Elizabeth retreated to Rokeby with her own romantic secret. She was completely preoccupied with Jack. She wrote longingly to him that upon walking into the house it had “a honeymoon fragrance that makes me feel you by me at every turn.” The very smell of Rokeby summoned up “the vision of half forgotten things . . . all throbbing with life.” While her bathwater was being drawn, Elizabeth wandered into the billiard room where she and Jack had spent time alone the previous spring. Three happy weeks he’d been at Rokeby. Just walking into the billiard room brought it all back—it felt “like a great wedding chest holding a dense condensation of every hour we have spent there—It was almost an over powering outburst . . . like hanging on a precipice in heaven.”
She waited anxiously for his daily letter that seemed to her like a “Christmas stocking” that left her “guessing what’s inside before daylight.” She was sleepless thinking of him, and wrote him long, yearning letters. She wanted to visit him in the city, but there were unnamed people coming to Rokeby who might prevent her leaving. Perhaps it was the family lawyers.
Word about Archie had hit the headlines. A New York Times reporter—a morphine addict confined to Bloomingdale Asylum—had the professional good fortune to cross paths with Archie in the hospital. Archie was only too happy to narrate his story, and he asked the journalist to smuggle out a letter laying out his pitiful situation. What a scoop! Once released from the hospital, the reporter broke the news of the Astor scion’s whereabouts. A headline in the October 14, 1897, edition of the Times read:
MR. CHANLER NEEDS REST
CAUSE OF THE WELL-KNOWN NEW YORK
CLUBMAN’S COMMITMENT TO BLOOMINGDALE.
SOME QUEER HALLUCINATIONS
THE FORMER HUSBAND OF AMÉLIE RIVES
BREAKS DOWN MENTALLY AND
IS PLACED IN AN ASYLUM BY HIS NEAREST FRIENDS.
Archie had been locked up at Bloomingdale for seven months. The article quoted brother Willie, the egocentric African explorer, who tried to put the best spin on the situation: “[Archie] has a splendid constitution, and there is every reason to expect that with rest he will cease to suffer from the nervous exhaustion which has been his trouble.” In an attempt to contain the situation, Willie warned his sisters not to speak about it. But the Times reporter had Archie’s side of the story and that was juicy enough. He detailed Archie’s vehement legal objections to his institutionalization; he also provided an insider’s view of Archie’s peculiar room at Bloomingdale—among the furnishings were two portraits of Napoleon and a miniature roulette wheel. (Archie claimed that he’d figured out a way to beat the house at Monte Carlo.) And then there was the sordid business of Archie’s earlier misbegotten marriage to the scandalous best-selling novelist Amélie Rives, their subsequent divorce, and other public embarrassments, all of which the journalist rehearsed yet again. It was all very titillating and extremely embarrassing for the Astor clan, who were very concerned about the family’s image. (That being said, the Chanlers were not the only branch of the family to flout social mores. The entire line of Astors begat one delicious marital scandal after the next, leading cousin Daisy White to opine that “the Astor blood seems morally unsteady in the matrimonial line.”)
The news leak about Archie was bad enough, but rumors had also begun to circulate about Jack and Elizabeth’s relationship. The siblings confronted her. How could the saintly Elizabeth have put herself into such a bad light? Her brother Wintie accused her of acting as if she and Jack had been secretly married. Elizabeth wrote to Jack and told him of Wintie’s accusation. (Years later she scribbled an addendum to the letter in pencil: “This implies that we had been living together, which is of course not the case. But we had had many secret meetings, & unequivocal love making, & this amounted to marriage in my eyes.”) Wintie threw up his hands: do what you like, he told her, but either marry him, and the public be damned, or stop seeing him. Margaret, the most sensible but most judgmental of all the siblings, served as an emissary from the family. She was going to meet with Jack and thrash it all out. Elizabeth begged Jack to be diplomatic: “I only ask one thing about your talk with Margaret & that is that you don’t horrify her with any revelations of the past that would be more than she can stand.” Apparently they came to an understanding.
Elizabeth and Jack married quietly on April 24, 1898, in the parlor of Margaret’s townhouse. Only a few family members were in attendance, and, as it turned out, no one in New York took much notice. The newspapers referred to it as a “war wedding,” as war had just been declared between the United States and the Spanish in Cuba. Clubmen throughout the city were signing up for the action, making the quick wedding seem a part of the race to go to war. Wintie described the wedding to his absent wife: the nervous bride carrying orange blossoms, the men with lilies of the valley in their buttonholes. The bride and groom were overwhelmed—“Bess was simply going to pieces and Jack looked like an undertaker.” After the ceremony there was a luncheon and toasts to good health—and lots of talk about war. Elizabeth’s brother Willie and her brother-in-law Temple Emmet came to the wedding directly from the recruiting office; Margaret spent a good deal of time on the telephone trying to arrange a boat to Key West with the Red Cross (she eventually got as far as Puerto Rico, where she tended to the wounded).
To everyone’s amazement, and fright, Elizabeth got pregnant. All believed she would never survive childbirth, but it was Jack who faced disaster. In March 1901, a matter of weeks before she was to give birth, Jack had a complete mental and physical breakdown.
At age thirty-nine, Jack was one of the country’s great intellects, a prolific literary critic, and a political gadfly. He detested the corruption of the political process by money and, to fight it, he became a leader of the Independent Party. When his old friend Theodore Roosevelt ran for governor of New York in 1900 on the Republican ticket, Chapman felt betrayed. He took potshots at Roosevelt; in turn, Roosevelt memorably referred to Chapman as residing “on the lunatic fringe.” The former allies didn’t speak again for nearly two decades. The intensity of Chapman’s life—bitter political infighting; nonstop lecturing, writing, and lawyering; anxiety over his wife’s condition and concern for his three young sons—all became too much for him. His mind abruptly stopped working. While giving a talk in a small town near Philadelphia he could no longer comprehend the questions being asked by the audience. “The crisis came with a crash,” he later reported. He was helpless. He believed he couldn’t walk. He suffered harrowing hallucinations. The Chanlers resorted to putting him in a darkened room at Rokeby, in the mansion’s tower, which rose above William B. Astor’s grand octagonal library and boasted a magnificent view of the Hudson and the distant Catskill Mountains beyond. Chapman didn’t see a thing. The blinds were tightly drawn because even a sliver of light pained him.
Elizabeth gave birth to a son, Chanler Armstrong Chapman, on April 26, 1901, in New York City. “Armstrong” was in honor of her mad brother Archie—née John Armstrong—who had been left to molder in the insane asylum. As soon as Elizabeth was permitted to travel, she hurried to Rokeby with the infant. Elizabeth now had three stepsons—eleven-year-old Victor Emmanuel, seven-year-old John Jay Jr., and four-year-old Conrad—a new baby, and a deranged husband. The infant was christened at Rokeby. Jack was carried downstairs for the event, though he may have been unaware of what was taking place, and then whisked back up to his personal asylum. He remained immobile, curled up in the fetal position, unable to feed, bathe, or dress himself. This went on for nearly a year, until he began to crawl around on all fours. A trained nurse tended to his every need. The family shrank from the idea of institutionalizing Jack, considering it too cruel. (The Chanlers hadn’t been so magnanimous with Archie, but money was at stake that time.) All could see that Jack was not sane, but one brother-in-law made light of his condition, saying that the patient was merely “imaginative.” Jack later described his hellish existence and how he felt like the prisoner in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum,
” who was strapped to a board and had a lethal scythe above him, swinging back and forth, moving ever closer. Jack believed he had to lie perfectly still to avoid annihilation.
Elizabeth understood confinement and pain only too well. During Jack’s prolonged infant-like state, she remained even-keeled and compassionate and stood by patiently. She prayed for his recovery. When her prayers went unanswered, she turned to a Christian Science healer—a short, redheaded woman named Emma Curtis Hopkins who invariably wore a black satin dress and a matching hat or veil. Elizabeth’s sister Margaret described Hopkins as a “a mystic to whom this world and the next were one.” Elizabeth paid the healer a salary and expenses. She also promised her a lifelong annuity if she could cure Jack. What real affect Hopkins’s businesslike commands had on Jack is uncertain, but Jack slowly emerged from his illness, and the healer earned her annuity.
When Jack could finally abide sunlight, Elizabeth had him carried outside to the garden where she’d sit with him for hours, holding his hand. She had his legs regularly massaged, and eventually he began to walk on crutches. A small carriage with a wicker seat was fitted out with a mule named Clara Barton, after the founder of the Red Cross, so that Jack could take short drives around the estate. Elizabeth thought a change would do him good, so on one occasion they ventured as far as the Catskills, spending several nights in a house atop a mountain. When he was called from his room to witness a magnificent sunset, he was overcome by its beauty.
In the fall of 1902, Elizabeth arranged a trip abroad, reasoning that such a “jounce” might awaken Jack fully. They traveled with a large entourage—in addition to Jack and Elizabeth and the four children, there were five servants, including a tutor. Elizabeth thought that the beauty and culture of the Old World would revive Jack’s spirits, but when she brought him into a magnificent Italian church he was overcome once more. He could scarcely control his emotions. As time passed Jack’s moods stabilized, and after Christmas he was able to shed his nurse. His appetite for art returned. Come spring, Elizabeth and Jack amused themselves by collecting paintings and beautiful objects for the house they were planning to build next to Rokeby. They had expert advice in that regard, as they were spending much of their time in the company of their friends Bernard Berenson, the most famous art connoisseur of the day, and Lionel Cust (later, Sir Lionel Cust), who was then the director of the National Portrait Gallery in London.
When the summer heat in Italy became oppressive, the Chapmans moved to an enchanting mountain valley in the Austrian Tyrol. “Absolute heaven,” and “the most blessed place on earth,” Jack declared. Though he was still on crutches, Jack took his two eldest sons, Victor and Jay, and their tutor, on an excursion to Römerbad, a spa town about ninety miles away. In letters to Elizabeth during early August 1903, Jack reported on their activities: They had enjoyed a concert set in a grove of trees; Jay, not quite ten years old, had gone bowling on the green with some Austrian friends. Jack had a particular soft spot for Jay—such a beautiful child, with a sweet disposition, and an artistic flair. Elizabeth, who planned to study the violin, wrote that she was thinking of buying a Stradivarius. Jack sent along some tongue-in-cheek advice, ending with, “How smart I am. I’m just the kind of man that always gets cheated.”
The next news from Jack came in the form of a telegram: “Jay drowned this afternoon. Body not found. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” On August 13, the tutor had taken the two boys to a swimming hole fed by a river, and he had left them briefly to check on their bicycles. In an instant, young Jay had slipped into the rushing waters of the river and disappeared. It took two days before authorities recovered his body. Jack was inconsolable, but it was as if an electric shock had been administered to him. Jack threw away his crutches and told Elizabeth it was time to go home. He was cured. They made the sad journey back to the States. The trip seemed interminable, traveling as they were with Jay’s body, and customs officials stopping them along the way. Young Jay was buried next to his mother, Minna, in St. Matthew’s Episcopal churchyard in Bedford, New York.
Back home, Jack didn’t want anyone to speak of Jay. The pain was too deep. For the next two winters Jack took refuge alone. He moved by himself into Edgewater, a temple-like, 1820s Greek Revival house on the edge of the Hudson that was part of an estate and farm that he and Elizabeth had recently purchased next to Rokeby. (The Chapmans planned to build a new mansion on higher ground on the property, on a bluff above the river.) Though charming, Edgewater was a warm-weather retreat, unheated, and considered uninhabitable in the winter. The newly bearded Chapman, biblical in appearance, stayed by himself in the frigid house, swathed in furs like an Eskimo. Elizabeth and Chapman’s son Victor would stop by regularly to check on him. Jack made acquaintance with local eccentrics, including an elderly man who lived on a houseboat nearby. Chapman, the erudite man of letters, visited the boat frequently. What on earth do you talk about? Elizabeth asked. “I don’t talk to him,” Jack said, “I just sit there.” Then what do you think about? Elizabeth persisted. “Oh, I keep wondering whether the black things in his beard are melon-seeds or cockroaches.”
While secluded, Jack studied music, immersed himself in philosophy and religion, and corresponded with Harvard philosopher William James. Elizabeth put up with her husband’s antisocialness and shielded him from unwanted visitors. Over time he returned to his literary pursuits, while Elizabeth—an accomplished poet and artist whose work was little known beyond her circle of family and friends—took over the management of their new Georgian mansion above the Hudson. They named the house Sylvania and moved into it in 1905. Elizabeth ran the farm and household, tended to the children and their education, and kept a watchful eye over her troubled husband. Though she had recurring bouts of illness and increasing difficulty walking as the years went by, Elizabeth could never escape the role of maternal caretaker that she had inherited as a child. She remained the glue that kept her unstable husband intact.
In 1909, at the age of forty-three, Elizabeth became pregnant again. After a joyous pregnancy, Elizabeth delivered a stillborn daughter in August 1910. Buried amid the hundreds of letters that remain at Rokeby is a faded manila envelope. On the front of it, in fountain pen, an unidentified hand has written:
Letters of Condolence
received August 1910 . . .
for Elizabeth to glance at before destroying
Inside the envelope are letters and telegrams from fashionable addresses—Pointe-au-Pic in Canada, Tuxedo Park, Lenox in Massachusetts, Long Island, Bar Harbor in Maine, Wall Street, neighboring estates in the Hudson Valley—with messages expressing grief over Elizabeth’s latest loss. Elizabeth would have no more children.
With Elizabeth providing ballast and much needed stability, Jack’s literary career revived and brought him renown. A photograph taken on June 21, 1916, shows two men remarkably similar in appearance: about the same height and age, sporting full gray beards and mustaches, in academic caps and gowns. One man, however, is missing a left arm. The photograph depicts John Singer Sargent and Jack Chapman after commencement ceremonies at Yale. Sargent had just received an honorary doctor of arts, and Chapman an honorary doctor of letters. It was a joyous occasion. Jack wrote to his mother the following day, describing the pomp and ceremony and the praise he received while being introduced to the crowd: “I’ve been discovered, by Jove! . . . They had a mace as big as a Lord Mayor’s and gold chains and robes. John Sargent looked like Titian. . . . It was all very noble.”
The next day, back home at Sylvania, Jack was stopped by the head farmer. A reporter from Poughkeepsie, hoping to elicit a comment for a news story, had called the farmer and asked him to relay a message to Chapman: Jack’s eldest son, twenty-six-year-old Victor, a volunteer airman fighting for France before the United States entered World War I, had been killed behind enemy lines. Jack appeared so unfazed by the news that it was as if he’d expected it. He went to the house and found Elizabeth in the library. “
Victor has been killed,” he said matter-of-factly. His firstborn son was dead.
Victor, the first American aviator to die in World War I, became a national symbol of bravery and idealism. A member of the Lafayette Escadrille, Victor had shot down four enemy planes, and been downed himself a number of times. A photo of the young aviator taken just days before his death shows him next to his plane with his head bandaged. Despite the nasty head wound, Victor took off on an errand of mercy—flying oranges and chocolate to a sick comrade in a hospital not too far away. When he came unexpectedly upon a dogfight in which his fellow aviators were outnumbered by Germans, Victor dove into the action. A member of a reconnaissance plane later said he’d seen Chapman’s plane get hit and that “it had dropped like a stone.”
As the parents of the first martyred American, Elizabeth and Jack had to grieve publicly. There was a memorial service at Trinity Church in New York. All stood for the playing of “The Marseillaise.” Letters poured in, among them one from Bernard Berenson, who wrote to Jack from Florence on July 3, 1916:
I have just heard that your son Victor was killed a few days ago fighting for a cause he elected to make his own. I can not easily conceive a finer end. To die for one’s own [country] is something, to die for another because it happens to be fighting for justice & freedom & humanity, is a thousand times more. I confess I feel vicariously sancified [sic] & saved by a death like his. . . . [F]or him at the bottom of my heart I have congratulations only. . . . [For you] there is no compensation, no consolation. I can give you my sympathy for what it is worth.
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