by Bibi Gaston
My father never mentioned the name Rosamond Casey when he came to graduation, perhaps because she wasn’t a Gaston who ran around the horsy country with vast wealth. Rosamond was just a few years older than I was, an artist, and his cousin Tony Pinchot Bradlee’s daughter, so he might not have kept tabs on her. If he had known that he had a cousin who had been named for Rosamond, his mother, he certainly never let on. In the web of family confusion and information blackouts, it was very possible I’d missed things, but I certainly hadn’t missed the fact that I had a cousin who’d lived down the street for the past three years. A cousin who shared the name Rosamond with my grandmother and who had pictures of my grandmother on her wall taken the year my father was born, a year no one could forget for its joys and sorrows, 1929.
CYCLE TWO
4
A SYNONYM FOR LOVE
I once told a boyfriend, a Canadian, that longing isn’t love, it’s longing. Cantankerous and surly on his good days, he longed for someone who had vanished. I considered myself an expert on matters of the heart, so I gave him my opinion: a living, breathing definition of love requires the beloved to be present. We may still love someone who has died, but that is different. Loving someone who is alive but isn’t around seems to me like a waste of time and sets up a chain reaction. I longed for him, he longed for her, and she longed for someone who, for all I knew, might have been the man in the moon.
Longing has all the intensity of love, but it is dark whereas love is light. Longing isn’t fluid; it is static and impenetrable. It isn’t buoyant; it’s leaden—and ready to pour its way into cracks of emptiness like barium or lava. When the loss of someone is staggering, when someone has completely vanished, longing becomes a replacement for love.
The energy of love needs to go somewhere, so many things offer themselves up as surrogates. Rosamond longed for Bill to be a decent, gentle husband. My father longed for his French cars, the Salmson, the Delahaye, and various rare Peugeots. He longed for Maine in August when half an hour before dark, the light dropped down from the west and bounced over the coves before it landed on the beach at Crane Island, where it turned everything a flaming shade of red like roses he’d seen in the desert. He longed for the old green punt, which had served him well, and his 45-horsepower white outboard, Old Faithful, once beloved and true; it had somehow failed him at the worst possible moment, so, like a lover scorned, he’d first lose faith, then lose interest and lean his little failure up against the boathouse to rust. Soon after he married my mother, he longed for women in faraway places. That set off an epic chain of longing. Or maybe the chain began before my father’s disappearances, before Big Bill’s disappearances, even before Rosamond’s untimely death. Perhaps the longing began with Rosamond’s father, Amos, maybe with his father, or his mother. The chain of longing may go farther back than any of us know.
My father was the first man in my life to stage a vanishing act. The rest, I suppose, have been a variation on the first. Friends said I chose men who would vanish. There one minute, gone the next. I’d long for a while, then, as my longing subsided, I’d experience sightings like I’d seen a ghost: driving next to me in traffic, walking along the street, or grazing in the vegetable aisle at Whole Foods.
Perhaps longing is a precursor to rebounding. Some women are all business when it comes to a rebound, attacking the situation like an algebra problem or a spot on the rug. Some take trips, employing the geographic cure. Among nature’s synclines and anticlines, longing stands little chance of holding on. One might take a stubborn case to Maine, where it washes away with the tides at full moon. Try exposing it to a stiff nor’easter. I’ve found the best place to take my longing is where the landscape longs for itself, where glaciers and forests are vanishing, where the extinction of wet-lands and songbirds puts human longing in perspective, where the landscape is so grand and fascinating, there isn’t time enough to dwell.
Perhaps the best cure for heartbreak is some combination of forgetting and remembering. The easy part is to forget the scoundrel, how handsome he was in his raccoon coat. The hard part is remembering ourselves, that before the life we know, there was a life we had, and the pieces are scattered all over the place. Step by step, we move forward, remembering who we were, discarding the old, cultivating the new until one day we wobble forward on tender hoof into a grassy clearing with an overlook, a prospect where the view goes on forever.
Rosamond
ROSAMOND: 1929–1934
On the good days, usually Saturday afternoons in the fall when the light and the air in Manhattan are tied for first place, Rosamond and Big Bill would steal away into the corner of some old, dusty bar in the theater district, throw back a double round of old-fashioneds, and, five minutes before curtain, run across the street to a matinee. She said on those days, the good days, that being with Big Bill was truly living. He was the only man for her. On the bad days, she wanted to rip his eyes out.
On the good days, it didn’t matter what he said or did; she believed in herself and her ability to bring good things to their marriage. She looked in the hall mirror at 444 East Fifty-second where they lived with Little Billy and liked what she saw: the golden locks that framed her soft, round features, her full lips, her long-legged athletic physique and the way she held herself, regally and with poise. She forgave herself those things she didn’t like, her potato nose and her thick calves because, what the hell, she was a lot better looking than most women. Men noticed her, so she knew she must be something special.
On the good days, the inner and the outer reached a kind of synchrony. The melancholy subsided, passion showed on her face, and hope made an end run around the unknown, around the million little insecurities a woman keeps hidden from the world but mostly from herself. She not only knew just how much she had figured out about life by her mid-twenties, but she knew that even if Big Bill couldn’t take care of her financially, the way most women expected, she could take care of herself. She hadn’t married for money; she’d married because she loved him and they understood each other. If worse came to worst, all she had to do was lean on the doors of fate, and Providence would open up to greet her. There’d be love, there’d be work, and there’d be money. When one is young and beautiful, life unfolds that way.
On the good days, she would look over at Big Bill on their walks through the Ramble in Central Park and like what she saw. She locked arms with him at parties in New York and traveled with him back and forth to Crotch Island where they’d till and harvest and throw seaweed on the vegetable plots for mulch. They’d nibble herbaceously like rabbits al fresco, squatting and gazing at each other between rows of lettuce and spinach. He was there, so she thought she’d never know the Cinderella loneliness again or the eyes that followed her. She had a husband, and the days on balance were mostly good days.
At twenty-five years old, Rosamond had a nose for business and on one of the confident days, she purchased two pieces of real estate on Third Avenue between East Seventy-fourth and East Seventy-fifth streets with her earnings from The Miracle. It was the same year that Little Billy was born. Not many people were confident about anything in the late fall of 1929, but Rosamond had a suspicion that if he was lucky, someday Little Billy might come into some real money from her investment. She had faith in the future for his sake, faith that tomorrow would show up even more handsomely than today. She had learned about smart investing from her grandmother, Mary Eno, whose father, Amos Eno, made his money back in no time by collecting rental income on his holdings. Real estate, particularly Manhattan real estate, was never a folly.
January 24, 1931, was another of the good days, when the New York Times reported that Mr. and Mrs. William Gaston and Clare Boothe Brokaw threw open their neighboring apartments at 444 East Fifty-second Street for an after-theater supper attended by some of New York’s most highly sought after dinner companions. The fifty guests that night included the Hamiltons and the Nasts and the Hearsts and the Krocks, the Warburgs, the Lamonts, Walter Lippman
and Mrs. Douglas Fairbanks. Clare’s publishing people mixed seamlessly with the Gastons’ friends from the theater world.
But despite the sumptuous meal, the perfectly appointed table settings, and the three indisputably glamorous hosts, people weren’t gossiping or gay; conversations covered dreary, depressing topics such as Manhattan’s bread lines, personal financial ruin, and what, if anything, the government intended to do about it. Herbert Hoover was predicting that prosperity was just around the corner while promoting public-private partnerships and volunteerism to stem the misery of the poor and the unemployed. The do-nothing party season could be laid at the foot of the do-nothing president. Even Manhattan’s gilded party crowd felt the pinch. Clare Boothe Brokaw knew things just weren’t right, even for her.
It was a trying time for a woman on the prowl. While many women’s dreams of grandeur were going down the drain with their husbands’ fortunes, Clare Booth Brokaw, the ambitious socialite, writer, and managing editor at Vanity Fair magazine, had done just about everything a woman should do not to become one of them. She had received her divorce from her millionaire husband, George Brokaw, in 1929, so with a nicely paid position at the magazine plus the settlement, she was in good shape. Under no circumstances was Clare Boothe Brokaw about to let the worst days of the Great Depression become the worst days for Clare Boothe Brokaw. She was one of the women who attacked life with a sledgehammer. She didn’t sit around longing for a man who had vanished; she’d zapped her ex like a spot on the rug. So, on the night of the dinner party to die for, Clare kept one eye on the canapés and the other on the men in the room.
Many knew that Clare hadn’t married for love when, at age twenty, she married George Brokaw, the son of multimillionaire Isaac Vale Brokaw, a clothing magnate whose French gothic château dominated the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Seventy-ninth Street across from Central Park. Admitting that she wanted to jump out the window of the Plaza Hotel the night she married her husband, Clare Boothe hadn’t married George, she’d married the name, address, and bank account of one of New York’s most eligible bachelors, a man almost twice her age. The Brokaw Mansion, located at the epicenter of Millionaire’s Row, was about as good as it gets for a woman determined to stage a ground assault on Manhattan and described as being about as feminine as a meat axe.
The design of the Isaac Vale Brokaw Mansion at 1 East Seventy-ninth Street was based on the French Château Chenonceau, a spectacular castle dating to the early 1500s. Chenonceau bravely straddled the Loire River and became known as the “château of six women” because, over the course of four centuries it was under the control of six powerful women including Catherine de Medici and Diane DePoitiers, who constructed four fabulous triangles of flowers, tapis vert, and other acts of extreme Frenchness adjacent to the château. Constructed in 1890, the Brokaw Mansion was unusual for a house of the period, and highly unusual for Millionaire’s Row, not because it had huge, airy, well-lit rooms, four stories, an attic, a basement, and a sub-basement but because it had its own moat that wrapped around its foundation—that is, until a horse fell in and Isaac Vale Brokaw enclosed it with a stone wall. Soon after she moved in, Clare wanted to demolish not just the stone wall but the entire Brokaw Mansion. According to her editor, Donald Freman, her husband George prevailed and kept the wall by deferring to his mother, who still lived at 1 East Seventy-ninth Street. Meanwhile, Clare persevered, making needed improvements to the interior of the castle like a woman possessed. Second only to a moat or portcullis, the wall wasn’t a bad feature for a woman who mucked around in the world of men whose love was about as murky as pond ooze.
Most women experience at least a brief pang of longing when they learn that an ex has moved on and married someone else. To substantiate her dictum that “no good deed goes unpunished,” on January 10, 1931, just a few weeks before putting the finishing touches on the menu for her celebrated dinner party with the Gastons, Clare learned that her ex-husband, George, had married Frances Seymour, a young, glamorous Massachusetts socialite. Although it appears that she never really loved her alcoholic bore of a husband, Clare took the news like a woman scorned. She wrote in her diary how she wished the couple the worst and hoped they would never experience a happy moment together. But after her private rant, Clare probably composed herself, and with her self-professed “rage for fame,” composed a mental list of eligible men. Clare being Clare, and Bill being Bill, it wouldn’t have been a surprise to see Big Bill’s name on that list.
At first, Rosamond couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was about Clare she distrusted; after all, they were neighbors, not quite friends, but friendly. Perhaps it was Clare’s unquenchable thirst for men or her sense of competition. According to Clare, she, too, had met Max Reinhardt in April 1923, crossing the Atlantic on the SS Majestic, just six months before Rosamond met him on the Aquitania. Clare claimed that Reinhardt had asked her to play the Madonna, and she claimed she would have, had the part not mysteriously gone to Lady Diana Manners.
Rosamond couldn’t compete when it came to Clare’s killer instinct for men, but she knew she needed a backup-man plan for the times when Bill couldn’t overcome his bouts of grouchiness or forgo his frequent disappearing acts. In mid-April of 1931, Rosamond chaired a benefit for the Halton Fund featuring a “Carnival of Imagination and a Pageant of Romance.” Entertaining New York’s A-list at the Plaza Ballroom, she dreamed up a theme for the pageant, “The History of Love and Romance,” in which guests were directed to appear in costume as heroes and heroines of love, from Greek mythology to the present. But no pageant was complete without a contest, so the contest chair posed the guests a question, “What is love?” At the height of the evening, a contest winner would be announced.
That night while the who’s who of New York paraded around in their masks and the latest Paris fashions, Rosamond masqueraded as the Spirit of Love and wore a blue traveling suit similar to the one she had worn the day she married Big Bill. She called her outfit the “costume of a modern bride,” only this time, instead of ten minutes of protocol performed before the justice of the peace, she staged an elaborate mock wedding ceremony complete with dutifully costumed attendants played by New York’s wealthiest and most powerful women. If there were whispers coming from the corners of the ballroom of the Plaza Hotel that night, they concerned the fact that the role of Rosamond’s fiancé wasn’t played by Big Bill. The old grouch was nowhere to be found. Her fiancé was played by John Davis Lodge, the handsome actor and grandson of Henry Cabot Lodge who had trounced Bill’s father, the Colonel, in the race for senator of Massachusetts. The younger Lodge, like Big Bill, had graduated from Harvard, received a law degree, then served in the navy and married Rosamond’s lithe and lovely dancing friend, Francesca Braggiotti. With a world-class ego and lineage to boot, Lodge dressed up as the Spirit of Youth and met Rosamond, the Spirit of Love, at the Carnival of Imagination’s Altar of Love. Onstage, Lodge looked triumphant.
Although Rosamond couldn’t explain the absence of her husband, still the resplendent panorama of romance proceeded with a parade of gods and goddesses, including Jupiter and Juno, Apollo and Venus, Osiris and Isis, Helen of Troy, and Ulysses plus miscellaneous historical figures such as Gandhi, who made his cameo appearance as the love of government. One and all agreed that the pageant was a spectacular success and cheered the night’s contest winner, a Mrs. Juliana R. Force, who defined love as a “great happiness and much serving.”
In what seemed to be an unending season of denial, no one from Herbert Hoover to Big Bill Gaston seemed to want to tell the truth about anything. More than one quarter of the nation’s money supply was hidden under mattresses, and people throughout the country were hoarding food and supplies in expectation of the worst. Big Bill established his regular schedule of vanishing and hiding things like where he was going, what he was doing, and with whom. About the time Rosamond and Bill realized that she was pregnant again, Rosamond’s marriage to Big Bill wasn’t just struggling, it had pitche
d itself on the rocks.
December 14, 1931, just eleven months after the Carnival of Love, Rosamond was having one of her worst days. In the middle of the night before her second son, James, was born at York House in Manhattan, she was bedded down when the phone rang. She couldn’t imagine who would be calling her at that hour, but unable to sleep, she picked up the phone to hear the voice of a woman who asked for Big Bill several times but refused to identify herself and then hung up. Rosamond was furious. Big Bill wasn’t even around to answer the phone when his other women were calling.
Baby James, Rosamond, and Little Billy, circa 1931
She too managed to survive by denying there was anything wrong, believing that the good days were just around the bend. Three weeks after the birth of James, on the day after Little Billy’s third birthday, she was at home at 444 and distraught but didn’t tell anyone. Instead, she wrote and wrote deep into the night. She thought about how the days passed comfortably and the apartment was so lovely as the sun poured in the windows. She mused on the pleasant little roof with its beautiful views of the East River and the dear little Watanabis with their good food. It was all so consoling, but after about seven in the evening, when Big Bill got back from the speakeasy, things got ugly:
By this time, 11 o’clock, I’m sunk every night it seems. It’s so dreary living next to a person and hardly speaking to them because you know there is nothing but nastiness between you. When we are alone, we haven’t a word to say. So we sit in silence. Bill left another of his handkerchiefs with lipstick around today. Why the hell must he do that? I feel cornered sometimes. Desperate in any direction. I can see nothing but loneliness and heartbreak at least for a while.