by Bibi Gaston
The day before he went into surgery in New York, I saw James Gaston at Rosamond’s buildings. He wasn’t a conversationalist, and as I sat awkwardly with him at his bar, Hurricane Island, on Third Avenue, he warned me that after surgery my father would spend the rest of his life, what was left of it, institutionalized. Staring straight ahead and in a tone devoid of emotion, he told me that I’d be unable to take care of him so he’d end his life in a “home.” Simple as that. I didn’t know how to respond. A few moments later, stunned, I got up and walked away. His was the worst bedside manner I could imagine from a surgeon, much less my father’s so-called brother.
That afternoon, just before their offices closed, I overheard my father on the phone with the office of the chief counsel of the Disciplinary Committee for the First Judicial Department in New York, following up on his most recent complaint against my mother’s attorneys. I could virtually hear the tendrils wrapping around his brain as he made his tragic last phone call. I didn’t want to dissuade a dying man from pursuing his obsession until the end, so I said nothing. That night the Irishman and a group of newfound friends in Florida shouted “good luck” over the phone, and the next morning, my father went into brain surgery performed by Sloan Kettering’s chief of neurosurgery. After five hours, the surgeon came out to report that the procedure went remarkably well. My father woke up in intensive care speaking Spanish to the neurology students and Arabic to the nurses. Between dozing and seizures, he demanded his New York Times and a banana.
In the days after my father’s surgery, the Moroccan and I jumped on the conveyor belt of caretaking, and, like it or not, we were a team. She cooked and served him little bits of exotic food, and over the months, we shared the thankless tasks of caregiving. When I wasn’t busy, I was disoriented, so I cased the Old Mill trying to figure out what I was doing there. At night, I paced the halls, looked in cupboards, and scanned the bookshelves, and in the morning I ran out into the woods thinking the answers were where the chestnut orchard had been or near the stream where I’d played alone with my crawdads and rocks. The landmarks of my childhood were still there, and one by one my father’s great big dramatic names for places came back to me: the river, the little bridge, giant rock, the dungeon, the weeping willow, the moat, the fort, the wall, the fence. On excursions into the woods, the landscape seemed smaller now, compressed into mature green rooms. Still, a sharp aroma drifted through the field where my father had once planted sunflowers and buried dead pets. The trees, however, had grown up and puffed out, reaching for light, scrapping and fighting for the sky.
Several times that fall, I loaded up the Moroccan bag with my father’s Rolleiflex and his bananas, pulled his World War II army Jeep out of the old red shed, dusted her off, and took my father for a spin. I commandeered “Jeepsy” like a chariot through the fading yellow hickory forests of western New Jersey. We must have looked quite the sight all dressed up for World War II without the war, me in my long golden scarf that matched the leaves and flapped in the wind, and he in his turban of bandages. For the first time since our trip back to Tangier in 1981, my father sat in the passenger seat clutching whatever he could, barking directions, “slow down, speed up, watch out for that rock.” Jeepsy wouldn’t top twenty-five miles per hour, so I let him know he needed to settle down. He smiled, wincing at my grinding downshifts. During our last tour, we were driving along when he got a certain look on his face as if he wanted to turn around and go home. I asked him what was wrong. Staring out into the forest, he asked me what would happen if he just walked off into the Sourlands and vanished behind a rock. I turned to him and asked him what he was talking about. “What are the Sourlands?” I said. As we pulled into the driveway, he said “Whaaaaat? You don’t know about the SOURlands, where have you been all your life?” I had grown up in the Sourlands, he said, New Jersey’s only chain of mountains. They were just bumps compared to Morocco’s Rif, he told me, but they were all New Jersey had to offer. “Take them or leave them,” he said. I decided to leave them. They were suddenly important to him, though. He’d been thinking about a disappearing act, his last.
He had a gun in the house, a .45, the one he’d bought for self-defense during “an unnamed incident” when a friend from Kent played a nasty trick on him and the FBI pointed the finger at my father instead of the friend. One day the gun became a big issue. He had forgotten where he’d hidden it and he was frantic. I didn’t know him well enough to rule anything out and it occurred to me that perhaps he’d use it on himself and I’d be on the receiving end of yet another family mess, like someone accusing me of murder. Later that day when we found it under my mattress on the top floor of the Old Mill, I took it and locked it in his desk. His memory was slipping, and he never asked me about the gun again. A thousand ways of vanishing had dwindled down to one.
In late October my father staged several fits of discouragement when it finally dawned on him that “we” had nowhere to go and nothing to do but sit and wait for the end. After a life of hurrying and moving on, there wasn’t a goddamned thing he could do. So at night, he stopped turning off the light by his bed because, he said, if he could just keep his eyes open, he wouldn’t die. It’s what he had done when he was a child.
I’d sometimes imagine how my father might die. Like drafting a disaster plan for a category five hurricane when nothing survives a category five hurricane, I imagined he’d go down in a boating incident in the fog off the Maine coast and no one would ever hear from him again. The boat would hit a rock at full speed and explode in flames. Without life preservers or flares, he would try to prop the boat up with an oar like Ahab until the tide finally swept him away. Mr. Philadelphia and I had watched that very scene unfold one night during a hurricane on Crotch, so my imaginings probably seemed dramatic, but, minus the conflagration, they really weren’t all that far off.
One October morning, abjectly bored with his convalescence, my father emerged from his room carrying his oldest Moroccan bag, the one I’d last seen in Tangier. All he had to do, he said, was fill it with the requisites—a fresh copy of the New York Times, several trusty bananas, and the leather-cased German Rolleiflex he bought in Malaga—and we’d be off. He was well past the sardine days, when several of the raft-shaped tins kicked around at the bottom of the bag waiting to be deployed in case of extreme hunger. Those days had officially ended, he said, in some port like Cartagena or Cebu in the 1990s, when there had been what he called a “bad experience,” a sort of bitter divorce from his once beloved meal in a can. I miss the sardine days, especially now.
By the time he came downstairs he had already considered many things, such as the relative imperfection of the day. It wasn’t the most beautiful day, he said—that was yesterday—but it was damned close and this was the last chance, so we’d be leaving for Milford in half an hour. I didn’t have a Moroccan bag, but I did have a camera. That day in Milford I would take the first and last pictures I’d ever take of my father.
The day was cool and bright. We drove up through the Delaware Water Gap talking about the landscape and agreeing, as we usually did, about beauty. To me, the Water Gap was like the Columbia River Gorge, but he said no, the Gorge, woefully, was far more impressive than the Gap. He’d only been there once but that was enough to know. If it came down to a waterfall competition, the Gorge would win and the Gap would lose. Sorry, he said, the Gorge is in a league of its own. But I wasn’t sorry, I was glad we saw things the same way.
It was on that trip, the last time he’d see his beloved Milford, that he first took me to the little mausoleum at the top of the hill in the Milford Cemetery. I didn’t ask him why his family, the illustrious Pinchots, had been buried in two cemeteries, not one. But no matter what he might have said on that not quite perfect day, I had a notion that what separated the cemeteries was not time or space, but grief. I didn’t know for sure, but I imagined there had been so much grief after Rosamond died that it couldn’t all fit on the old family plot below the château at Grey Towers, so t
he family exported it across town and buried it somewhere else.
While the first generations of Pinchots were buried over at Grey Towers, he said that all the Pinchots he had known were either tucked inside the little gray mausoleum or buried within a stone’s throw. The Pinchots were planners. They’d built the somber little structure with the Doric columns in preparation for the inevitable, but they’d never planned for Rosamond to go first. And then Amos six years later, who never recovered from the grief. The next to go, my father told me, was Amos’s brother, the good Governor Gifford, and then his excellent wife, Cornelia. Rumor had it that Grandfather James Pinchot had been moved to the little mausoleum, but my father didn’t know for sure. Amos was in the crypt, but he also had a little headstone adorned with an American flag for his service in the Spanish American War. His service was the only thing he felt he had accomplished in life. His second wife, Ruth, was there by his side, but my father didn’t have anything good to say about her. Typically, the mean ones outlasted everyone else, but there she was under a stone, which was fine by him. Then there was someone I’d never heard of at the time, Mary Pinchot Meyer, who also died young. My father said she’d been a mistress of President Kennedy’s, maybe his favorite but definitely the smartest. She’d been shot on the towpath in Georgetown, he said. And finally, there were two more Giffs. There was Dr. Giff, the governor’s only son, who’d decided to get out of crusading altogether and become a doctor, and there was another Giff, Rosamond’s brother, Long Giff, who wasn’t all that sensible. That was the Giff he’d run into in the nightclub when he’d played hooky from Kent School and hopped a plane for Havana. I’ll probably never know the whole story behind that episode, but my father assured me that it was the strangest coincidence of his life.
Beside the first and second generations of Frenchmen over at Grey Towers, the Pinchots were all there at the little mausoleum. But on that day in October of 2000, I had a feeling that my father had come to say good-bye to just one of the Pinchots, to Rosamond, and he wanted to be alone. So after he showed me around, I went back to the car and watched him circumnavigate the graves one last time, passing through a hopeless little line of disheveled hemlocks and scurrying up the steps to peer through the steel bars into the darkness of the crypt. As I watched him, I wondered if most of his life and the way he had lived it had to do with Rosamond.
Driving out of the cemetery, he asked me if I thought I would come back there without him, alone. I nodded, certain that I would. I asked him if he wanted to be buried there, and he told me he didn’t know, he hadn’t given it as much thought as the Moroccan had. “The Moroccan, what’s she got to do with it?” I asked. He told me that the Moroccan didn’t take much stock in the illustrious stories of the Pinchots, the history, and how beautiful Rosamond had been. She didn’t believe much in names; her name was as good as his name. It hurt him, he said, that she didn’t care about his past. But strangely enough, she often said she’d like to be buried next to Cyrille or Constantine, the French-born Pinchots, in the old cemetery with the obelisk below the château. It was odd, I thought, a Moroccan in the American cemetery of my French ancestors. I had always kept a journal, so that fall I added it to my list of things that didn’t add up.
In Milford that day, we both knew he’d soon become too ill to negotiate the world. After our tour of the cemetery, we drove to Grey Towers and made our way to the Forester’s Cottage. No one was around, so we pulled the old rattan chairs off the deck and sat beneath what he told me was Rosamond’s room, the room with the tourette and the little balcony with James Pinchot’s corn cob railings from New Orleans. He asked me if I thought the little tower was beautiful. Oh, yes, I said, I could imagine her up there, like Rapunzel. She didn’t have long hair, he said, she wore it short, they called it a shingle cut, something like that, like a boy. It was then I decided to ask him, one more time, about his mother.
“She spent the last full night of her life in Princeton,” he told me, “with a man by the name of Harris, Jed Harris.” I asked him why she did it. “You can never know; maybe she wanted to get back at Harris for firing her from the lighting of a play or props or something she’d been working on. There was some kind of fight, but I don’t know, I suppose she’d lost it,” he said. Lost what, I asked. Her beauty, she felt old, he replied. I asked him if he thought that it was selfish to take her life like that. I suppose you could say that, he said. “Was there a note?” I asked. “Not that I know of. I never saw one. I was first taken to the Pells on Long Island, then to various houses. My father would finally have his freedom.” I didn’t understand what he meant by that. The old man had been skiing in the West, he said. They had their own lives. He eventually came to pick me up, he said. I didn’t understand why the Pinchots hadn’t, why he had been left alone. He didn’t, either. “My father had dirt on the Pinchots, maybe on my mother. I just don’t know.” Grey Towers was the place he came to in the summers with her and they’d sit just a few feet away. He pointed and said, “Right under that porch over there.” I asked him if an awful lot of the mess and confusion in the family could be tied to what she’d done. Well, it certainly did no good, he said. She must have been very upset, I said, and he nodded. I looked over at him and his eyes were closed.
After lunch, we walked along the dormant flower borders of Cornelia’s long gardens. I thought about how things got worse before they got better and how someday, perhaps, my father would still be around to watch me marry the Irishman at Grey Towers. We meandered down the rill, around the Finger Bowl, and he pointed to the bust of Lafayette in the niche and the tower room where he’d spent the summers as a child. We wandered back toward the Forester’s Cottage and made our way through the green curtain of trees and onto the path that leads into the forest and down to the falls. He crept gingerly along, providing a description of how the forest once was, how much more lush, how once upon a time there’d been hemlocks, watercress, rhododendrons, azaleas, wild mushrooms, and ferns. There’d been birds, he told me, lots and lots of birds, but now the forest was in decline. His cousin Peter Pinchot, one of the grandsons of the governor, was trying to bring it back. “The woods and the path are so wonderful. You had the best of both worlds,” I said, “waterfalls and a forest in your backyard and perennial gardens lapping at the sides of the house.” We walked along and I took several photographs, profiles of his Little Billy smile, now helpless, still alone. It was one thing to say good-bye to Crotch Island, the landscape of his father, but Milford was the landscape of his mother. He’d been dutiful and performed the pilgrimage every summer, but a lifetime wasn’t time enough to know it. There was no way to fathom what it meant to leave this place.
One afternoon about a month later, my father said we should go up into the attic room at the Old Mill to throw things out. After sliding backward up each stair step, he pointed to a closet in the eave and directed me to haul out two green garbage bags. “Get rid of all that stuff, or keep it, I don’t care,” he said, “it’s just junk.” Sifting through the bags, I picked a dusty old letter and started reading it out loud. The letter was from Big Bill to my thirteen-year-old father at Kent School, advising him like an attorney on culinary matters:
Dear Billy,
Glad you liked the steak. It does seem to me, though, you were taking quite a chance cooking it in your room. What if you had been found out—where would you have said it came from? I certainly don’t want to be known as being a party to breaking your rules there. Also, should think it would be more fun to cook outside anyway.
Will send you another one this Friday which will arrive Saturday morning. It may be what you call a “round steak,” which is a little tougher and a little thinner than the other one, but buried in the freezer in the bulk storage department with a lot of other stuff belonging to other people. But we have been eating these other steaks and love them. After all, they are from the same animal, just a little further down the leg.
Hope you finish up well there this year—I really hope it sincerely.
I forgot, please promise me you’ll cook this next steak outside somewhere.
See you soon.
Love,
Pops
To me it sounded fatherly and funny, but my father got a pained look on his face. Throw that out, he told me; he didn’t want to think about the “old man.” I fished out another letter in beautiful penmanship that looked more cheery and read it to him:
Dear Mrs. Gaston:
Here’s how Billy revealed real greatness. In his first lesson he was shown the correct way to hit a forehand. Then he never even touched the ball in 100 attempts to hit it. Yet he kept on swinging correctly. Undaunted by 100 failures, not even perturbed, he kept on swinging correctly. Knowing he was on the right track, I showed him how to hit a backhand. He missed fifty times before he hit one. 150 unsuccessful though correct swings yet he never lost his poise, determination or courage. Knowing some of his other characteristics, it’s small wonder then that I confidently predict he’ll be President say about 1981, and hereby put that prediction in writing on November 30, 1937.
Sincerely,
Alexander Bannart
The Pinchots kept on swinging. But he couldn’t. He had reached his limit of sorting and discarding, so he pulled himself to the ground. “Do what you want with it,” he said. “I’m going for my siesta.” The Moroccan told me that she had stopped my father from throwing everything out several years before. Together they had filled the green garbage bags, and when he moved back to the Mill, they’d stuffed the bags in the eave. That night, I transferred the contents into two small boxes. Someday I would have the courage to face it.