The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  During one of my snooping expeditions, I discovered a fax my father had sent to Harvard for the Fiftieth Anniversary Report and, as usual, he had taken the assignment seriously. He had signed the report on August 7, 2000, one day after he had called me in Maine to tell me he had only five months to live. He probably wouldn’t have bothered writing anything at all, but as a practical man and staring his fate in the face, he decided that it was time to take the measure of who he was. So he asked himself perhaps the most pertinent question a man could ask himself: Was he on the right side during the battle? After he was gone, if it were up to others to summarize his life, who knows, he might be tagged a crackpot of the first order or one of the Gastons who had Dante’s nine rings pretty well covered, particularly that dreaded fourth circle of greed and miserliness. So it made sense that the last installment went on a bit and repeated the story for the unenlightened; after all, there would never be a family-wide truth-and-reconciliation commission to address each wrong, not while he was alive at least, so this would be the last dispatch from the front. This would be his obituary:

  How to encapsulate the last 50 years, or even the last 25 years since the 1976 report. My interests and myself remain largely the same. People don’t change much, only their surroundings. At college I acquired a taste for obsolete mechanisms (unrelated to any curriculum) which eventually led me into the business of World War II era ships diesel engines. At 71, I remain active, more or less, in the field having accumulated a lot of experience in engine rooms, the smell and the noises of which I find intoxicating stuff—“You went to where?” My mechanical aptitudes were revealed to me in “Fender Alley” (now grassed over) in ’47 and ’48. A few other classmates of the time, long before it became widespread, also caught the old car bug: Holly Robbins, Bradley Richardson, owner of a 1930 Studebaker “Dictator” and other names are forgotten. Much (too much) of my college career I spent nurturing my 26 Ford T, 28 Willys Whippet, 30 Pierce Arrow and many others now gone to the big Scrapman in the sky.

  My other principal interest, since 1970 when I became the defendant in a monumental 8-year matrimonial lawsuit, has been the venality of the legal profession, that of my father, both grandfathers, and a great-grandfather, mostly Harvard men. I believe there was more rectitude in lawyering in their era than one sees today. At least there were far fewer practitioners of the “talkative and dubious trade” (Jefferson) who now overwhelm us with their numbers and chicanery. Those who perceive “justice” or recompense for perceived wrongs in court proceedings should know that courts exist primarily to protect and promote the interests of the judges and lawyers who labor therein. Anything beyond that is a windfall.

  Another pearl of wisdom earned from personal experience in the practice of law—in a case where the stakes are high, there is no place for minnows or sole practitioners whatever be their virtues and talents. The small fox will by nature be devoured by the major law firms who always have contacts in the judiciary. These contacts will be used when necessary. Simply put, the big firms by their size have political power, clout for which there is no substitute in litigation.

  With that pearl I close and turn my thoughts to more felicitous matters, which include my three children and one grandchild, to whom I have become closer as life winds down.

  Given the chance what would you do differently? “Avoid litigation and lawyers.”

  Of all your professional accomplishments or volunteer activities, which did you find most personally rewarding? “Distant business trips to South America and the Orient.”

  How would you like to be remembered? “He stood up to and attacked attorney and judicial misconduct rampant in that profession.”

  William A. Gaston, 7 August 2000

  I had never known my father’s birthday, so January 6 passed without fanfare. January, my mother reminded me, had always been a very bad month for him, the month when his mother died, and he was sure to get depressed. In early January, I received a phone call that something was amiss at the Florida house. Being one who is paid to envision disasters at their worst, I asked hospice if I could take a quick trip south to go take care of things that hadn’t been cared for in five months. The hospice nurses said it was a risk and insisted I wrap up business as his executor just in case. So I put his papers in order and hid Rosamond’s silver plate in the wheel well of one of his old cars. I went to the funeral home to arrange for his ashes to be placed in a black plastic box instead of a shiny marble urn, because my father wouldn’t have paid one red cent on afterlife apparel. Once you were dead, you were dead.

  I hemmed and hawed but on the morning of January 23, 2001, I felt a sudden urge to leave immediately. It felt as though a vacuum was sucking me out of the Old Mill. The night before I left, I awoke to the screech of a heron at midnight. I went downstairs to find a deer pawing at the front door to get in. The next day, practically sleepless, I told my father I would be back in four days, three if I was lucky. He waved his Little Billy wave and smiled his Little Billy smile, but his last words to me were “Ha Ha Ha.” People said they were coming back but never did.

  I arrived in Florida on the afternoon of January 24. It was an unusual cold, gray day in Florida and my house had no heat. That evening, Uncle Tom had arrived at the Old Mill and was calling to tell me that since I’d left, my father had taken a turn for the worse. The hospice nurse had dosed him up on morphine. My sister and brother and the Moroccan had arrived, and no one expected him to make it through the night. Freezing and knowing almost no one in Florida, I called the Irishman and asked him if he could return the heater. I told him that my father was expected to die that night. “No, he’s not, you are just manipulating me,” he said. He said I wasn’t taking care of my father, I was in New Jersey having an affair. I spent the night shivering under blankets and trying to get through to the Old Mill. Finally, Uncle Tom answered and held the phone to my father’s ear so I could tell him for the last time that I loved him, I’d miss him, and things would be okay. He was loved.

  He died that night, the twenty-fourth of January, 2001, at seventy-two years old, surrounded by the Moroccan, his half-brother Tom, and two children who he knew felt ambivalent about him at best and who, like me at the time, knew very little about him. They were assembled in the room I’d lived in as a child, above the garage, in the Old Mill, in the little town of Ringoes, at a low point in New Jersey’s best-kept secret, a chain of mountains known to me now as the Sourlands, where none of us had been particularly good to each other, where we hadn’t made enough of an effort at being all that happy or telling the truth in our brief lives together, where perhaps we managed as best we could but it wasn’t enough. Perhaps it was where we just held on. It was where, in the words of Thornton Wilder’s character Simon Stimson, we’d moved around in a cloud of ignorance and we’d spent and wasted time as if we had a million years, where I spent most of my hours by myself in the shadow of a big rock watching leaves drift down a creek and out of sight, where my father planted sunflowers and built a tree house, and where, after he left, I hid under the sheets from a tall, ghostly figure dressed in white who came down the hall and stood beside my bed. I’d never known why that figure visited me when I was a child; for years I thought it was my father, but now I think it was Rosamond, roaming the world with unfinished business, looking for someone who would understand. I wasn’t with him on the night he died, and I knew virtually nothing about Rosamond, and I’d never really believed in spirits, but her photo hung on the wall of his room and I felt her presence when I left him that day for the last time.

  Only these six years later did I come to think it was indeed she who pulled me out of the Old Mill so that she could be with him on his final ride. She was like a force of nature, or like the wind. I can think of no better explanation. I’d done everything I could to care for him. I could leave and she’d take over. I learned several years after he died that January 24 was no ordinary night. My father died on the very same night Rosamond killed herself sixty-three years before.
If I had known, I would have stayed to watch over him.

  9

  BEAUTY SESSIONS

  In the last days of January 2001, a winter tornado spun through the woods of Crane Island. An old black spruce swayed on its frozen roots and toppled through the raspberry thicket, splitting the Shack in two. High winds demolished the better part of the path around the island as well. The storm was quite unusual and the timing was uncanny, to say the least, so I figured my father wasn’t particularly happy with what had transpired back on Earth and was taking revenge on the tribe. I wasn’t around to see the destruction of Shack but heard the details from a friend, how her floorboards had turned to matchsticks, her eyelids turned under, and her funny little roof buckled and caved in on itself. I didn’t want to see her like that, not right away at least. Not until I could stage a rescue mission to straighten.

  Shortly after my father died and I’d heard about the demise of his creation, I wrote him a letter, in part to remember the place where we spent our best days together, on the rim of Crane Island, in and around his beloved Shack. I also wanted to ask him just one question, the one I never had time to ask when I could have, on our last trip to Milford:

  Dear Papa,

  I’m alone now, but there is a place between the islands where we would meet. We’d make a game of it and see who got there first. You’d take your white dinghy along the west side and I’d be on foot. Passing Shack, which is gone now, and through the wild raspberry thicket, I came to the little rise of land where the trunks of dead spruce line the path and form a tunnel of light opening out to the sea. Past the driftwood outhouse, at the end of the forest, tufts of grass frame a threshold. I knew the spot for its headwind, nothing else. That’s where I turned and could see you rowing like an Olympian, rounding the island’s tip, where you made the best of the tide by heading up into the currents close to shore.

  It is there I fell behind because there wasn’t really a path after that, only the up and down of the rocks and ledges I’d known all my life like a familiar hand with long, patrician fingers of clean, sparkling granite. If I’d stopped on that bank of rocks, I could have seen it all: through the gap in Spectacle, clear over to the Whites that once belonged to the Lindberghs, past the quarried ledges of Bald and to the south beach on Crotch. Over the white loaves of Crane, I could have made out the north end of your brother’s Hurricane, looming with its watchtower, larger than the rest. There is really no end to what I could have seen if I’d stopped to look. But there wasn’t time. This was a race and we always knew who would get there first.

  At the bottom of Crane’s high cliff, the beach is hammered by storms. You had a name for it. You called it Styrofoam Beach. You’d never know what you would find there, and there was always the chance of finding something good. In the corner of the beach, at the base of Lover’s Leap, emerging from the rock, there’s a little spruce with a curved trunk as wide as a bicycle tire. I photographed it every summer and you kept the photograph on your bookshelf at the Old Mill. I found it after you died. I guess you kept it because it was like the Good Ship Rhododendron, a little tale of survival, what it takes to stand up against the wind and the water with no support at all. Each summer we’d check to make sure the tree was still there, where you said it belonged, at the base of the Lover’s Leap. Last time I checked, it was hanging on, but it looked as if it had given up its needles. It never had a name, so perhaps it was ready to go.

  Further along, the cliff performs a ninety-degree twist to become a grand promenade, as perfect as a sidewalk in New York or Paris. One perfect granite slab, no construction joints, no heaving, with the perfect pitch to drain. Off to the side where the water collects, there is a little black swamp in the shape of a triangle. You gave that a name, also, but I can’t remember what it was. I could see you from there, where the quarriers made their probes, then vanished. You’d be gaining speed in the calm waters of the lee, so intent on winning, as usual. Everything was some sort of test for you, a competition. You lived your life that way. I never got to ask you why. But since you’ve been gone, I’ve been wondering about Rosamond. So now I’m coming to understand. That what it takes, perhaps all it takes, is learning about your mother.

  At this place between the islands, we’d meet. We’d see each other there. Perhaps for who we were. It could be the saddest, loneliest place I’d ever known, with dark, birdless skies, or it could teem with so much life we couldn’t hear each other. The world would spin to the cry of gulls and we’d just stand there, in the swirl of the wind, listening.

  So I wonder now what you would tell me about Rosamond. Whether you loved your mother. I wonder if you would still tell me there was no point in it, not while there was world enough to forget about all that, about her, about the past. The tide would be up and if we weren’t careful, time, too. You were always right, at least about the tide, and in this place between the islands, you taught me something you didn’t mean to, how time determines everything. In this place, we watched the very breath of the world, watched how the sea brought things in and took them away and how things we think stay the same forever change constantly, imperceptibly, so there isn’t time to dwell or linger on what hurts us or the people who leave. Not while there are places on this earth that allow us to forget, not while the landscape is still so grand and fascinating, like this place, which spends eternity protecting itself from the icy currents, knowing the sun but once a day. For those few minutes, there is time enough and the tide’s just right so toss the anchor overboard and let us find what we are looking for: shells and shards of smooth black granite, tiny sand dollars and red urchins that dwarf the head of a pin. You’d say that a boat, if not a beauty, is like a tool to win the race. Turn around and if you’re not watching, she’s gone, fifty yards out, and there’s no swimming after her, not in these waters. So there’s beauty and there’s utility. If they’re lucky, they find each other and stay together. That’s what I learned in this place between the islands, so I imagine you probably wouldn’t say anything about her still. Everything disappears in time. Thinking about her wasn’t useful.

  Here, the land and sea say yes to each other. It was here I first told you about the eagle’s nest. You refused to believe there was an eagle’s nest, saying you knew the place like the back of your hand and there was no such thing, you would have seen it. The nest was the oldest and most prolific on record. Marine biologists first knew about it in 1959, the year I was born. We were both right. For years the nest was abandoned, and then suddenly, as if everything were all right again, the eagles came back.

  High in the North Atlantic between thousands of islands that dot the Maine coast, the birds enact an ancient dance. They swoop and soar and plunge and soar higher and plunge deeper until they at last lock talons, mating, rolling, falling in a death-defying free fall of bone, feather, and whistling air before disconnecting a wing’s distance from the sea.

  BIBI: 2000–2007

  Two weeks after my father died, I packed a small brown traveling case with the gifts of three lovers and went back to the Sourland Mountains of west central New Jersey. It was time to say good-bye to many things, so, on a cold winter day, I put the Old Mill up for sale and sat on the stone bridge abutment between the road and Giant Rock, dangling my feet over the creek and mumbling words of farewell to my father. I had decided to dispense with the memories of the Italian, the Irishman, and the man from Philadelphia, so it seemed practical to let go of their trinkets: shiny objets d’amour, crumpled love letters, photos, pearl rings, and odd little vessels of crocodile bone and onyx. One by one, I watched them twirl through the waters of Mill Creek, the waters that once fed the Moat, falling softly on the sandy bottom. Those that didn’t sink disappeared downstream, where I had faith that someday, they would fit into some glorious or inglorious pattern where they belonged, or if not where they belonged, pretty close to where they started out.

  The scenes surrounding my father’s death fit into one of the inglorious Gaston patterns, scenes so pred
ictable I now understand why Rosamond had written that the Gastons weren’t good for the blossoming of the soul. When I returned from Florida, the Old Mill had been ransacked. My father’s personal effects were strewn about and all but three pieces of furniture had vanished. As his executor, I had told my father that I would distribute his belongings equitably among his children, but they had already been distributed. His framed photographs of Morocco, the Gifford Pinchot paraphernalia, and the colorized portrait of Rosamond in his bedroom were all gone. The attorneys told me not to touch anything, but I knew who had done it. This had all the fingerprints of a family that had never learned what it meant to be a family. “Sure, we see cases like this every so often. Problems in families. Sometimes,” they said, “they go on for generations.”