Josie is happy to return from Jersey, and even happier when Fisk announces a new home for the reconstructed management of the Erie. Samuel Pike has opened an opera house on Twenty-third Street at Eighth Avenue; its ornate design and elaborate furnishings draw the attention and patronage of the theater set in the city. But Pike encounters cash flow troubles and hints that he might have to sell. Fisk has been an impresario at heart since youth; it tickles his ambition to imagine himself the proprietor of an opera house, with all the opportunities for self-promotion proprietorship entails.
Gould is skeptical, wondering what an opera house has to do with running a railroad. But Fisk’s excitement inclines Gould to believe that the Opera House will keep Fisk busy, leaving Gould to manage the company. He assents to Fisk’s plan, which calls for purchasing the Pike place and refitting the second floor to be headquarters of the Erie.
The railroad is one of the state’s largest employers, and the New York papers report the relocation as a major event. Some applaud the move to larger quarters as overdue; others question the extravagance even by the generous standards of the Gilded Age. The same papers carry a simultaneous announcement that the Erie is building a new ferry terminal at the foot of Twenty-third Street, just a few blocks from the Opera House. Proximity to the Erie offices is one consideration; another is readier access to the railroad stations of midtown. The Erie will operate a horse railway from the ferry to the Opera House and the stations, ensuring the swiftest travel for its customers. Observers of the late flight to Jersey cheekily remark that the new arrangement will also facilitate fast getaways for the Erie directors, should the necessity again arise.
The possibility appears quite real. Dan Drew leaves the road literally a wreck: in the week of his departure an Erie night express from Buffalo careens off rails that were supposed to have been replaced with fresh ones funded by money he is discovered to have diverted to his own pocket. Four cars plunge over a cliff, somersault several times, burst into flames (from upset stoves employed to heat the cars), and wedge into the bottom of a narrow canyon, trapping the passengers, twenty-two of whom burn horribly to death. The “Erie Slaughter,” the papers call it, and it reminds the public—and the new Erie directors—that a railroad is a serious business, not simply the plaything of speculators.
Yet Fisk can’t take anything very seriously for long. He lets Gould run the Erie and revels in his role as master of ceremonies at the renamed Grand Opera House. He entertains more lavishly than before, hosting pre-performance receptions and post-performance suppers for special guests and members of the casts.
Josie is often on his arm and in his personal box. She mingles with professional actresses and dancers, who swirl about Fisk as though he is the most important, powerful, and attractive man in New York. The presence at the Opera House of other important men—elected officials, judges, business associates—tends to confirm the impression. Champagne flows freely; cigar smoke clouds the air. The Opera House has many private rooms where Fisk’s guests can get to know one another better.
Fisk visits these rooms, but he ends most evenings at Josie’s house, just around the corner. It is his home away from home, and he spends more nights there than in his own house—and many more nights than he spends at the Boston home of Mrs. Fisk. Moralists like Dan Drew shudder at Fisk’s flouting of the conventional code, but in his own way he is the soul of domesticity. Josie will remark how often he comes home—that is, to her house—in the evening and promptly falls asleep, too exhausted from playing the Prince of Erie, as the papers call him, to do any of the scandalous things ascribed to him.
On these nights she looks around her house, at her dresses and diamonds and furniture and paintings, and concludes that she has done well for herself. And yet, as her eye falls on Fisk, slumped in an armchair with his coat thrown off, his stomach bulging over his belt, his jowls hiding his cravat, his snores shaking the paintings and the silver, she wonders if there isn’t more to a young woman’s life.