he’d gone on his way. A while later he had written a brief letter to say that he hoped to call, and she had sent an equally polite reply to say that as one of the children had measles, this would be a bad idea. He hadn’t troubled her after that. Seeing him entering Hetty’s house now, she thought: Well, if socialist Mr. Keller was coming, that just proved how right she was to intervene. And if he wanted war, he was going to get it.
“This is where we get out,” she said to the two young people who accompanied her. And a few moments later she was sweeping them past the astonished butler.
She was smiling brightly, though as she saw the other guests gathered in the