By Harry’s death in 1934, all of the Fairchilds were dead except Sally, who soldiered on for several more decades. Sally was a tough old bird. Her great nephew Blair Fuller visited her in Boston in the 1930s, and she made a deep impression—a daunting, lordly personage, tended by a liveried Japanese manservant and flanked by snappish Pekinese dogs. The bookplates in her library—many of them now at the Boston Athenaeum—featured her favorite canine, “Tug,” the name of the Fairchild dog that she claimed as her own as a child. Sally maintained her patrician Old World hauteur, a reminder of the long-dead Gilded Age. Not everyone was taken in by her pose, however. Lord Bertrand Russell, once smitten with the young Sally, was less than enraptured when he saw her in her elder years, long after her money, beauty, and youth had faded. In his Autobiography he wrote that when he encountered Sally in 1940 he wondered what it was that he had ever seen in her. (Of course, his dismissal of an older woman may say even more about Russell, who enjoyed a string of much younger wives and mistresses.)
But what stories Sally could tell of the places she’d been, the great artists and literary figures she’d known: John Singer Sargent, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, George Bernard Shaw, and other eminences. Even H. G. Wells had sought out Sally when he visited New York in 1905, having heard so much about her in England. As an old woman she still had the ability to seduce. At eighty she took up with a man nearly fifty years her junior. His wife sued for divorce, but Sally expressed no remorse whatsoever, saying instead, “If that young woman can’t hold her husband that’s her lookout.” The man remained devoted to Sally until she died in 1960 at the age of ninety-one.
As the years went on, even Clara softened in her feelings toward her aunt, though she couldn’t resist reporting that, since Sally outlived her sister by many years, it was Lucia who triumphed in the end. She had the “last laugh,” Clara wrote, referring to the peace of the afterlife. “She had thirty-six years of undisturbed peace with [her mother] Miss Lily” before the annoying ghost of Aunt Sally “joined them on the other side.”
Sargent kept his painting of Sally—that effusion of veiled youth and beauty on the shores of Nahant—for the rest of his life. It was not a commission; he had done it for himself. At one point Charles Fairchild wanted to buy a portrait of his daughter from the artist, perhaps this one, but Sargent refused. In fact, they got into an argument over it. Since Sargent never gave up this painting, it clearly was meaningful to him. Perhaps the portrait brought back memories of that summer day at the beach and the happy family whose lives seemed so filled with promise. After Sargent’s death in 1925, the auction house Christie Manson & Woods in London held an estate sale of the artist’s studio work. The printed catalogue did not include a listing of Lady with a Blue Veil, as Sally’s painting is called, since it was a late addition to the sale. Someone at the auction house added an annotation in pencil to the catalogue: “Lot 149A,” and her portrait was described as “Girl veiled with sailor hat poor unfinished.” Sargent obviously thought otherwise.
The social world they all moved in was a very small one, so Sargent surely knew of the Fairchilds’ fading fortunes, of Lucia’s success as an artist and her tragic decline, and of Sally’s life as it unfolded. Sally cared deeply for her mother, traveled widely, entranced some of the extraordinary artists and intellects of the era, dealt with the loss of money, the deaths of siblings, and finally ended up being loved by a much younger man. It was an eventful life, but compared with Lucia’s accomplishments and heroism, it pales. Looking back upon his choice of sisters, one wonders if Sargent regretted his decision. He had once counseled Lucia that an “interesting” face, an interesting person, was a better subject for art than one who was merely beautiful. Perhaps he should have taken his own advice.
Sargent’s portrait of Sally, now in private hands, remains as fresh and mysterious as the day it was painted. Yet it is Lucia—the “other sister,” who watched as the painting emerged—whose story continues to resonate. Lucia seems to have cast a spell over the current owner of her house in the old Cornish Colony. He says that living there has been a kind of fantasy come true. And he means that literally. Before he’d ever seen the place, he made a freehand pencil sketch of his dream house: U-shaped, with a courtyard and garden in the middle, and an overhanging roof on all sides. Around the same time he happened to see an ad for Lucia’s house, and he was amazed that it looked exactly like his drawing. It seemed fate had drawn him to the house so he bought it, even though it was well beyond his means. With the taxes, the cost of heating it in a New Hampshire winter, and other expenses, it is a continual struggle to hang on to the place, but, like Lucia before him, he economizes as best as he can. Inspired by Lucia, he has taken up painting, and has methodically transcribed her letters. He speaks of feeling an affinity with her, as if she were still alive. Her courageous spirit and determination inspire him. “Each time I turn a door knob, I know that Lucia has turned it with her own hand before me,” he says, “and I feel her presence everywhere.” As for her husband, Harry, he feels no such empathy. “Harry, well, he is where he is.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Madonna
The bud is so beautiful one wonders what the open flower is to be.
—Margaret Astor Chanler, speaking of her infant daughter Elizabeth
BOTH THE WOMAN and her portrait were deeply loved. In a family of operatic passions and conflicts this woman, Elizabeth Chanler, and her image, by Sargent, offered points of repose. Such beauty! Elizabeth’s sister Margaret so loved the portrait that she could not bear to be away from it. For half the year the portrait hung at Rokeby, the Chanler family’s country estate on the Hudson River. A semiannual ritual took place for six decades. Come late autumn, the four-foot-by-three-foot portrait (not counting the elaborate scallop shell frame chosen by Sargent) was taken off the wall at Rokeby, carefully packed, and brought to the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Margaret relocated for the winter. The painting would then be ceremoniously hung above the fireplace in the drawing room of her townhouse at 317 West 74th Street, the residence that had been personally selected for her and renovated by über-architect Stanford White, friend to both her and Sargent. When the weather warmed, the reverse commute took place, and the prized family possession returned to Rokeby like a migrating bird.
Sargent had painted twenty-seven-year-old Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler in June of 1893, in his studio in London. She was in England for a happy occasion—the marriage of her brother Robert. The artist described Elizabeth as a woman with “the face of the Madonna and the eyes of a child” and there’s a saintly, even somber quality to the painting. Over her shoulder, on the wall, hangs a religious scene that appears to be the Virgin and child encased in a Florentine frame. Elizabeth’s black satin dress with its puffy, leg-of-mutton sleeves is elegant but old-fashioned. The strands of pearls and frothy jewels that adorn some of Sargent’s women are absent here. Instead, an antique pendant hangs around her neck—though it might as well be a cross. She is beautiful but hard to fathom, with her brown, deep-set, impenetrable eyes. Sargent may have described those eyes as childlike, but they are neither carefree nor joyous. Elizabeth stares directly at the viewer, so hard in fact that you wish she’d blink. Curators at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where the portrait now hangs, point out the tension in the portrait—the utter stillness of her face versus the jumble in the bottom half of the painting where her clasped hands try to keep a colorful “restless” pillow under control. Chaos is not far from the serene surface, with Elizabeth doing everything she can to keep it tamped down.
How is it that Sargent intuited the storms—past and future—that swirled around a seemingly guileless, innocent soul? Sargent knew her story. She was one of the famous “Astor orphans,” set adrift at an early age. The artist was aware of the terrible illness she had endured. She limped just as his own sister Emily did, from inscrutable childhood diseases. Unable to walk then, they both spent a good part of their young lives carried about on portab
le beds. The similarity was uncanny, and it couldn’t help but give Sargent a special empathy for this woman.
Elizabeth’s fragile health convinced her she’d never marry. Her family felt equally certain of that. She was to be brave, but virginal. Long-suffering and self-abnegating. And ever cheerful, no matter what tragedies befell her—and there were lots of them.
At six years old, Elizabeth stood by as her sister, two years older than she, died from scarlet fever. Three years later her great-grandfather, William B. Astor, the richest man in America, passed away at the ripe old age of eighty-three. Her mother, Margaret, reportedly caught a cold during the funeral procession. Within weeks, the Astor heiress—just thirty-seven years old and pregnant with her twelfth child—was dead from pneumonia, the unborn child perishing with her. Elizabeth was, at nine years old, the eldest daughter of ten surviving children, and she took on the role of surrogate mother.
The grief-stricken father, John Winthrop Chanler, a lawyer and former three-term U.S. congressman from New York, was unable to cope with his huge brood. At Rokeby, about six miles north of Rhinebeck, New York, the children were overseen by a succession of governesses and tutors and a house full of servants, but it was Elizabeth, a mere child herself, who provided the emotional ballast. Her father spent much of his time tending to financial matters in New York. He recruited Mary Marshall, his sternly Calvinist, unmarried cousin from South Carolina, to take charge of the overactive and combative children, who ranged in age from thirteen-year-old John Armstrong “Archie” to Egerton, who was barely a year old.
Despite the ample staff and the elegant surroundings, the children were largely unsupervised and sometimes their world seemed more Lord of the Flies than Peter Pan’s Neverland. Visitors were shocked by the scenes of bedlam that played out at Rokeby. Years later, Elizabeth’s sister confessed in a memoir that their playmates found the Chanler children “formidable” and the family brand of humor “grim in every sense.” The children were either sick, fighting, or recovering from an accident of some sort. The household featured a menagerie of pets—ponies and rabbits, raccoons and snakes. One brother yoked an ox to his wagon for fun. There were dogs of varying breeds: fox terriers, a bulldog, a setter. One fierce dog fight in the parlor ended only after Elizabeth’s brother Robert bit the dogs’ tails. Pets regularly foraged under the table at dinner and on at least one occasion, a goat made an appearance in the dining room. At that, Mary Marshall leaped out of her chair and bolted from the room. Dinner provided an opportunity for arguing at high volume. Natural orators, the Chanlers prided themselves on their commanding voices and on their debating skills. They all shouted at once, but when words failed they’d sometimes resort to stronger measures. Knife slashes can still be seen on the family dining table.
The children were daredevils, determined to best one another in death-defying feats—a competitive streak that would continue their entire lives. Mary, dark-eyed and gentle, could barely contain her charges. She did a lot of praying. A telling photograph shows the children surrounding their seated cousin. Poor Marshall has an exhausted look on her face, dark circles around her eyes; she sits slumped in her chair, one of the children firmly pressing a hand on her shoulder as if holding her down.
Elizabeth—known also as Bess, Bessie, or even Queen Bess—served as a kind of maternal presence, parceling out advice to her older brothers, Archie and Winthrop “Wintie,” who were at boarding school at St. John’s Military Academy in Sing Sing (now Ossining), New York. In an 1876 letter, Elizabeth counseled them to work hard and earn good grades. She also offered tidbits of life at Rokeby in their absence. “Dear boys,” she began, as if a grown-up, though her childish handwriting, misspellings, and ink blots on the page reveal her true age of not quite ten. She went on to describe a “grand dinner party” she held with the help of her governess Miss Tisdale. She and her coconspirator kept the party a secret until the last moment, and Elizabeth felt very proud of her hostessing skills: “I had my little table brought up to the dineing room and the leavs put in. We had sherry glasses for goblets, we ate off my dinner set that aunt Margaret gave me. I inviteed all the children as far down as Margaret [who was five years old; the three younger children didn’t make the invitation list] and we dined at the little table. We had soup, beef steak, & quail for chicken, mashed potato, cranberry, and pie. . . .”
She wrote dutifully to her brothers, reporting on the status of the puppies; on younger brother Willie’s mumps, which then spread to Lewis and Marion; and on baby Egerton—too little to know that he had no mother—taking his first steps. Amid the chaos, servants came and went. “Nanie and Mary, have both left with out saying good bye to any one,” she wrote. Small wonder.
Elizabeth missed her father as much as she missed her brothers, and she’d write to him in New York, where he remained sequestered at their Madison Avenue residence. “The children at home are very well,” and “Bob is getting on very nicely,” she reported in one letter. She also included news about a pony and the arrival of a carriage— “carriedg” in her youthful misspelling. She eagerly anticipated her father’s visits to Rokeby, even if she did have to remind him of his social obligations. Don’t forget to let the neighbors know if you’re going to dine with them, she lectured him in one note. It was as if Elizabeth were the mistress of the household, or his social secretary, the practical one making arrangements. “I would have gone to meet you but there is only one seat in the sleigh,” she wrote to her “Dear Papa” on mourning stationery with thick bands of black around the edges. The stationery told its own grim tale.
It was a strange household. Remote. Old-fashioned. Like a world unto itself, with its own rules of behavior, and brutally clannish. The children clung to one another and to Rokeby itself. The house was vast, with multiple levels, long hallways, a looming tower with a winding stairway that led to the rooftop. The children could browse through William B. Astor’s original library of books that still remain in the octagonal-shaped library; family treasures throughout the house reminded them always of their exalted position in the world. But many of the rooms were frigid in winter, and everywhere there were deep shadows relieved only by the dim flickering of kerosene lamps. There was an emptiness beneath the grandeur—their mother gone, their father deeply distracted.
The boys were tended by Jane Cross, a former slave who’d been working as a laborer at the Navy Yard in Washington when their mother hired her as a nurse. She moved with the family to New York after Congressman Chanler finished his final term. She never learned to read or write despite the best efforts of the children, who took turns trying to teach her, but she was a beloved peacekeeper in a household in need of one. She settled disputes among the staff and scolded the boys well into adulthood when they got out of line. She even took it upon herself to lecture fifteen-year-old Margaret about her poor posture, telling her how un-Chanler-like it was. Cross swept the boys’ rooms and kept their clothing immaculate into her old age. She died at Rokeby and her ghost haunts the house. On the anniversary of her death, one of the brothers heard “Old Black Jane” sweeping the billiard room above him, the room where she’d caught the cold that killed her. She had told the children it was her “death cold.” Years later, a guest experienced the same ghostly phenomenon on the anniversary of Jane’s death.
Besides Cousin Mary and Jane Cross, their upbringing was mainly in the hands of servants whom the children summoned with bell pulls. The servants created their own minidramas. One butler borrowed money the sisters had saved for the poor and collected in a mite box—and then refused to repay them. A housekeeper who lived on the third floor kept up a melancholy vigil for her brother, long since lost at sea. She expected his return any day, her hopes raised and then dashed whenever a visitor approached. The children were, of course, well aware of her misery. In a letter to her brother in Sing Sing, Elizabeth announced the arrival of yet another new nurse—and this one stayed for thirty years. She walked “like an empress,” was very English, and lorded over the othe
r servants.
The majority of the servants were Irish, most of them fresh off the boat, and they treated the children like little English lords and ladies. They bowed to the children’s superior rank, but they also taught them jigs and reels, and bewitched them with strange stories. The servants were country people, steeped in old ways and superstitions. Sunday was their day off, and after the requisite churchgoing, the boys would sometimes wander to the servants’ porch for blood sports like dogfighting. Irish wakes were held in the house. One winter a young boy living on the estate was murdered in his family’s cabin. The drinking and the keening went on all night, the sounds from the wake echoing throughout the dark hallways. The children watched the next day as the funeral sleighs wound through the snow outside their windows.
Unsettling spirits hover over the house. Even Mary Marshall, the soul of sobriety and common sense, had a ghostly premonition. In the middle of the night, a cousin came to her bedside. Marshall was not at all surprised when she later received the news that her relative had died that very night.
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