by Bibi Gaston
Amos Pinchot had a more difficult time of things than his older brother. As a child, his parents criticized Amos for everything from his dawdling to his penmanship. Surviving in the shadow of Gifford, he became a member of TR’s inner circle and, with his brother, a founder of the progressive wing of the Republican Party that later became the Progressive Party. To Gifford and Cornelia’s dismay, Amos eventually became a fierce critic of the Rough Rider; and Roosevelt, in turn, warned Amos that he was his own worst enemy. Amos, he announced, had an inability to get on with others and to unite for a common cause. As the center of the Progressive Party’s “radical nucleus,” Amos argued for the common man, for social and economic justice and civil liberties. “What I am trying, in a humble way, to help do,” he wrote, “is to prevent violence, disorder and misery by getting people to see the justice of the average man’s demand for a better economic position in this country, and the utter futility of denying or ignoring this demand.” Not everyone agreed with Amos Pinchot, however. Theodore Roosevelt cut to the chase, writing Amos: “Sir: When I spoke about the Progressive Party as having a lunatic fringe, I specifically had you in mind.”
During late summer storms in the Poconos, boulders thundered down the floor of the Sawkill, scouring everything in their path. When the afternoon turned quiet, Rosamond and Little Billy sprawled out on the front porch of the Forester’s Cottage protected from the rain. They could hear the sound of bells every quarter hour tolling from the church with the beautiful stained-glass windows in downtown Milford. The tones reminded Rosamond of lying in bed on summer nights in childhood trying to sleep, hearing the whip-poor-will behind the house and counting the hours until sunrise. Along with the wood thrush, the whip-poor-will was Rosamond’s favorite bird. As a child, she’d sit on the floor of the forest, holding her breath and watching as the bird emerged from holes in the canyon wall at dusk. She observed how it hid itself to lay its eggs. In folklore, she knew, the whip-poor-will appeared at the moment between life and death.
Little Billy had a busy summer in his first year on earth, and in August, it was about to get even busier. As if Grey Towers wasn’t enough of an immersion in the natural world, when Rosamond came back from Corsica, she loaded him up for another spin, this time up the Maine coast where his father was in the last throes of work on the Crotch Island house.
Logistically speaking, construction on an island fifteen miles out to sea made the construction of Grey Towers a generation earlier look about as easy, as the French would say, as folding a serviette or tying a cravat. There wasn’t one easy thing about building a house off the Maine coast in the 1920s. Between the wharf, the boathouse, the icehouse, and the satellite guesthouses, Big Bill had set himself up with a nearly impossible task. Just getting there was an obstacle. Once there, there was the problem of the fog and the boats and the tides, not to mention the equipment and the help. Maine was synonymous with “away,” and away was how Big Bill liked it.
Colonel William Gaston at Gaston Cottage, North Haven, 1919
Big Bill first landed on Crotch Island in June of 1926, shortly after learning he’d been left out of the Colonel’s will. At twenty-eight years old, he called it quits, for the most part, with his siblings. He swore off cucumber sandwiches, toast points, and the well-packed clay courts over on North Haven, making only the required appearances at “Gaston Cottage,” where the rusticating relatives kept one eye on their bank accounts and the other on the Fox Island Thoroughfare. The Thoroughfare, the tidal channel between elegant North Haven and the working-class warrens of Vinalhaven, was about the only thing Big Bill missed, for its long safe harbor, its sleek, low-to-the-water Herreshoffs, and its tippy fleet of North Haven dinghies bobbing gently at anchor. He’d learned to sail in its choppy inlets. Sail—by God, he’d been a legend, not just at sailing but at boxing and tennis; but then he’d staged a secession from his siblings, bought Crotch Island, and christened his boat the Crotch Island Crab. Next door to the Welds and down the road from the Pingrees, the Gastons, the unconscionably rich tribe he’d once thought was his, looked down over Iron Point, down over their sprawling deck, down over their extra-dry gin and tonics, down to the water where Big Bill plied the Thoroughfare just getting where he had to go. They smirked at the name painted on the stern. It was so embarrassing. Proof that he was a mess.
Big Bill, North Haven, Maine, 1912
In his first summer on earth, Little Billy was too young to know he was being transported from the Pinchots’ French feudal castle to the Bostonian Gastons’ interisland family feud, nor did Rosamond know the depth of the discord between Big Bill and his siblings. Five nautical miles away from each other, it was easy to keep matters at bay. To her, the badmouthing and drinking all seemed harmless and colorful. With the exception of Uncle Gifford and Aunt Cornelia, her family wasn’t exactly a pack of teetotalers, either. Big Bill used to tell her there were inlets and tides and hull-stripping rocks between him and North Haven, and maybe now he could finally have a little peace. He stayed in touch with his mother and his sister Hope, but that was about it. On Crotch Island he would cook, sail, make friends with Vinalhaven’s quarriers and fishermen, those who worked for a living. In exile or excommunication or whatever anyone wanted to call it, he would plant potatoes with young Billy. And to keep his colorful imagination from going down the drain the way the rest of the family had, he would continue to write his plays.
Rosamond and Bill, Crotch Island, 1930
When Rosamond and Little Billy arrived that August, they rounded the point at Crotch Island and were greeted by a seven-foot-tall painted wooden sculpture of a stern, balloonish character in top hat and tails. The Man was Rosamond’s wedding present to Big Bill and in it, she probably saw a likeness to her husband, or at least to the mysterious family she had married into. As she came up the path with Billy, she couldn’t believe what she saw. The house was largely complete and Big Bill sat like a swami reading a book, surrounded by alyssum and peonies. He’d planted vast flower gardens at the front of the house, and in the lower fields—between Crotch Island’s drumlins of granite, where the topsoil was as deep and rich as one could imagine—he’d planted his potatoes, his beans, and his corn. He had outfitted the corners of the cabin with cigar-store Indians and hung its walls with naïve oils of small harbors and sailing ships. A French lithograph of Pandora hung in the bedroom. Great candelabra and Italian putti floated from the roof beams. He’d found a miniature replica of a steamship and onto the mantel it went, christened the SS Crotchetta. Female figureheads adorned the walls. A ship’s stern was fashioned as a balcony. And flowers, oh, how Bill loved flowers. Indoors and out, the flowers were everywhere. Big Bill’s architect, a local named Coombs, understood Big Bill’s vision of rusticity, so he kept the bark on the cabin’s logs. Big Bill got his bark and the bugs that came with the bark. But what Big Bill really wanted was his stage. Half the great hall was designed as a living room, and the other half accommodated the dining room. The two areas, set off by a stair, doubled as a stage and a seating area for his audience.
Big Bill celebrated the arrival of his family that August as if it was the opening night of his first successful play. He introduced Rosamond and Little Billy to his boatman, Reddy Phillips, who really was as red as a lobster and ran the Crab through the rocky jaws of Crotch. She met his new friend, Les Dyer, a fishermen from Vinalhaven who sold Big Bill fresh flounder off the back of his boat. Big Bill was growing wild mushrooms under the house, and the Watanabis concocted one of their fabulous creations that night, with seaweed from the rocks and mysterious bivalves no one had ever seen before. His modern kitchen looked out over the back cove where the full moon rose in August. In the lee between Crotch and adjacent Crane Island, Big Bill had begun work on a cottage for Little Billy, with bunks, a little desk, and a bright red hand pump for fresh water. On his own cove, facing west, where the sea lapped up beneath his own tiny dock, Little Billy would one day be able to look over to neighboring Crane Island, where the rocks turned
as pink as roses in the setting sun. In future summers, Big Bill and Rosamond planned to invite their theater friends when they could stay in the satellite guesthouses. But this summer, they didn’t need anything or anyone else. The island and Little Billy and fresh flowers and a potato patch and the tides and the stars, and honestly, what more could one need? Life was complete.
3
A CHRONOLOGY OF CHAOS
On my first day of kindergarten in September of 1963, my father aimed his sleek Moroccan limousine, the Delahaye, through the low stone walls at 53 Bayard Lane in Princeton and scanned the school yard for an audience. As he pulled up to the stairs to drop me off, an assembly of mothers and teachers whispered and pointed at our car’s Arabic license plates. I rolled down the privacy window separating front and back compartments, said good-bye to my father, slithered off the red leather seats, and crept quickly up the stairs hoping that no one had seen me. The king of Morocco’s limousine wasn’t the kind of car you’d see pull up every day at Miss Mason’s School and I wasn’t the kind of child you’d see, either, dressed like a ragamuffin in my homemade smock.
All I wanted was to be deposited on the steps like Beth Johnson or Alice Britt by what my mother said were “normal mothers” and certainly not by my father. My mother didn’t drive my father’s precious foreign cars, so he drove me to school, which I don’t think he minded, because Miss Mason’s entrance drive was like a runway at a beauty pageant. Princeton perfect mothers were all lined up in their Ford Country Squires, the family car du jour, complete with fake wood paneling. They sported floral shifts, dark orderly hair, and sunglasses like Jacqueline Kennedy. Somehow I knew that those mothers were different from mine. They spent their mornings at the hairdresser and their Bain de Soleil afternoons primping and applying unguents at the club. They kept a firm grip on the social order, who was who and what was what. Meanwhile, all those normal mothers wanted was to get to the bottom of just one thing: Who was that man behind the wheel of that fancy car? Was he a movie star?
They never got their answers, at least not the ones they were looking for, because our family didn’t leave tracks. No one knew quite what the story was. Some talk of fancy lineage, some Moroccan connection, it didn’t add up. We didn’t appear at the ritual gathering places of suburbia where people snooped and put the pieces together, like country clubs, dance lessons, or church. Our mystery quotient was only enhanced by our disappearing acts, which, after school, were swift and certain. It was a long way home. We lived twenty miles outside Princeton in Ringoes, New Jersey, a one-building town outside the township and the borough and the gossip radar range.
The drive from Princeton to Ringoes, like any drive from here to there, was made interesting by a series of spaces and landmarks. Driving back and forth to school, I’d play spy from the front seat of the king’s car as we passed beneath tunnels of elms and sycamores as splendid as boulevards in the suburbs of Paris. We’d cross over little brooks surging with spring runoff, along sinuous white fences of horse farms, and around houses so close to the road that on dark winter mornings we could shine our headlights on what the owners were eating for breakfast. On the way home from school, I’d announce to my father that the drive was boring. I’d stretch out in the backseat with the top down and I’d gaze up at the thick canopy of trees, followed by an opening to the sky, followed again by canopy, followed by sky.
While the drive was discouraging to any form of adult social life, my parents were unclassifiable bohemians, Ivy League, but certainly not suited to galas, golf, or a gin fizz by the pool. They lacked the wardrobe and the patience, so the distance from Princeton suited them just fine. In fact, the town of Ringoes, part of rural Hunterdon County in the Sourland Mountains of western New Jersey, was closer to the artist’s colony of New Hope, Pennsylvania, and the muddy currents of the Delaware River than it was to Princeton. But like Princeton, Ringoes had history and once claimed a far more industrious past. Still there was a world of difference between the trim streets of Princeton and where we lived. Looking back, twenty miles was the greatest gift a parent could give a child. Outside the grip and maw of well-tended lawns, I got to thinking about the landscape.
My mother was no “normal” mother and my father assured me that our house, an old mill, was no “normal” house. One day in 1964, my mother was poring over the New York Times when she found a Sotheby’s advertisement for eight acres and a picturesque old mill. My father fell hopelessly in love. The mill building had gone through a conversion as a summer getaway by a childless couple named the McCrackens, who removed the mill wheel, completed an addition, and then divorced in what seemed to be a hurry. My father and mother were thrilled at discovering the mill, but they were equally excited at what came with it—a house full of early American furniture. They weren’t the shopping types, so tables, chairs, and bureaus became an attractive selling point. Soon, my father was giddy that he owned the oldest structure around, but I was too young to know what that meant to him, that the mill was awash in history and history was ripe for cherry-picking. He’d tell me that in 1730, when the mill was built, Louis XV, the Sun King, was the king of France, George Washington was just two years old, and Thomas Jefferson wasn’t even born yet. The mill, put in context, made you scratch your head in wonder.
The Old Mill
My father loved old mills, but I never knew why until I was forty-five years old. After he died, I discovered the connection between his love of mills, growing up in a mill, Milford, and the region of mills in Picardy where the Pinchots lived in France. When I was young, we’d go for long drives in the Delahaye, and my father would keep one eye peeled for his favorite buildings. The mills and moats he discovered on our drives were never quite as impressive as our Moat or our Old Mill. He said that our mill had a proud past. In the early 1730s, Ringoes, New Jersey, attracted English and Scotch Presbyterian farmers who beat the land into submission, then sent their grain to seven flour mills and fifty-seven gristmills to be used for stock feed. By 1965, the prosperous Presbyterians had long since vanished and the mills had shut down. The little town of Ringoes had become just another far-flung rural outpost between New York City and Philadelphia grooming its open fields for developers. Narrow dirt roads and sweet-smelling brooks still meandered through farms, fields, and orchards, but what most distinguished Ringoes, in my opinion, was a sporadically manned general store with a noteworthy candy selection.
Like most mills, ours was a sensible structure, built on a fieldstone foundation with a second story of wood painted barn red. The Old Mill sat at the low end of eight rugged acres of ash, maple, and sassafras, and so many rocks that even the Scotch Presbyterian farmers gave up clearing much of the land. Mill Creek once ran its natural course feeding the millrace, but in the 1950s, the creek was diverted under a bridge and sent off the property. Above the Old Mill was an open field for softball and a mature chestnut orchard where my mother sent us with thick canvas gloves to retrieve the key ingredient for her turkey stuffing. I never thought trees could be dangerous, but harvesting a chestnut was like approaching a sea urchin in a tree. As a child I was fixated on the unlikely journey of the sea urchin, how it had escaped its watery climes and found a home among the terrestrial family of nuts.
The McCrackens’ conversion of the original mill was a simple affair. It included a rustic country kitchen on the ground floor, a spacious light-filled living room on the second, and a large bedroom in the eaves on the third floor. The 1950s addition was built at an obtuse angle to the original mill and doubled the size of the living space by including a stone-floored room, a garage at ground level and two bedrooms above. I lived in the bedroom over the garage, and attached to my bedroom was a vine-covered porch from which I kept watch over the comings and goings in the driveway. In my bedroom was a closet and in that closet was a rickety ladder and a string that led to a 40-watt lightbulb in the attic. Spanning the joists in the attic was a long wooden board that led to a dusty old trunk. And in that trunk, forty stuffed animals led
extremely complicated lives, and like my mother with her soap operas, I was always trying to figure them out.
Living in an industrial mill building from the 1700s made perfect sense to my father, who liked anything with gears, wheels, and moving parts. In the early days, he spent most of his time fixing things. According to my mother, the mill wasn’t your all-American dream house. Like driving King Mohammed V’s parade car, it required certain unusual qualifications: an unfailing imagination, a toolbox one might take onboard a ship, and either an extremely practical spouse or a full-time mechanic. Along with fixing things, my father named things like a self-appointed geographer or Adam in the Bible. His names weren’t systematic, but I went along with them because I felt sorry for places that had been abandoned to geographic anonymity. There was the Moat, the Dungeon and Giant Rock, the Fort, the Tree House, the Wall, and the Chestnut Orchard. As if to remind us of the greater history, he named the places of our lesser history. Named or unnamed, those places became my closest companions in childhood.
The Moat once housed the mill wheel but now skirted the length of the original mill like a sunken aquatic theme park. After the wheel was removed and the river diverted, the poor struggling Moat became a mold incubator. About the length and width of a train car, she filled up with enough stagnant rainwater and underground seepage to support a colony of birds, frogs, and fish. The Moat probably could have been classified as a Superfund site, but there was something endearing and tragic about her. The Moat had once known a purpose, but denied her purpose, she descended into a murky wet hell realm that invited one to recall everything that was creepy about the world: the strange stagnation that takes over a pond when it loses the flushing action of floods or the pallor of a forest when it loses its nutrition from fire. I thought waterborne gremlins inhabited the Moat, and gremlins needed company, so I’d line up my pink-haired troll collection, a subset of the stuffed animal ark, in the ivy on the Moat’s parapet wall. I was anxious as a child and felt sympathy for the Moat, because like me, she seemed restless and her conditions fluctuated for no apparent reason. I’d look down after the ice melted in the spring, and the water was green; but the next year it was orange or yellow, and no one knew why. “Something to do with mold,” my father said, or “something upstream,” he’d snap. “Don’t fall in there.” No one ever fell in, but a deer did and my father hatched various schemes to rescue it. After a week of throwing grass and legumes at the hungry deer, a band of handsome young men from the fire department showed up to airlift the deer out of the Moat. It was the first rescue mission I’d ever been on. If I’d been a little bit older and a bit more clever about men, I might have found a way into the Moat myself.