CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Alva
NEW YORK, 1877
Months passed and nothing changed. Consuelo was in Europe with her future husband, and other than attending a few dinner parties with Emily and James Van Alen, Alva felt abandoned. With no one else to turn to, she found herself gravitating toward the only person who seemed to understand her: Jeremiah Vanderbilt. As of late, they’d become quite good friends. He would come to her house or she would go to his, a modest brownstone equally modest in its furnishings.
“For a Vanderbilt, you really don’t know how to spend your money,” she’d said the first time she was invited to his place.
He laughed, reaching for a cigarette.
“Have you noticed,” she’d said, “that all Vanderbilt houses look the same inside? Everything is always done in that god-awful mossy green.”
“Well, you know what they say, just because you have money doesn’t mean you have taste.” He’d laughed again.
“You’re certainly right about that.”
He struck a match, and there, with his handsome face inches from the flame, she saw a hint of madness, but also a flash of genius. His wit and timing were uncanny. And yet, when he wasn’t uttering quips and being sarcastic, he could be intensely deep and sensitive. He knew when and how to make her laugh and when to keep quiet and commiserate. He’d done just that when Alva learned she wasn’t invited to Emily’s wedding, when Mrs. Astor snubbed her at Tiffany & Company and again after Alva had dropped off her third calling card for Mrs. Astor.
The more time they spent together, the more she marveled at his uniqueness. He was a true original who did his own thinking and didn’t care what others thought of him.
Alva remembered the first time she’d met Jeremiah’s companion, George Terry. He was a short, stocky man with a handsome face and round oversize spectacles, which he’d removed upon their introduction, as if to get a better look at her.
“So this is Alva,” he said, shaking her hand. “I understand that you’ve been a very good friend to Jeremiah. He needs a good friend like you.”
She was moved by what he’d said and hadn’t realized until then just how difficult life must have been for someone like Jeremiah.
“I’m not ashamed,” he’d said to her one day, unprompted, out of the blue. They were walking down Seventh Avenue. Jeremiah liked walking. Said it cleared his head and swore the exercise kept his spells, as he called them, at bay. “George is my best friend. My favorite person on the planet.”
“I thought I was your favorite person on the planet,” she teased.
“Next to you of course.” He looped his arm through hers. “If we had half a brain, George and I would move to Paris.”
“Why don’t you? I’ll come visit.”
“Takes money,” he said. “Now you’d think my father would like it if I’d—poof—disappear. But no. He’s cut my allowance. Again. So now I can’t leave. I’m stuck here. At least for the moment until I can turn things around.” Jeremiah was on a losing streak. “The Commodore—”He shook his head and laughed. “Come on now, who calls themselves ‘the Commodore’? It’s ridiculous. The man’s an absolute loon. And don’t be fooled by his old man act. Watch him, I mean it. He’s calculating. And mean. Do you know that he once put my hand in a keystone press?” He held out the evidence.
Alva studied the mangled fingers, having always wondered what had happened to his hand.
“And that’s nothing compared to what Billy used to do to me. He used to chase me around with a hook wrench. He’d catch me right in the collar and drag me around. So much for brotherly love, huh?” He laughed.
Alva thought about her own sisters. There were times she’d chased Julia and Jennie around the house with her hairbrush or anything else she could get her hands on. Armide was bigger than her, so she never dared. Their fights were always verbal.
“Sometimes I can’t believe Billy and I have the same blood running through our veins,” Jeremiah was saying now. “I don’t think like a Vanderbilt.”
“Well, thank goodness for that.”
“You want my advice? Be careful. Keep your guard up. The Vanderbilts are ruthless people. They get in your system. They’ll warp your mind if you let them. Given half a chance, they make you think you’ve gone mad.”
* * *
—
Alva decided to follow Consuelo’s advice, and after several more attempts, she was finally granted a meeting with August Belmont, the Academy of Music’s impresario.
It was raining the day of her meeting, a steady downpour, peppered with sleet, the temperatures on the brink of changing to snow. The Academy was located on East Fourteenth Street and Irving Place, in a pocket of Manhattan that had once been the pinnacle of New York society. Now that had changed. Alva passed by a sign for Tony Pastor’s, a raunchy vaudeville house in the basement of Tammany Hall, located next door to the opera house. The sidewalk was crowded and she had to weave through clusters of protestors, men and women, hoisting signs that read EMPLOYMENT FOR JOBLESS MEN, WE SHALL FIGHT UNTIL WE WIN, WORK OR RIOT. Some of the lettering blurred, the paint running in the rain. As she passed them, she recognized the same anger and determination etched in their faces, regardless of their causes. She wondered what pushed a person to the point that they’d stand on a street corner on a miserable wet day like that.
After shaking the rain from her umbrella just outside the front door, Alva found a young woman with a very pointy chin waiting for her inside. She was polite, and overly formal as she showed Alva into a dark, cavernous office just off the lobby. “Mr. Belmont will be with you momentarily, Mrs. Vanderbilt.” She practically bowed as she closed the door.
Alva took one of the chairs opposite the desk, hooking her umbrella over the arm. A puddle of rainwater immediately began collecting on the floor, and she regretted not having left the umbrella in the lobby. She scooted her chair over just a bit to hide the one puddle while another, slightly smaller one began forming.
On her carriage ride over, Alva had recalled Tessie Oelrichs saying that Mr. Belmont was a Jew—the only Jew to have gained acceptance into society, as far as she knew. She had been nervous about the meeting, but once Mr. August Belmont walked in, all her foreboding seemed to have been for naught. August Belmont, a slight man, clean-shaven with distinguished graying temples, could not have been more welcoming, apologizing for keeping her waiting, even offering her tea and biscuits.
“Now tell me, what can I do for you, Mrs. Vanderbilt?” He smiled and sipped his tea as his spectacles rode down his nose.
“First, I’d like to thank you for making time in your busy schedule to meet with me,” she said, sounding as if she’d just arrived from the Deep South.