Gramercy Park
Paul Cohen’s sumptumous debut novel captures the high drama and low dealings that lie behind the polished facade of fin de siecle New York.He sang for his lifeShe lived for his loveMario Alfieri is the world's greatest tenor. He is also, if rumours are to be believed, the world's greatest lover. When he arrives in New York in 1894 to prepare for his first season at the Metropolitan Opera House, all Manhattan is aflame with excitement. Society hostesses compete for Alfieri's company. Everybody wants to hear him sing. Success, it seems, is assured. Until he meets Clara Adler. This bewitching orphan lives in the mansion of her late guardian, penniless, friendless and alone except for the unwelcome attentions of Thaddeus Chadwick, the lawyer who controls the estate. Mario and Clara fall hopelessly in love. But Chadwick is determined to keep Clara for himself and will stop at nothing to destroy all that Mario and Clara hold most dear. As Clara faces the unforgiving gaze of a world astonished that she has snared its most eligible bachelor, she is forced to confront her own dark secret and unravel the mysteries of a past she has tried hard to forget.
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GRAMERCY PARK
PAULA COHEN
Contents
DEATH IS A GOOD TOPIC for conversation. The fascination with it seems ingrained in human beings, and there are few acts performed during the lives of most people that are so endlessly discussed, so lovingly dissected, as the act of leaving it. A natural modesty seals the lips of even the most talkative when procreation or birth are mentioned, and the intimate details of marriage, child-rearing, and family life are, at best, confided to one’s closest friends.
But death is different. The last, lingering illness and all of its symptoms are picked over with morbid glee; and the greater the suffering, the longer the illness, the uglier the end, the more the head-wagging preoccupation with it.
The passing, therefore, of an elderly gentleman, dying quietly in his bed, would normally elicit little discussion. It is a fact, however, that there is one topic upon which people love to dwell even more than death. That topic is money. Should the elderly gentleman have been rich, therefore, the heads would wag with no less vigor, but the solemn preoccupation would be with the size of the fortune, the way in which it was amassed, and (most important of all) how—and to whom—it would be bequeathed.
Such was the case in the passing of Henry Ogden Slade—financier, philanthropist, pillar of the community—in the late winter of 1894. Sixty-six at the time of his death, Slade had been known in many circles of New York society as an upright and God-fearing, though slightly
peculiar, man. That he was upright was proved by the exemplary lack of scandal surrounding his business dealings, all of which were large, lucrative, and accomplished with unusual ease and goodwill. That he was God-fearing was proved by his success. That he was peculiar was attested to by the presence in his house of a ward—a young woman taken in by Slade at the age of fifteen, and reared and educated, for the four years until his death, as his own daughter.
What made this rather ordinary situation unusual enough to earn Slade a reputation for peculiarity were three facts. Fact one: Henry Ogden Slade was a bachelor who had lived alone for more than forty years. Fact two: Clara (for that was the young ward’s name) was neither related to Slade nor the orphaned, penniless child of friends of his youth. Fact three: her father, reputedly still living and quite prosperous, was a German immigrant who was, also reputedly, of the Hebrew faith.
All this, of course, was enough to fuel sporadic fires of conversation for years within New York society, for yet another example of the man’s eccentricity was the extreme secrecy with which he shrouded his domestic affairs. Few people had ever actually met Clara, as Slade kept her carefully cloistered within his house at Gramercy Park; and those who had, mainly elderly men like himself, come to discuss weighty matters of business over dinner, were frankly unable to say much about the girl, other than that she was tiny, pretty (in a rather Semitic way—dark, and all eyes, with an air of melancholy), and had a positive genius for vanishing silently at the tread of strangers’ feet, and the sound of strangers’ voices.
Slade’s reasons for taking her in, therefore, remained a mystery. All that was definitely known was that he and the girl’s father, one Reuben Adler, had had financial dealings, and that in the summer of eighty-nine they had met at Adler’s home on the south Jersey shore, to discuss business away from the stupefying city heat. There he had been introduced to Clara. Three months later, shortly after her fifteenth birthday, Clara had moved permanently into Slade’s home.
Perhaps it was felt that the young Miss Adler would benefit from being in the great metropolis, where she could regularly attend the opera, ballet, concerts, and the theatre, and where she would have the opportunity to meet people from a wide spectrum of acceptable society. Perhaps Slade, who should have known better, neglected to tell both the girl and her family the brutal fact that her ancestry would bar her from the company of that acceptable society, regardless of the identity of her sponsor. Or perhaps he did tell her, at some later date, for society was never once disturbed by having to refuse the discreetly dropped suggestion that Slade’s ward desired an invitation to tea, or wished to pay a call. Instead, Clara had spent the four years with Slade in nearly total seclusion, and her appearances at the ballet or opera were memorable simply because they were so rare.
