Paul’s countersuit against Edison was defeated in the U.S. circuit court in Pittsburgh. Judge Bradley ruled that Edison’s light bulb had been clearly differentiated from any of its predecessors. As such, Edison had not violated any of the patents that Westinghouse had purchased from Sawyer and Man. Edison’s patent remained inviolable. In Paul’s absence, his senior partners had appealed. No one had much hope that they would win.
He returned to the offices of Carter, Hughes & Cravath on a Monday as the sky threatened to loose the year’s first snow onto the city. As Paul took the steps up from the street and then mounted the iron staircase to the third floor, he felt a curious sensation. Returning to this familiar place felt both strangely comfortable and strangely foreign. He’d worked here for under a year. Yet it felt as if he’d been a child when he first hung his overcoat on this brass rack. He both could not imagine how young he’d been, and at the same time could not fathom ever feeling young again.
He found Carter and Hughes well into a meeting with a short man of serious demeanor. The attorneys and their guest appeared engrossed in a set of contracts. Paul gestured hello through the glass, but none of the three saw him. He returned to his office, to begin, very slowly, to attend to the mountain of papers that had spawned there in his absence.
It was only after the stranger had left that Hughes walked by Paul’s office door.
“Welcome home,” said Hughes.
Paul asked about their visitor. Hughes smiled with pride before he explained.
In Paul’s absence, Carter and Hughes had done what they did best: They’d made deals. Westinghouse’s new business plan—the creation of a “network of current” that stretched from coast to coast—required more hands than merely his own to man the decks. It didn’t make sense for Westinghouse to ship a whole generator and all the technicians required to set it up to Michigan, for instance; it would be much more efficient for a local shop to build it. Which suggested to Carter and Hughes that perhaps subcontracting out manufacture and installation to a series of smaller, local companies around the country would be prudent. Even Paul had to admit that it was a good plan.
And so Carter and Hughes had begun the process of buying up small manufacturing companies throughout the East and Middle West. To be sure, the Westinghouse Electric Company did not have much of a store of capital on hand. The purchases needed to be strategic, carefully considered. And in many cases they could save money by subcontracting production out to these local entities, rather than buying them outright.
The most substantial of these deals had been made with a Mr. Charles Coffin, the president of the Thomson-Houston Electric Company, based in Lynn, Massachusetts. This was the gentleman who’d been signing contracts just that morning. His company had the capability to manufacture generators from Maine to Connecticut. Mr. Coffin’s support would be invaluable.
The Westinghouse team was assembling its players.
—
Sitting in his office some days later, Paul overheard the arrival of a messenger. The boy told Martha that he had an envelope to be opened only by Mr. Cravath himself. Paul was expecting news of the case or a summons to appear in court. But the contents of the brief telegram were utterly unexpected.
“Mr. Cravath. Please hurry to the new Metropolitan Opera House right away. Will be in my dressing rooms. Have something you’ll want to see. Sincerely, Miss Agnes Huntington.”
Science seldom proceeds in the straightforward, logical manner imagined by outsiders.
—JAMES WATSON
IT TOOK PAUL just a minute to hail a carriage, but thirty-four more to ride it to Thirty-ninth Street. The Metropolitan Opera House occupied an entire square block. Seven stories tall and almost as wide, the Met stood above the less formidable sweatshops of the Garment District. Only five years old, the Yellow Brick Brewery, as people had nicknamed it, retained a number of the design elements common to its neighborhood. The building did look more fit for manufacturing than for high art.
The Met had been founded in 1883 as a great big thumbed nose in the direction of the Academy of Music, which had occupied a considerably more distinguished space at Union Square. The Academy admitted only the oldest of New York’s old money to its velvet seats. Its eighteen boxes had each been sold off to elite families some fifty years previous. None would ever be for sale again. Even as the city began producing enough millionaires to fill another three opera houses, the Academy’s board of directors would not budge. Not even the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, or the Morgans were allowed in. So those three families, and their equally new-moneyed friends, got together and built their own opera house. The Met had been an instant success, and now, five years later, all the finest productions from Europe and Philadelphia came there first when they arrived in New York. The Academy had fallen in ’86. Its manager gave a terse statement to the newspapers: “I cannot fight Wall Street.”
There was a lesson in all this, Paul thought. America was a place in which the powerful and the popular were doomed to an uneasy alliance. Money, even as old as New York’s, was something. But it was no longer quite enough. The fashionable flexed the real strength that made the American muscle bulge. Fashion was popularity. Popularity was people. And it was to the people’s ever-shifting tastes that even the wealthiest of this young nation sought to appeal. What’s the use in being rich if not a soul admires you for it?
Paul was greeted by the manager of the house, a tall man in a dinner jacket who kept watch over the scattered maids dusting and polishing the ornate fixtures that dotted the walls. As it was morning, the lamps along the corridors were off. But Paul could make out their shape from where he stood. The lamps were electric. And they were Edison’s.
Paul explained to the house manager that he was looking for Miss Huntington. It was only after he assured the suspicious manager that he wasn’t some devoted fan in search of an autograph, but rather the prima donna’s personal attorney, that the man deigned to accept Paul’s card.
He soon reappeared, leading Paul into the cavernous theater at the center of the opera house. Their footsteps echoed beneath the domed ceiling. The sensation was eerie. Four thousand empty seats swept across the long floor and up the rear wall. Paul turned to peek at the five tiers of empty boxes that hung from the sides.
To think of the scenes that took place nightly between those chairs. The backstabbing, the social climbing, the bitter family feuds played out at every intermission. The drama among the audience was famously more intense than what was performed upon the stage. Empty in the quiet morning, the house seemed pregnant with the promise of the night’s warfare.
The manager led Paul up onto the stage, past the curtains, and finally down a flight of rear stairs to a door on which the name AGNES HUNTINGTON shone in gold lettering. It would not have shocked Paul if it turned out to have been etched in genuine gold.
The manager knocked twice on the door and then announced Paul’s name. It occurred to Paul that he had met two very different Agnes Huntingtons, between her mother’s house and the Players’ Club. Would he find a third at the Metropolitan Opera?
“They’re waiting for you,” the manager said before turning away.
Paul stood for a moment, taking a breath.
“They?”
But the manager was already gone.
The door opened with a creak and Paul found the radiant face of Agnes Huntington before him. Her attire was informal, a tastefully casual black dress that extended to the ankles and down her arms, with just a slight touch of white frill at the wrists. She wasn’t wearing shoes.