Don't Marry for Money, but ...

While in the law school I lived at the University and thought and saw little outside of the law school. I was for two years a member of the editorial board of the Columbia Law Review, and this work and my courses filled my whole time. . .

There was a movement underway in 1909 to admit women to Columbia Law School, but Edward didn’t have time for such foolishness. He was studying to become, like his father and grandfather before him, a lawyer. He lived a comparatively monastic life in the new Livingston Hall dormitory on Washington Heights, endlessly debating with his friends from the Law Review George Gordon and Harold Medina; Harold, who would go on to become a federal judge, complained “in all that Socratic method I found out why they gave that hemlock to Socrates - he deserved every bit of it.”

Max, Edward’s brother, moved to the city as well. After briefly teaching at a settlement house in Boston, he managed, through the father of a friend, to catch on as a cub reporter for the New York Times. He lived in a cold-water flat on 7th Street and headed uptown to the Harvard Club (or his Mother’s apartment on on 11th Street) for a hot bath. While Edward learned the theory of the law on Morningside Heights, Max covered murders in Chinatown, midnight suicides, rent strikes on the Lower East Side; he got strapped in the electric chair at Sing-Sing for one story, covered William Jennings Bryan’s final speech at Madison Square Garden for another, and took a sixty-mile-per-hour test drive with race-car driver George Robertson in his Locomobile.

Louise Saunders had her eyes on the dashing young reporter. Louise had a fine figure, almond eyes, light brown hair, a winning smile, and a small straight nose. Every Sunday morning the Saunders sat three rows behind the Perkins at Plainfield’s Holy Cross Episcopal Church, and Louise followed Max's dreamy gaze up to the silver stars set in the cerulean ceiling over the nave. Louise’s father was the head of Ingersoll Rand and good friends with Woodrow Wilson, the president of Princeton. Louise, who had artistic aspirations, had her father convert a stable behind their house into a small theater where she staged intimate productions for her neighbors. Max was taken by her creative temperament and clever personality, and accompanied Louise to her family’s place at Sea Girt on the Jersey shore, to swim and picnic that summer of 1909. He left his pajamas behind and wrote to retrieve them; Louise couldn’t find the PJs, so she sent Max a bathing suit instead, “Here are your pajamas, I’m afraid they have suffered a sea change into something rich and strange.”

Max invited Louise to Windsor. Fanny, his younger sister, spied on the lovebirds spooning in the parlor; holding a pin cushion between them “they just gazed into each other’s eyes and seemed very much in love.”

On New Year’s Eve, 1910, Max, 26, married Louise, 22, under the starry heaven sky of Holy Cross Church. The young couple took their winter honeymoon in a small cottage across the river from Windsor in Cornish. When they returned to New Jersey, they moved into the house in North Plainfield which Louise’s father bought for them. The first thing they did was to return all the junk they received as presents and buy a statue of Venus de Milo, and then Max started his new job in the advertising department of Charles Scribner’s and Sons.

Mercy! This generation was coming of age quickly. Eleven years earlier, when sister Fanny was only seven, Archibald Cox, a young patent attorney eighteen years her senior, had spotted her walking down the steps of her parents’ home in Plainfield and declared, “That’s the girl I am going to marry!” Now Fanny was graduating from Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, and on June 7th 1911, the family travelled en masse back to Boston and eighteen year old Fanny married thirty-six year old Archie Cox at the old Cleveland home Nutwood, next to Oakwood and Pinebank, on Jamaica Pond.

The new generation was spreading its wings. Edward graduated from law school and caught on with the law firm of Lord, Day and Lord on Wall Street was admitted to the New York Bar in November 1912. The following May he moved on to the office of Gordon, Gordon where his prospects seemed even brighter.

His brother and sister started growing their families. Fanny brought her baby “Billy” (Archibald Cox Jr.) to Windsor for the first time that summer of 1912, while Max and Louise brought their baby girl “Bert”. Summers in Windsor were gay indeed!

The summer of 1913, President Wilson made his summer White House in Cornish, and Percy Mackaye wrote and produced a "Bird Masque", a poetic plea for the preservation of endangered birds. The President’s daughter Eleanor played the lead role of Ornis the bird spirit, and her sister Margaret sang the song of "The Hermit Thrush". Louise had promised Max that she would give up her theatrical aspirations after their marriage, but she couldn’t resist the opportunity to appear in a lead role as the Hermit Thrush, supported by the other youth and beauty of the Evarts, Cox, Saint Gaudens, and Maxfield Parrish families. The President and Mrs. Wilson were in the audience, but the artists, poets, playwrights and literary folk were used to notoriety and paid little heed to the politician’s presence.

In 1914 Max was made an editor at Scribners “to keep the company from going bankrupt” from his advertising career, as Edward quipped. Charlie Scribner, Edward’s old charge from St. Paul’s, had just graduated from Princeton in 1913. Charlie, who never pretended to be “literary”, fell in with the young editor whose brother had been his master at SPS. The two young men would take the open-caged elevator up to the fifth floor of the new Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue; getting off the elevator they passed under the plaster busts of the great printers: Franklin, Gutenberg, Caxton, and Aldus. While Max dived into the slush pile, eager to find young talent, Charlie found his role by becoming a “friend” and a champion to young writers, and found the voice to speak up to his stodgy relatives and persuade them to explore the bright new voices coming on the scene.

Sister Molly Perkins married Thomas Thomas at St. Stephen’s Church in Plainfield on February 28 1914. Louis and Carlie were ushers and Betty Evarts was the Maid of Honor; the couple soon sailed to Florence, where their father had been born and where the Perkins family had lived for so many years. Brother Carley who had just graduated from Harvard, was thinking about following his oldest brother into law school, and was courting Louise’s cousin Emily Saunders. Emily was the daughter of W. B. Saunders, who founded a publishing house dedicated to publishing medical books (W.B. Saunders Company would go on to its greatest commercial success in 1948 when it published the Kinsey Report). Louis, the baby of the family, was off at the “prosperous and well dressed” St. George’s School in Newport, where the family had summered for so many years.

Edward, the oldest son, may have had his head in the law books, but he may also have noticed Kate Riggs when she made her debut at Delmonico’s ten days before Max and Louise’s wedding in 1910. Kate had a puckish bob to her nose, straight brown hair, a patrician neck and eyes and a brow that displayed a knowing intelligence greater than her years. The Riggs were the “President’s Bankers” who founded the Riggs Bank in Washington. Edward certainly knew of Kate’s cousin Dudley Riggs who had been a big football star at St. Paul’s and an All-American guard at Princeton and raised champion hunters and beagles in the Green Spring Valley in Maryland (and who would die suddenly of “foot and mouth” disease in 1913), and he must have heard when Kate’s mother died in 1911 in Ridgefield Connecticut.

Edward Newton Perkins married Kate Cheeseman Riggs in April of 1915 at the Church of the Transfiguration in New York City. She wore a white satin gown cut on long, full lines, with a full tulle veil held in place by sprays of orange blossoms. Her sister, Maria Louisa Crane, was matron of honor, George Gordon, from the law review was best man, and Edward's old friend from Plainfield, Ames Brooks, who had graduated from Harvard Law, was an usher. Uncle Prescott Evarts, who had been his family contact in Cambridge, conducted the ceremony, as he did for everyone in the family.

Kate claimed to “have the soul of a char”, and her friends made her hats and hauled her off to Bloomingdales to freshen her up from her “thrift shop” look, but within her casual down-to-earth demeanor, was a woman of great composure and class.

New York – March 4, 1930
Dear Laurence,
I take my pen in hand etc., and you will probably be sorry that I did before you get through this, as I feel very conversational and Ed is out and the children in bed, and the more I write the more unintelligible my handwriting gets and the worse my spelling. The truth is I am rather gloomy at the moment – I’ve given up smoking- I’ve just thrown the last cigarette I’ll ever smoke into the fire – and I have to tell someone about it, that’s that. There are no men in the house, so you can see how final that is.

You were grand to send me those seeds; I’m so excited about them. You were a peach too gather them, and oh how I hope we’ll have a nice warm Italian sun in Tyringham next summer to make them grow. As like as not if they do, I will have an Italian statue in the garden, and from that to turning “Glencote” into pink stucco is, I’m sure you’ll see, only a step. Maybe it would be as well if they don’t grow at that rate. It sounds expensive.

You really can’t stay away too long, as heavens knows what will happen to our house if you do. My bedroom is a dream of Victorian propriety and I feel it slowly influencing my character – giving up smoking for instance (I’ve still given it up) is merely a beginning . . .

Have you ever thought how awful it would be when you were giving a dinner party in town if no one turned up? People are so late all the time that I often think they have forgotten to come. Last Friday I had a dinner, rare and expensive food (you know what I mean, not hash in other words) was prepared, cocktails mixed, flowers bought, hardest of all, the living room neat and – my hair waved! Well we waited and waited and no one came. Half an hour after I’d asked them to come I called up one of the party and she, on consulting her engagement pad, said they had been asked for the following Friday! – as had all the others.

I never lived through such an evening. Angry Irish faces in the kitchen, great selfcontrol and some slight reserve and lack of conversation on the part of Edward as we seated ourselves at the extended dining room table, with flowers and many candles between us. A great deal of food, and abortive attempts at conversation from me – and no one in sight. The flowers fortunately hid Ed; a row of empty plates between us. Polly came down and thought we looked like poor rich people. I really think I shall have to fire all the maids after this and start afresh.

. . . Love to you both.
Kate
P.S. I’ve still given up smoking!