At Forty-ninth Street I stopped, stepping just around the corner to watch a gray limousine, the gray-uniformed chauffeur sitting out front in the open, hunched over his wheel, as he swung off Fifth into West Forty-ninth, made a tight little U-turn, and stopped before an imposing brick building. The chauffeur hopped out and stood almost at attention by the curbside rear door. Then the doors of the building were swung open by a uniformed attendant, and out trooped this impressive bunch, to head down to their waiting limousine, their faces certain of the world and their places in it. Then for a few minutes I stood, my back against a sun-warmed building wall, to watch other faces move past my eyes along Fifth, wishing I had the nerve to lift my camera and snap some of these faces head-on. What were they thinking, these 1912 people, their shoe leather scuffing or tapping by? Who were they? People of other times aren’t simply people like us except for the funny clothes. These faces were different, even the children’s, formed by the thoughts, events, and feelings of the unique experiences of their own time. So what did these passing faces tell me? I thought that they looked . . . serene. That most of them seemed cheerful, eyes fully open, aware of and enjoying this particular day. And—what else? There was something else. They didn’t seem afraid, I decided. Or worried, most of them. And no one I saw looked angry. These people walking and strolling past my eyes along Fifth Avenue through their own time and world seemed to me secure and confident in it. I knew that they were wrong; that this pleasant peaceful world had only a few years left to it. Unless . . . but it seemed preposterous that I could possibly do anything at all about that.
Walking toward me now, here came a not-quite-elderly marvel, a boulevardier, a bona fide dandy with Kaiser Wilhelm mustache, gray, striped trousers, black coat with plush lapels and collar, heavy gold watch chain, silver-headed cane, glittering silk hat. I walked toward him, trying to make myself lift the camera and snap him, but didn’t. Couldn’t. A spear of lightning would have flashed down and instantly killed me.
But when he had passed, heading north there on Fifth Avenue, cane swinging beautifully, I turned around to catch him, but waited a moment, fiddling with the camera, then pretended to take my man up ahead—and instead snapped these marvelous chattering girls. Yes, girls, damn it. Of course they are young women, but to sometimes say “girls” was never to call them children. The English language is hardworking; the meaning of a word can vary by context. And to compare using “girl” for “young woman” with the Southern use of “boy” for a black man is thoughtless, and just plain dumb.
Well, all right. Okay. Yes, yes, I’m fine now. The girl on the right is wearing a green–and–white–striped coat, the young woman in the middle a maroon dress, and the other—your choice now—a kind of bottle green, I think you’d call it. She caught me in the act of snapping this—and I caught another young–woman watcher behind them.
Where was The Rev. and Mrs. C. H. Gardner’s Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies and Gentlemen? Gone. Julia sometimes talked of sending Willy there, but I didn’t.
Fifth Avenue was changing more obviously now, as I walked on. I was seeing more and more storefronts. And Apartment to Let signs like this one, which I took because I remembered the house there with the heraldic lions as the home of a rich family. A little depressing somehow, and then I glimpsed something just ahead at Forty–fourth Street, grinning with pleasure and using my next-to-last film to take this wonderful little wedding cake of a building. What was this? I had to see, and I walked catercorner across Fifth Avenue past the cop. And then, standing under the awning looking up the stairs, I saw the polished brass plate that told me this was Delmonico’s, moved uptown. A hand touched my elbow, and a woman’s voice behind me said, “Well, I am surprised! Are you here for the lecture?” I turned, and the Jotta Girl’s face, framed in the cartwheel brim of a pale blue hat, smiled up at me, and I smiled back.
“Well!” I said a little stupidly. “What are you doing here?”
“Following you, of course! Are you coming in?”
At the curb women were arriving steadily, mostly middle-aged or elderly, stepping out from limousines, cabs, or carriages—more limos than cabs—car doors slamming, low-horsepower engines clunking as they pulled away.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. Now here came the young women, smelling just great, laughing, looking so splendid in their enormous hats, and showing some fine ankle as they plucked up their skirt hems to climb the stairs. Accompanying a lot of them, and all the best-looking ones, were young or youngish men, nearly every damn one of them eight feet tall.
“Oh, don’t be a stick!” said the Jotta Girl, her hand at my elbow urging me on. “This lecture should be very helpful to you!” and she smiled at some kind of joke.
“Okay.” We walked on up. “What’s going to be so helpful?”
She nodded at a large poster just inside the open doors. It stood on an easel of gilded bamboo, and read in expert lettering, the margins decorated with painted ivy leaves: Mrs. Charles Henry Israel’s Committee on Amusement and Vacation Resources for Working Girls Will Present Professor Duryea’s Demonstration of the Dance Promptly at 10 a.m. I understood her joke now, and said, “I thought I’d done my share of entertaining working girls with my dancing last night,” and she smiled again.
No one inside seemed to be taking tickets, and we followed the crowd up a flight of carpeted stairs at our right, the women ahead of us daintily lifting their skirt hems, and I realized how well I was adapting, already an expert ankle watcher. Down a short hallway now, the women, chattering, laughing a lot, leaving a trail of perfumed air. Okay, Rube; I’m following orders. When do I get lucky? A man just behind us said, “Hello there, Helen,” and the Jotta Girl turned to smile and answer, “Hello, Archie,” and I wondered, Helen Who? Into a ballroom now: wood floor, mirror panels inset in the walls at intervals, a small raised platform up front. Rows of gilt chairs had been set out, the crowd sidling into them, women doing that splendid skirt-smoothing motion as they sat down. Up front, before the raised platform, stood a half-circle of chairs, green ribbon strung along their backs to mark off a reserved section of floor.
I glanced around as we sat down, and saw that among the few men in the audience a couple were reporters, I thought, because they seemed to be jotting down names, and it occurred to me that this might be a pretty social crowd.
Up on the platform three men in formal morning dress sat waiting, music open before them: a pianist, clarinetist, and violinist. And at stage center, on a gilt chair, a large, magnificently impressive, gray-haired woman in a maroon beaded dress, pince-nez glasses hanging from a dime-size gold button fastened at her chest: Mrs. Israel herself, I had no doubt. Nodding, smiling graciously, she sat talking eagerly to the man seated at her right in a double-breasted black frock coat whose hem touched his knees. He was fifty, maybe, dark graying hair worn longer than any I’d seen anywhere else. His wife, I guessed, to whom Mrs. Israel turned now, wore a white evening dress with a gardenia pinned to one side at her waist.