Minna and Jack would not be denied. They married in July 1889 at the evocatively named Prides Crossing in Massachusetts. Nine months later they had a son, Victor Emmanuel Chapman; a second son arrived three years later in November 1893. Jack worked on Wall Street as a lawyer and was left alone in New York for long stretches while Minna and the babies stayed with family in Italy or Massachusetts. He loathed the law and preferred philosophy, politics, and literature—all of which appealed to the Chanler sisters. He became a staple at their dinner parties in New York and Rokeby, a brilliant addition to their table. And then, inexorably, as if brought together by forces beyond their control, he and Elizabeth drifted into a passionate romance. They recognized something in each other: they were kindred, damaged souls. They were survivors. “I have played chess with the powers of darkness steadily day & night and beaten them,” he wrote to Elizabeth on June 25, 1895. “I have suffered vivisection—& not flinched.” Having both passed through dark torments of body and soul, they shared a bond. He could see into her heart. After a dinner party one winter night in 1895 during which Elizabeth was clearly depressed—“way down in Hades and could scarcely make conversation”—he penned her a note. “There is a certain cut fate has for us—against which there is no defence—namely the misfortunes and unhappiness of other people,” Chapman wrote.
Their dozens and dozens of letters, some of them twenty pages long, grow ever more intimate. The “My dear Miss Chanler” eventually morphs into “Elizabeth darling” and “my beautiful Elizabeth.”
“I love you & am with you in spirit,” Jack blurts out just after Christmas in 1894. He counts the days when he will see her next and fears missing any opportunity he has to visit. Sunday noon on February 17, 1895, he writes as if to prepare himself for disappointment:
My dear Miss Chanler
What is going to happen is this—I leave a card at 2:40 at your house & shall be told you do not receive till 5 & as I have to go downtown I shall not see you for a week. . . . But you are here always & forever. We will have no partings & deathbed scenes & attempts to sum up & deliver the whole treasury of human thoughts & feeling which the word parting suggests—You are to be always here—And you will ask me to Rokeby will you not.
Their letters simmer with desire and frustration, volleying back and forth like “a sort of electric wire.” One moment Jack says they have no need to see each other physically as their connection is of a higher metaphysical order: “The air is full of spirits—shuttlings through the universe & riding on the spider filaments of reminiscence.” But sometimes those filaments don’t suffice and he has an animal craving to see her, to be with her. In the evening he often went to the Century Association on 43rd Street, the grand, all-male club in Manhattan. There, fellow members like Stanford White—whose firm had designed the grand Renaissance Revival clubhouse—gathered for drinks and blustery talk. Jack sat at a remove, huddled over a table with paper and pen, scribbling pages to his beloved. Perhaps he was fueled by a few stiff drinks, as the handwriting sometimes deteriorates and the letters begin to ramble. Still, there is no doubting the depths of his feelings. On the night of October 3, 1895, he writes from the club that in her absence he feels as if he is “gasping for air or water.” She is in Paris at the time, impossibly far away.
For all the passion and love in the letters, there is also a strong spiritual current. Jack writes to Elizabeth that when he first set eyes upon her he felt a “blessedness” in her existence and saw “all the Light Life shining out of you.” Elizabeth had been schooled to bend to God’s will, no matter how unfair or inscrutable the events in her life had been. All those lectures she’d heard from cousin Mary Marshall at Rokeby, and the Sewell sisters on the Isle of Wight telling her over and over again that life’s sorrows were all part of God’s plan. Perhaps her relationship with Jack was also the work of God. If so, she and Jack were helpless to resist. Elizabeth experienced a joy and an awakening she’d never known before.
In an impetuous moment in 1895, Jack sent Elizabeth the sonnets he had written for his wife. Minna was in Italy at the time, off with the children, but upon her return she asked her husband for the poems. Jack wrote to Elizabeth, then in Paris, begging her to return the sonnets. Elizabeth was enraged. She burned all of his recent letters. When Jack received her “big letter with death in it,” he was beside himself. How could she do such a thing? The letters were “holy things . . . a part of my soul. . . . Those letters were my memorial and part of me—the veins in the body—you have burnt them—” He begged for an explanation and prayed that she’d at least kept the ashes. In a single day he wrote her three separate letters from his Wall Street firm and the Century Club, alternating between professions of love and anger. When he got home that night there was a cable from Elizabeth saying “so sorry.” He was incensed. That was all she could say? Your cable “sounded like cracked china,” he wrote back. “You are a shallow pan . . . a flighty shallow girl.” Letters and cables flew back and forth across the Atlantic. Where is my Elizabeth? Jack wanted to know.
The drama and accusations led to a long-distance reconciliation. By the time Elizabeth headed back to the States in October 1895, she and Jack were desperate to see each other and more passionate than ever. It would take six long days by ship from Liverpool to New York. Jack wrote in care of the Cunard office on Bowling Green so that Elizabeth would be handed his letter the instant the boat arrived, saying he’d try to meet her at the dock.
Minna, conveniently, was in Massachusetts with the children. She was often away. That held risk, as there were women, among them Elizabeth, who found Jack’s smoldering good looks and intellectual intensity appealing. “How is it you dare to go off to Europe and leave every woman in New York ready to fall on my neck?” Jack wrote supposedly in jest to Minna in January 1895, when she and the children were in Italy. “Knowing my weakness of highly organized and contemptible flirtations, you don’t think I’ll indulge in them?” Clearly she didn’t think he would, and the least likely candidate for a love affair was the saintly Elizabeth, her dearest friend. Nonetheless, Elizabeth and Jack’s furtive relationship remained secret until suspicions arose at a Chanler family event.
On October 27, 1896, the youngest Chanler sister, twenty-three-year-old Alida, married the dashing Temple Emmet. (Like most of his set, Emmet was a gentleman lawyer/sportsman, with the emphasis firmly on the latter.) Two hundred family and guests boarded a special train from New York City, which converged on Rokeby for the celebration. It was a Tuesday. Stanford White (referred to as “a kind, gay pagan” by a Chanler in-law) served as impresario, orchestrating the event to the tiniest detail. The morning wedding ceremony was co-officiated by Henry Potter, Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, in the picturesque church near Rokeby that had been built by an Astor forebear. Entering the Carpenter Gothic church, guests passed beneath an archway of evergreens and brightly colored autumn leaves. The local country folk, who more or less served as dutiful peasants in Hudson Valley’s feudal society, had erected the wedding archway in honor of Alida.
A grand wedding breakfast and reception followed at Rokeby. The festivities went on all day. Tapestries festooned the exterior of the mansion, Neapolitan mandolin players strolled among the guests, and a popular Hungarian orchestra provided dance music. Revelers danced in a canvas-covered pavilion that Stanford White had built for the occasion.
Jack had written Elizabeth weeks before the wedding, telling her that he was coming solo, as Minna was pregnant and due to give birth in just a few months. Rather than rush home after the reception, Jack asked if he could stay on for an extra night at Rokeby to spend some time with her.
Anticipating her sister’s marriage—and her reunion with Jack—Elizabeth had gone to the very fashionable Mme. Macheret’s shop on East 23rd Street and purchased a “crimson chiffon dinner gown and blue silk blouse waist.” (Crimson! The Sewell aunts would have been appalled.) Her purchase amounted to $150—over $4,000 in today’s money. The brilliantly colored d
ress would match the autumnal landscape and would surely be noticed by Jack. During the reception, or in the dark hallways that night, Margaret Chanler came to the shocking realization that her older sister—the one supposedly destined for spinsterhood and fated never to experience sexual passion—had found love after all. But it was a forbidden love that Margaret determined to destroy, because it defied all conventions of society and religion.
Margaret confronted her sister and convinced her to pack up. They would leave together for a long voyage to Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka), India, and Japan, so that Elizabeth would forget Jack. The Chanler sisters stopped in London to pick up letters of introduction from their influential friends before traveling to the British colonies in South Asia. They received entrees to the leading tea estates in Ceylon; to experts on the education of Indian women (a subject of particular interest to both Elizabeth and Margaret); to the head gardener at the Taj Mahal who would give them a personal tour. Aboard the steamship RMS Valetta they sailed through the Mediterranean, traversed the Suez Canal, suffered from seasickness, and celebrated Christmas dinner with their fellow passengers by holding hands and singing “Auld Lang Syne.” The regular voyage from London to Ceylon, the tropical island off the southern coast of India, took roughly a month. After landing in the capital city of Colombo, the sisters soon went to a Buddhist monastery where Elizabeth conversed with monks through an interpreter. They attended an exhibition of Buddha’s tooth, and made an arduous trip through dense jungle to reach the ancient holy city of Anuradhapura, where a cutting from Buddha’s “tree of enlightenment” has grown for several thousand years. An ancient order of high priests protects the leaves from monkeys eager to eat them.
Limp or no limp, Elizabeth wanted to go off the beaten track. In India, a British general plotted an itinerary for them from Madras to the Khyber Pass, a route of nearly two thousand miles. Elizabeth kept a diary of their Indian travels; she said it was for her friend Minna Chapman. Elizabeth noted the exotic sights and colors of the country: “Women’s skirts and saris glowing reds and blues. Anklets of brass half way up the leg like a stocking”; “great fields of lovely pink opium poppies”; houses nearly covered with bougainvillea vine; water palaces and “a marvel of balconies, gratings, balustrades, domes and minarets”; “hundreds of savage bristling boars” being fed with corn to fatten them for the Maharaja’s hunting pleasure; elephants and “great peacocks the size of life.” Diamonds and rubies were seemingly everywhere. Even a trip to the armory was impressive: the swords were gold and encrusted with extravagant jewels.
By March the heat was becoming oppressive, and Elizabeth, whose fragile health was always a concern, was growing weary. She and Margaret retreated to Calcutta. There they received a cable from their sister in New York with shocking news: Minna Chapman was dead. After giving birth to her third son, Conrad, on the day before Christmas 1896, Minna developed a blood clot. Though bedridden, she seemed to be improving; but on the evening of January 25, 1897, while Jack was reading aloud to her, Minna suddenly sat upright and then collapsed, dead. She was thirty-five years old. Jack’s three children—the youngest an infant, the oldest only six years old—were now motherless. Elizabeth knew how that felt. As soon as she got the news on March 3, 1897, she wrote Jack:
God help you—And help us all for the light has gone out of the world. We are coming home. . . . I want to stay close to everybody I love forever more—Those children—and you—How can this world go on—Darling Jack
Jack insisted that she stay in India, that he would be all right. Elizabeth couldn’t be stopped. Over Margaret’s objections, they crossed the Indian continent to Bombay (present-day Mumbai) and caught the fastest steamer available. The sisters arrived in New York on April 7, and Elizabeth raced to Jack’s side.
According to late Victorian convention, Jack would remain in “deep mourning” for a year after Minna’s death. He’d have to dress in black with a mourning band on his hat—the so-called widower’s “weed” that would indicate his status to the world at large. Social calls, theater, and other amusements were off limits for at least six months, and a romantic attachment—at least one openly displayed—would be scandalous within a year’s time. If he conformed to a “perfectly formal line of conduct,” in Elizabeth’s words, Jack couldn’t remarry for at least two years. Those were the rules.
Elizabeth and Jack secretly shared a correspondence of the grandest, most heated, and forbidden passion. She kept all of his letters locked up at Rokeby so that her siblings wouldn’t find them. She told Jack to tell her when he received each one of her letters lest it was unaccounted for and fell into the wrong hands. In the summer of 1897, Chapman brought his children to the seashore on the main coast of Rhode Island—close enough to Newport, where Elizabeth would be staying, so that the pair could meet. Conanicut Island in Narragansett Bay, reachable by steam ferry, was the perfect midpoint. Elizabeth could slip away for the day and no one would know (though she feared that her sister Alida was already beginning to get suspicious about her relationship with Jack). Four hours alone on Conanicut. Such joy!
Jack teased her about her enjoyment of all the “mystery and clandestine meetings. . . . You shall have all the fun of it. I’ll wear a cloak and give the countersign, evade the eyes of hotel clerks, pass you in public, and leap through your casement to the sound of twangling instruments.” It was all very romantic, but brief encounters and letters were not enough to sustain her. Sitting beneath a tree on a breezy August morning in Newport, Elizabeth wrote passionately, “I crave more habit of you Jack—I need the close waking & sleeping intercourse of every moment of life. . . . And this living apart in our bodies delays that day,—though it must be going to make it more perfect when it comes. . . .”
In New York they met surreptitiously in out-of-the-way places like the Paulist Roman Catholic church on Tenth Avenue. Surely, no one would recognize them there. But on one occasion, Elizabeth dared to rendezvous with Jack at Grace Episcopal on lower Broadway, a religious outpost for their own social set. Jack had been writing poetry of late and he read some to her in church. She was so enthralled by his presence—“these blessed visions of your bodily nearness”—she could barely hear the poems. Their being together was all that mattered—“It was less than two hours, but it held days of fulfillment & verification. . . . For when I am away from you my own, all joy & peace seem prophesies of our meeting. And so they are.” She was transported with love, “my soul all full of you.” Elizabeth wrote this in New York City just before setting off for Rokeby, where she was to spend the fall, but she assured Jack that “every field & wood & brook will shine with you! Bless you, bless you my treasure—God keep us. . . .”
It was essential that Elizabeth go to Rokeby, but she couldn’t tell Jack why. A family scandal was brewing. The Chanler siblings were hunkered down, bound together with a secret only they knew. Though Jack was in the dark, he sensed something was wrong and asked about it in a letter. She refused to tell him. While away in India, Elizabeth and Margaret’s oldest sibling, Archie, had been placed against his will into Bloomingdale Asylum, a mental institution in White Plains. Two of his brothers had signed the commitment papers. Stanford White, Archie’s friend, helped lure him unsuspectingly to New York City. Family friend Theodore Roosevelt, then police commissioner of the city, helped lay the trap. Archie was arrested and clapped into the asylum, with a diagnosis that would keep him there permanently. The family put out a story that Archie was out of the country and so far no one had divined the truth.
Madness ran in the Astor line, beginning with the family patriarch’s eldest son, John Jacob Astor II, who had been afflicted with debilitating mental illness and referred to as an “imbecile.” Archie was certainly eccentric—among other things he believed that he could turn his face into the death mask of Napoleon, and that he had psychic powers from his so-called “X-Faculty.” Nonetheless, he was highly functional. He was putting the finishing touches on a mill town called Roanoke Rapids that he had crea
ted in the middle of the wilderness in North Carolina. Stanford White designed the textile factory and workers’ houses; he was also an investor in the enterprise, as were all the siblings. And there was the rub. Archie was spending money recklessly on the project, and the family’s Manhattan property, the bedrock of their fortune, was being mortgaged to the hilt to create a potential textile empire. The project was way over budget, and Archie was showing signs of mania. Not an unusual trait in a Chanler—they were all manic to some degree, and several of the brothers could easily have been deemed “insane”—but money was involved, family money, and lots of it. The brothers lost patience. Archie was locked away, and the textile project basically abandoned and written off as a loss (though the industrial town later became hugely successful, proving Archie’s prescience).
Elizabeth learned of her thirty-four-year-old brother’s plight when she arrived home from India. She went to see him in Bloomingdale Asylum. It was a genteel establishment for the rich—the grounds were lush and campus-like, tea was served every afternoon from a monogrammed sterling silver tea service—but, as Archie pointed out to Elizabeth, there were bars on the windows. He was imprisoned. As a trained lawyer, he knew his rights and said the law had been bent to suit his siblings. By the end of their meeting, Archie became convinced that even sweet, loving Elizabeth—as yet, the only sibling to visit—was part of the cabal against him. He sent her away and told her never to return. She was crushed, but felt she had to trust the judgment of her brothers who’d had Archie committed.
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