by Bibi Gaston
I saw my father off and on through the 1970s and 1980s and never quite understood what he was doing. When I was asked, I’d say his work was related to ships, but most of his time seemed to be spent on legal matters. I didn’t know that over the years, he made halfhearted attempts to discover who Rosamond was, attempts that never yielded much of anything. Clues would surface from time to time in the papers, then years would go by when nothing surfaced at all. The obituaries, in particular, were frustrating because they reminded him that it was too late to ask questions of the people who once knew her. As for the diaries and the scrapbooks, he assumed they had “long since vanished.”
Finding his mother’s name in the index, he bought an occasional book on Hollywood or Broadway in hopes that he would learn something new, but those books ended up in the fireplace because they referred to his mother by names she never used, like “Rosie,” and spread prurient fairy tales about how she rode bareback by moonlight in the nude through the forest at Grey Towers. There were books that said Rosamond had received her master’s degree in English when, to his knowledge, she had never been to college at all. He didn’t know much about his mother but most of what there was, he said, was a “pack of lies.” So many lies, in fact, he’d written to one editor offering to fact-check the next edition.
Sometime in 1982, my mother decided that my father worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. She wasn’t the only one who thought that might be the case, so one day, like a counterspy, I invited myself over to his basement apartment to investigate. His place was too small to snoop, so I planted myself on his couch, scanned the walls, and listened to him talk over classical music on the transistor radio. He went into his usual diatribes, how he was foiled by my mother’s attorneys in their rotten games in court, how good wine was wasted on him. He poured me a glass of cheap Chilean swill, slapped a bologna sandwich together, and heated up a can of lima beans; I pretended to be listening when I noticed a colorful book holding down the end of his coffee table. The title was Edie. It was unusual to see a contemporary cover amid my father’s stack of dog-eared legal files, old Peugeot manuals, and dusty classics. “It’s the story of your great-great-grandmother’s family and a woman by the name of Edie that was my mother’s cousin,” he explained. He said the book was about two very rich and famous families, the Minturns and the Sedgwicks, who had seen their share of glory and tragedy. “Have you ever heard of them?” he asked. Naturally, I hadn’t, so he gave me a book report, including how the authors, George Plimpton and Jean Stein, circled the families like sharks and found a desperately wounded creature, Edie, at the center.
During the years of my clandestine visits to see my father, Edie would always be sitting on his coffee table, but I never so much as dared peek inside that book for fear my mother would hear about it. If I had, I would have seen the photos of the glam, long-legged Edie Sedgwick, the four fabulous Minturn sisters in full turn-of-the century plumage, and, ten pages later, a stunningly modern portrait of Rosamond. It was only years later that I bought the Edie book myself and learned that Edie’s grandmother, Sarah May Minturn, and Rosamond’s mother, Gertrude, were sisters. Although Edie Sedgwick and Rosamond were cousins a generation apart, there was an uncanny similarity to their lives. Like Rosamond, Edie came from a childhood of extreme privilege, and after a mediocre performance at a small private finishing school, she spun through parties in Boston and New York and landed at Andy Warhol’s “factory” on Union Square. She was promptly proclaimed Manhattan’s “it girl” thanks to Warhol’s publicity machine and became a centripetal force in his short-lived artistic bacchanal, which included “happenings” and short films in which Edie appeared in various states of undress. The painter Robert Rauschenberg said that he found that her “physicality was so refreshing that she exposed all the dishonesty in the room.” She was reported to have been the inspiration behind Bob Dylan’s “Just Like a Woman,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “Leopardskin Pillbox Hat.” According to Jonathan Sedgwick, Edie’s brother, Edie was madly in love with Dylan, became pregnant with his child, and lost her mind when she decided to abort. No one knew if it was Dylan who drove Edie over the edge, or Warhol, or Edie herself. She plunged into depression, was institutionalized, and died of a drug overdose in 1971. In the aftermath of her death, Truman Capote said, “Andy Warhol would like to have been Edie Sedgwick…. He would like to have been a charming well-born debutante from Boston. He would have liked to have been anybody but Andy Warhol.”
In the spring of 1986, my father and I both received phone calls from his first cousin, Nancy Pittman, the daughter of Tony Bradlee, Rosamond’s half-sister. Nancy had been hired by my father’s brother, James Gaston, to write a book about his mother. James had given her a salary and an apartment in one of Rosamond’s buildings in New York. We met in a restaurant, where she asked me questions about Big Bill. I barely knew my grandfather, and when the subject turned to Rosamond, I knew even less. I had just seen the advertisement for the Hupmobile on her sister Rosamond Casey’s wall in Charlottesville that summer, but still knew almost nothing. That summer, Nancy also interviewed my father, who gave her a startling account of his fearful childhood with Big Bill, mentioning that he and James were immediately sent to the Pell family on Long Island in the days following Rosamond’s death, and, after that, they were shuttled from house to house before my father was eventually sent off to Kent School. He didn’t learn during that interview that his brother had the diaries and the scrapbooks.
During his interview, my father veered off the central topic of Rosamond to talk about his divorce, which, he explained, had destroyed the family. He told Nancy that two of his three children had stuck by their mother, vigorously defending her through years of legal wrangling, but that there was one child he was close to, me. He had attended my graduation that spring, he said, and I had said something that touched him deeply. I had told him that since I’d left for college I had nowhere to return to, no home. I didn’t belong anywhere. He told Nancy that this was tragic; even he had had a home with Big Bill after Rosamond died. It wasn’t much of a home, he reported, and he didn’t want to go back there, but his daughter had none at all.
In June of 1986, my father was distributing parts to his clients’ aging diesel behemoths around the globe and adding to his sad little pile of Rosamond-related clippings, when he stumbled across Lady Diana Manners’s obituary in the Washington Post. She had died at ninety-three at her home in London and the Post reported on a life that was similar to Rosamond’s:
In order to maintain the lifestyle she so much enjoyed, Lady Diana turned to acting. She starred on the silent screen in several less than memorable films, though they achieved great popularity because of Lady Diana’s beauty. Her deep blue eyes, flawless complexion and delicate features led the poet Hilaire Belloc to enthuse that she possessed a “perfected face immutable,” while photographer Cecil Beaton compared her to Helen of Troy, Cleopatra and other great goddesses of beauty. “Why I was chosen remains a mystery and a miracle,” she once wrote.
That same year, after the launch of the good ship Aung, my father barreled his way down to Boston in his swift, white Thunderbird to attend his thirty-fifth college reunion at Harvard. That fall, wanting to address his classmates’ thirty-five-year-old curiosity, he provided a biographical sketch clarifying his activities for the Class of 1951’s Anniversary Report. He took the assignment seriously and what resulted was equal parts reportage, history lesson, and manifesto. Sandwiched between notices of cheerful asset managers, the boring travelogues of attorneys, and sobering names of the deceased, he wrote:
To claim that a career emerged from “Fender Alley” may strike classmates—and others of our institution of higher learning—as unlikely, if not preposterous. Yet, in my case, it is true for it was in that narrow lane that I developed an affinity for things mechanical while nursing a succession of antique vehicles, including a Model T Ford, Pierce-Arrow and Willys Whippet to mention just three.
From “F
ender Alley” life’s path went by a long circuitous route, including running a Jeep business in Tangier, Morocco, to a firm I head which specializes in ship’s diesel engines formerly manufactured in the USA. Such names as Busch-Sulzer, Nordberg, Baldwin-Hamilton are now unfamiliar to most persons, but during the heyday of American heavy industry these very large diesel engines powered the majority of non steam-propelled American civilian and military ships. The survivors are now largely operated in foreign countries and this fact has taken me, in recent years, to Junk Bay in Hong Kong, Cebu in the Phillipines [sic], and to various ports in South America, some of which I prefer to forget. A ship’s engine room is “home” to this Harvard grad and entering into an engine—possible in the case of the real behemoth—is an experience I delight in. Who said we would all grow up to be doctors and lawyers?
If my father wasn’t an attorney, he certainly fooled a good number of people, except my mother’s attorneys, who stayed for what seemed like forever on retainer. His pro se legal maneuvers became an obsession. My mother, he had decided, was a victim of her own attorneys. She had emerged from her divorce settlement with absolutely nothing. He wasn’t out to get her anymore or to avoid his responsibilities; he’d chosen a far bigger fish to fry, the attorneys themselves. Having lost her father at a young age, my mother had transferred her faith to the legal profession, he claimed. So she hadn’t kept track of where the so-called Gaston money and the Gaston property had gone. She wasn’t keeping track of the lawyers’ bills, either. They were.
My father’s battles weren’t confined to my mother or her attorneys. In the mid-1980s, he also decided to confront his cousin, Rosamond’s half-sister, Tony Bradlee on a matter she probably preferred to forget. Tony came away with what might have been his, had it not been for his dreadful stepgrandmother, Ruth, and his rotten luck:
21 February 1987
Dear Tony:
The other day a gentleman here in the District told me of the millions in furniture and cash (from sale of the apartment) which flowed from 1165 Park following the death of your mother Ruth. I do not believe any of the fortune had its origins in Elmira, New York.
Amos, I have read, spent most of his life battling injustices as he saw them. Somehow, I think he would be surprised (if not appalled) at the inequitable division between his direct descendants of property that once was his. The beneficiaries of a distant divorce and a subsequent suicide fared very well as fate had it, and none of them could be described as needy.
There are those of Amos’ descendants (and I do not count myself amongst them) who have nothing. I suppose it is fortunate that this is not a close family; if it were, there are those who would (or should) feel uncomfortable with the treasure that cascaded upon them.
Bill
In 1989, deciding there was no place like home, my father gathered up his clippings and his legal briefs into green plastic garbage bags and moved back to the Old Mill. He was on a mission to rescue his beloved from his renters, a band of attractive but clueless Princeton co-eds who never fully appreciated the glories of the Moat. From his reestablished base camp at the Old Mill, he could motor into New York’s law library in his convertible Peugeot, do a brisk business in diesel engine parts, and continue besieging the wretched, corrupt attorneys with motions he filed himself.
As the keeper of the Old Mill, his days were filled with the mundane. He diligently mowed her mole-infested lawns and tended to dead things around the grounds. He kept his muscles toned at the gym and his romantic life a secret. For a time, no one knew that he had found what his Little Billy self had always half hoped for. In the 1970s, he had met a tall, blondish, olive-skinned woman at the Moroccan embassy who pushed him in the direction of her friends, but he wasn’t interested. He liked her tenacity and her teasing, and he rolled his eyes when she insisted she wasn’t Moroccan, but French.
When I first met the Moroccan, he said he had known her for thirty years, and she reengineered his sentence by adding “as friends.” It didn’t matter to me, I was glad to see anyone in the family having a good time. She cooked spice-laden dishes with aromas that wafted through the Old Mill like something burning in the souk and sat by his side to giggle at Seinfeld. They’d make fun of people who were ugly or fat. She bought supersized underwear to string up on the clothesline, which embarrassed my father in front of his rural neighbors. She was practical and intrepid and bombed around the Old Mill with her throw rugs, and she disposed of things when he wasn’t looking. She’d complain that the place hadn’t seen a single update since the 1960s, which it hadn’t. In the summer, they’d head up to Maine in her late-model Jeep and she’d prove she could be what every Gaston man wanted, a cross between Marilyn Monroe and an Amazon. She’d yank mussels from the rocks and roll up her sleeves to dig for clams and make the best of a driftwood bunk in Shack that he insisted was a luxury accommodation. Meanwhile, he kept watch over the ship, insisting on sleeping with his “true love,” Aung, a hundred yards away. Their voices traveled over the water to say goodnight and both knew a little separation was good. She’d call him “Monsieur Gaston” and he’d call her “Mademoiselle,” and the world seemed complete.
I saw my father only three times in the 1990s when I broke free from projects in Oregon, flew east, and hired myself a lobsterman to take me out to the islands. Circumnavigating the coves and inlets to see whose boat was anchored where, I’d find my father floating in the back cove of Crotch Island or in the long harbor at Crane, leaning back in an orange plastic desk chair with his feet propped up on the gunwales and reading last week’s New York Times. It seemed to me he’d been waiting and hoping I’d arrive, so that summer would begin.
My father presented himself with an air of formality when I’d first see him, and I thought of it as a by-product of coming from old speak-when-spoken-to families. I’d smile and tease his Little Billy self. “So where’d we get the designer furniture?” He’d smirk, pull his thick reading glasses down off his nose, put the paper aside, and say, “It floated up. Welllllllll, speaking of floating up, it’s about time. What took you so long?” The Times went in the hold, the bananas came out of the Moroccan bag, and he’d offer me a warm beer he knew I wouldn’t drink and ask me what my plans were. “Plans?” I’d say. He was the organizer. I’d never make plans. After routine housekeeping, he’d devise the next watery chapter of our brief days in Maine together.
Crotch Island by Eliot Elisofon
He had improved his navigational skills, and with the purchase of a secondhand depth finder, he was now mastering Aung and not the other way around. In his late sixties, he was running and lifting weights and fighting the war against fat so he could still leap from boat to boat and row thirteen miles to the mainland and thirteen miles back. Once a year, he circumnavigated Vinalhaven in his custom dinghy with only one pit stop, at the rusticating relatives on North Haven. Without proper warning, he’d row up to the bright shiny boats on Iron Point and after making sure the coast was clear of a certain someone he wanted to avoid, namely his brother, he’d tie off at his cousin Jennifer Cabot’s dock. He’d find his way up the path to his great-grandfather’s Gaston Cottage that wasn’t a cottage at all, down an expensive dry martini, two olives straight up, talk about the past no one remembered, say hello to the Cabot children who inhabited the porch he grew up on, and row on, which meant rowing twenty-some odd miles around Vinalhaven, the long way, back to Crane and Crotch.
In the 1990s, what was once Big Bill’s archipelago survived despite the war between my father and his brother. Thanks to the nonwarring half-brother, Tom, Crotch Island had seen something of a renaissance. However, none of the brothers had done anything about completing Big Bill’s headstone, which stood on Crotch’s northeasterly flank, facing the mainland. Big Bill had ordered up a respectable headstone before he died, and his boatman, Reddy Phillips, had installed it in a little corral with a split-rail fence that always reminded me of the Unicorn tapestry at the Cloisters in upper Manhattan. There was nothing of Big Bill hims
elf at the gravesite, only his words carved in granite:
WILLIAM GASTON
ARRIVED HERE JUNE 1927
DIED OLD ENOUGH
BACCHUS VENUS THE UNDERDOG
INDIVIDUALISM THE STARS THIS WORLD ONLY
AND ALL ON TIME
Poor Bill, underdog or not, had died a miserable death from complications of alcoholism and diabetes. When his esophagus ruptured in 1970, he’d left a long, complicated will for Tom, his youngest son, to disentangle. In the will, some of the heirs were reminded of their flaws, and his distributions naturally reflected his paternal preferences, but when it was all said and done, his ashes were distributed off the rocks on the northwest flank of Crotch Island. Twenty-five years later, in keeping with the family’s general pandemonium, marriages, divorces, feuds, stops, starts, and problems with finishing things, it was no surprise that a stone carver hadn’t been recruited to inscribe the age at which he died, seventy-four. Anyone stumbling upon his headstone might assume that Big Bill had arrived in June 1927 and simply never left. If symbolism is any measure, the past hadn’t exactly been buttoned up when Big Bill died.
The good old days were gone but apparently not forgotten. I kept an ear cocked for the stories of Crotch Island. There were stories of the “help” that Big Bill treated like family, and the family Big Bill treated like the “help.” There was Lee Ping Quan, “The Chinaman” who was Calvin Coolidge’s cook aboard the USS Mayflower, who lived in a closet off Big Bill’s kitchen and wrote a cookbook full of recipes laced with booze. The Chinaman was more than just a cook—his ancestors were poets and philosophers—so he wrote, “It is not good to be without a cook, but it is very much worse to have a bad one.” There were stories of Reddy Phillips, the boatman who really was red and was the brother Big Bill never had in his own brother and who ferried him through the bony spines of Crotch. There was John Barrymore, who’d drift over between productions in Hollywood, and Michael Strange, a strange name for a wife, and Bill Laurence, who Big Bill called his best friend, the Lithuanian-born New York Times correspondent who won the Pulitzer for reporting from a plane above Hiroshima but turned out was on the payroll of the feds, and Eliot Elisofon, the Life photographer who’d boat over to shoot Big Bill’s Christmas card accompanied by his accomplice, the sizzling Gypsy Rose Lee; and of course there was the scheming, me-first Clare Boothe Luce, and Margaret Wise Brown who had a passion for Big Bill because a children’s writer needed some grown-up fun. Big Bill thought he’d retreated to a private life, but he was frequently spotted by the lobstermen or the neighbors in varying degrees of undress, ferrying one nude woman in a canoe over to Vinalhaven and another woman in the nude on his way back. Through lots of hard work, he’d achieved a reputation for “boats, booze, and broads.” No, the subsequent generations had never quite lived up to the stories of Crotch Island in the good old days. Not that they tried.