The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  My mother wasn’t a shopper, but she collected postcards, and I collected state banners on sticks, and books on wildflowers, so naturally we went into the tourist trap at the base of the falls. There she found a postcard with the legend of a young Indian squaw, the daughter of the chief of the Multnomah, who married a young Clatsop brave. Shortly after marrying, the squaw dressed in white and, abiding by the will of the tribe’s medicine man, leaped off the top of the falls, sacrificing herself to halt the spread of the plague and save the tribe. The legend was a little bit intense for me, so I bought a book on western wildflowers. There I discovered the bright red cardinal flower, the delicate shooting star, and Oregon’s state flower, the prickly, muscular Oregon grape that doesn’t look like a flower at all.

  Mother drove us back to Oregon in the summers of 1969 and 1971. Thanks to the Mobil Travel Guide, each time we devised a different route through America’s national parks and forests. By the next summer, the backseat started to challenge the front seat rotation policy, and since nothing in the backseat could be worked out without a restraining order, the latter-day Corps of Discovery spent the summer of 1972 back in miserable Princeton. By that time, I was thirteen years old and my interest in straightening, planting, ladders, and paints had evolved into a full-time job painting the exterior of Princeton Day School where I was in the eighth grade.

  I never did see ninth grade at Princeton Day School. That fall, my father felt the attorneys nipping at his heels, so we didn’t see much of him; but we learned that he wouldn’t be paying for his children’s education at the expertly painted private school. After throwing a perfectly understandable fit and wailing to her ground force of attorneys, who, for some reason, weren’t able to wring tuition out of my father but were able to pay themselves, my mother announced we were moving to the suburbs outside Washington, D.C., where there were perfectly good public schools.

  Through the 1970s, my brother, my sister, and I saw my father every so often according to court order and elaborate negotiations facilitated by the attorneys. We’d tiptoe out the front door and over the lawn to pile into his two-seater Peugeot or the king’s car and, in my mother’s version of things, breathe in all his glamour. We were actually dodging discussions about attorneys and hearing tales of his eggless, butterless life, his weightlifting at Gold’s Gym and his runs around the reservoir in Central Park. It wasn’t really clear where he lived but he always had the day mapped out. Sometimes he’d take us to the “talkies” to see Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times or City Lights, the only films he said were worth watching. Other times, he’d take us to big houses with butlers and silver bells above Georgetown to meet people who he said knew his mother. But I was mostly quiet and didn’t ask any questions. That might give him the legal advantage.

  In the fall of 1977, I had just turned eighteen years old and been accepted to college when it occurred to me that there was something fairly unusual about my parents’ divorce. Neither of them would speak to each other and my mother sobbed continuously, saying she couldn’t afford to rent a shack, much less a house or an apartment. She’d emerged with nothing and my father had lost his most valuable asset, what he said were some buildings in New York. Still, no one was allowed to mention my father or see him. No one knew who was paying the legal bills, either. My mother thought that her lawyers were doing their work out of the goodness of their hearts.

  I enrolled at Newcomb College in New Orleans in 1977. When he died in 1970, Big Bill had left a college fund for each of his grandchildren, which came in handy. I was old enough to be financially independent, but young enough not to know what to do with the money. Two years later, I came up with a creative solution and at nineteen, packed myself off to Italy, defying my mother’s mother, who thought that the only place to absorb culture was in her homeland, France, and that Michelangelo, with his rippling displays of musculature, was a vulgarian. Unlike my brother and sister, I wasn’t all that fond of my mother’s mother, not since the summer of 1977 when she took my brother and me on the grand tour of Europe and discovered, while in Lucerne, that instead of taking my afternoon nap at the hotel room, I’d disappeared up Mt. Pilatus on a gondola ride with a man named Hans. In Italy I ran wild, telling her I preferred Italians to Frenchmen because the Italians made gaga eyes at me while the French did zero. She had the last word. I had terribly good taste, she told me, in everything but my father.

  Michelangelo wasn’t one of my mother’s heroes, either, but on the eve of my departure for Italy in the fall of 1979, she gave me a handwritten note with the words of Bernard Berenson, nicknamed Bibi, a Harvard scholar and Italian Renaissance art collector, who, I discovered later, was born Bernhard Valvrojenski, oddly enough, a cousin of Morris Gest:

  Now I am in the decline of my eighth decade and live so much more in the people, the books, the works of art, the landscape than in my own skin, that of self, except as this wee homunculus of a perceiving subject, little is left over. A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the not-self that there is no self left to die.

  While I was enrolled at the School of Political Science at the University of Florence, I kept the quote by my bedside, reading it over and over and trying to understand what Berenson meant but also what my mother meant by giving it to me. Looking out at the hills of Fiesole and Berenson’s villa, I Tatti, I dreadfully missed my college boyfriend, the man my father called “Allen the Red.” But I reasoned that if I was to become a “wee homunculus,” I would need to study and travel and forfeit things like marriage, pregnancy, and other distractions where women lost their way. I’d become an explorer, a nomad, and focus on the paintings of Andrea Del Sarto, the politics of Italy’s Brigatti Rossi and I’d master the “passato remoto” that no one ever mastered. My mother had entered a difficult, perimenopausal, Sylvia Plath period and my father didn’t know where I was—but I didn’t know where he was, either, so I decided not to cogitate on my nonparents. Instead, I’d become smart and write papers on the psychodynamics between Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, I’d memorize the capitals of foreign countries. I’d learn about topography, forests, and gardens. I’d begin my life with a full identification with the not-self. So full, I’d disappear.

  I graduated from college in the spring of 1981 with a degree in political science and a love of photography. I moved back to Washington where from time to time I’d see my father, who thought I showed signs of talent so he bought me a rudimentary darkroom. I was working at an architecture firm, taking photographs of Andy Warhol and immigrant parades as a stringer for the Prince George’s County Sentinel on the weekends. I found an Italian boyfriend who bought me red roses and who talked about his heroes, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Thomas Jefferson. He’d call me Berenice after Berenice Abbott, the photographer. I was twenty-two and he was thirty-two and I had fallen in love, but mostly with the things we talked about, things like form and the quality of light hitting trees. I became mesmerized by Eugene Atget’s photographs of the parks around Paris and I began to be haunted by landscapes, so I spent hours taking photographs on the Mall and walking by myself in the upper reaches of Georgetown where, between 1923 and 1933, Beatrix Farrand designed one of America’s most complex gardens for the ambassador Robert Woods Bliss and his wife, Mildred—Dumbarton Oaks.

  Things were going along just fine until one moonless night my rose-toting architect called me to say that he had the opportunity to go back to his ex-girlfriend, who had suddenly become free. While the two of them went tooling off to a romantic weekend on the eastern shore, I found myself with a turbaned taxi driver speeding through the rainy streets of Washington, D.C., to spend the night with my mother. I was devastated, and she knew that kind of shock firsthand. Are you sure he wasn’t gay? she’d ask. Maybe he was depressed. Maybe he will come back. After I assured her he wasn’t and he wouldn’t, she told me that it was a good thing to love a man. It was better than feeling sorry for him like she had for my father.

 
It wasn’t the first time I’d been left, but it was the first time I wrestled with how someone could tell me that he loved me, then vanish from my life without a credible explanation. For months I walked around like a corpse, but then something strange happened. I saw the rose-toting Italian wherever I went, or at least I thought I did. Launching my Cartier-Bresson period, I started shooting shadowy pedestrians and capturing mysterious moments on the back sides of government buildings. My father didn’t want to see his darkroom dollars going to waste, so he asked me how I planned to make a living on shadows.

  Soon enough, I got a real job as a lab assistant at the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. Each morning I sailed down Washington’s towpath on my bicycle to work, and sometimes I would pass my father in his Jeep or the Peugeot crossing the Key Bridge. He was living the life of a mole in a subterranean cave off MacArthur Boulevard, while ostensibly working at an outfit in Arlington that dealt in ships’ diesel engines, and seeing a woman who worked for the Moroccan embassy. When we passed each other on the bridge, we’d simply wave. My mother lived just a few blocks away, barely surviving as a paralegal for the nastiest pack of lawyers in town. In the evenings she’d sedate herself with wine and the Washington Post and tell us that if any of us saw my father, she’d kill herself. So my sister cut my father off completely, calling him a Nazi; my brother saw him on the sly from time to time, as did I. But I was learning that what people said and what they did were two different things. My mother didn’t kill herself, but my brother and sister felt it their duty to tell my mother I’d seen my father whether I’d seen him or not.

  When we saw each other, my father and I both had our own agendas. Sometimes I’d meet him at Clyde’s, a marble and wood-paneled restaurant in Georgetown, to ask him for money. He wanted information from my mother’s attorneys, he said, about where all the money had gone that was supposed to go to my mother and to us. He’d order up his dry martini, two olives and a twist, and whip out a stack of legal papers; if I didn’t sign his affidavit, he wouldn’t help me in what he called “the financial department.”

  I enrolled at the University of Virginia’s Department of Landscape Architecture–Charlottesville in the summer of 1983. At twenty-four years old, I had an intimate relationship with Thomas Jefferson, thanks to my mother; a portfolio of shadows and light, thanks to my father; and thanks to Beatrix Farrand, a career plan that sounded a lot better than dodging parents, siblings, and ex-boyfriends in northwest Washington, D.C. That fall, at Virginia, I met a young woman named Silvia Erskine. After studio, we began running together, and between classes we talked about love, boyfriends, Italy, and professors we thought were handsome. I had never met someone whom I felt I’d known all my life. Silvia was tall, poised, and good-tempered. She dressed simply and in good taste, wore little or no jewelry, and kept her hair in a bob. Her mother grew up in Florence, Italy, and her father was a famous editor and a native of Memphis. Silvia had grown up just off the Merritt Parkway, in Westport, Connecticut, in a dignified world where books and history and gardens mattered and where, on visits, I’d sit down to dinner with the likes of Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, and Cormac McCarthy. On break from the university, I’d drive north from Virginia, spin around the family vortex on Washington’s beltway, and head for Connecticut. I’d run into car trouble along the way, and once I broke down on the Merritt Parkway. Its gentle alignment coils through the deciduous forest of southeast Connecticut like a serpent, making for one of the prettiest drives in New England and one of the most historic. But the Merritt, Silvia’s father, Albert, told me, was the best and worst of roads. It would be better, he said, to break down on the Indianapolis Speedway.

  After several gallant winter rescue missions, Albert Erskine grew a bit tired of my car troubles, and I became embarrassed. His writers came and went with their manuscripts, and I came and went with my car stories. On an icy winter day, I broke down again, this time in New Canaan, and called the Erskines from a pay phone at exit 37. I stood shivering by the side of the road and looking around at the landscape of wintry trees when memories of my grandfather came flooding back. Before my father left, we spent Christmases at Big Bill’s old stone house in New Canaan on the Silvermine River. Big Bill gave my mother kangaroo rugs and purses from Australia. His fourth wife, Teddy, kept the name Getty squeezed between Teddy and Gaston, the Getty from her previous marriage to J. Paul. I recalled her Christmas presents, ribboned packages wrapped in red velvet from New Canaan’s fancy department store. She had made Christmas magical for me as a child. In 1970, my mother drove us to New Canaan for the last time. I was eleven years old when I kissed Big Bill’s red, swollen face good-bye. A few days later he died. As the story went, he died the way he lived, making last-ditch passes at the nurses.

  Between 1983 and 1986, the family drama around Washington, D.C., was unpleasant enough that I didn’t have a home to go back to. So I hightailed it for Connecticut where Silvia and her parents didn’t know if I had a family or not. Through the years at graduate school and holidays spent with the Erskines, as inseparable as Silvia and I became, she still knew virtually nothing of my life.

  One day in May 1986, all that began to change. The day we graduated from the University of Virginia, my father showed up in his usual fashion, unannounced, driving a white Thunderbird with his Moroccan bag, a clutch of bananas, the New York Times, and a Rolleiflex on the front seat. This time he showed up with my brother. I remember being happy to see them but distinctly disappointed by the Thunderbird, a low-slung domestic car that he admired for its sweeping lines and reliable engine but that I thought looked like a porpoise.

  I remembered everything my father ever told me. He frequently mentioned the names of people he said were his relatives, names like Eno and Sedgwick. They seemed always to be lurking around the bend with what he called their “vast wealth.” Sure enough, there were Gastons rusticating in the horsy hills of Charlottesville, but he told me he wasn’t going to go see them. The ties to the Gastons had been severed long ago, over money, he said, so there wouldn’t be much to talk about unless one wanted to talk about the weather, or the $7 million the Colonel left. Or how his father got left out of the will, which left him out also.

  I’m not sure whether my father thought of himself as the black sheep son of a black sheep father but he always seemed to know where the white sheep had gone. When I’d visit him in his Washington cave, I’d notice articles about an illustrious relative, or people once married to the relatives he’d met once or twice, articles clipped from the Style section of the Post, about people like Tony and Ben Bradlee and Ben’s new wife, Sally Quinn. He’d clip book reviews on people long since dead and who were somehow related to him, like Mary Pinchot Meyer and Edie Sedgwick. He’d clip the lengthy obituaries of the friends of Rosamond and Big Bill’s, like Kay Halle and Lady Diana Manners and the Barrymores and the New York Times science reporter, Bill Laurence. He’d clip the articles like teenagers clipped stories of their idols, but he’d rarely contact those names from the past because they were either dead or not particularly interested in him. Like ghosts, they were lingering about, somewhat benevolently at this point. They inhabited their world while he inhabited his, but he knew where they were just in case, if he was ever in the neighborhood. He’d never call first, he’d just show up. Displacement was one rugged terrain and his clippings were like survey markers to all that had gone by, to all that was lost.

  I never asked about who all those people were because I’d never let myself believe that they were my relatives. I treated his clippings unkindly, by rolling my eyeballs, like he lived in a fairy tale. So I didn’t read the articles or make sense of who these people were. Perhaps I was still wanting the king’s car to become a station wagon with fake wood paneling. I wanted my father to go to work in the morning and show up in the evening, and I didn’t want to call him Papa.

  A few days after graduation, Silvia asked me to dinner at the Caseys, her fiancé David Radulski’s landlords, wh
o lived close to the architecture school. Everyone was packing up and leaving for the summer, but I was in no hurry to leave because I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I accepted the dinner invitation. That night, Silvia and David picked me up and we drove over to an old country house in a gracious neighborhood in Charlottesville. As we entered, Silvia introduced me to our hostess, Rosamond Casey, who went by “Ros,” and her husband, John Casey, a novelist and professor of English at the university, and several other dinner guests. As the party moved about the house, several old prints caught my eye on the wall of the entrance hall, so I lingered over them and made out the name Rosamond Pinchot, and beneath it, Mrs. William Gaston. The advertisement identified Rosamond as a driver of the “New Century Hupmobile.” I knew the name Rosamond, and the name Pinchot, but I had never put the two names together nor had I put them together with my father’s name. I knew there were about six William Gastons, but I didn’t know how this William Gaston was connected to the woman in the picture who appeared to be some kind of celebrated driver. According to what was written, she’d had a corner table at a restaurant called the Voisin and sped off in motorboats to an island off the coast of Maine. I was confused and disoriented. What was this advertisement doing in a house in Charlottesville?

  Ad for the Hupmobile, 1929

  After a few minutes I joined the guests at the dinner table. Still dizzy from the names, I noticed Rosamond’s husband, John, looking at me. “She looks like a Pinchot,” he said. I was embarrassed and told the table that I might be a Pinchot but I wasn’t really sure. The Pinchots were some kind of relatives of my father but I didn’t know them or know much about them. After a short while, Rosamond and John established that the woman in the advertisement was my grandmother and that my grandmother Rosamond was this Rosamond’s aunt.