"YOU get a Democrat in the White House," Papa used to say gloomily, "and you’ll see." The very vague- ness of what was foredoomed seemed to add to the dire quality of the catastrophe. Less than two months before his death, he struggled out of bed and insisted on being driven to the polls to cast his vote for Benjamin Harrison as President. Even if the effort cost him his life, he wasn’t going to risk going before his Maker without having done his best to stave off ruin to his beloved country. I had the pleasure, some years later, of telling Mr. Harrison of this sacri- fice on the part of my father; he seemed much touched.
Papa had a beautiful voice, one of those rare, true baritones, sympathetic, deep, but never approaching a bass rumble. Often, as a little child, I used to lie in my bed unable to sleep, listening to Papa entertaining guests in the parlor. Somehow it always made me ANNE NATHAN ‘MEYER, now eighty-four years old, has had a varied and active career as dra- matist, novelist, and worker in public causes.
As a pioneer in the cause of higher education for women, her greatest achievement was the founding of Barnard College; it was she who in I888 succeeded in obtaining the sanction of the Columbia University trustees for the opening of a women’s school, and she has served on Bar- nard’s board of trustees since its inception. Mrs.
Meyer is the author of a number of plays, in- cluding The Advertising of Kate (1921) and Black Souls (1932); the most recently pub- lished of her non-dramatic books was Barnard Beginnings (935). These memoirs of Mrs.
Meyer’s childhood are drawn from an auto- biographical volume as yet unpublished.
273 sad, for a man’s singing always evoked for me the lame beggars who used to go about the streets singing and collecting pennies from bystanders. I can remember distinctly how puzzled I was. When at last I sank into sleep, my mind was a confused jumble of Papa limping about with crutches, although not in the street but in the parlor, collecting pennies from well-dressed guests.
Papa delighted in surprising people with his voice. He related with great glee how skeptical sopranos used to be when he asked them to sing duets with him. And when he finally persuaded them, much against their will, to make the attempt, how delighted they were. I remember he had sung with Carlotta Patti, sister of the divine Adelina, and had thought her voice even more beau- tiful than her better-known sister’s. Carlotta was lame, so she did not have a professional career. I think she used to sing now and then for charity.
Papa was a great whist player. He was always one of the team that upheld the whistly honor of the Union Club, going from city to city when important out-of- town matches were on. His usual partner was a man named Henry Clay, although we were told he was no relation to the great Southerner. Papa had outspoken contempt for the way women played the game; he re- fused to honor it with the name of "whist" but called it "cranberries." But he made an exception of me and used to say that I had a head for the game-possibly his affection for his baby warped his judgment. He wanted me to study the game seriously, but cards never appealed to me.
Mama’s father was also a great whist ERM THE AMERICAN SENCOMMENTARY player, although we children were brought up to believe he could not approach Papa in his knowledge of the game. He was a small, dark, nervous man with a fringe of white hair encircling his shiny, pink bald pate. He was constantly clearing his throat in a loud and, to us children, quite fasci- nating manner. He wore strong spectacles on his thin, aristocratic nose and always claimed that he possessed very poor sight.
Papa, however, maliciously insisted that he had mighty sharp vision for a trump or a revoke on the part of an opponent, but could never see the outstretched hand of a beggar.
But then Papa, as I have intimated, either liked or disliked heartily; there were no half measures with him. In the end, all of Papa’s children were cut off in Grandfather Flor- ance’s will. His considerable fortune went to those who had sympathized with the South in the Civil War. So I suppose I can say that we four suffered for our country’s sake.
Since I was very dark, Grandfather Florance used to amuse himself by threat- ening to take me down South and sell me as a slave. (Slavery was over, but that didn’t spoil the joke for him. In fact he loved to speak, as did so many Southerners, as if Appomattox had never been.) "It’s lucky for you, child," he used to say, "that you’re not living in the South. You’d find yourself sold down the river in no time!" The grown- ups had rare fun watching the tears come to my eyes.
Mama did not always approve of Papa’s jokes. I don’t mean to imply for a moment that she had no sense of humor. I can still hear the little sniff with which she showed her appreciation if any of her brood of youngsters said anything quaint or amusing.
But she didn’t always agree with Papa about what was really funny. She was especially annoyed at one of his capers involving me.
Papa would proudly announce that, young as I was-somewhere around four, I think-I could spell my name. So, as yet unacquainted with the alphabet, I would glibly rattle off: "M-o-n-k-e-y-Annie!" It never failed to be greeted with laughter. And I never failed to be disgusted. I couldn’t see anything funny in being able to spell my name before most children could. Surely it was a feat to be applauded, not laughed at. But there was no predicting the behavior of grownups. No understanding them. For many years the name "Monkey" clung to me, although of course I hadn’t the slightest idea why.
nAPA, on the other hand, considered him- r self something of an artist as a joker and often went to great lengths to sustain this image of himself. At a time when everyone was anxious over a pestilence that was sweeping the city, he would seat himself in a Fifth Avenue bus, having arranged that his nephew and fellow conspirator Mortimer Hendricks was standing at the next corner ready to enter the same vehicle. On Mort’s entrance into the bus, Papa would assume an expression of great concern and anxiously inquire how he had left his friend. Cousin Mort would shake his head lugubriously and express the fear that his imaginary friend was doomed. Usually there was no need to say more. One by one the occupants of the bus would slip away as inconspicuously as possible, or if with one or two less nervous ones the joke failed to "take," the two pranksters would continue the conversation realistically until the bus was theirs and they would roll on the empty seats (two long benches, one on either side, not the cross seats of today) roaring with laughter at their success.
Mama particularly minded Papa’s pranks when they interfered with the peace of the household, and Papa was constantly prom- ising, and just as constantly forgetting, not to test out the sense of humor of our domestic servants. He would instruct the waitress, for example, to go on filling his glass with ice water until he said "when." He would hold out his glass slightly away from the table so the waitress would not wet the tablecloth, and she would start to pour.
"That will do," said he; and nine times out of ten she would stop. His indignation would be immense: "I told you to go on filling the glass," he would say, "until I said ‘when.’ Did you hear me say ‘when’?" He would look very fierce and often it ended with the maid bursting into tears and leaving the room, if not the house. Mama would run after her and explain that "Mr. Nathan" had a dreadful way of fooling with the maids, although he had promised again and again he would stop. Papa would be a bit ashamed of himself and for a while our meals would proceed in peace.
274PAPA, MAMA, AND GRANDFATHER FLORANCE But once he met his match. She was a new girl, but she seemed less flustered than most of them. I wouldn’t swear that Mama hadn’t put her wise, but anyway when Papa said, "That will do," she continued blandly to fill his glass. Surprised, Papa said, "That’s enough, thank you," but she appeared ob- livious. When the water began to drip onto the rug, he was forced to swallow his pride and say: "When," whereupon she stopped pouring and we all laughed. Papa, I regret to say, sulked. Like most jokers, he laughed at all who couldn’t take a joke, but if any- one paid him in his own coin, it was no laughing matter.
Another habitual joke of his that annoyed Mama extremely was his asking, at the din- ner table, "Who wants some of this dead fish?" On being reproved, he would answer mildly, looking up at us with his babyish blue eyes with the most innocent expression, "Why, it is dead, isn’t it? You wouldn’t want to eat a fish alive, would you?" He was in the habit of reading the Police Gazette, and it was his custom to stop at a news stand and ask with a grave and seri- ous air, "What religious papers have you?" The news dealer would list the Christian Union and whatever others he carried; and then Papa would pick up his copy of the Police Gazette and say with complete seri- ousness, "Well, I guess I’ll take this one," leaving the news dealer to grin with delight.
I never read Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People, without thinking of the scrape Papa got into at Richfield Springs, where he and I went one summer in search of a cure for his sciatica. As soon as he was well enough to think of anything but his illness, he was like a schoolboy at his pranks again.
Papa insisted that there wasn’t enough water in the sulphur springs to bathe every patient and have enough left for them to drink, and a friend of his spread the story that the water for the baths was led back to the source whence the drinking water came, and what they were all drinking every morning so conscientiously (many holding their noses so they could get the unpalatable stuff down) was what had been drained from the baths. The two grown-up boys even went to the trouble of drawing maps and plans showing how the bath water drained into the springs. When word of all this reached the authorities, I believe a suit was threatened. In any case, Papa and I left, more or less under a cloud. The doctors were frightfully indignant, but not more so than Papa himself, who always had the greatest contempt for those who couldn’t "take a joke." Considering that we were a large family -we Nathans together with the various off- shoots: the Hendrickses and the Seixases and the Florances-it was astonishing that we possessed no photographs of our ancestors or even of our contemporary relatives. The explanation was: Papa. A few daguerreo- types, not being of cardboard, escaped his predatory scissors. But all photographs aid all colored prints-some of the rarest of the Currier and Ives prints among them-Papa looked upon as his legitimate prey. He would take all sorts of pictures and give them a highly personal flavor by pasting upon them the contents of our family album. There rises before me a picture of three pedestrians much in the public eye at the time. It was supposed to be a scene taken from the famous Walking Match held at the old Madison Square Garden. Miraculously the match was transformed to one between Papa, Cousin Mort, and Cousin Monte, a handsome bachelor cousin who boasted of great popularity in New York society and always served as the fortune-teller in the fashionable "Kermesse" of the day. And also, miraculously, the onlookers crowding the bleachers consisted of cousins, uncles, and aunts, as many as Papa could lay his hands on; one ardent rooter was dignified old Rabbi Lyons, who had married Papa’s oldest sister.
(There was such a difference in their ages that Papa, concealed behind a sofa, heard him make his proposal; a giggle betrayed him and he was yanked out and punished.) It was all very amusing, certainly, but Mama was left to mourn the contents of her al- bums.
HE Florances, my mother’s people, were I an old Southern family that came from Portugal to Charleston, South Carolina, early in the i8th century, and later went to New Orleans, where my mother was born in I842. She grew up surrounded by slaves, and koew nothing of the household arts. In her young ladyhood, the family moved to Philadelphia. She used to enjoy telling how, when she set up housekeeping in New York, 275COMMENTARY in West Fifteenth Street near Fifth Avenue, shortly after her marriage in 859, her maid had inquired how she wished the potatoes cooked for dinner. In a panic, she hastily answered, "Oh, do them any way you are accustomed to," and then rushed around the comer to purchase a cookbook.
My mother’s mother must have been a remarkable woman. She was a daughter of that sturdy old patriot, Gershom Mendez Seixas, who suffered his synagogue to be closed rather than have his congregation pray for George the Third. He was one of the few Whigs, perhaps the only one, among the trustees of Kings College, which was later to become Columbia. He lived to have the satisfaction of assisting in the inaugura- tion of the first President of the United States. As Mrs. William Florance, of Phila- delphia, his daughter, my grandmother, played an important part in the life of the city. Her portrait, taken from a daguerreo- type in my possession, is admirably repro- duced in The History of Rittenhouse Square written by a scholarly Philadelphian.
She was a good deal of a Puritan, and the story was often told in our home of how some guest had come to one of her dinners dressed with less modesty than she would have at her table. My grandmother rose from her seat, ascended to her room, and re- turned carrying a light shawl which she put about the guest’s shoulders, remarking gently as she did so, "I am afraid, my dear, you must be chilly." So far as I know, the friv- olous lady succumbed without protest. There is something in the deep-set eyes looking out at you from the daguerreotype that lends credence to the tale.
Mama, without being a professional author, basked in the paler glory of pos- sessing literary talent. In those days, it was not considered quite polite to speak of a woman as a writer. One referred genteelly and somewhat deprecatingly to her having or indulging in a cacogthes scribendi. Mama had had some verses published in the Phila- delphia papers. It gave her a certain dis- tinction without, however, rendering her obnoxious to the average unliterary person.
She was sparkling, witty, a delightful con- versationalist, but she never could be classi- fied by any stretch of the imagination as that horror, a learned woman.
In those days, amateur theatricals claimed much more of the time of New York society women than they do now. Where today various good causes are served by dances or dinners, or by buying out some evening of a successful professional performance, in those days the same function was performed by amateur theatricals. I remember distinctly how Mama boasted of the many institu- tions which her club, the Amaranthine of Brooklyn, had assisted. There was the start- ing of some Boys’ Lodging House she was especially proud of. I have no idea why my mother was the leading lady of a Brooklyn society, for we never lived in Brooklyn.
Perhaps it was the best.
AMA knew a great many women of the 1MI stage and they were constantly coming to the house. The one with whom Mama was most intimate was Clara Morris. I won- der if anyone remembers her now? She was the American Sarah Bernhardt, clearly America’s greatest emotional actress and, like Bernhardt, she derived much of her fasci- nation from a certain air of mystery that clung to her. She was very thin, as was the divine Sarah, and her voice was also ex- quisitely melodious. Her face was ravaged by her great eyes. How perfectly I remember her sitting informally at the luncheon table where we children were also taking our meal. One of us, I am not certain that it was I, leaned forward and, quite unabashed by the lady’s presence, asked Mama how it came that she could be a dear friend of one whose teeth were so black. I can see Mama’s horrified expression. But Miss Morris, I remember, smiled a sad smile and murmured something to us about the iron she was obliged to take.
After her departure, Mama told us how frightfully, inexcusably rude we had been.
She impressed upon us with great clearness and firmness that personal remarks must never be made before others. Especially not before the very one concerned. She ex- plained that poor Miss Morris was a great sufferer from some mysterious disease which necessitated taking medicines that black- ened the teeth, and she took pains to assure us that Miss Morris’s teeth were not black from any lack of care: Mama had brought us up with the understanding that one of our most important duties was the care of our teeth. Her slogan, which was particularly 276PAPA, MAMA, AND GRANDFATHER FLORANCE applicable to women, was that no one could be pretty who had poor teeth and no one who had nice, white teeth could be wholly unattractive.
AMA was very beautiful. She had one MV1 of the rare, truly Grecian noses. Her features were indeed so regular that her vivid animation could not be caught in a photograph. She looked cold. I have often noticed that people with irregular features usually take more flattering likenesses. In fact I have never seen a photograph that does justice to a really beautiful woman and I have often seen photographs that flatter ugly women.
I lavished affection upon Mama and tried in awkward and often foolish ways to express it. I can still hear my whimper and Mama’s scream as she realized she had rocked on my toes. "But how could you do such a thing!" exclaimed Mama. "What on earth were you doing with your foot right under the rocker?" Shamefaced I replied, "I was trying to pet your foot." Mama’s tears joined mine as she pulled me to her lap.
Mama and Papa were second cousins, Mama’s grandfather, Rabbi Gershom Seixas, having been a brother of Papa’s grand- mother. I own a miniature of Rabbi Seixas in his clerical robes. It is mounted as a brooch and was worn by my mother when her daguerreotype was taken during her wedding trip. A fine, ascetic, scholarly face.
Of course I knew little or nothing about Papa’s courting of my mother. To a child, it is inconceivable that his parents ever had any existence apart from each other. I sup- pose, without working it out at all, one assumes that one’s parents were born mar- ried. But there is one tiny envelope in my possession addressed in my mother’s fine delicate penmanship to Robert Nathan.
There is no other address on it, so un- doubtedly it was brought to New York by one of Papa’s sisters who often visited their Philadelphia cousins. The little envelope is pink and in one corner my mother had written: "Mark how the envelope blushes for its contents!" How I would love to know the contents! Theirs was a generation that had not yet learned to seek protection for its sensibilities by covering them with a shell of assumed indifference. But the little envelope is empty.
I have also in my possession the hand- written invitation to my mother’s wedding, January 5, 1859. It took place in the roomy, dignified old home in Philadelphia to which Mama had come as a small child from New Orleans, the city of her birth.
TE fact that I had a great many relatives was always getting me into trouble. In- numerable aunts, vague white-haired figures, always dressed in black, visited us frequently -and usually unexpectedly. I was forever being rushed into clean stiff dresses and brought down with clean face, carefully examined ears, and freshly curled hair to be looked over coldly with appraising eyes (all of them alike in this-though, alas, not alike in the name with which each must be duti- fully addressed). Then there would come from the thin pursed lips the eternal ques- tion: "Now whom does she look like?" Once, at least, my patience ran out. I can hear myself saying, "I look like my mother around the elbows and like my father around the knees." Shocked faces. I am dragged off supperless to bed.
The most impressive of the lot was Aunt Rachel, short, enormous, wearing her superb white hair in a huge pompadour. She moved regally, spoke graciously, and was always tightly corseted, though I must confess with- out much tangible result. She lived in a great brownstone mansion on Fifth Avenue at the corner of Thirty-seventh Street-a house that many years later was to be the first Fifth Avenue home of the rising caterer who was fast becoming the rage, the elegant and tactful Louis Sherry.
We were always on our best behavior when we were taken to visit Aunt Rachel.
The chairs in the parlor were of tufted light blue satin. I was fascinated by the matching button at the heart of each dent. A marble statue stood at each end of the huge high- ceilinged room-the ne plus ultra of fashion and elegance. One of these fascinating groups, I remember well, represented the trial of Abraham. Our withers were wrung in sympathetic agony, as we saw it all there before us, almost life-size. The bearded patriarch’s head raised to heaven in agonized prayer, the poor little obedient boy (who, it was duly impressed upon us, never had 277COMMENTARY questioned his father’s right to slay him) lying so still and so meek with the knife at his throat and-yes, oh, look, look-the ram which God had provided as a substitute at the last split second, there lying in the bushes! Nor must I forget the altar with the marble flames playing beneath it and faggots bound on the top, where soon the ram was to be placed. Never could we tire of looking at this work of art. I remember also some paintings on the walls, which rendered it all very grand indeed. One was a large oil painting by Bouguereau, but I am not quite sure of its subject. I think it was "The Swing" or "The Spring." I know there were two figures in it, a youth and a maiden.
MONG my aunts, there was one who lived A in Philadelphia, and we saw her only on very special occasions, such as a funeral.
It was as fixed as the laws of the Medes and the Persians that the family show up at fun- erals. Even if one had not spoken for years to the deceased, it was done as a matter of "respect for the dead." A funeral in the fam- ily was therefore quite an exciting event, bringing us in contact with numerous cous- ins and even now and then an aunt or an uncle whom we had never before laid eyes on. You see, with such a large clan, someone was always being offended-someone did not call often enough, or someone neglected to ask after the health of someone’s father or mother, or sister or brother-and then whole groups would cease to be on speaking terms.
Mama had committed some crime of omis- sion when meeting one of the Lazarus family. Aunt Hettie had’resented it, and so Mama and she no longer spoke to each other; and Papa felt bound to take up the quarrel and refuse to speak to his sister, so as not to seem to reflect upon the behavior of his wife.
Thus it was that I used to see my cousin Emma, the poetess, only infrequently and at some relative’s house, never at ours. Besides Emma, whom I would have liked to know better, there was her almost equally brilliant sister Josephine who wrote prose with de- lightful wit and clarity, and the fascinating oldest sister Sarah whom I later came to adore. Although, when I knew her well, Sarah was an old woman and almost shape- less, having put on weight with her years, nevertheless she still possessed great charm.
Her dark eyes were magnificent, her hair re- mained jet black long after most women had resigned themselves to white hair, her com- plexion was exquisite, her smile wondrously tender and understanding, and her voice pure melody.
About Sarah there lingered also the fra- grance of a beautiful and tender love story.
There was a man well known in Newport society who worshipped her but who was married to a woman who was either a hope- less invalid or insane. I never knew the de- tails, but I remember there was always about it all the aroma of the same sort of tragic romance that had prevented George Eliot from marrying George Henry Lewes.
One aunt had a daughter who was tall, splendidly proportioned, a queenly beauty.
I never understood why we saw so little of her and a good deal of her two less attractive sisters, but now and then I overheard mys- terious allusions to this Beauty, and whis- pered remarks among the servants about my aunt’s strange blindness in continuing to open her doors to her-and sometimes a sly remark made by an older cousin.
"She seems utterly blind to everything," one would say.
‘Well, what do you expect?-that a mother would cast off her daughter?" I used to wonder and wonder what my beautiful cousin could have done to make all her relatives lower their voices when they mentioned her. Years later, I learned that she had been the mistress of a married so- ciety leader; and the last time I heard of her, she had married an unemployed waiter and the two were living miserably in one dingy room.
THErE was one aunt-Aunt Rosalie-who 1was really a cousin, the daughter of Uncle Ben, but she had married one of Mama’s brothers. There was much bated breath in discussing him, too. There had been not only a woman who had separated him from his wife, but a daughter, an actual flesh-and-blood daughter by this woman-.
at least everyone insisted so and refused to believe his story that he had merely been sorry for her and had helped an unfortunate widow with a daughter. Later on the woman died and what was more natural than that the girl should come to live with her father? But, horror of horrors, soon rumors began 278PAPA, MAMA, AND GRANDFATHER FLORANCE and at last were verified. He was about to marry his own daughter. Such behavior was scarcely to be believed. In fact, it was so utterly inconceivable that opinion swung around in his favor. If the young woman whom he married was not his daughter, then perhaps what he had said about merely being a good friend, and merely being sorry for her mother, had been true all along.
Before he died, after years of the cruelest kind of ostracism, he was actually once more established in grace, at least in time to die with the blessings of his relatives upon him.
This Uncle Theodore lived in Phila- delphia, so we never saw much of him as children. But when we did, we liked him.
There was an air of sadness about him, and yet there was plenty of fun and life in him to be brought out if the atmosphere was favorable. We children, who were supposed to know nothing about the scandal, found ourselves wondering about the true story even as we jumped up and down on his knee.
If there was anything that could reconcile me to a divorce in every six marriages, it would be the thought of those poor "grass widows" of other days-women like my Aunt Rosalie, deserted by their husbands, neither wives, widows, nor spinsters. So- ciety proclaimed that their lives were ruined and so they must remain; they were accord- ingly expected to dress in black, go out little, have no men friends, and not smile too much. The husband could go to the devil in his own way, but it behooved the wife to walk the straight and narrow path.
Aunt Rosalie, however, was independent in a manner that in her day was utterly original-and, let me hasten to add, utterly indefensible. At the time when I can re- member, her three children were practically grown up and she actually had the temerity to enjoy her freedom and, what was com- pletely unforgivable, to show the world that she did. I remember well the buzzing that arose when she decided to travel all over Europe with a man. He was an oculist; Aunt Rosalie wore the thickest glasses I have ever seen, and doubtless her friendship with the oculist began on a strictly professional level.
She insisted that he was merely a good friend-borrowing, perhaps, from her faith- less husband’s example?-and declared that traveling with him saved her no end of trouble and being "put upon." I think it more than likely that, in fact, no romance of any kind entered into the perfectly prac- tical, common-sense arrangement. But rumor and gossip are not concerned with common sense. I myself, I remember, was highly in- dignant at Aunt Rosalie’s "flying in the face of decency," as it was called. Childhood knows no compromises.
