Excerpt
Paris Undercover
1For so long Etta Shiber had lived the most circumscribed of lives: Until the age of fifty-nine she had lived in four apartments, none of them outside a radius of sixteen streets and three avenues on the Upper East Side of New York. She had married William Noyes Shiber, manager of the telegraph department for William Randolph Hearst’s New York newspapers, in 1901, when she was twenty-three; she stopped teaching kindergarten three years later and didn’t hold a paying job ever again. She had never learned to drive, had never registered to vote, had never appeared in the pages of a newspaper. Most days she cooked and kept house, did her marketing among the bakeries and fruit stands and German butcher shops around the neighborhood; almost nightly she accompanied her cousin Irving Weil, one of New York’s most prominent music critics, to the symphony or the opera, or otherwise stayed home to knit and listen to the radio, or perhaps read a novel by Dickens or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. “For almost thirty-five years,” a reporter would later write, in some wonderment, “this quiet pattern comprised Mrs. Shiber’s daily existence.”
Hers was an exceedingly comfortable, predictable routine, one almost medicinal in its regularity—for it was that very predictability, Etta found, that best held at bay her true constant companion: the nervousness that had afflicted her since she was a girl. Most of the time the feeling was like the low, persistent call of a fire alarm in the distance; it was always there, but she did what she could to ignore it and focus on whatever was in front of her. On other days, though, the bad ones, the alarm was close and loud in her ears, as if the fire were right outside her door, and she could feel herself growing hot and her heart quickened and sometimes, more worrisomely, it pounded out an irregular rhythm, and there was nothing she could do to concentrate on anything else and she had to lie down. By the time she was in her middle years Etta was suffering from hypertension, a condition that the doctors of the time still found maddeningly difficult to treat; she knew she should lose some weight, but she found that hard to do, which only increased her anxiety.
Etta had been prone to anxiety for as long as she could remember, had always been very shy, self-conscious about her appearance, and almost reflexively self-effacing; she recoiled at the notion of ever calling attention to herself. “One thing I have learned,” she once observed, “is not to be a fussmaker.” Early on she seems to have decided that the best path lay in being unfailingly polite and always following the rules—at Grammar School No. 1 she won medals not only for scholarship but also for “deportment”—and while she was a kind and sympathetic listener and was liked by everyone, she still found it painfully difficult to socialize with people she did not know well. At the Normal College of the City of New York, where like many smart young women of her time she studied to become a teacher, she did not belong to a single club or fraternity (as they were called, even though all of the students were female); she did not read Shakespeare and Swift with the Phoebean Literary Society, did not observe robins and warblers and wrens in Central Park with the Bird Club, nor sing with the Glee Club, nor help organize the annual “pink tea,” in which pink chrysanthemums were strewn over the top of each brewing pot—which actually contained hot cocoa, as tea was considered too mature a drink for college girls.
In the photograph of the graduating class of 1901, which shows several rows of young women in white shirtwaists and black velvet neck ribbons, their long hair swirled into pompadours in the “Gibson Girl” style of the time, Etta stands at the edge of the photo, ever so slightly apart from the rest of the group, like an island just off the mainland; in the
Normal College Echo for 1901, the sole reference to her is the description provided by the yearbook staff: “Rather inclined to be good.”
In the yearbook, as in the college’s grading books, she is identified as “Henrietta” Kahn, a name that seems to have been a kind of way station on the path to Americanization; four years later, in 1905, she gave her name to census officials as Etta, and that is how she would be known for the rest of her life. Her parents had named her Jennett, after her father’s late mother Jeanette Lowe Kahn, in accordance with the Jewish tradition of naming children for deceased ancestors. The Kahns were immigrants from the Alsatian town of Eguisheim, where a Jewish community can be traced as far back as the early eighteenth century. Etta’s grandfather Benoit Kahn had arrived in New York in 1845, among the small percentage of Alsatian Jews who emigrated to a foreign country after they were granted the right of mobility; likely he sensed an opportunity in the United States, for he had been trained as an optician in Alsace and when he opened B. Kahn & Co. on lower Broadway in 1850, he was only the second optician in the city.
Benoit and Jeanette had two daughters and five sons, three of whom went into the family business, but only one of whom, the eldest, worked not as an optician but instead as a “traveling agent”—that was Jacob Kahn, Etta’s father. Etta’s mother, Julia Roth, was herself the descendant of German Jewish immigrants, and though she had been born in New York she grew up speaking German as her first language. She gave birth to Etta on January 20, 1878, nine months to the day after her marriage to Jacob; three years later the couple had a son, Chester Arthur Kahn, born just six weeks after Chester A. Arthur, another New Yorker from the East Side, became president.
Jacob died while Etta was still in school, leaving the family in straitened circumstances, and for many years afterward, Julia Roth Kahn took in boarders to help pay the rent. The Kahns lived on the top floor of a four-story walk-up apartment house on Lexington Avenue at Fifty-fourth Street, above a funeral parlor and a French restaurant. The avenue was lined with buildings like that, four or five stories of stone or brick, simply corniced at the top, housing little shops or restaurants beneath cheerful awnings on the ground floor. Here and there, on more substantial corner lots, institutional buildings looked as if they had been dropped in from Europe: dark, austere churches from Germany and Sweden, synagogues in the Moorish style, a safe-deposit bank with the crenellated towers of a medieval castle, Second Empire rounded mansard roofs adorning the Hospital for the Ruptured and Crippled. From the street came the constant whir and clop of horse carriages and the occasional clang of a trolley car; every few minutes the Third Avenue elevated train rumbled in the distance like thunder. Just up the avenue was the Normal College of the City of New York, a tuition-free institution that provided most of the female teachers for the public schools of the city. Bookish and unmarried, without a father and with a younger brother still at home, and living only two trolley stops away, it was natural that Etta would attend the Normal College, and she applied and was accepted to enter in 1898.
Etta was still enrolled when she met and married William Noyes Shiber, who was living seven doors south of her on the very same block of Lexington Avenue. Born in Pennsylvania, Shiber had grown up in the small town of Olean in western New York, where his father made barrels for Standard Oil; as a young man he came to New York City and found a job as a Western Union operator before getting hired in the telegraph room of William Randolph Hearst’s New York newspapers, the
Evening Journal and the
American. By 1896, at the age of twenty-four, he had already become the manager of the telegraph room—an exceedingly responsible position for someone so young, as telegrams were the chief means by which the paper’s employees communicated with far-flung correspondents, not to mention with Hearst himself, who was generally three thousand miles away in California but who took a regular interest in the workings of all his newspapers and magazines. William Shiber was highly esteemed in the trade for his ability to oversee an efficient telegraphic service, but he was also understood to be honest and politically independent and he was trusted by labor and management alike. “Shiber is one grand fellow,”
The Commercial Telegraphers’ Journal once noted. “That’s why everybody on the Journal from W. R. Hearst on down is stuck on him.”
For Etta Kahn, born and raised in an immigrant neighborhood in Manhattan, Bill Shiber must have seemed something like America itself: large and athletic, gregarious, outdoorsy (he was an avid rower and an enthusiastic nature photographer), and with a charmingly small-town demeanor. He was also not Jewish; unconventionally for the time, Etta had married outside the faith. She had been raised in a family with little in the way of religious strictures (her brother Chester’s wife, Helen, was Catholic), and though Etta herself believed in God, she didn’t observe Jewish holidays nor keep kosher, and their wedding had been held not in a synagogue, nor for that matter in a church, but at the Society for Ethical Culture, which ran the progressive private school where Etta was then receiving her postgraduate training. No less a figure than Felix Adler himself had performed the ceremony.
