“Welcome to them,” said Edward.
“Oh it’s terrible frigid out, isn’t it, sir?”
“Even polar bears are inside tonight,” Edward said.
“Is your sister well?” Katrina asked Cora.
“Oh she is, Miss, she’s just fine. Your sister and parents and all, they’re inside already.”
“They all miss you, Cora. And so do I. I have no one to tell my secrets to anymore.”
“Them were good times, Miss Katrina. I’ll never, never forget them. I miss you all so much, but isn’t that just the way it is?”
Katrina kissed Cora on the cheek. Edward pressed a dollar bill into Cora’s hand and then took Katrina’s arm and walked with her into the dining room. People were eating at all but two of the dozen tables, and in one corner a harpist and violinist were playing “After the Ball,” a song Edward loathed and Katrina loved. Edward saw Tom Maginn across the room, dining with two couples, and recognized one of the men as a powerful New York City Assemblyman. Edward caught Maginn’s eye, waved. Katrina nodded to Maginn and smiled.
“Maginn,” said Edward. “Busy at work.”
Edward’s dinner guests were already seated at a round table in the far corner. The party numbered six: Edward and Katrina, Jacob and Geraldine, Katrina’s sister, Adelaide, and her new husband, Archie Van Slyke, bright young man out of Harvard Law School, now an assistant vice president of the State National Bank, and whose great-grandfather, in collaboration with Jacob Taylor’s grandfather, had assembled a pair of family fortunes by confiscating Tory estates after the Revolution.
Dinner would begin with oysters, be followed with choices of foie gras, shad with sorrel, partridge and cabbage, tenderloin of beef, lobster gratiné (a Katrina favorite), an array of wines, fruit, and cheeses, charlotte russe and Roman punch, Napoleon brandy and Spanish coffee. The menu was chosen by Edward to please the palate of Jacob Taylor, who believed the Delavan served the best food in Albany.
“Can you read your father’s mood at this stage of the evening?” Edward whispered to Katrina as they neared their table.
“He doesn’t see how this dinner can do anything to stop him from loathing the sight of you,” Katrina said.
“I hope to reverse his expectations,” Edward said, and with smiles and formality he greeted Jacob and the others, kissing the hands of his female in-laws.
He had ordered small bunches of violets to be at the place settings of the women, and when they arrived Katrina picked hers up and pinned them as a corsage to the breast of her gown. “Flowers, like love,” she whispered to Edward, “should lie easy on one’s bosom.”
Her mother pushed the violets to the center of the table, disowning them. Adelaide sniffed hers, threw Edward a kiss.
“How thoughtful you are,” she said.
Of the Taylors, only Adelaide had no censure for Edward; for she had coveted him when he was courting her sister. “If you don’t marry him,” Adelaide told Katrina when she was abed with indecision, “you’re a fool.”
Edward had reserved this table in the Delavan’s second-floor dining room, which was decorated with sketches and photographs of the luminaries whose visits gave credence to the Delavan’s boast that it was one of the nation’s greatest hotels. Here was Abraham Lincoln, who supped here before and after he became president, and Jenny Lind, when the hotel was a temperance bulwark, and P. T. Barnum, Oscar Wilde, Boss Tweed and a generation of his plundering ilk, who had made the Delavan a political mecca. Here were actors Edwin Booth and James O’Neill, Albany’s Irish tenor Fritz Emmett, the dancers Magdalena Colón (La Última) and Maud Fallon, the actresses Mrs. Drew and Charlotte Cushman, plus one actress who inhabited the American demimonde, photographed in a gown revealing all of her right breast except the nipple, and whom Edward once glimpsed in the Delavan bar, coquettishly urging a swinish, kneeling pol to swill champagne from her slipper.
On this penultimate night of 1894 the hotel was in its political but not yet swinish mode, abuzz with the noise, money, and power of the politicians who had come to Albany for the legislative session that would begin on New Year’s Day. The ritual was familiar to Edward, who had dined here often during the years he covered politics for The Argus. The festive air, he decided, would be a useful distraction from the heavy mood of this dinner party. The opposing political forces were already feasting and roistering in the two grand suites at opposite ends of the second floor when oysters on the half shell were served to Edward’s table.
The maître d’ and two liveried Negro footmen approached carrying a box almost the size of themselves.
“Would you give that to the elegant lady over there?” Edward said, and the bellboys set the box on its end beside Geraldine.
“What might this be?” she asked.
“You could open it and find out,” Edward said.
“Is this some sort of joke?”
“I assure you it isn’t.”
“Shall I help you unwrap it, Madame?” the maître d’ asked.
“If I must, then please do,” Geraldine said.
The maître d’ cut the twine that bound the box, then gently ripped away its festive holiday wrapping.
“Open it, Mother,” Katrina said.
“Are you in on this?” Geraldine asked. But Katrina only smiled.
“I’ll open it,” said Adelaide, and she revealed an ankle-length black sealskin coat with high collar and abundant cuffs.
“Gorgeous, it’s gorgeous,” said Adelaide. “Full-length.”
“It’s a coat,” said Geraldine.
“I’d be abashed if it wasn’t,” said Edward.
“But what is it for?”
“For you, my dear, for you,” Edward said, “a belated Christmas from your daughter and me. You know how things were at Christmas.”
Adelaide lifted the coat out of the box.
“I’ll try it on for you, Mother,” she said, and she slipped into it, with Edward’s help, and twirled about so all could see the coat’s glory from every angle. “It feels divine,” Adelaide said.
Edward noted that the room’s other diners regarded the display with smirks and smiles, disdaining the ostentation, admiring the exquisite garment.
“I suppose you want one now,” Archie said to Adelaide.
“I wouldn’t say no if you brought one home.”
“I can’t accept this,” Geraldine said.
“Of course you can,” Katrina said.
“It’s too much.”
“Not for you,” said Edward.
Adelaide took the coat off and held it for her mother.
“Must I?” Geraldine asked.
Then, without standing up, and offering a small smile, she thrust her left arm, then her right, into the sleeves of the coat. Edward could see Jacob relax, not quite into a grin, but that enduring owlish frown of his was fading.
“Very becoming, Gerry,” said Jacob.
“It feels so silky,” Geraldine said, rubbing the fur with her palms. She took the coat off and folded it into its box. “It’s a lovely gift,” she said to Katrina.
“It was all Edward’s idea,” Katrina said.
“Yes. Well, then. Thank you, Edward.”
“My pleasure totally,” Edward said, snapping his fingers to the maître d’, who came forward with a much smaller package and handed it to Jacob.
“Another gift?” Jacob said, squinting at Edward. “Wise men say that gifts make slaves like a whip makes a cur.”
“Or a horse,” said Edward as Jacob undid the gift wrapping, revealing a pen-and-ink sketch of a racehorse pulling a sulky and driver.
“Very pleasant,” said Jacob. “I didn’t know this was a night for gifts.”
“The picture isn’t the gift,” Edward said. “The horse is. It’s Gallant Warrior. I know how you value a good trotter, and I know how you felt when you lost Chevalier.”