Manhattan Monologues Read Online Free

mentioned in any social column without the added legend "a grandchild of Samuel Thorn." That was and is, of course, also true of my siblings and of my first cousins on Mother's side of the family, that cheerful, boisterous group of youngsters who in our youth stuck so harmoniously together in our neighborhood of brownstone mansions up and down Fifth Avenue. They were the offspring of Mother and her sisters: Sewards (that's us), Hammerslys and Degeners, and of her brother, Samuel Thorn, Jr., almost a society of their own, united in friendly and loving awe of Grandpa and Grandma Thorn, smug and smiling in their immense chocolate-colored cube of a residence. You can see the latter today in my living room, in the conversation piece by Seymour Guy, facing each other complacently in opposite armchairs, hands in lap, surrounded by walls cluttered with academic canvases. Grandpa was known to the public as simply the richest man in the world.
    Yet it was still important that I was
not
a Thorn; I was a Seward. Mother, of course, had been a Thorn, and we lived in a house adjoining Grandpa's, waited on by a staff of fifteen, but I never regarded my branch as wealthy. Children look up the social ladder, rarely down, and we all knew, and fully accepted, that Grandpa was intent on establishing a dynasty in his name and that Uncle Sam had already received half his fortune and could look forward one day to receiving the rest, minus the settlements on his sisters, which, however small in relation to his own, would have been considered princely in any land of accepted primogeniture. We children learned exactitude in using the vocabulary of wealth. I never, for example, considered myself an "heiress." That in our world denoted a dowry of ten million and up. Mother was an heiress, yes, but she had four children to divide an inheritance much diminished by Papa's lavish spending. In my generation Uncle Sam's daughters, Beatrice and Diana, were the real heiresses and could marry European dukes if they chose—or were chosen—while we other granddaughters would have to make do with humbler mates.
    Not that I minded these distinctions. I have always been devoted to Beatrice, who found happiness in a second marriage, and to Diana, who survives to this day in a renowned and rather bristling virginity. But the situation was somewhat complicated by the fact that I was the one who was supposed to be Grandpa's favorite. Yet I never ascribed this to personal merit, nor did I expect any compensation for the status. It was a role that had been handed me by a quixotic deity in the skies who might just as well have given it to any other grandchild. There was no cause for pride on my part or jealousy on anyone else's. When I was told to run next door to Grandpa's, where the smiling butler behind the bronze grille awaited me, because Grandpa wanted to show me off to his breakfast business guests, I would scurry into the dining room and raise my round little face to be kissed by a rotund, balding, thickly whiskered old gentleman with glinting piggy eyes and a smell of tobacco, and be called his "darling Aggie-Baggie." I recognized it as a kind of charade of homely piety, and that once I was dismissed with a friendly little pat on my rump, the great man would totally forget me in the resumption of his business discussions.
    That different adult males should play different roles in the family drama did not strike me as inconsistent. It was the way things were. Papa, for example, saw Grandpa, his father-in-law, through lenses not adjusted to the more general family view. He used to say—and he was never one to lower his voice or spare anyone's feelings—that the "Thorn tribe" of my siblings and cousins tended to cling together because the reputation of Grandpa Thorn's deceased father, to whom Papa referred unceremoniously as "that old pirate," was still sufficiently odorous to keep the Knickerbocker families at bay, and that even the cloak of Seward