Chapter One Gasping for air and gulping down large hunks of land in one great inhalation, the greedy new metropolis was stretching north along the twin arteries of commercial Broadway and stately Fifth Avenue. By 1850, New York's middle-class strivers had moved uptown to the third of the great residential squares that had been inserted in Manhattan's rectangular grid of streets. Madison Square spread leafily east from their one point of intersection where, with Twenty-third Street, they formed a six-pointed "Etoile" that New Yorkers boasted compared with any Paris might have to offer. But the days of private and gracious habitation in that verdant oasis were numbered even as they began. Within ten years of the construction of the Square's first townhouse, in 1853, Franconi's Hippodrome appeared on the northwest corner of Twenty-third Street and Broadway facing the Square. It could seat ten thousand, under a canvas roof stretched over brick walls, and was built to house spectacles. This grandest edifice in all of New York City took two years to build and cost an unprecedented two million dollars. The enterprise was a failure, and a scant three years later the building was torn down to make way for a magnificent white marble palace of a hotel. The old Hippodrome had wanted a racy theatrical connotation, and its address was on Broadway. The new hotel on the same site, a so-called Renaissance palazzo striving after elegance and dignity, was significantly named the Fifth Avenue Hotel. From the Fifties onward, no more private homes were built on the Square.     I n the same year the great hotel was opened, Elizabeth McCoun Marbury gave birth to her fifth child, on June 19, 1856. This second daughter was born at home, at 76 Irving Place, and named for her mother. She would later claim that her name always had been spelled as she spelled it as an adult, Elisabeth, and that it was a family name and spelling. There were many Elizabeths among the McCouns as well as several in the Marbury family, but there was not one recorded Elisabeth. It was the earliest of the many myths she invented about herself while living a life that was itself mythical enough to have won a place in Bulfinch.     Another myth had it that she came from "an old New York family" with all that the phrase implied. Her father, Francis F. Marbury, actually had emigrated from Maryland, while her maternal McCoun relations were an "old" Oyster Bay family only in the chronological sense of having long been established in the rural Long Island community. John McCoun (originally Mackholme), of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, was the first of his line to set foot in the American colonies. He had been a loyalist soldier in the army of the Stuart king until taken prisoner by Cromwell's forces, on September 3, 1651, at the Battle of Worcester. On November 11 of that year, John and David Mackholme were among 276 healthy young Scottish prisoners shipped to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and sold into indentured service for six to eight years. Far from being the adventurous younger son of a grand and distinguished lineage, as the legend of so many old New York families would have it, the first American McCoun was little better than a white slave.     Samuel and William, John's sons by the second of his three wives, migrated to Oyster Bay. Both prospered in the manner in which young men of no particular fortune did prosper in those days: they married the daughters of comparatively well-to-do landowners. The McCouns continued to rise socially and economically through marriages with members of prosperous New York families such as the Phelpses and the Townsends.     A talent for politics and an instinct for placing oneself on the side of the winners was Bessy Marbury's legacy from the McCouns. What she did not inherit was their ability to marry well. Grandfather McCoun improved her future standing with the Colonial Dames and Daughters of the American Revolution when he married Emma Jackson, a member of a distinguished Huguenot family whose mother had been on the reception committee for the first great independence ball, held in New York City, in honor of the Marquis de Lafayette.     When young William Townsend McCoun came to New York to study law, in 1804, it was still an affably small city "which clustered about the Battery and overlooked the Bay, and of which the uppermost boundary was indicated by the grassy way-sides of Canal Street." The aspiring attorney knew and thought little of old John Jacob Astor, a fur merchant who had to be watched carefully, for he was as likely to skin a customer as a beaver. In the summer he would buy fresh watermelons off Cornelius Vanderbilt's boat anchored in the harbor.     McCoun was soon recognized as a man with a great future at the bar. By 1812, he was doing well enough to marry and set up house in then fashionable Warren Street. He continued in private practice until 1831, when he was appointed vice chancellor of the First Circuit Court. He remained in that position until forced to retire in 1846, having reached sixty, which was the age prescribed by the court as the limit of judicial service. His wife had died the year before, and though lonely he was still too vigorous to settle for retirement.     By a special provision of the court of 1846, the vice chancellor was elected justice of the Supreme Court of the Second District. It was a position he held with distinction until 1853, when he officially retired to his estate in Oyster Bay, if retirement was the right word for it: at the age of sixty-seven, he took up the dual positions of overseer of highways and town commissioner, which he held almost until his death at the age of ninety-two, in 1878.     I n 1844, a brilliant young man of excellent Maryland family applied to Vice Chancellor McCoun for the position of law clerk in his chambers. It may have been the name, Marbury, that drew the vice chancellor's immediate approbation. William Marbury was a famous name in the history of American jurisprudence and the cousin once removed of Francis F. Marbury, the young applicant standing before him.     When Thomas Jefferson's secretary of state, James Madison, withheld William Marbury's appointment as justice of the peace for the District of Columbia, which had been made by President John Adams shortly before his term expired, he sued. The case, Marbury v. Madison , was brought before the Supreme Court in 1803. It was Chief Justice John Marshall's first great case. In it, he confirmed the Supreme Court's right of judicial review. That proposition was at the heart of the vice chancellor's legal philosophy, and it tickled him to have a Marbury in his office.     Francis F. Marbury was a remarkable young man. He had entered Amherst College at the age of thirteen. Upon graduating, he taught high school, in Hudson, New York, to boys not much younger than himself. He continued at that until he had saved enough from his earnings to move to New York and pursue his studies of the law. It was after passing the bar, in 1837, that he entered the employ of the vice chancellor.     A dapper fellow of slim, elegant proportions, he had a taste for all those good things that were well beyond his means. His affable southern charm masked a ruthless ambition. It was not long before he realized that both his ambition and his tastes could be satisfied by paying court to his employer's plain but handsomely dowered daughter. On his part, the vice chancellor was well aware that his Elizabeth could do far worse than a man with his young clerk's promise. The chap's suit was no crime in his court. The junior and senior attorneys met; the terms were agreed upon; the suit was adjudicated.     T he Marbury family first appeared in English history at the time of the Magna Carta. The name derived from the hamlet of Miribirie, in Cheshire, which had been confirmed by King John to William de Miribirie. By the fifteenth century, the family included several generations of successful Marbury lawyers and clergymen as well the odd physician cropping up every now and again.     Francis's direct forebear, Thomas Marbury, passed the bar at Gray's Inn, London, in the beginning of the seventeenth century. He migrated to Virginia and married into the Isham family. Through the Ishams, Nevilles, Fitzhughs, and John of Gaunt, Bessy Marbury was in direct descent from King Edward III.     An Elizabethan Marbury, an earlier Francis, was rector of St. Pancras, in London, a friend of Sir Francis Bacon and himself a true Renaissance man. While in prison for accusing the bishop of London of choosing men for the priesthood too ignorant to give spiritual guidance, he wrote a spirited comedy, The Contract of Marriage between Wit and Wisdom , which was performed successfully in the lively Elizabethan theatre. A copy exists in the British Museum. This made him the first and only theatrical Marbury until Bessy came along almost three centuries later, unless one counts his grandnephew by marriage. (Francis's wife was Bridget Dryden, the great-aunt of the poet-laureate dramatist John Dryden.)     Francis had twelve children, the most famous of whom was Anne Marbury Hutchinson. Anne had a sister Elizabeth Marbury as well as a stepsister Elizabeth Marbury. Rector Francis educated Anne with the books from his own library. The New York Francis, almost three centuries later, would do the same with his daughter. Although Bessy went to school, she always claimed that her real education came from the books in her father's library and law office.     After her marriage, Anne Marbury Hutchinson had emigrated to the Massachusetts colony, where her espousal of a liberal church and freedom of worship brought her into direct conflict with Governor John Winthrop and John Cotton. She and her followers moved on to Rhode Island. After her husband's death she migrated again, believing she would have more freedom in the Dutch colony of Pelham on Long Island Sound. It was a lonely spot later known as Anne's Neck, near a river later named the Hutchinson River. The year was 1643 and the Algonkians, displaced by the white settlers from their Manhattan homeland, set upon the party, massacring Anne and her whole family. It was one of the tribe's rare acts of aggression The irony was that Hutchinson was among the few émigrés who had refused to contribute arms, or the money to purchase them, if her compatriots intended to use them to exterminate native Americans.     Anne Marbury Hutchinson was one of the first American civil libertarians and the first woman to win a place in the history of the nation. Bessy must have been unaware of this extraordinary collateral ancestor, for she never mentioned the connection and was not one to have hidden anything that might have reflected so favorably upon her. The sad fact was that singular, independent women were often omitted in the oral family histories handed down from generation to generation.     T he marriage of Francis and Elizabeth McCoun Marbury was not unlike many of the period. If there was no grand passion, there was an amiability and congress of interests that outlasted passion. This mutuality was fundamental to the solid unions of the period.     Theirs was a time in which good manners were a very important constituent of education for both sexes, and that instilled politesse extended to the rest of their public and private lives. There were exceptions, but couples generally were not rude to each other. It was a defined society: marital roles were assigned, played, and respected even when the performance fell short of perfection. If there was boredom, it was not damned as the eighth deadly sin, and recrimination seldom was mistaken for communication.     W ithin a decade of entering the bar, Francis had fulfilled the promise his father-in-law had seen in him. He had provided two grandchildren with a third on the way and purchased a townhouse, at 76 Irving Place, close to fashionable Gramercy Park. The second half of the century was borning, and he was well positioned to be one of its inheritors. The United States was becoming a maritime power, and one of his specialities was maritime law. The country was on the brink of the era of the great investment bankers, and one of his clients was the New York Stock Exchange. As the freedom of the continent was being constricted in a web of railroad tracks, he represented one side or the other in the many large suits brought by one king of the rails against another in the never-ending battle for supremacy of turf. As the century aged, the former colony grew closer to the mother country as a major trading partner and ally: Francis Ferdinand was counselor to the New York consulate of Great Britain.     E lisabeth's earliest memories were associated with what she later deemed her most unattractive traits: "cowardice, gluttony, and mendacity." She pointedly described herself as a "chubby little person." It was only as she matured that her more attractive qualities emerged: compassion, loyalty, a gift for friendship. Once she made a friend, it was an eternal commitment. She had no time for enemies: that was a waste of people who might one day prove useful. The adult Bessy would constantly amaze, infuriate, and delight by proving a rare combination of Pollyanna and Reynard. Why not? Paradox was a survival mechanism for many women of her generation.     During the Civil War, a grateful client presented Francis Marbury with a stalk laden with green bananas. This fruit was little Bessy's "strongest passion." Her eyes widened as they followed the unripened stalk's progress downstairs to the kitchen and out to the pantry. That was on a Wednesday evening. The child grew feverish devising and discarding schemes for getting her hands on them, and by Sunday she could stand it no longer. They had to be hers!     As the rest of the family prepared to go to church, little Bessy began to cough, and sneeze, and wheeze, and hold her throbbing head. The poor child showed every symptom of coming down with some dreadful illness. The servants also went to services. There would be nobody in the house except the cook, who would be down in the kitchen preparing the dinner. Perhaps her mother should stay home to look after the invalid. No, no, the child protested, fearing she might have overdone it, she'd be fine by herself, all she needed was some rest.     It seemed forever before they were dispatched. Bessy got out of her bed in the nursery on the top floor and crawled down four flights of stairs to the basement kitchen. Getting by Cook did not pose a problem, for she was up to her elbows in poultry and flour, rapt in her artistry.     In the pantry at last, the pudgy little body sank to the floor and, forgetting all biblical injunction, caressed her forbidden fruit. As Sigmund Freud and she were born within a month of each other, she had no idea of the gesture's symbolism beyond a biblical admonishment. "I had Adam and Eve discounted, for I ate six green bananas at one fell swoop."     That afternoon, a worse illness overtook her than the one previously feigned. The pains in her stomach were real, as was the perspiring fever in her brow. Neither her frantic mother nor the family physician could find the source of the malady, and little Bessy refused to explain. If the doctor was trying to put the fear of God in her when he said her hours were numbered, he succeeded. The combination of theatrics and religion, which would later play so large a part in her life, took over. Then all the Sunday school threats of eternal damnation flashed before my eyes. Hell fire was sizzling. Red devils were dancing. Three-pronged forks were pricking. I was broken at the wheel. My spirit groaned, my flesh was conquered, my soul cried out. I confessed--not through remorse, but through fear. I had lied through fear. I was truthful through fear.     At that time there were more serious problems in the Marbury household than who ate the bananas. They colored Bessy's memories of the period. Although she was unable to recall exactly what had happened, it was something at once smaller and more subjective than the war that caused the traumatic response she ascribed to it. "Hatred replaced love. War drove out peace.... I began to realize that revenge and disaster went hand in hand."     Like her family and most of their friends, Mrs. Marbury was pro-Union. A letter was circulated in 1860 addressed to "the women of New York and especially to those already engaged against the time of wound and sickness of the Army," inviting them to a meeting at Cooper Union, where they would "appoint a General Committee with power to organize the benevolent purposes of all into a common movement."     It was signed by some of the most influential women in New York society, including Mrs. Hamilton Fish, Mrs. William B. ( the Mrs.) Astor, Mrs. James J. Roosevelt, several of Edith Wharton's Jones aunts, Mrs. Abram Hewitt, Mrs. Lewis Morris Rutherfurd, Mrs. William Cullen Bryant, Mrs. Cyrus W. Field, as well as an assortment of Stuyvesants, Potters, Bayards, and Auchin-closses. The fact that Bessy's mother was among the signatories was one of the few recorded indications that, as she later claimed, the Marburys were associated with the old New York families.     The Women's Central Association of Relief was formed at that meeting, and despite having to care for five children, Mrs. Marbury committed herself to large-scale volunteerism on behalf of the Union cause. It was the overt source of the schism between the Marbury parents that so colored Bessy's memories of the period. Often called the war between brothers, this was a war between husband and wife in which the national conflict displaced their personal differences as the root of their problems. Francis was a southerner, descendant of generations of southerners. His allegiance was naturally to his family and background. He was also a Democrat, and many Democrats considered the war between the states a Republican altercation.     His fellow member of the distinguished men's club the Century Association and his Gramercy Park neighbor, the diarist George Templeton Strong, castigated Marbury as one of the treacherous "Copperheads" who should be drummed out of the club. The term was first used by James Gordon Bennett in his New York Herald , on July 20, 1861, to liken the anti-war group to copperhead snakes, which struck without warning. "A rattlesnake rattles, a viper hisses, an adder spits, a black snake whistles, a water snake blows, but a copperhead just sneaks."     Like many Democrats, Marbury turned it into a symbol of defiance by wearing "copperhead badges" made of one-cent copper pieces cut away so that only the head remained with the word liberty written across the brow. With an irony Marbury would have appreciated, for he was no traitor despite his familial allegiances, the current one-cent copper is adorned with the head of Abraham Lincoln.     A fter the Draft Act was passed in 1863, it became apparent that it was not only well-to-do men like Marbury, with biases based on political and regional loyalties, who were against the war. The terms of the new act made it possible for any man with three hundred dollars to buy a less fortunate youth to take his place in the army. Young John Pierpont Morgan purchased a poor northern laborer to fight and die for him. It proved a wise investment. Morgan's war profiteering made him much richer by its end than he had been at its start.     Karl Marx had published what could come to be known as his Communist Manifesto fifteen years earlier, but it already had spread its message to radicals around the world. In the Mr. Astor's New York slums, not two miles distant from the Mrs. Astor's ballroom, which could only hold four hundred, the scene was very different. [They were] packed 290,000 to the square mile in a density more choking than Bombay or Canton, and they listened to flaming tribunes ... who cried that if they must fight, let them fight against their oppressors, the capitalists.     Riots broke out in the streets of New York City. The mobs set fire to draft offices, gutted newspaper pressrooms, burned the tenements to which they had been condemned, and lynched blacks because, as far as the rioters were concerned, they were the cause of the war. Urged on by rabble-rousers, the city's needy poor armed themselves with stolen weapons and paving stones ripped up from the streets. It took three days for the police and volunteer militia to bring them under control. By then, it was estimated that one thousand people had been killed on both sides.     The Marbury family altercation seemed to have inflamed a world beyond its doors, and when Lincoln was assassinated, Bessy was so overwrought she remembered every detail of the day for as long as she lived. For four years her mother had been terrifying her with stories of southern atrocities. Now all she could think was, with the president dead, "the awful rebels ... would surely pour into New York and kill us, each and every one."     She had to escape from her warring parents and hid in a seldom-used cedar closet. Sitting on a steamer trunk, she shivered with fear and waited. She could hear them calling for her but remained silent. Later, she heard her mother's sobs and the anxiety in her father's voice. It could be a trick. They were not to be trusted, and she remained silent. At length things grew hazy. It was almost as if the earth was slipping away beneath her. She had to get out, but the latch had slipped and the door was locked from the outside. Try as she might, she could not open it. With her last bit of strength, she cried out and pounded on it. The door was flung open, and the child fainted across the hall floor.     T he Marburys apparently did not subscribe to governesses. When Bessy was old enough, like her brothers and sister before her, she was sent to a day school. Many acceptable establishments were within easy walking distance of her home. As kindergarten toddler, she likely attended a coeducational school for very young children that was at Irving Place and Sixteenth Street. Bessy went on to spend several years at a "fashionable" girls' school not unlike Miss Graham's Academy for Young Ladies, at Fifth Avenue and Thirteenth Street. No book bags heavy with scholarly tomes for Miss Graham's students; posture took precedence over intellectual curiosity.     Bessy had little regard for what was considered a suitable education for a young lady. She considered her real education to have begun when her father started to teach her from the first Latin grammar. That was when she was seven. By the time she entered adolescence, she was able to read and discuss the works of Horace, Tasso, the Greek and Roman dramatists, Shakespeare, Dr. Samuel Johnson, Plutarch, and "a score of other classics." What would eventually prove most valuable was going down to his office and rummaging through his law library. Miss Marbury learned all of the fine points of drawing up a contract long before she ever thought she would need to compose one. She also acquired a knowledge of what was within the law, if only by the subtlest shaving of the facts.     The only lifelong friend Bessy made at that time was Sarah (Sally) Hewitt, the daughter of her father's friend, the latter mayor of New York City, Abram Hewitt, and granddaughter of the industrialist-educator Peter Cooper. It was not merely the closeness of their families that made Sally and Bessy best of friends. They were alike in many ways: both too boisterous in a demure age, too smart in a period of feminine fear of being thought clever, given to obesity when delicacy was the valued girlish charm, not interested in boys, indeed, sexually ambivalent. There was every reason for other girls to withhold their intimacy. As adolescents they had enough to cope with without these two. Puberty and menstrual cycles were mysteries inadequately explained by mothers who themselves inadequately perceived them.     Gramercy Park was a wonderful neighborhood in which to grow up. The park was actually a private square for the exclusive use of the inhabitants of the neighborhood. Unlike insecure, ostentatious nouveau riche Fifth Avenue or snobbish old-family Washington and Stuyvesant squares, it was a relatively new development that was both a quiet backwater of the city and a lively place inhabited by young professionals with a sprinkling of successful artists to give it a jaunty, slightly Bohemian air.     Despite her weight, Bessy was a natural athlete, and Gramercy Park was a paradise for any child who loved sports, until Samuel J. Tilden and Cyrus Field formed a committee that forbade any games in the park that endangered its "ornamental character." It marked the end of glorious afternoons of lawn tennis, croquet, and baseball--the latter, of course, the girls of that day were permitted to enjoy only as spectators.     Any spectacle, religious or secular, that appealed to all of her senses at the same time not only captured and held Bessy but also tempted her to become a part of it. It started at Mr. Barnum's circus, which would set up its canvas country tent each spring opposite the Academy of Music, at the foot of Irving Place and East Fourteenth Street. The color, the spectacle, the lights, the costumes, the music, even the pungent odors--it was everything that was both holy and worldly to her.     The Marburys believed the theatre was a part of education, and weekly attendance on Friday evenings began when Bessy was very young. For the child the theatre was a case of love at first sight. That love would change her life and remain a potent force in it until the day she died.     The first dramatic performance she could recall attending was at the ubiquitous Mr. Barnum's Museum at Broadway and Ann Street. It burned down in 1865, which would make her nine years old or younger. Barnum, who once boasted that there was a sucker born every minute, liked to pass his establishment off as an educational institution. After buying their tickets, the audience was detained for some time in the museum before being permitted to enter the lecture hall, which actually was a theatre of three thousand seats. It specialized in vaudeville and evenings of minstrelsy alternating with runs of lurid melodramas, the most popular having been The Drunkard , which ran for one hundred performances, setting a long-run record for the period.     In his memoir A Small Boy and Others , Henry James also fondly recalled the Barnum's Museum of that era: --the weary waiting in the dusty halls of humbug, amid bottled mermaids, "bearded ladies" and chill dioramas, for the lecture room, the true centre of the seat of joy, to open: vivid in especial to me is my almost sick wondering if I mightn't be rapt away before it did open. [And when it did] ... the stuffed and dim little hall of audience smelling of peppermint and orange peel, where the curtain rose on our gasping but rewarded patience.     Bessy was far more attracted to the men in her family than to the women. She admired her mother and tolerated her sister, but she adored her father and brothers and loved her grandfather most of all. The vice chancellor doted on his stocky, earnest child, some seventy years his junior, with fair hair pulled tightly back in a pigtail and large, deep-set blue eyes that seemed to look clear inside him to be sure he was telling the absolute truth when answering her endless questions.     With her small hand grasped by his large, ancient paw, they were boon companions exploring the city. It was the old gentleman's leave-taking, a farewell to the scenes and friends of his youth, and the little girl's introduction to places she would not ordinarily have visited, a hearing of tales of times and deeds that made the town and her grandfather both seem venerable. Even the place where he lived was filled with the excitement of history for the little girl. The vice chancellor had brought her grandmother as a bride to that very same narrow Federal house in Warren Street. That was when George Washington was still president. One of their neighbors was another descendant of the Huguenot émigrés, Major General Ebenezer Stevens, a hero of the Revolutionary War. Years later, Bessy would be the sometime friend and literary representative of the general's great-great-granddaughter Edith Wharton.     The pair had an annual ritual that lasted until the commercial part of the city totally overwhelmed McCoun's house on Warren Street, and he sold it in disgust to retire permanently to his Long Island farm. On the first bright day of early spring, he came by for her in his carriage to take a drive out into the country. They went north on the Post Road and turned east to the river along the country lane the city planners had designated as Fifty-seventh Street. Their destination was the greenhouses belonging to her grandfather's old friend Thomas Hogg. These were on the embankment a short distance to the north and could be seen from the distance as the visitors approached them. It was a thrilling sight to the little girl, those glittering glass domes reflecting the sunlight ricocheting off the clear sparkling water of the East River.     They had come so that McCoun might make his annual selection of new plants for the family homestead in Oyster Bay. In these transactions the old man became a wily country lad again and would not be hurried. Hogg knew this could take the better part of an afternoon and was thoughtful enough to have a diversion planned for the child. The fish ran fast and plentiful and could easily be caught from the rocky escarpment. Hogg always had a little rod and some worms ready for her. More than sixty years later, the memory was still fresh. "I can recall the joy I felt sitting over the water, my little fat legs dangling while I, feverish with excitement, would catch the small fish with which the river abounded."     Bessy's favorite time of the year was the summer holiday in Oyster Bay. The railroads were in their infancy, and trips to the rural neighborhoods of Long Island were taken by boat. They embarked at the Fourteenth Street pier on the East River and sailed north between Blackwell's Island and Mr. Hogg's glittering greenhouses, through the treacherous Hellgate, past Mr. Astor's and Mr. Gracie's Yorkville summer houses, and into the Long Island Sound.     At Glen Cove, the boat landing for Oyster Bay, old McCoun would be waiting with a team of stout farm horses harnessed to a wagon usually used for hauling farm goods. Wisps of hay and the odors of ripening vegetables and manure clung to the vehicle, conspiring to tell them they were in the heart of the country.     Her grandfather was a serious gentleman farmer on land that had been in the McCoun family for two centuries. Bessy recalled: "His livestock was my delight, and I remember how I trudged joyfully with him over every acre of his property, growing daily more and more familiar with the complexities of crops and fruit trees."     F rancis Marbury was a successful attorney who earned very handsome fees, but he was also a compulsive speculator in real estate and the stock market. The devaluation of the dollar and his refusal to profit from the misery of his native South left him in a financially delicate position. Elizabeth McCoun Marbury was unable to prevent her husband's irresponsible speculation, but she permitted no public display of their circumstances. The world in which they moved continued to see them as the upper middle-class family they always had been. She was a formidable household accountant. The ability to keep both books and appearances was as valuable a legacy as the intellectual curiosity Bessy inherited from her father. Copyright © 2000 Alfred Allan Lewis. All rights reserved.