Then the play, dedicated to the beloved Saint-Gaudens, began. It is set in the Cornish Hills, a kingdom ruled by the classical gods and goddesses who are dumbstruck by the arrival of mortals. Jupiter, the chief diety, dispatches Hermes to summon all the gods from Mount Olympus to convene at Aspet. Jupiter wants to learn more about these humans and perhaps find one among them worthy to take over as ruler. A “countryman” carrying a tin dinner pail (acted by Harry, who also appears later in the production as Apollo) enters the stage, sits down on the altar, pulls out a corncob pipe, and begins to smoke. Jupiter, intoxicated by the smell, is drawn to this common man and asks, “What people are these you live among?” The countryman replies:
Well, they’re a crazy bunch take ’em large and small
None of ’em do any work just play
though hanged if they don’t seem to make it pay.
Paintin’ pictures, writin’ books
Makin’ statues, hirin’ cooks,
Fussin’ with flowers, buildin’ pools,
You never see such a lot of fools.
The countryman goes on to describe the music and art that permeated life in the Colony and Jupiter is moved:
Ah, now I begin to understand
This is a sort of promised land
Come true. A group of perfect mortals found,
In mutual admiration bound.
With ideals high, and free from strife
They all pursue the simple life.
One by one, the gods and goddesses arrive to meet in council. Once assembled, Jupiter announces that he plans to abdicate, for “The Gods are not what they’re cracked up to be / . . . . No mortals take us seriously.” Neptune and Pluto step forward and each one, in turn, claims that he would be the best. Jupiter asks Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, to choose between the two. She selects neither. She orders Neptune to be content “to rule the tides” and Pluto to get “back to the Earth’s insides.” The candidate she chooses is “from amongst the mortals, / One who’s never passed Olympus’ portals.” Jupiter asks, “Is he painter, poet, sage?” and Minerva responds:
He’s all in one.
The maker of a new Augustan Age.”
It is Saint-Gaudens.
An emotional Saint-Gaudens—the new king of the gods—was escorted onstage, surrounded by the cast members, and presented with a bowl embellished with mythological figures and engraved with both his name and that of his wife. He and Gussie were placed on a chariot designed and painted by Lucia and Harry—with Gussie somewhat denting the magical moment by memorably shouting at her husband that the paint was still wet. Cast members then carried them off. (The chariot remains at the historic site, a relic of that remarkable evening.) Saint-Gaudens later recalled the transcendent moment: “As the play ended and the performers followed the chariot up to the house in their classic dresses, all bathed in a wonderful sunset, it was a spectacle and a recall of Greece of which I have dreamed, but have never thought actually to see in Nature.” Dinner on Saint-Gaudens’s colonnaded porch followed, and then dancing and more revelry in his studio.
Saint-Gaudens was so touched by the Colony’s tribute to him that he created a bas-relief bronze sculpture to celebrate the event. He reproduced the pagan scene: Parrish’s grinning masks hang from pine trees flanking the temple-like stage set; a fire burns on the altar above the motto “Amor Vincit” (“Love Conquers All”); to the right of the altar, the figure of Amor, the ancient god of love, plays Apollo’s harp. The sculpture is topped with a classical pediment embellished with a golden bowl; at the bottom is the chariot. The names of all the participants in the masque, eighty-six of them, including Lucia and Harry and their two children and even Ebba Bohm, are memorialized in it. Saint-Gaudens had three-inch tall medals of silver and bronze—minisculptures known as “plaquettes”—cast from the larger original he’d made. He had two editions produced—one in Paris by Janvier & Duval, and the other by Tiffany in New York—and distributed the plaquettes to all the colonists who had taken part in the pageant. Though the keepsakes celebrated the notion that “love conquers all,” the medal didn’t save Lucia and Harry’s marriage.
Not long after the grand celebration, Harry decamped for his mother’s farm in Deerfield; she had an inheritance and could support him. Lucia would be relieved of the burden of carrying him financially and enduring his depressions. Around the same time, Lucia painted a six-inch-by-four-inch miniature self-portrait. In the Looking Glass depicts Lucia at her easel in midcreation, looking into a mirror. (The viewers are in effect the mirror, with Lucia staring directly at them.) Dressed in a shapeless brown dress with a prim lace collar, looking wan and joyless, she almost appears to be a nun or one of her colonial-era Plymouth women. She portrays herself as an artist, and she doesn’t sugarcoat it. It’s hard work. She’s now on her own, left with the care and support of their two children.
She and Harry had parted amicably and she insisted in her letters to him that he needn’t worry about trying to provide for them financially. (She was surely a realist when it came to that.) Nor did she bad-mouth him to her children. Just the opposite. As her daughter later wrote, “Lucia firmly told us that he was a much better painter than she, and that we should love and respect him.” The following summer they rented their house and pool in Cornish, the center of their dreams, to Ethel Barrymore. Lucia and the children took a more modest place nearby.
During subsequent summers Harry would sometimes reappear in Cornish as if the family were whole once again, but in short order they’d go their separate ways. They were better off apart. Lucia’s health was growing worse, and she surely didn’t need Harry around. And yet, narcissistically, he believed that he was the victim. After Lucia rejected his attempt at a rapprochement in 1909, he wrote angrily to her: “Whereas the pain I cause you brings you nothing but pain, the pain you glory in causing me is immeasurably greater. . . . I am myself degraded in your degradation, not because you affect me egotistically, but because while I live with you I am zero.” And then, the final rebuke: “I am no more a part of your psychological existence than a chair.” It would be better for her to be free of that particular chair.
One thing was clear: Lucia could not look to her own family for help. Over the years Sally had made certain of that. In hectoring letters to her younger sister, Sally repeatedly reminded Lucia of the pledge she’d made that she would never ask the Fairchilds for money. “If you had a husband who could support you,” Sally lectured Lucia, there wouldn’t be a problem. And as for the family’s post-1893 financial losses, well, things were becoming “quite desperate” by Sally’s standards: “We cannot even afford the cheapest seats at Symphony this season.” Yet, Sally and her mother made at least two trips abroad, to Paris and London, in the mid-to-late 1890s. Sargent wrote to the art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1894, proposing a dinner in London with a small guest list that included Sally. Paterfamilias Charles was left behind during these excursions, and he began a slow descent into senility. Lily confided in a letter that his speech was becoming nonsensical and the once-savvy financier no longer read his business correspondence. He’d tear it up instead.
It was expected that the Fairchild sons would join their father in the family business on Wall Street. They were well-bred Harvard grads who’d rubbed shoulders with the most privileged young men in the country. But misfortune and tragedy—and plain failure to thrive—haunted all of the brothers. The only exception was Blair, who shrewdly married for money. He wed Edith Cushing of Boston, whose disfigured leg had discouraged suitors despite her handsome bank balance. One family account speculated that Blair was homosexual, but this marriage of convenience turned out to be a happy one. After a brief stint in business he entered the diplomatic service, with posts in Turkey and Persia (present-day Iran). Then, thanks to his wife’s income, he turned to composing music. The couple had no children. They lived in Paris and summered in Saint-Jean-de-Luz. Blair artfully fended off requests for money from his siblings, claiming that he got by o
n “an allowance from Edith.” Though Blair felt especially close to Lucia—“my angel sister!” he called her—he did not do much to ease her travail.
Reading the letters and the accounts of the brothers, one is struck by the spectacular way they imploded. They were all handsome, athletic, well-liked members of the right clubs. Every one of them was an expert sailor, having spent blissful summers on Narragansett Bay in Newport in a house that a family friend described as having “its back to the world and its face to the Infinite.” They all lived in an uneasy borderland between the world and the Infinite—and, deeply troubled, they seemed drawn inexorably to death. In contrast, Lucia’s Infinite was art. And Sally focused her considerable energies on clinging to her place in society.
None of the brothers inherited their father’s business acumen. The most incompetent of all was the oldest son, Charles Jr. Unfortunately, he took over the helm for his sick father and made a complete hash of the business. By 1905, he had squandered the family fortune—and then, to make matters worse, he sold his father’s seats on the New York Stock Exchange and Corn Exchange, apparently for his own gain. Blair, insulated as he was by the Cushing money, attributed his eldest brother’s misbehavior to mental illness. Charles was an alcoholic and, at times, apparently homeless. He’d dart into the best New York hotels and pinch stationery to write to his siblings, saying things like “[I’m] staying alert for any opportunity that may present itself.” Meanwhile his frantic wife, May, who, like Lucia, was a miniature artist, was moving from town to town in New England and writing pathetic letters to her in-laws begging for money so that she could buy warm clothing for her children. She was so desperate she even approached Lucia.
The Fairchilds had been brought up to believe that one had the right to take one’s own life—to choose the Infinite, so to speak—and, unfortunately, the brothers took that philosophy to heart. In 1906, the charming Nelson, who’d been a member of the fencing and Hasty Pudding clubs at Harvard and who was noted by his classmates for his special ability to cultivate long-lasting friendships, was appointed vice-consul to Mukden, Manchuria—the first American mission in that remote corner. He wrote enthusiastic and colorful letters to his mother of the sights and smells he encountered en route to Manchuria on the Trans-Siberian railroad. He seemed happily engaged at his new post—that is, until he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. He was twenty-seven years old. His mother, devastated, refused to believe it was suicide. The Boston newspapers called the death a tragic accident. Lily collected the letters Nelson had written to her during his foreign adventure and published them privately. A copy of the book, with a long sunny summation of his life, remains at the Boston Athenaeum. Lucia painted a posthumous miniature of Nelson, based on the last photograph taken of him in Mukden.
None of the brothers survived middle age. Charles Jr., the financial miscreant, took his own life in his fifties. Jack, the second oldest son and a star at Harvard—class president, head of the Hasty Pudding club, member of the crew team, and all-round football player (he played variously as quarterback, fullback, kicker, and punt returner)—never made it to fifty, dying of some mysterious cause. He had several disastrous marriages—the first one in 1898 to Charlotte Houston, a Bohemian art collector and photographer who shed Jack when it became clear he had insufficient money to indulge her interests. Charlotte had her own intriguing story. She moved to New York with their three children and became a prominent performing arts photographer, shooting modern dancers and actresses, Ethel Barrymore among them.
Gordon, the sweet youngest brother, would become ensnared in scandal. When Sargent visited the Fairchilds in Nahant in 1890, he watched eight-year-old Gordon playing by the seaside, clambering over some rocks. The artist determined that he had to paint the boy. And so he did. The canvas depicts Gordon sitting cross-legged, nearly enveloped in a wicker chair, looking as if he is about to nod off to sleep after an active day at the beach; dreamy-eyed, he clutches his pet guinea pig. By the time Gordon graduated from Harvard Law School in 1907, the family was in free fall. Money gone. Father incapacitated. Brothers scattered, incompetent, or dead. Gordon moved to the other side of the world—to Manila, where he worked as a legal attaché for the governor-general of the Philippines.
In August 1909, Lucia visited her parents in Newport and was shocked at her father’s pathetic condition—slack-jawed and wandering aimlessly about looking for something he couldn’t remember. (Oddly, he repeated over and over again how grateful he was to Harry.) Lily, in need of money, was forced to sell the gift her husband had once given her—Sargent’s portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson. She had an American offer, but wanted to get the highest price possible. In the spring of 1910, she corresponded with Sargent, asking if she might find a more lucrative bid in England. Forget the English market, he told her, as budgets here are very tight. He ended the note by saying how sorry he was to hear of her husband’s “melancholy” state; he also sent his love to Sally and Gordon.
Charles died later that year. Sixty-five-year-old Lily and forty-one-year-old Sally decided to join Gordon in Manila. “Change is relief,” William Dean Howells wrote to the widow, “even if you must come back to the loss you try to fly.” While in Asia, mother and daughter also visited Japan. A photo of Lily in a Japanese rickshaw survives, as do complaints from Sally about local hygiene: “They are so clean in some ways & so disgusting in others. The best dressed ladies all use their hair pins to pick their teeth & I am sorry to say clean their ears & nails—& they spit raucously into bits of paper which they put in their sleeves until next time!” she wrote to Lucia.
After a few years Gordon gave up on the law and moved back to the States with Lily and Sally. In 1912 he considered taking a job at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. A friend on the staff had suggested Gordon to the director, who was in search of an assistant. The director’s eyes lit up at the possibility of a Fairchild working for him. Gordon was just the sort of blue blood he wanted—a man of the world who understood the subtleties of the Cabot set and was “a more or less certain fork chooser.” Yes, Gordon knew all about forks and Cabots. But then his friend had second thoughts. He warned Gordon that the job would entail working with “a lot of women and hermaphrodites who wished they were women. God would hate you.” Better to go to the Metropolitan Museum in New York or “to some fresh water museum which is building up,” his friend advised him. The Museum of Fine Arts had changed for the worse: “The old . . . days of sacrifices to the Muses are gone and we have strange new gods the smoke from whose altar goes up in shapes like $.”
Perhaps heeding his friend’s caution, Gordon instead became a master at St. Paul’s School, the all-boys aristocratic breeding ground in New Hampshire. His mother and sister moved in with him at the boarding school. Sally served as Gordon’s hostess, entertaining homesick boys on Sunday afternoons with tea and goodies served on fine, bird-patterned china, and doubtless offering up advice.
Lucia, meanwhile, fought her increasing disability and achieved great professional success: she helped found the American Society of Miniature Painters in 1899; she was elected to the American Society of Painters that same year; she won medals at expositions in Paris, Buffalo, and St. Louis; she became an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1906, and eventually president of the American Society of Miniature Painters in 1913. A 1910 exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London included Lucia’s miniature of a sweet young girl in a nightgown holding her doll. Clara had been her model. (The Metropolitan Museum purchased the painting five years later.) Sargent probably saw Lucia’s miniature on display, as he, too, exhibited at the show. A wealthy Viennese woman so admired Lucia’s portrait of Clara that she commissioned her to come to Austria and paint a posthumous portrait of her dead daughter.
At sixteen, Clara accompanied her mother on the trip. Their departure in 1911 was delayed for a month when Lucia became ill with what seemed to be a bad cold. By force of will, Lucia managed to travel to Vienna and complete the portrait.
But Clara remembered this as the beginning of the steep deterioration in her mother’s health. After their return to New York, Lucia went to the Neurological Institute for the Study and Treatment of Nervous and Mental Diseases on East 67th Street. Finally, a diagnosis: sclerosis of the spinal cord, what we know today as multiple sclerosis. At that time the disease was almost completely misunderstood, and the doctors believed that Lucia’s case stemmed from the childhood mishap when she jumped off the steps of their Back Bay mansion and hurt her back, the injury that her sister Sally thought she was faking.
In 1914 her doctor recommended an immediate five-week stay in the hospital for daily electrical treatments and massage. After that, she would require a period of rest for at least several months. Work was out of the question until they could arrest the spread of the disease. If she followed the prescribed regimen, there was hope that she’d have many more years producing art. Lucia was frantic. She couldn’t afford to stop working. She had rent and medical bills to pay. And then there were her children’s school expenses—nineteen-year-old Clara in college, and seventeen-year-old Charley at boarding school. Lucia insisted on the best schools—Brearley and Bryn Mawr for Clara, Groton and Harvard for Charley—believing it was her children’s birthright to have an elite education. This was the world to which she had been brought up, and she wanted them to enjoy the same privileges, even if she lacked the financial wherewithal. Tuition money depended on scholarships and the generosity of others. When Charley enrolled at Harvard in 1915, Lucia’s childhood friend Jessie Morgan covered four thousand dollars of Charley’s expenses. Lucia’s brother Blair, thanks to his wife’s fortune, contributed another thousand dollars.
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