The Jews in America Trilogy (40 page)

To join his new father-in-law, Sam Sachs was required to liquidate a small dry-goods business which he had been operating, and, to facilitate this, Marcus loaned Sam $15,000. The loan was to be repaid in three promissory notes of $5,000 each, over a three-year period. By the time Sam's and Louise's third son was born, Sam had repaid Marcus two of the three notes, and Grandfather Marcus, in his old-fashioned German script, wrote formally to his son-in-law to say that, in recognition of Sam's “energy and ability” as a partner, and in honor of little Walter's arrival, he was forgiving Sam the final payment. Louise Goldman Sachs, a sentimental sort, always kept her father's letter, along with the canceled note, in the little strongbox where she kept, tied in faded bows, her little boys' silky blond ringlets and, dated and labeled, all their baby teeth.

“And thus,” Walter Sachs was able to say years later, “it appeared that on the very first day of my entrance into this world, I concluded my first business deal for Goldman, Sachs.”

The Goldmans and the Sachses, however, were still relatively minor figures, socially, in the crowd. Two ladies had for years contended for social leadership—Mrs. Solomon Loeb and Mrs. Jesse Seligman. Betty Loeb was famous chiefly for her dinners, whereas Henriette Seligman was renowned for the large scale on which she lived and for her grand manner.

Henriette was a creature of habit. Her carriage always arrived at her door at precisely the same moment each day for her drive through Central Park, and neither the length nor the route of the excursion ever varied. She and Jesse entertained frequently, and, since Henriette believed that punctuality was not only a duty of royalty but a courtesy that royalty deserved, whenever her butler announced dinner, she arose and proceeded into the dining room, regardless of whether or not all her guests had arrived. When she traveled to Europe, as she did at intervals of clocklike regularity, she always engaged the same stateroom on the same steamship and, since her itinerary never varied, the same suites in the same hotels.

In Paris her hotel was, naturally, the Ritz, and once the old Kaiser Wilhelm was planning a state visit to Paris coincidental with Mrs. Seligman's. The Ritz, who knew Mrs. Seligman's preferences only too well, deemed it wise to go through the German ambassador to see if, just possibly, Mrs. Seligman would be willing to relinquish her suite for the Kaiser and accept another. Henriette replied that she was “not ready for a change of suite,” and that, though she was very sorry, nothing could be done. The Kaiser slept elsewhere.

She had, on the other hand, a true sense of
noblesse oblige
when it came to the sleeping habits of the working classes. Early one morning in her New York house, Henriette was awakened by a noise belowstairs. Convinced of the presence of a burglar, she rose and, in wrapper and slippers, descended to the parlor floor to find the culprit. She found no one there, and so, though she was extremely nearsighted and had left her glasses upstairs and had only a candle to light her way, she continued to the basement. There, in the darkness ahead of her, she heard the sound of running footsteps as the frightened prowler hurried to an open window and made his way out. Henriette proceeded to the window and cried out imperiously, “Do not return!” to the retreating figure in the street. Then she closed and bolted the window and went upstairs to bed.

The next day she told her friends and family of this episode at her customary hour for telling things, teatime. Someone asked her why she
hadn't waked her husband. “Mr. Seligman was recovering from an illness,” she replied. “I couldn't think of disturbing him.”

“But, Auntie,” said a nephew, “why didn't you ring for one of the menservants?”

She gave the young man a disapproving look. “My servants,” she said, “had done their day's work. It was my duty to put my home in order.”

The Seligman house stood in Forty-sixth Street near Fifth Avenue, and the Jay Gould mansion was a block to the north. Between these two residences stood a hotel called the Windsor, which burned down with a great loss of life. During the fire Henriette, with her customary considerateness, opened the lower floors of her house for use as a temporary hospital for the wounded and dying, and her daughters and maids served sandwiches and coffee to the firemen. Mrs. Seligman herself could not come down; the fire occurred at that hour of the day which she customarily devoted to her embroidery. It was here, over her needlework in her upstairs sitting room, that she agreed to receive the Fire Commissioner of the City of New York, who said he had come to deliver a message of some urgency, even though it was not the proper hour for callers. The Commissioner was ushered in, and explained that the shell of the Windsor seemed about to collapse, and that very likely a large portion of it would fall on Mrs. Seligman's house.

“Then, Commissioner, I do feel that the lady of the house should be present when that happens,” said Henriette, completing a stitch.

“Your roof has already caught fire three times,” said the Commissioner and, clearly aware that he was in the presence of a Personage, added, “I have come here to have the honor of escorting you out.”

“Thank you very much,” said Henriette, “but my menservants—” there were four—“are taking care of the roof.”

“Exactly. And I want them to continue doing just what they're doing—putting out the flames on the roof.”

Henriette gave him another of her stern looks. “Mr. Commissioner,” she said, “are you suggesting that I leave and my servants
stay?
”

“Of course.”

“If a house is safe enough for the servants, it is safe enough for the mistress,” said Mrs. Seligman, and went on with her embroidery.

At ten o'clock, her usual hour, she prepared to retire. As she rose to go to her bedroom, she said to one of her nephews, “If things become
too
dangerous, I count upon your waking me.” In her bedroom she undressed and turned down her bed. This was her only concession to the
situation, that she did not ring for one of her maids to turn down the coverlet for her.

A few feet away from her bedroom wall, a tower of flames rose into the night. Above her, through the night, her roof caught fire repeatedly. Just before midnight, the blazing husk of the Windsor tipped, swayed, and came thundering down, missing the Seligman house by inches and scattering fiery bricks on the roofs of the Seligmans' and the Goulds'. Mrs. Seligman slept on. The Goulds had evacuated their house hours before.

Babet Seligman, Joseph's widow, was a much more modest lady, who was always rather awed by the ways of her aristocratic sister-in-law. After her husband's death Babet went into heavy mourning, and, though she survived Joseph by nearly a quarter of a century, she never emerged from her widow's weeds and never again appeared at any large social gathering or public function. Her entertaining was limited to little family dinners. Edward, her coachman, also went into perpetual mourning for his master, in a black uniform with the monogram “J.S.” stitched in black on the sleeve. Edward, in fact, became Babet Seligman's one male friend. On their rides through the park they chatted through the speaking tube.

Quite another story was James Seligman's wife, Rosa. Rosa was a Content, and James married her when she was just seventeen, a beauty with a highly bred, olive-skinned Modigliani face and huge dark flashing eyes. But she had a violent and unpredictable temper, and the Contents had made it quite clear that they thought Rosa was marrying beneath her station, and that they had consented to the union simply because James Seligman was rich.

By the 1880's James's and Rosa's had become a notably unhappy marriage. Rosa was an excellent dancer, but James was not. “Germans,” she used to say contemptuously, “are always heavy on their feet.” She took her Content heritage seriously, and enjoyed referring to the Seligmans as “the peddlers.” It soon developed that she was an almost compulsive spender. James was miserly in his personal spending, but the family said that this was because it cost him so much to pay Rosa's bills. She demanded furs, dresses, jewels, and beautiful houses, and James got them for her. She insisted on numerous servants, and he hired them for her, even though she often pointed out that the servants had more distinguished pedigrees than the Seligmans. She had an English butler whose first name was the same as her husband's, and it amused her to say, in front of dinner guests, “James, will you please tell Jim that dinner is ready?”

She raised eight children, but would let none of them bring friends into the house, claiming that other people's children were inferior and probably germy. In her youth Rosa's behavior had been attributed to “temperament,” and she was considered “high-strung.” As she grew older, her conduct grew increasingly erratic, her outbursts and tantrums more frequent and alarming. Soon Seligman family letters began to refer darkly to “our family skeleton”—not a reference to Rosa, but to the fact that James had sought solace in a young mistress. Rosa began to spend most of her days in department stores, where she would astonish salesgirls by leaning across counter tops and whispering confidentially, “When do you think my husband last slept with me?”

Rosa Content Seligman may have been odd, but her children were even odder. One daughter, Florette, married Meyer Guggenheim's son, Benjamin (the “smelter” of the Seligmans' cablegram), and that union produced the art-collecting Peggy Guggenheim, who, in her autobiography, wrote that most of her Seligman aunts and uncles were “peculiar, if not mad.” She also insists that James and Rosa had eleven children, though
The Seligman Family Register
, privately published in 1913, lists only eight. What became of the other three, if they ever existed, is a family mystery. The eight remaining were certainly colorful.

One aunt, wrote Peggy Guggenheim,

was an incurable soprano. If you happened to meet her on the corner of Fifth Avenue while waiting for a bus, she would open her mouth wide and sing scales trying to make you do as much. She wore her hat hanging off the back of her head or tilted over one ear. A rose was always stuck in her hair. Long hatpins emerged dangerously, not from her hat, but from her hair. Her trailing dresses swept up the dust of the streets. She invariably wore a feather boa. She was an excellent cook and made beautiful tomato jelly. Whenever she wasn't at the piano, she could be found in the kitchen or reading the ticker-tape. She had a strange complex about germs and was forever wiping her furniture with Lysol. But she had such extraordinary charm that I really loved her. I cannot say her husband felt as much. After he had fought with her for over thirty years, he tried to kill her and one of her sons by hitting them with a golf club. Not succeeding, he rushed to the reservoir where he drowned himself with heavy weights tied to his feet.

Another of Rosa's daughters grew to be enormously fat. Despite this handicap she convinced herself that she had had a long and passionate
love affair with a druggist. She even knew his name—Balch. The family tried to persuade her that the druggist Balch was imaginary, but to no avail. She was so overridden with guilt and remorse that she became “melancholic” and had to be placed in a home.

James's son Washington had curious dietary theories, and lived on charcoal and cracked ice and almost no food. His teeth were black from chewing charcoal, and the ice he sucked between the bites of charcoal made him a somewhat noisy dinner companion. Whiskey was also a part of his diet, and he always had a glassful before breakfast. He had his suits constructed with a special zinc-lined pocket to hold his ice cubes, and once, when his tailor mistook Washington's instructions, Washington cried out, “No! No! The
right
pocket is to hold the ice! the
left
pocket is for the charcoal”—to the bewilderment of other customers in the shop. At a very early age he had adopted the practice of threatening to commit suicide unless his father gave him what he wanted and, as a result, he was permitted to keep his very own mistress in his room—a room none of the rest of the family was permitted to visit. He was certainly a trial. Finally, however, he carried out one of his threats and shot himself in the temple.

Another brother had a neurosis the opposite of his mother's. He refused to spend any money at all. In order to eat, he showed up at his relatives' houses at mealtimes, usually saying he wasn't hungry and then devouring everything in sight. He repaid his hosts with after-dinner entertainment; it was always the same. He placed chairs in a long row, and then slid and wiggled along the seats on his stomach. His act was called “the snake.”

Brother Eugene had been an infant prodigy, and was ready for college at the age of eleven. So as not, to be conspicuous, he waited three years and graduated from Columbia at eighteen with the highest honors in his class. He became a practicing lawyer, and a bachelor, whose only pronounced peculiarity was his obsession about cleanliness. He bathed six or seven times each weekday, and much oftener on Sundays. De Witt Seligman also had a law degree, but he never practiced. His favorite pastime was writing plays, none of which was ever produced. Playwriting experts used to say that De Witt had talent—at least for getting his characters into suspenseful situations and predicaments. The only trouble was, he could never quite figure out solutions for the troubles his characters had got themselves into. Invariably his plays ended in a way that reflected their author's dilemma: a gigantic explosion took place, eliminating everybody.

Jefferson Seligman had ways more beguiling than any of his brothers
and sisters. Jeff married a girl named Julia Wormser for whom he cared little. The couple soon separated, and Jeff took two small hotel rooms in the East Sixties where he began a life devoted to keeping young ladies clothed and warm. Peggy Guggenheim has said that her uncle's rooms were stocked with fur coats, and “Almost any girl could have one for the asking.” Geoffrey T. Hellman, on the other hand, has written that Jeff kept closets full of dresses from Klein's which were equally available to all his friends. Probably he went through a fur-coat period, and then, for reasons of economy, followed this with a dresses-from-Klein's period. It is known that his sister Florette once visited him and seized a supply of dresses in her size, saying, “I don't see why I shouldn't have some, too!”