A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth Read Online Free

least known of, by a good portion of the readers.
    In the 1920s and '30s there existed indubitably, however hard to define, a social structure called "society" that regarded itself as just that. These persons resided on the East Side of Manhattan (never west except below Fifty-ninth Street) as far south as Union Square and as far north as Ninety-sixth Street. The members (if that is the word; it doesn't seem quite right) were largely Protestants of Anglo-Saxon origin. (Note that Catholics and nonpracticing Jews were not always excluded if rich enough.) The men were apt to be in business, finance, or law, sometimes in medicine, rarely in the church and almost never in politics. Franklin Roosevelt was an exception and not a popular one, either.

    For the women, society offered a certain power and prestige, but it also tended to reinforce conventions that limited those with ambition. I had known Janet Auchincloss's daughter, Jackie Bouvier, since her mother's marriage to Father's first cousin Hugh D. Auchincloss. But they lived in Washington and Jackie was a good bit younger than I, so I saw her rarely. We all, of course, were drawn by her charm and beauty, but such qualities are not unusual, and none of us predicted her remarkable destiny. I did, however, have a curious premonition of it.
    I was spending a weekend with my brother John in Washington, and he and his wife had asked the Hugh D. Auchinclosses and Jackie for a family dinner. During the meal we learned that Jackie was engaged to a New Yorker called Husted. After the meal she and I sat in the corner, and I quizzed her about him. I had just published a novel titled
Sybil
about a rather dull girl, which Jackie, perhaps surprisingly, had read.
    "Oh, you've written my life," she told me. "Sybil Bouvier, Sybil Husted. Respectable, middle-class, moderately well off. Accepted everywhere. Decent and dull."
    And then a curious but strong feeling gripped me, quite unlike anything that usually accompanied parlor chatter.
Why was this pretty girl talking such nonsense? Didn't she know that a very different fate awaited her?
A week later we learned the engagement was off. So sometimes women did break the rules and found that it worked out quite successfully.

    The real and formidable influence of society was, fittingly, social. Those inside society's ranks controlled the private schools, the clubs, the country clubs, the subscription dances for the young, the Episcopal and Presbyterian churches, as well as the larger banks and law firms. It is commonly said that they have been relegated to the past. That is not so. They have simply lost their monopoly; they have had to move over and share their once closely guarded powers with the new rich, who are quite willing to spare the older generation so long as they are allowed to copy, and perhaps enhance, their style. See any Ralph Lauren ad.

    My eight great-grandparents were all natives of Manhattan and all uncritical members of the society I have attempted to describe. As they had multiple siblings and numberless descendants, the city seemed awash with cousins, and I was apt to be surprised if I didn't find one or more in any circle I attended. To me, New York society (we never used the term) was not a class that dominated my world; it simply was that world. It was said of a school that I later attended, Groton, that there was no snobbishness because the boys all came from the same background, and there was actually some truth to this.
    The four principal families of my origin seem to merge together in retrospect into a single unit: an uninspiring but decent and respectable bourgeois tribe. Yet how different they seemed to a growing and observant boy! Father's mother's family, the Russells of New York and simpler pre-Vanderbilt Newport, had been rich from imports and clipper ships prior to the Civil War and prominent in the society described in the diary of Mayor Philip Hone, a cousin. But all was now in the past. Despite their Italian