Manhattan Monologues Read Online Free Page A

respectability (we were dimly related to Lincoln's Secretary of State) that Papa had provided for his own offspring would not wholly shield us from the snubs of Livingstons and Van Rensselaers. But looking back on that era, I can see that only the stuffiest of the old guard would hold themselves aloof from a crowd of good-looking and amiable youngsters who had money to spend and large country estates for congenial house parties. Even people who shunned Grandma's receptions were happy to have their issue play with and ultimately marry her grandchildren.
    But Papa never changed his mind, never altered a position once taken. I see him now in the solid marble bust so out of scale with the rest of my apartment. How the round eyeballs over the strong aggressive nose and flared nostrils seem to glare! From the richly thick wavy hair and tall formidable brow down to the pointed moustache and trim goatee and to the astrachan collar of his frock coat, it is only too clear that you are faced with the type of American orator or statesman of his day, as seen in those dreadful statues in the rotunda of the Capitol in Washington. Except that Papa was not a statesman; he only dreamed of being one. He had been president of a street car company that went bankrupt because he would not allow the cars to operate on the sabbath, and he had managed, by the extravagance of his residences in town and country, to go through all of Mother's money that was not nailed down in trust. But he had fought gallantly as a cavalry colonel in the Civil War, and as a leader of civic groups he had thundered impressively and ineffectually against the corruption of the age. It never occurred to any of his three daughters that he could be disobeyed or criticized. It did occur, however, to his only son.
    My brother, Otto, had none of Papa's vigor or much of the
joie de vivre
of our cousins. He was tall and skinny and highly critical of almost everything. I'm afraid that he hated Papa, and that his feeling was richly returned.
    "He thinks he's such a god among men," Otto would ob- serve sourly to me. "But he's really only a figurehead on the pedestal of Grandpa's money."
    I, as the eldest daughter, was chosen to take the place of honor in Papa's life that Otto declined. This only confirmed the childhood impression, already created by Grandpa's favoritism, that my life was a series of sets before which I, like a professional monologist, was to enact certain prescribed roles. As the great Ruth Draper, whom I was later so to admire, would in one scene be an empty-headed debutante and in another the wife of a miner lost in a cave-in, so I had the different but equally factitious parts to play of the idolized grandchild and the adoring daughter. It wasn't that I found the parts difficult to perform, but I was afflicted at times with the haunting sense that there was no Agnes Seward left of me when I had to run off stage into the wings.
    One could argue, of course, that I was no different from Grandpa or Papa, who were also playing roles. Certainly Papa enjoyed responding to the image of the virgin priestess daughter who would love him more than she would any swain, who might indeed elect to remain permanently unwed to tend the paternal shrine, an Iphigenia, who in the Racine tragedy that I always detested, assents docilely to her father's demand that she be sacrificed to bring winds to the becalmed Grecian fleet. But it was always evident to me that neither Grandpa nor Papa suffered from any loss of identity when the curtain dropped. They were only too visibly strong and definite characters in the "real world," which the former dominated and the latter tried to.
    Sometimes I would speculate that it was a matter of gender; that men were not acting, that off stage as well as on they were the same persons, that it was my own poor sex who had to learn our parts in the play that duplicated the lives of our masters. Yet even here there was an "out" for some fortunate ladies. I use