by Bibi Gaston
My father shipped the Delahaye aboard a British ship bound for New York, just in time for a remarkable celebration that fall when the president of the United States was scheduled to land in a helicopter on the lawn at Grey Towers. Not one to miss an occasion, on the morning of September 24, 1963, my father rolled the king of Morocco’s limousine out of her safe, dark lair near Princeton, shined his car to within an inch of her life, and made adjustments under the hood. She arrived ninety-five miles and three hours later in little Milford where flags and banners were hung in celebration. The papers warned of scalpers hawking overpriced food and “Brobdingnagian” traffic jams complete with ten to fifteen thousand flag-waving visitors. A rare 1917 handblown glass goblet was bought as a gift from the people of Pike County to be presented to President John F. Kennedy, who was sure to put Milford on the map.
Around midday, I climbed out of the king’s car like a foreign dignitary, albeit a young one, and my father lifted my brother, Billy, high onto his shoulders to listen to the president speak on the legacy of Governor Gifford Pinchot. “Every great work is in the shadow of a man,” the president began, “and I don’t think many Americans can point to such a distinguished record as Gifford Pinchot.” The celebration that day was to honor not only Gifford, but Gifford’s son, Dr. Gif, and the entire Pinchot family for its donation of the château to the U.S. government.
Bill, Isabelle, and Bibi Gaston at the Bait Box, Grey Towers, 1963
This was my father’s first trip back to Grey Towers since 1960 when Aunt Cornelia died. In fact, he’d hardly been back since 1946 when, at seventeen, he’d been the youngest pallbearer at the governor’s funeral. Cornelia and Gifford had once meant the world to him, but now practically everyone he had ever loved in his family was dead and the château he’d grown up in was being given to the U.S. government. “Of the thousands of cultural resources administered by the Forest Service,” began the Historic Structures Report for Grey Towers, “none holds more profound significance for the Forest Service itself than Grey Towers, the home of its founder Gifford Pinchot.” But on that fall day, once-manicured lawns had turned to fields, the pools and fountains had been turned off, and the vision of James W. Pinchot and Richard Morris Hunt resembled a scene out of Rebecca. Since the governor had died, the old place had sunk into dishevelment.
In his speech of 1963, staged in Cornelia’s Depression-era amphitheater, President Kennedy publicly announced how the government intended to straighten out the situation. The Pinchot family would slice off 101.77 acres of land and deed it to the U.S. Forest Service. At the same time, preliminary plans for the Pinchot Institute for Conservation Studies would be drawn up with headquarters in the château. “This institute,” the president announced, “which is only the latest manifestation of a most impressive legacy, I think, can serve as a welcome reminder of how much we still have to do in our time. I hope that…what Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt and Amos Pinchot and others did in the first fifty years of this century, will serve as a stimulus to all of us in the last fifty years to make this country we love more beautiful.”
President Kennedy completed his tour of the house and grounds and posed outside Grey Towers’ massive wooden front door for photographs with Ruth and her two children, Rosamond’s two half-sisters, Tony Bradlee and Mary Pinchot Meyer. None of the photographers and practically none of the family knew just how close the relationships were—that Mary, then forty-three years old and married to a man in the CIA, was having an affair with President Kennedy at the time.
My father would not have known about the affair; nevertheless, the scene at the front door of the château must have seemed odd. There was barely a trace of what once had been. Rosamond had once stood on those very steps with Amos and Gifford and the Roosevelts. Perhaps the problems began when Amos took a sabbatical from his marriage, leaving uptown Gertrude for upstate Ruth. Someone had told young Bill how the scene between his grandparents played out, how infidelity was called a “breach of promise” at the time, and a scene was staged to spare the new wife. The police were called to view photographs of Amos with another woman in a hotel room to make it appear that he’d been caught red-handed. No one emerged completely unscathed, but the marital rupture was complete, so Ruth could march into 1125 Park Avenue as if she hadn’t been a party to infidelity.
My father felt what Rosamond had felt, that Amos’s first family was all but forgotten. Perhaps it was Amos’s undoing that was Rosamond’s undoing and explained why he felt displaced. Or maybe Amos’s problems began when James Pinchot designated Gifford the heir apparent and Amos was assigned to balance the family checkbook. He’d also been displaced. Or perhaps the Pinchots had been so high-minded that they forgot about one another. But that wasn’t true, either; Amos and Gifford had been good to Billy after his mother died. Maybe it was his father’s fault, the man the Pinchots called Beelzebub, the Devil. Maybe it was Ruth’s doing; after all, she was intimidated by the very memory of Rosamond and how Amos loved her so.
No one mentioned Rosamond anymore. One almost wondered if Rosamond had been a dream. Someone said something of Bill’s mother that sounded like a dream: “She had a presence of poetry—a whisper of myth come alive again.” Perhaps it was John Barrymore who had said it or his wife, Blanche Oehlrichs, who used the pen name Michael Strange. He couldn’t say for sure.
What mattered and what was being celebrated, was that the “Amoses,” as Amos’s second family was called, would become the government’s new neighbors, inhabiting the Forester’s Cottage adjacent to the château. The Forester’s Cottage was smaller and more manageable. Meanwhile, the “Giffords,” who once lodged in the château, had succumbed to the crippling monster of maintenance, so they were leaving. But on that fall day, everyone’s moving on with their lives hadn’t settled his.
Despite the diaspora of the good old days, my father made his regular pilgrimages to Grey Towers. When he really thought long and hard about the way things had turned out, it was probably better he hadn’t owned any of it. He could come and go as he pleased and never lift a hammer or drive a nail or write a check. Instead he honed the art of pilgrimage, living lightly on the land having survived his lessons in loss.
He could do the trip in his sleep. From the Old Mill he’d wind his way through the rural farms and fields of the Sourlands, through the Water Gap, over the Delaware River. He’d usually pass up the Milford Cemetery with the signs that talked about Governor Gifford Pinchot, and where few knew it, but where Rosamond was buried in the little mausoleum. When he finally reached Grey Towers, he’d navigate the forlorn entrance drive, park, get out, and head through a copse of aging black locusts Cornelia had planted. He’d cross the deteriorating lawns and head over to the Forester’s Cottage, where he’d fix himself a drink like they did in the good old days. He’d take a seat in one of Ruth’s rattan chairs on the front porch and chat amicably with whoever was around. There’d be a kind of simultaneous and symmetrical forgetting and forgiving as he’d nod at the children, though he couldn’t remember their names. He’d spent endless summers torturing his governesses and playing with his puppies on those deteriorating floorboards under all that ivy which hung beneath Rosamond’s tower room. But now there was really nothing to say, so he’d make a few polite efforts at small talk, bid adieu, and do what he came to do. He’d go where there had never been enough time to go and do what he’d never gotten enough of in what he called the good old days.
Grey Towers
He thought there would be a resolution through repetition. Year after year he came back for the same thing, something that never changed. It was the thing that the whole family sought at Grey Towers, but it hadn’t shown up on the government’s maps because that would have ruined the place. He didn’t keep coming back for a cultural moment or a historic one. He returned to a moment in the landscape where, by stepping through a curtain of green, he’d puncture the solid wall of everything that seemed so terribly important and descend into the
canyon of the Sawkill. He was opinionated about these things, and if pressed, he would have dispensed with the houses and the gardens and the cultivated fields. He’d keep the history and the accomplishments that had distinguished the old place, but it was that pine-needle path through the forest that he would take, and in turn would take him, to what was really going on at Grey Towers. Rosamond had taken that same path. The path had taken all of them there, he and James and Governor Gifford and his grandfather Amos. All the Pinchots knew that the land was splendid, of good exposure and views, but the one thing that made Grey Towers worth remembering and the thing that kept them all coming back was the Falls.
So on that glorious fall day in 1963, after the president said his final good-byes to the Pinchots and thanked them again for the château, he was whisked off the steps to begin a multistate tour to promote the nation’s environmental heritage. After the helicopter lifted off, my father led us through the grounds, then down to Sawkill Creek where he’d once played with his mother and learned to fish with Amos and Gifford. Together we found our way to the narrow channel at the base of the Falls where he took me on his back and then in his arms. We kicked and slid through the green chasm of the Sawkill where there was no forgetting Rosamond.
Just two months later, on November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas. Almost one year later, on October 12, 1964, Rosamond’s half-sister Mary was also assassinated, at close range, along the C and O towpath in Georgetown, Washington, D.C. A black man, Raymond Crump, was accused and tried but never convicted. People said the CIA was responsible, but her murder was never solved. In the year after my father’s return from Morocco, the Pinchot family was compared to the ill-fated Greek house of Atreus.
From 1963 through 1965 my father traveled frequently back and forth from the States to Tangier, Rabat, and Casablanca on his orange-juice and Jeep ventures. Airmail letters and postcards flew back and forth between Morocco and the Old Mill, where my mother had developed a distinctly unglamorous existence, a cardinal sin in the Gaston lexicon. Overwhelmed in the musty Old Mill with three children, she battled loneliness but succumbed to the one thing my father said was a deal breaker: fat. She’d ballooned to a size 16, which my father warned her was untenable for a man who “grew up in the shadow of three splendid, perfectly proportioned cylinders at Grey Towers.” The Gastons carried the fat gene, which my father had been lucky to avoid, while the Pinchots were long, lanky, and athletic ectomorphs. Fat was criminal, so my mother went to see a doctor, but, like many women, she couldn’t slim down. She’d had her children and sunk into a state of deep despair. My father started spending more and more time away from home, eventually taking a Moroccan lover. My mother found postcards from foreign countries in the Old Mill, and several days before her birthday in May 1965, my father wrote my mother from Rabat, Morocco, admitting to an affair:
Hotel de la Paix
Dear Sweet Fran,
I suppose this morning I can count myself lucky to be alive, and that I did not take the way out which is customary in my family. I think it is best you know something of the terrible crisis I am going through. Frequently I feel like I am on the precipice, with the bones of my mother and her father beckoning from the gloomy abyss below. Yet I have not succumbed for I sense there is sunlight and day above, and these attract me more than the morbid. I feel I shall emerge and be reunited with those few who do love me despite what I have done…. My dear, this experience has been so incredibly painful for me that, whatever be my relations with you in the future, such an event can never take place again in my life. I have learned a lesson, perhaps late in life for this sort of thing, but I have learned it. I have lagged behind in many things as you know. Needless to say I am equally distressed that you, as innocent bystander in this turmoil, should suffer. But perhaps you too will learn something from it, something about the man you had the misfortune to marry. Perhaps you can fathom what demon inside him caused him to fling himself into a situation which could from the beginning, only destroy him or, at least, come close to it.
My mother had heard it all, or something like it, before when he’d spoken of ending it back in 1948 and 1949 in his letters to her during their sophomore and junior year. Here was his grief again, only this time she could add infidelity to the story. This time, she decided to stop feeling sorry for him.
In the summer of 1965, my father hatched a plan, and once again, it wasn’t her plan, it was his, and for all she knew, he was saving the best for someone else. We were going to build a shack of driftwood on Crane Island, Maine. To a child, the enterprise sounded like fun, but to my mother, the plan, coupled with my father’s disappearing acts, was the beginning of the end.
No one in his right mind would place a dwelling so close to the sea. And maybe he wasn’t in his right mind after he returned from Morocco and went to work on the little building he called “Shack.” In 1965, Shack was just a folly, a self-deprecating statement of where my father stood, a stone’s throw but a world away from his father’s island, Crotch, where, through the 1960s, Big Bill still held court in his great hall with his candelabra, flying putti, and famous guests. Shack was more than a world away from his brother, James, who always managed to come out on top, with the largest island in the Gaston archipelago, Hurricane Island, which he rented to Outward Bound for its first wilderness camp, mainly, people said, to avoid taxes.
Half Pinchot and half Gaston, Shack was purposeful, but with a feminine loveliness that defied her salty origins. Like my father, she made good use of what nature had deeded. Shack was not opposed to the sea; in fact, each year she became more a part of it. With her warped and mottled irregularity, her steely gray eyelids, and a delicate roll to her roof, Shack resembled a rail car that had run off its tracks just inches from the sea. My father hooked up a red hand pump to a hose that led to a fetid swamp that, in the wet years, siphoned enough liquid he called water into a small steel sink in Shack’s galley kitchen to wash the dishes or boil the lobsters. But that was Shack’s only utility so to speak. “No heat, no electricity, no bathroom, and complete luxury,” my father would say. Shack wasn’t tied down to a footing or a rock. Exposed and vulnerable, she accepted her destiny and braced herself against the winds and the storms that would ravage her each year. During the winter, tides swept through the cracks and fissures of her floorboards, leaving deposits of sand, ground barnacles, twigs, and strands of desiccated seaweed. Like a gentle friend, the sea would perform a kind of scrubbing action on my father’s little driftwood creation, wreaking no havoc, but leaving notice of its annual visit.
Courtesy of the sea, Shack stared out through two wide-eyed windows my father fashioned from a double-holer. Somewhere someone was missing the seat to an old wooden outhouse, that, from the looks of things, had seen many a derriere. It was magic, really, how he’d make something out of nothing. I thought of Shack as a brief moment in an archipelago of sadness when creativity transformed his grief.
In 1969, my mother initiated divorce proceedings, engaging two law firms in New York State and one in New Jersey, whose first task was to prove my father lived in New York so that they could attach themselves to Rosamond’s buildings at Seventy-fifth Street and Third Avenue. Playing games of cat and mouse, the attorneys proved unsuccessful, but in time, he was outwitted; in letters to Big Bill from Tangier, my father claimed to be a fugitive from the American legal system. He wrote to friends saying that my mother had fallen victim to the worst sin imaginable, “accumulation of gross poundage.” He wrote letters to his girlfriend, Therese, in Paris claiming his love for her and inducing her to come to Crane Island where she could drink from a swamp and experience an American summer vacation à la Emerson and Thoreau. And in a series of letters to Lady Diana Manners in London, the Madonna in The Miracle, he desperately sought to fill in gaps of information about his mother. He was forty-four years old and Manners was seventy-seven when the two exchanged a series of letters in which my father admitted knowing virtually nothing about his mo
ther. His mother’s diaries and scrapbooks, he told the Madonna, had long since disappeared.
6
PARADISE
I received my master’s degree from the University of Virginia in the spring of 1986 knowing more about the geometries of Andre Le Notre’s moat surrounding the French château Vaux Le Vicomte than Thomas Jefferson’s perfect little oval fishpond at Monticello or the temperate rain forests in the Pacific Northwest. European classicism was an elegant place in which to steep for a few years, but not a place to linger. I never aspired to become a garden designer for the rich and famous, but after analyzing the axis at Versailles and the proportions of the Villa Lante, I soon realized that the arrows in a classical designer’s quiver are best deployed in the garden design of palaces and vast pleasure grounds of the new gilded age. In the years that followed, I paid my dues in Greenwich and Palm Beach, places with enough geometry and intrigue to match that of Vaux in the midseventeenth century. Next door to properties I worked on, the owner wasn’t around to enjoy his twelve-car garage and his acres of flowering parterres and vanishing perspectives. He’d been sent up the river as had Vaux’s owner, Nicolas Fouquet, France’s minister of finance, for misappropriation of funds. In Palm Beach, we read about the neighbor’s plight in the paper. It turned out the misappropriator didn’t actually miss the manse or the grounds while he was locked up because he had never used his backyard to begin with. The landscape was all for show, a vast spread, a pattern really, which one didn’t inhabit but viewed from on high.