New York - The Novel

would have agreed—was to raise their social position. Indeed, for a married woman of her class and time, blessed, or cursed, with ambition, there wasn’t much else one could do.
    The question before her was by no means simple. There were many things to calculate, opportunities to seize, social pitfalls to avoid. And the further up the social scale one went, the more one’s freedom of choice was restricted.
    Where was the family going to live?
    Not in the summer, of course; that was settled long ago. They’d always be at the cottage.
    Every family needed a cottage. By “cottage,” of course, one meant a summer house on the coast. It might be modest or it might be a mansion, but that’s where mothers and children spent the summer months, and one’s husband, assuming he had work to do in the city, came for weekends. And the truly fashionable had cottages in Newport, Rhode Island.
    Newport had been chosen for good reason. As the British and French had discovered in centuries past, its harbor was deep, sheltered and magnificent. The New York Yacht Club, which now trounced Britain’s elite Royal Yacht Squadron in the America’s Cup every year, had its home there. Newport’s many miles of unspoiled shoreline provided space for all the cottages that society might need—indeed, more than enough, for Newport society was exclusive. Once one belonged in Newport society, one had reached the top.
    Naturally, presence was required. A couple of years ago, when her husband had taken her to London for the season, she had still insisted that she be back in Newport by the second week in July. Of course, with dozens of American heiresses already married into the English aristocracy, and a regular American colony now enjoying the British capital, some fashionable folk—the “steamer set”—preferred to winter in New York and summer in London. But Rose liked to be seen in Newport. “Otherwise,” she informed her husband, “people might think we’ve fallen off the end of the Earth.”
    Newport was perfect for the summer. The problem was New York.
    The family was well represented in the city. William’s grandmother, old Hetty Master, was still in isolated splendor at Gramercy Park. His father Tom had recently bought the late Mr. Sean O’Donnell’s splendid house on Lower Fifth, after he died on a return voyage from England. And for the last few years, William and Rose had been renting a fine place, further up the avenue. But now the owner wanted it back, and it was time to buy a place of their own.
    “You’d better decide where we go, Rose,” William had genially remarked. “Brooklyn or Queens, Manhattan or the Bronx. Staten Island if you like. So long as it’s in the city.”
    Technically, of course, all the outlandish places he mentioned were part of the city now. Just before the new century began, these surrounding areas—Brooklyn and Queens County on Long Island, part of the old Dutch Bronx estate above Manhattan to the north, and rural Staten Island across the harbor to the south—had all been incorporated within the expanded City of New York. Brooklyn, proudly independent, had only just been persuaded to join. But the resulting Five Boroughs of New York made the metropolis, after London, the most populous city in the world.
    And there were splendid houses, and pleasant parks, and delightful open country in any one of those five boroughs. But Rose Master wasn’t free to choose them. The family could only live in Manhattan, and not in many places there.
    Lower Manhattan was out. The area of the old city was all commercial now. Even the pleasant areas around Greenwich Village or Chelsea, a little to the north and west, had been overrun with immigrants, and turned into tenements mostly. Respectable New York had moved gradually north, and kept on moving. The fine old Broadway stores, like Tiffany’sthe jewelers, had moved uptown with their customers. Lord & Taylor, and Brooks Brothers, both fashionable now, were already in the Twenties.
    Then there was the question of noise. After the terrible blizzard of 1888 had brought the city to a standstill, everyone had agreed that the telegraph wires should be buried underground. This was easy to do, and it had improved the look of the place. Many people also argued for underground transport, which would be out of sight, and impervious to weather. But this was taking much longer. So for the time being, the El trains, with their noise and smoke, and tracks running