The Old Maid: The 'Fifties

Originally serialized in The Red Book Magazine in 1922, The Old Maid is an examination of class and society as only Edith Wharton could undertake. The story follows the life of Tina, a young woman caught between the mother who adopted herthe beautiful, upstanding Deliaand her true mother, her plain, unmarried "aunt" Charlotte, who gave Tina up to provide her with a socially acceptable life. The three women live quietly together until Tina's wedding day, when Delia's and Charlotte's hidden jealousies rush to the surface. Says Roxana Robinson in her Introduction, "Wharton weaves her golden, fine-meshed net about her characters with inexorable precision." This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the original magazine publication.

<b>Roxana Robinson</b> is the author of the novels <i>Summer Light</i>, <i>This Is My Daughter</i>, and <i>Sweetwater</i>, as well as two short-story collections. Her fiction has appeared in <i>Best American Short Stories</i>, <i>The Atlantic</i>, <i>Harper’s</i>, <i>The New Yorker</i>, and <i>Vogue</i>.

Chapter I

In the old New York of the ’thirties a few families ruled, in simplicity and affluence. Of these were the Ralstons. The sturdy English and the rubicund and heavier Dutch had mingled to produce a prosperous, prudent and yet lavish society. To “do things handsomely” had always been a fundamental principle in this cautious world, built up on the fortunes of bankers, India merchants, shipbuilders, and shipchandlers. Those well-fed, slow-moving people, who seemed irritable and dyspeptic to European eyes only because the caprices of the climate had stripped them of superfluous flesh, and strung their nerves a little tighter, lived in a genteel monotony of which the surface was never stirred by the dumb dramas now and then enacted underground. Sensitive souls in those days were like muted keyboards, on which Fate played without a sound.

In this compact society, built of solidly welded blocks, one of the largest areas was filled by the Ralstons and their ramifications. The Ralstons were of middle-class English stock. They had not come to the colonies to die for a creed but to live for a bank-account. The result had been beyond their hopes, and their religion was tinged by their success. An edulcorated Church of England which, under the conciliatory name of the “Episcopal Church of the United States of America,” left out the coarser allusions in the Marriage Service, slid over the comminatory passages in the Athanasian Creed, and thought it more respectful to say “Our Father who” than “which” in the Lord’s Prayer, was exactly suited to the spirit of compromise whereon the Ralstons had built themselves up. There was in all the tribe the same instinctive recoil from new religions as from unaccounted-for people. Institutional to the core, they represented the conservative element that holds new societies together as sea-plants bind the seashore.

Compared with the Ralstons, even such traditionalists as the Lovells, the Halseys or the Vandergraves appeared careless, indifferent to money, almost reckless in their impulses and indecisions. Old John Frederick Ralston, the stout founder of the race, had perceived the difference, and emphasized it to his son, Frederick John, in whom he had scented a faint leaning toward the untried and unprofitable.

“You let the Lannings and the Dagonets and the Spenders take risks and fly kites. It’s the county-family blood in ’em: we’ve nothing to do with that. Look how they’re petering out already—the men, I mean. Let your boys marry their girls, if you like (they’re wholesome and handsome); though I’d sooner see my grandsons take a Lovell or a Vandergrave, than any of our own kind. But don’t let your sons go mooning around with their young fellows, horse-racing, and running down south to those damned springs, and gambling at New Orleans, and all the rest of it. That’s how you’ll build up the family, and keep the weather out. The way we’ve always done it.”

Frederick John listened, obeyed, married a Halsey, and passively followed in his father’s steps. He belonged to the cautious generation of New York gentlemen who revered Hamilton and served Jefferson, who longed to lay out New York like Washington, and who laid it out instead like a gridiron, lest they should be thought “undemocratic” by people they secretly looked down upon. Shopkeepers to the marrow, they put in their windows the wares there was most demand for, keeping their private opinions for the back-shop, where, through lack of use, they gradually lost substance and color.

The present generation of Ralstons had nothing left in the way of convictions save an acute sense of honor in private and business matters; on the life of the community and the state they took their daily views from the newspapers, and the newspapers they already despised. They themselves had done little to shape the destiny of their country, except to finance the Cause when it had become safe to do so. They were related to many of the great men who had built the Republic; but no Ralston had so far committed himself as to be great. As old John Frederick said, it was safer to be satisfied with three per cent: they regarded heroism as a form of gambling. Yet by merely being so numerous and so similar they had come to have a weight in the community. People said, “The Ralstons,” when they wished to invoke a precedent. This attribution of authority had gradually convinced the third generation of its collective importance; and the fourth, to which Delia Ralston’s husband belonged, had the ease and simplicity of a ruling class.

Within the limits of their universal caution, the Ralstons fulfilled their obligations as rich and respected citizens. They figured on the boards of all the old-established charities, gave handsomely to thriving institutions, had the best cooks in New York, and when they traveled abroad ordered statuary of the American sculptors in Rome whose reputation was already made. The first Ralston who had brought home a statue had been regarded as a wild fellow; but when it became known that the sculptor had executed several orders for the British aristocracy, it was felt in the family that this too was a three-per-cent investment.

Two marriages with the Dutch Vandergraves had consolidated these qualities of thrift and handsome living, and the carefully built-up Ralston character was now so congenital that Delia Ralston sometimes asked herself whether, were she to turn her little boy loose in a wilderness, he would not create a small New York there, and be on all its boards of directors.

Delia Lovell had married James Ralston at twenty. The marriage, which had taken place in the month of September, 1840, had been solemnized, as was then the custom, in the drawing-room of the bride’s country home, at what is now the corner of Avenue A and Ninety-first Street, overlooking the Sound. Thence her husband had driven her (in Grandmamma Lovell’s canary-colored coach with a fringed hammer-cloth), through spreading suburbs and untidy elm-shaded streets, to one of the new houses in Gramercy Park, which the pioneers of the younger set were just beginning to affect; and there, at five-and-twenty, she was established, the mother of two children, the possessor of a generous allowance of pin-money, and, by common consent, one of the handsomest and most popular “young matrons” (as they were called) of her day.

She was thinking placidly and gratefully of these things as she sat one day in her handsome bedroom in Gramercy Park. She was too near to the primitive Ralstons to have as clear a view of them as, for instance, the son in question might one day command: she lived under them as unthinkingly as one lives under the laws of one’s country. Yet that tremor in her of the muted keyboard, that secret questioning which sometimes beat in her like wings, would now and then so divide her from them that for a fleeting moment she could survey them in their relation to other things. The moment was always fleeting: she dropped back from it quickly, breathless and a little pale, to her children, her housekeeping, her new dresses and her kindly Jim.

She thought of him today with a smile of tenderness, remembering how he had told her to spare no expense on her new bonnet. Though she was twenty-five, and twice a mother, her image was still surprisingly fresh. The plumpness then thought seemly in a young matron stretched the gray silk across her bosom, and caused her heavy gold watch-chain—after it left the anchorage of the brooch of St. Peter’s in mosaic that fastened her low-cut Cluny collar—to dangle perilously in the void, above a tiny waist buckled into a velvet waist-band. But the shoulders above sloped youthfully under her Cashmere scarf, and every movement was as quick as a girl’s.



Mrs. Ralston approvingly examined the rosy-cheeked oval set in the blonde ruffles of the bonnet on which, in compliance with her husband’s instructions, she had spared no expense. It was a cabriolet of white velvet tied with wide satin ribbons and plumed with a crystal-spangled marabou—a wedding bonnet ordered for the marriage of her cousin, Charlotte Lovell, which was to take place that week at St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie. Charlotte was making a match exactly like Delia’s own: marrying a Ralston, of the Waverley Place branch, than which nothing could be safer, sounder or more—well, usual. Delia did not know why the word had occurred to her, for it could hardly be postulated, even of the young women of her own narrow clan, that they “usually” married Ralstons; but the soundness, safeness, suitability of the arrangement, did make it typical of the kind of alliance which a nice girl in the nicest set would serenely and blushfully forecast for herself.

Yes—and afterward?

Well—what? And what did this new question mean? Afterward; why, of course, there was the startled, unprepared surrender to the incomprehensible exigencies of the young man to whom one had at most accorded a rosy cheek in return for an engagement ring; there was the large double bed; the terror of seeing him shaving calmly the next morning, in his shirt-sleeves, through the dressing-room door; the evasions, insinuations, resigned smiles and Bible texts of one’s Mamma; the reminder of the phrase “to obey” in the glittering blur of the Marriage Service: a week or a month of flushed distress, confusion, embarrassed pleasure; then the growth of habit, the insidious lulling of the matter-of-course, dreamless double slumbers in the big white bed, early-morning discussions and consultations through that dressing-room door which had once seemed to open into a fiery pit scorching the brow of innocence.

And then, the babies: the babies who were supposed to “make up for everything,” and didn’t—though they were such darlings, and one had no definite notion as to what it was that one had missed, and that they were to make up for.

Yes: Charlotte’s fate would be just like hers. Joe Ralston was so like his second cousin Jim (Delia’s James), that Delia could see no reason why life in the squat brick house in Waverley Place should not exactly resemble life in the tall brownstone house in Gramercy Park. Only Charlotte’s bedroom would certainly not be as pretty as hers.

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Excerpted from The Old Maid: The 'Fifties by Edith Wharton
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