New York - The Novel

Rutherfurd and Jay. But sprinkled all over the list were great names, still rich, and going back to the region’s seventeenth-century beginnings: Van Rensselaer, Stuyvesant, Winthrop, Livingston, Beekman, Roosevelt. If Mrs. Astor wanted to keep the quiet wealth of old New York as the example of how things should be done, then you’d have to acknowledge she’d pulled it off.
    When Rose met her future husband William, the first thing she had discovered, even before his heaven-sent second name, was that the old-money Masters were on Mrs. Astor’s list. And when after her marriage, old Mrs. Astor had taken her up, Rose became a willing acolyte. Many an afternoon she had sat at her feet, to learn the finer points of social etiquette.
    Only one of these rules had caused her any difficulty.
    “Mrs. Astor says,” she’d told William, “that one should always arrive at the opera after the performance has started, and leave before it ends.”
    It was an interesting idea, imported from Old Europe, where the best people went to the opera to be seen. Presumably, if the artists ever had the good fortune to perform for an audience composed entirely of aristocrats, there would be a mass exodus just before the end, leaving them to conclude their opera to a silent and empty house—and thus, most conveniently, obviate the tiresome need for curtain calls and flowers.
    “I’ll be damned if I’m going to miss the overture and the finale when I’ve paid good money for it,” her husband had quite reasonably replied. He might have added that it was an insult to the music, the artists and the rest of the audience. But he had wit enough to know that this was part of the point. Aristocrats were supposed to be above the music, and care not a bean for the feelings of the artists or the audience. “You can go,” he’d told her, “but I’m staying.”
    And indeed, Rose might have hesitated to observe this convention herself if she hadn’t felt a loyalty to Mrs. Astor.
    She and William found a compromise, however. Rose would leave just before the end of the opera and wait in the carriage a few yards down the street so that, as soon as William came to join her, they could get away quickly from the vehicles of the less instructed.

    “When I think,” she now remarked to Hetty Master, “of the way Mrs. Astor was treated, by her own family, it just makes my blood boil.”
    It was Mrs. Astor’s young nephew who was the culprit. He’d lived in the house next door. And because his father had died, and he could claim, technically, that he was the head of the family, he had demanded that it was his wife who should now be called Mrs. Astor, and that Caroline must revert to the less senior appellation of Mrs. William Astor.
    “Of course,” Rose said, “he was never a gentleman. He even wrote historical novels.”
    Anyway, Mrs. Astor had quite rightly refused. Age and reputation should be given their due. So in a huff, young Astor had left for England, and not returned. He’d even become a British citizen, like the turncoat he was. For a man to let his daughter marry an English aristocrat was one thing, in Rose’s opinion, but to become an Englishman himself was quite another.
    “They tell me he lives in a castle now,” Hetty Master remarked. It was quite true. He’d bought Hever Castle, in Kent, the childhood home of Anne Boleyn. “Perhaps he’ll write another novel there,” she added.
    But he’d taken his revenge on his aunt all the same. He’d turned his former New York house into a hotel, thirteen stories high. It towered over hers, destroying all her privacy. He called it the Waldorf.
    Four years later she’d admitted defeat and moved uptown. The Astor family rebuilt her house as a second hotel, the Astoria, and soon the two had been joined, by the gorgeous Peacock Alley, into a single establishment. Rose still refused to set foot in it.
    “Mrs. Astor deserves a statue in her honor,” Rose stated with finality.
    There was a pause.
    “They say,” said Hetty, “that she’s entirely demented nowadays.”
    “She’s not well,” Rose conceded.
    “Well, I hear she’s demented,” said Hetty, inexorably.
    The Rolls-Royce passed into the Forties. The old reservoir was no longer in use now, and they were building a magnificent new public library on the site. Everyone in the family knew that this was where Frank had proposed to Hetty, and Rose maintained a reverent silence while Hetty gazed at it as they passed. Soon