The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  Gardens used to serve a loftier purpose. At Villa Lante, I once watched a scruffy old Italian gardener deploy a coat hanger to unclog a line of Renaissance-era fountain jets at the base of a mossy sculpture of a lounging river god. The sight of the man, and the god, reminded me that gardens once served as allegorical Disneylands. Statues of mythic figures were not just sited to punctuate a garden axis, but to engage an owner in a quest of imagination and hope. Great gardens had a mission. When they stir us, gardens unlock the mysteries of mind and emotions, fate and destiny. They answer the question: How might we celebrate the place we live in, these leafy corridors between heaven and earth? May I suggest an island of lemon trees or a room of moss?

  I’d chosen landscape architecture because I wanted to rescue places. When I began to feel more like a spy than an architect, I decided to redesign my career. My romp across America first took me to work on the great American masterpiece, Central Park, and then to the forests of the Pacific Northwest and eventually back and forth between projects that had enduring value and those that did not. Along the way, I found myself in desecrated places where man and nature hadn’t gotten along. They’d ended things badly and I was sent in to rescue the patient.

  Fifteen years after resuscitating the landscape at Seventy-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue in Central Park, I learned that Rosamond, Gertrude, and my father had lived almost directly across the street. If my life and my upbringing had been, in my mother’s word, “normal,” or if I’d heard the elders tell their stories by the fireside, I might have known I was working to restore what was once my family’s front yard. If I had known my connection to New York City, I might not have gone on my ten-year romp. I wasn’t upset and it wasn’t a waste. During those years, I kept stumbling into places where Rosamond and my father had been and ones strikingly similar. Looking back now, perhaps I was always on a path to the diaries.

  While uncovering the story of my father and Rosamond, I would frequently share my story with strangers. As I described what I was doing in Morocco or Hollywood or Florida or Maine, they got a wild-eyed look and said that I was doing exactly what they had always wanted to do, so they made grand statements: I was a salmon, swimming back and back to complete the unfinished stories of my ancestors. I was putting a pattern to chaos. I was putting weary souls to rest. It was all projection, really; those were the things they wanted to do, the things we all want to do.

  BIBI: 1986–2000

  In 1986, my father spent a fifth dry-docked summer in a dusty boatyard next to the ferry terminal in Rockland, Maine, putting the last coat of varnish on a 1948 Nova Scotian cabin cruiser. Burmese for “Victory,” the Aung was a close replica of his father’s boat The Harpie. I had just landed a three-month position evaluating scenery for the State of Maine, a job that sounded much more fun than it was, when I wandered over to the coast and spotted him making last-minute adjustments in the engine compartment before launching the boat he thought of as “Miss America of the Sea.”

  The maiden voyage got off to a muddy start. At the last minute, I had invited a friend to come aboard before the launch, but a certain miscalculation woke us up in the middle of the night when I fell out of my bunk onto the floorboards. In darkness, we lifted the hatch and there, spread out in all its starry, watery glory, lay the rocky coast of Maine, only it was pitched at a forty-five-degree angle. The tide had gone out. Instead of spending the night aboard the ship with the crew, my father was snugly installed at the Wayfarer East, one of the species of seedy, slumping hotels on the Maine coast that he swore by because the price of a good night’s sleep was less than a weekend’s worth of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.

  The Aung wasn’t his first wooden boat by any means, but he said it was the first boat in a long time that was worthy of anchoring off Crotch Island. With a beam of nine feet, Aung was not much wider than a passenger car, but her stern deck was so long she could hold a dance floor full of people. Aung cut a fine inaugural figure leaving Rockland Harbor in the summer of 1986. My father wanted to show off his newly refurbished boat, so he planned to head north to Camden Harbor, where, like the beauty pageant at Miss Mason’s School on my first day of kindergarten, he hoped for an audience. As part of my new government job for the State of Maine, I had rated Camden Harbor one of the most scenic on the coast. The scenery was enhanced by a long, narrow channel stacked three deep with some of the most shapely, valuable sailboats in the world. My father knew everything about his new diesel engine, but he hadn’t had much of a chance to test drive Aung’s manual steering, so as we spun into Camden’s picture-perfect lanes of boat traffic, he became visibly agitated. Aung was twice as long as any boat he’d captained, so as he tried to slow her, she reared out of control and slid indelicately into the side of a small sailboat heading in the other direction. The sideswipe wasn’t serious, and the other party waved gaily as if it had been a most common error on our part. We recovered and were making a fast turn at the top of the harbor when I cringed, turned green, and ducked my head in horror. We were playing bumper boats in scenic Camden Harbor. Harbor gawkers glared and put their hands to their mouths as we careered into million-dollar Hinckleys and nailed the rub rails of J-class racing boats. Once we rounded the top of the harbor, my father brought Aung out of her death spiral and we hightailed it out of Camden. We rounded Curtis Island light and headed east into Penobscot Bay toward Vinalhaven, where I felt sure we’d be a bit more welcome. But as it turned out, my father had made quite a name for himself with the boatyard boys when Aung had spent time in dry dock, and according to his side of the story, the good ol’ boys had cheated the pants off him. According to their side, he hadn’t paid his bill, so they didn’t exactly cheer at Aung’s long, sleek lines when we pulled up to the dock. In fact, one of the boatyard boys greeted us by dropping his pants and mooning the boat.

  The captain and crew of the Aung

  I’d suffered enough excitement for one day, but we finally rounded the cove of Crotch Island where the captain popped a Pabst, and the crew poured a round of Chivas on the rocks for herself. We sat down to relax where Big Bill had once planted his flower gardens, and without unpacking or doing anything practical, we took in what we had come for, what he called “the setting,” and to do what we always did, argue about the view. He waxed poetic about the good ship Aung, about beauty in general, the evaluation of which he thought of as his best suit. I advised him that since I had seen him last, I’d acquired scenic expertise, what with my basement job analyzing maps. As always, he was curious how I planned to make a living, this time off scenery.

  Since he wasn’t impressed by my answer, I changed the topic to report on something I thought he would be more interested in: the pictures of Rosamond I’d seen on the wall of his cousin’s house in Charlottesville that spring, just days after he’d come to my graduation.

  He rose to the bait like an angry, feisty fish. “Listen,” he said, “we don’t need to talk about her. Ever. She was a whore.” I was terrified by his response, but I understood. There wasn’t any need to talk about her, not now, not ever. So we went back to talking about his beauty subjects, the setting, the noble lines of Aung, the sweet fluffy buffleheads bobbing in the cove. And of course, our favorite topic, a debate over the fate of a solitary spruce that split the view of Penobscot Bay like a knife.

  Moments later, he changed the subject, to his brother, the subject that, to him, never got enough airtime: how his brother had betrayed him and betrayed the whole family. I never understood the context of what had happened, only the way he described it, how his brother had poured acid in the wound. I let him repeat his story for his own good. There were no nice words to describe how his brother took sides with my mother during my parents’ divorce and came away with the property at Seventy-fifth and Third Avenue while my mother was in a divorcing woman’s coma. She’d signed away the family’s most valuable asset. Now listen to this, he said. Are you listening? he asked. The buildings would someday be worth hundreds of millions, he said. None of that, n
ot one dime, will go to you. Not to your mother, either, he said. My mother got nothing out of it, a big fat zero.

  It was true. My mother was left practically indigent after her divorce. She never spoke to my father again but she always maintained good relations with James Gaston, saying he had rescued her. He was the good brother, she said, and our hero. None of it made any sense to me. She was supported by her mother all her life and lived the last twenty years in a one-room San Francisco studio, without a working refrigerator or a washing machine. I could have asked my father why he left us with no money, and why he’d done things like call a moving company to have all our furniture moved out of the Old Mill when we’d left for Oregon one summer. But there was no point; it always came down to the same thing: he was ruined after the divorce. He couldn’t help us or help anyone. The properties were the family’s future and his brother now had everything that once was his. My mother was so brilliant with her Radcliffe education, he said, but trusting attorneys led to her demise. He would never ever call James Gaston his brother, not as long as he lived. Nothing could prepare a man for that kind of betrayal. And one thing you should know, he said, you can’t take betrayal to court!

  My father’s voice bobbed, weaved, then drowned out. I could have pressed him for the details of the legals and financials, but instead, I listened to the waves tapping at Big Bill’s dismantled dock. Betrayal was something I’d never experienced, but imagined, at its worst, was like the beat of a drum that never stopped, a firm warning that there is no refuge in human relations. Big Bill knew the betrayal of his siblings, and my father knew his brother’s betrayal. His brother hadn’t just poured acid in any wound. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the first wound, the deepest wound, the Rosamond wound.

  There was nothing I could say or do, so my thoughts drifted back to what my father had said about Rosamond. I had always had two pieces of information—that she was beautiful and that she had killed herself. But here was a third piece and far more perplexing. What did he mean when he said she was a whore? Was my father furious at having lost something irreplaceable, or did he mean that Rosamond had been with other men? I was too afraid to ask him. Too afraid to expose myself to the pain that never went away.

  My pain hadn’t gone away either, how he’d rated me like scenery during a trip back to Tangier in the summer of 1981. In a receiving line of dignitaries talking camels and rugs, I overheard him introduce my sister as the pretty one. I lost my voice for three days while my brother and sister said nothing, colluding in silence. He did to me what had been done to him, making one child feel good at the cost of another. It was the first time I realized betrayal could spread like a disease. But there was no point in bringing that up either. Discussing the scenery was more useful. So I told him how a cove view rated higher on the scenic scorecard if it contained moving water versus flat. Rocky outcrops, lighthouses, reversing falls and old boatyards were more beautiful than flat-roofed industrial buildings and used car lots.

  That fall, after the scenic work ended, I went to work for a firm that that ripped up the scenic Maine coast to make way for subdivisions with names like Stonegate and Buck’s Crossing. I was doing things that my education had not prepared me for, like ordering backhoes to turn virgin forests into mulch and flattening fern-strewn ledges to make way for neoclassical entrance statements. They were unforgivable acts really, crushing and trampling the divine to make way for mediocrity.

  One day the next spring, after receiving a ten-cent raise, I sat straight up in my drafting chair, put down my electric eraser, and placed a cold call to a grand old master of landscape architecture in Greenwich, Connecticut, Mr. A. E. Bye. I never expected Bye himself to pick up the phone but he did, and I must have sounded like an inmate on death row. I whispered my story into the receiver and with the voice of a hoot owl, he said he didn’t hire just anyone, that if I expected to do subdivisions, he didn’t do subdivisions, but I should come down to speak with him, anyway. When I arrived on the estate of his client, Leonard Lauder, Mr. Bye could see that I was a casualty of war. I had tortured spruce and injured lichens and maimed mosses in the name of landscape architecture, and in turn my actions had tortured me. We were staring down at a tree pit when Bye told me we’d stop all that, that I needed to work with him. Not for him, with him. I would do penance, be forgiven and shown the way home. We would go into the forest. Learn its moods.

  That summer, I met a man in Maine and we fell in love. We spent my birthday with eight friends in the crumbling house on Crotch Island. All weekend, the men set off firecrackers on the broken-down dock and the women fought off bats and spiders with a tennis racket. When we convened beneath the putti and candelabra at night, the group was curious about the island’s history and I admitted knowing little about it. I’d heard tales of Big Bill’s “boats, booze, and broads,” but the story didn’t go any further than that. Crotch Island had become a sad shadow of its once glorious self. There had been days, good old days, when the place was a showcase for bacchanals and artistry, plays and curtains and cooks and boatmen, gardens and an outhouse competition with charcoal drawings festooning the walls depicting the chronological development of the toilet. But by the late seventies, Crotch Island had sunk into a state of dishevelment, a state I knew all too well. With its dock dismantled, the boathouse sinking into the sand, and spruce logs rotted beyond repair, Crotch was just a few years away from the end.

  In the fall of 1987, I left for Connecticut to join Bye. Then in his seventies and an avowed bachelor, Bye spent his days ridding the world of noisome exotics and his nights cooking up plans for new projects. There was more than enough in the native landscape to amuse and inspire, so one didn’t need all those sickly hybrids. Nature, he thought, revealed herself to the willing and the observant. We were hired to design a soft reprieve from the muscularity of city life where our clients were often the captains of industry: George Soros, Robert Benton, Leonard Lauder, Bob and Sandy Pittman—people, Bye explained to me, who were often bored by their own success. He said it was his mission to introduce them to the emotional qualities of their property, something they didn’t have time to think about until he wandered into their lives to enlighten them.

  On a site visit, Bye and I would arrive in his little red Honda. He looked around, waved his arms in the air, and uttered a few words like delicacy or humor, and having summarized the emotional qualities of the land, he’d get back in his car and take a nap while I measured up the property. Waking from his nap, he’d collect the clients and, holding their rapt attention, say just two or three words—elegant, melancholic, elegiac—then walk away. It was landscape haiku and we’d stand around afterward scratching our heads.

  One weekend toward the end of our time together, I invited Mr. Bye to photograph Crotch Island with his Leica, and we got to talking about personal things; I asked him why, in seventy-odd years, he had never married. He smiled like an old elf and told me that he had all his work and his fame to contend with, plus, he added, he was too sensitive for love. He had more important things to do. Landscape offered a canvas of meaning on which we could work out a compromise with the destruction that is everywhere. If we could get it right in the landscape, we could get it right with our emotions; and if we could get it right with our emotions, the world might never end.

  In the winter of 1987, I penned a manifesto to my uncle Tom, Big Bill’s third son by his third wife, Lucille. Something needed to be done about Crotch Island, I said, or the house might as well be torched. In the same letter, I offered up my friends as labor, with a plan to restore it. After deliberations with his wife, Noni, who wasn’t enthusiastic about pouring money into the crumbling Gaston infrastructure, and his daughter, Kate, who was too young and had no interest in the place at the time, Tom agreed, and a major effort got under way to tear down half the house and rebuild it. I still knew nothing about what had made everyone abandon the family’s only built legacy to the squirrels and the bark beetles and the storms and the tides. Most plac
es eventually fall to pieces, but I found it a bit peculiar that every significant landscape in my family had deteriorated: Milford, the Old Mill, and Crotch Island.

  In the winter of 1989, a year after work on the island house was largely complete, Mr. Bye was admitted to the hospital and closed his office. Cut adrift, I took a position at Central Park in New York, a park I knew a lot about, thanks to a small, jumpy Chicago urbanist, who tried to convince my graduate-school class of semislumbering landscape architects that Central Park marked one of the great antiurban gestures in American civic life. That thought woke us up.

  As seen by the falcon or conjured by a landscape architect, Central Park appears like a great green rectangle that rejects the imposition of Manhattan’s glorious grid. In January of 1990, I was assigned to restore a landscape at the edge of the rectangle, along Fifth Avenue between Seventy-ninth and Eightieth streets. The most recent expansion of the Metropolitan Museum left a landscape of complete dishevelment—broken pavement, compacted dirt, and dead and dying trees. Tim Marshall, deputy director of Capitol Projects, took me to Seventy-ninth Street and Fifth Avenue on a snowy Saturday in January to explain my assignment: I was to first investigate the site’s history and then bring it back from the dead.

  Much had changed since the days when Olmsted and Vaux put pencil to paper, particularly on the city side of Central Park’s perimeter wall. In February of 1965, the Isaac Vail Brokaw Mansion, Clare Boothe Brokaw’s staging area for her victorious assault on Manhattan, had been razed in a stealth demolition that was reported in the New York Times as the “Rape of the Brokaw Mansion.” The demolition so incensed New York that Mayor Wagner created the first Landmarks Preservation Commission. On the park side, what was once a sprawling meadow below the Met had shrunk to a sliver of green, eaten up by successive additions that wrapped the original diminutive museum like a set of Russian dolls. The original 1880s brick structure by Vaux and Mould was devoured by Richard Morris Hunt’s addition and facade completed in 1926, which in turn was devoured by the Rockefeller Wing of 1982 and the Kravis Wing of 1990. Olmsted’s vision of a green Fifth Avenue had been abandoned. When I arrived on the scene in 1990, the latest addition, the Kravis Wing of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, had just been completed by the architectural firm of Roche and Dinkeloo. Henry Kravis, the Wall Street investment banker, then funded a spectacular $1.4 million restoration of the park’s landscape on the south side of the museum.