The Loveliest Woman in America

by Bibi Gaston

  I pulled up to the stairs of the Victorian funeral home on Main Street in Flemington, New Jersey, to pick up my father’s ashes. The director met me on the steps. “Come in,” he said. “Yes, there was someone here wanting half the ashes.” I looked at the man in shock. “Why didn’t they take two-thirds of the ashes since they represent two-thirds of his children?” I asked. “Well, I tell you, I don’t know. But we can tell the ones who were around and the ones who weren’t,” he said. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Just that,” he said. “You were the one who was with him, taking care of him, weren’t you? We’ll send your half of the ashes when we hear from the attorneys.”

  Six months later, I’d almost forgotten about my half of my father’s ashes when they landed on my stoop in Florida. No note, no nothing, simply a black plastic box with postage stamps slapped on the side and a label on the end that read REMAINS OF WILLIAM A. GASTON. I had no idea what to do with them in Florida, so I bought a green lacquered Chinese elephant with a platform atop its back and put the box of ashes there for the time being. But later that summer, I had a change of heart and felt guilty about keeping my father in a black plastic box on the back of a lacquered green elephant in a state to which he had no connection. I was determined to find a permanent place for him, and I suspected that that place was pretty close to where he’d started out.

  I took him with me to Connecticut in August, and with the help of my friend Silvia I tracked down the number for the Pinchots in Milford and called the Forester’s Cottage where Tony Bradlee picked up the phone and recognized my name. “I thought he called you Patricia,” she said. “Yes, but I go by Bibi; he was just being formal. My brother called me Bibi because he couldn’t say baby when I was born,” I said. “Very well then, how is your father?” she asked. I told her that he had died, and she said, “I’m terribly sorry. Why don’t you come see us? Stay for a few days.”

  A few days later I drove over to Milford, and just before town, I noticed the signs for the Milford Cemetery and the highway sign about Gifford Pinchot. I remembered my father having asked me whether I would go back to the cemetery by myself, so there I was, eight months later, with him in the box, making the turn into the Milford Cemetery.

  As soon as I arrived at the top of the hill at the little mausoleum with the Doric columns and the inscription in the architrave that read PINCHOT, I saw that the area where the ancestors were buried could use a bit of straightening. It seemed that someone had thought that the Pinchot plot was the perfect place for a picnic, so I made three small midden mounds of garbage and just as I was finishing up I saw a worker in a pickup truck. I walked over to the truck, but the man barely rolled down his window. “Ma’am, we’re supposed to leave the place alone,” he said. “That’s what they wanted, the way they left it. Natural.” I said I didn’t think that the picnic debris was what they meant by natural. Okay, he said, and rolled up his window and drove off. I drove off, too, to Grey Towers, thinking natural was best. I never liked plastic flowers or cheery exotics. On my way across town, I looked down at my father in the black plastic box and wasn’t sure that he wanted to be left at the Milford Cemetery. I thought he might grow depressed around all the tragic endings; besides, he was something of a stickler for maintenance.

  James Pinchot’s swooping entrance drive was under construction in August of 2001, so I found the back way my father had shown me and arrived at the Forester’s Cottage just in time for lunch. Cousins filed in and out of the front door, the back door, the side door, and the yard, and I sank down into one of the rattan chairs where my father and I had sat eight months before. When Tony emerged, I introduced myself and told her I’d just come from the Pinchot mausoleum. “Oh, yes, we must get over there,” she said. “We haven’t been there for some time.” I described my cleanup operation, and her eyes opened wide. “You didn’t need to do that,” she said, looking at me as if my activities were unladylike. She sat down in silence and gazed out over James Pinchot’s walled garden, like so much of Grey Towers, a relic of grand plans and temps perdu. The garden was once crowded with hundreds of roses, including the ornamental Pinchot Rose, a perfumer’s favorite, from the region of Grasse, but the roses had been gone for so long now that no one but Tony remembered anything besides what was there now, grass, a scattering of fruit trees, and terra-cotta urns. Tony still wasn’t saying anything, so I looked around and noticed a few ladybugs, lost and wandering the cylindrical surface of Rosamond’s turret room, and a book lying on the rattan ottoman about Richard Morris Hunt. I picked it up and thought of my mother and her heroes.

  “You’ve come to talk about your grandmother,” Tony said. I nodded yes, but that wasn’t really why I’d come. It was strange to hear Rosamond called my grandmother when I’d never known her and she’d never had time to get old or fade like a traditional grandmother. But that was all Tony was going to say. The memory of Rosamond tripped off a string of things unspeakable. “Why don’t you go for a swim and then we’ll talk.” I was gray from the heat, so cousin Rosamond, Tony’s daughter, led me off the side of the house where my father had taken me, down the pine needle path into the forest. We made our way down to the lower pools of the Sawkill where we dove and splashed and then hiked up to a string of upper pools that she told me were known as the “Forester’s Pool” and had been the family’s private swimming hole for five generations. That night, I thought about the Forester’s Pool as a possible place to distribute my father and wondered if he had swum there. I was glad Tony was there to tell me that he had. “Everyone swam and played there together,” she said.

  The next morning dawned as hot as it gets in a Pocono summer, and a dense fog blanketed the lawns. I woke up in a sweat, jumped out of bed, and, in my nightgown, I tiptoed past Tony and the sleeping cousins into the forest. I made my way back to the high promontory where I had taken photographs of my father and where he had first told me about the Good Ship Rhododendron. He said it was given the name because it had survived an eternity in the wind and the water at the base of the falls, not that the Good Ship Rhododendron was what his mother had called it.

  Barely awake, I stumbled upon a goat path that hugged the side of the canyon. Holding on like a spider in a skirt, I rappelled down the bank using fraying roots and branches as my ropes, eventually reaching a murky backwater where I shimmied under fallen hemlocks and scrambled through a dark soup of maple leaves and muck. I emerged on a little gravel beach where the river widened into a pool, and the banks were carpeted in luxuriant moss. I felt as though I’d been taken back to a place I had known intimately and once loved dearly, where I had made my home for many years and fallen in love, the Columbia River Gorge. Surrounded by water and moss, I had to remind myself that I was in Milford, at Rosamond’s home and my father’s home. It wasn’t my home, but it could have been.

  No one was around and the river looked inviting, but first I took off my nightgown and lay down on a sandy section of beach to take the sun. After a while, I entered the pool and swam up to a low cascade where the current played with a clump of twigs. Paddling and floating around for a bit, I gradually made my way upstream, to a narrow chasm just two and a half feet wide, where a funnel of water surged through the rock. The force of the river pushed against my chest and I struggled to keep afloat when something startled me. As if in a film, I remembered the day in 1963 when President Kennedy landed and we were all gathered together on the lawn. I’d never pictured the scene before, or let myself remember it. I was being held in my father’s arms, in that chasm, as a child.

  Swimming hard against the current, I looked up toward the falls, and just for an instant, I saw her sitting on a ledge in the sun. She was wet and smiling with her arms and legs crossed in front of her. I had never had a vision of Rosamond before. I didn’t even know what she looked like. But there she was, appearing and then disappearing in a split second.

  After my vision at the falls, I decided that the Forester’s Pool was the right place to leave my father’s ashes. The next mor
ning, I led a short ceremony with the relatives he barely knew: Cousin Rosamond; her husband, John Casey; Nancy Pinchot; and Tony Pinchot Bradlee. My friend Silvia joined us from Connecticut, having introduced me to Cousin Rosamond in Charlottesville fifteen years before. I read some passages I’d written about landscape and belonging and how from the little I knew, Grey Towers had been my father’s home. No one there really knew him, and they hadn’t seen him there but maybe once a year, but he thought of Grey Towers every day of his life and he thought of it as his home. Then I read from his mouse-eaten copy of Emerson’s Society and Solitude, the same two passages I’d read to him before he died:

  The world is always equal to itself, and every man in moments of deeper thought is apprised that he is repeating the experiences of the people in the streets of Thebes or Byzantium. An everlasting Now reigns in Nature, which hangs the same roses on our bushes which charmed the Romans and the Chaldaean in their hanging gardens. “To what end, then,” he asks, “should I study languages, and traverse countries, to learn so simple truths?”

  I concluded with another, also by Emerson:

  Life is good only when it is magical and musical, a perfect timing and consent, and when we do not anatomise it. You must treat the days respectfully, you must be a day yourself, and not interrogate it like a college professor. The world is enigmatical—everything said and everything known or done—and must not be taken literally but genially. We must be at the top of our condition to understand anything rightly. You must hear the bird’s song without attempting to render it into nouns and verbs. Cannot we be a little bit abstemious? Cannot we let the morning be? Everything in life goes by indirection…. Such are the days,—the earth is the cup, the sky is the cover, of the immense beauty of Nature which is offered us for our daily aliment; but what a force of illusion begins life with us, and attends us to the end!

  Nancy and Tony went back to the house while Rosamond, John, Silvia, and I climbed the narrow path to the Forester’s Pool. I waded out into the shallows with the black plastic box and when I had my footing, I sprinkled the ashes of my father back into the waters of Rosamond and Amos and Gifford, the waters he played in as a child. As I looked down at the river, now white with bone, John looked up and called our attention to a bird that shot through the canyon walls, “You know what that was, don’t you?”

  At dinner that night, Nancy asked me if I knew that Rosamond had left a set of diaries. “Really?” I said. “Where are they?” “James Gaston has the originals. We have a transcribed copy from when he hired me to write a book. It’s been twenty years. I’d have to dig it up. You could get the original diaries from him, I suppose; he has the scrapbooks also. Some sections of the diaries are exquisite, particularly when your grandmother wrote about nature and the falls.” That night, having yet to see the diaries or the scrapbooks, and knowing nothing more than my two facts, I wondered if the story of Rosamond wasn’t just the glamorous life that she’d lived. Perhaps the real story was what happened after she died and what happened to the generations she left behind. Particularly what happened to the two little boys who appeared in one brief sentence in the many news articles. Who did they become and what became of their children?

  I didn’t return to Milford the following summer. Through the chaotic aftermath of my father’s death, I forgot about the diaries. Meanwhile, I learned that my mother was dying from cancer of the esophagus. In late September I flew to see her at San Francisco General, a public hospital full of love and hope, and where, for the most part, people go when they are indigent. I spent three days with my mother, feeding her and setting up a little altar in her hospital room. On my last visit, she pulled me close so she could whisper in my ear, “I know what happened between you and your brother and sister. I know what betrayal is,” she said. “My mother betrayed me, too. She was paying the attorneys to fight your father all those years when I thought they believed in me.” My mother died a few weeks later. I never asked her exactly what she knew or meant by telling me about betrayal. She always left me with something to think about.

  Two summers passed before I made my way back to Milford. When I called to tell Cousin Rosamond I was coming, she said she had something for me. I arrived, we went for a swim in the Forester’s Pool, and that afternoon she put a box on my bed. I slept with the box at the end of the bed that night, too tired to move it and too scared to open it. I left Grey Towers in the morning in my rental car bearing the mysterious box as Cousin Rosamond urged me, once again, to come back the following summer. “Make it a tradition; after all, you are part of the family.” I assured her I’d read what was in the box. I was off to Crotch Island, I told her, but I’d be back the following summer.

  It was one of the hottest days anyone could remember on the coast of Maine. At dead low tide, my friends Val and Tyler from Cambridge met me at the dock in Camden and we crossed Penobscot Bay headed for Crotch. At noon, ready to wilt, we tied up at the dock and unloaded our gear. Val asked me what was in the box. “Oh, just a little light reading. A copy of my grandmother’s diaries, a gift from my cousins in Milford,” I said. “So if that’s the Xerox,” she said, “where are the originals?” I told her that they were in New York, with my uncle. “How’d he get them? Why had no one ever told you about them?” she asked. “I don’t have the foggiest idea. You know how things go in families.”

  From the wharf at the tip of Crotch’s easterly flank, I made my way up the narrow path with the diaries, weaving over granite outcrops and under the frail umbrella of spruce where Penelope and Odysseus met for the last time. I opened the house to air and light and set the diaries down on a bureau in my grandfather’s bedroom. Val, Tyler, and I settled in, swam, and arranged a dinner of cold canapés from Cambridge, but I couldn’t wait to climb into Big Bill’s bed and open the box of Rosamond’s diaries. So that night, after everyone went to bed, I turned off the propane lanterns, lit a candle, and gazed around Big Bill’s bedroom. A large lithograph of a nude hung above the bureau: Pandorre Avec Sa Boite. According to the myth, Pandora could not help but peek into the lovely golden box that Mercury had filled with all the pains of the world. Her curiosity had unleashed every imaginable sorrow. But the gods, feeling compassion, decided to allow her one more look into the box where they had placed a last lonely creature, Hope, which floated out in the form of a moth and found its way into the world.

  I wasn’t a praying person, but the night felt oddly sacred. So I said a little prayer for Big Bill and for Rosamond, climbed into their high wooden bed, opened the box, and began to read. I thought of it as a strange and exciting reunion between my grandmother and grandfather in the place they had spent some of their finer hours.

  In the first year, 1926, Rosamond had chosen her frontispiece:

  If one looks at life in its true aspect then everything loses much of its unpleasant importance and the atmosphere becomes cleared of what are only unimportant mists that drift past in important shapes. When once the truth is grasped that one’s own personality is only a ridiculous and aimless masquerade of something hopelessly unknown, the attainment of serenity is not far off. Then there remains nothing but to surrender to one’s impulses, the fidelity to passing emotions which is perhaps a nearer approach to truth than any other philosophy of life.

  She was twenty-one years old and had just finished performing in The Miracle and was seeing her counselor, Mrs. Witt, when she discovered the words of Conrad, sounding like an eastern mystic. She was about to embark on her great adventure to California. The passage reminded me of the quote my mother had given me by Bernard Berenson the year I packed myself off to Italy at nineteen.

  Rosamond by Cecil Beaton

  Within the first few moments of opening Rosamond’s box, I knew that understanding her life would help me to understand mine. I couldn’t say why at the moment. Perhaps it was hope. Hope that her diaries might explain the warring tribes and the hoarding of furniture. Hope that I would understand all the straightening, the abysmal choice of men, all my movin
g about. The Buddhists say that a suicide affects a family for ten generations. Understanding Rosamond’s life and death seemed to me like a prerequisite to hope. Or maybe it was hope. I blew out the candle and drifted off to sleep thinking about Rosamond, Big Bill, fidelity, and the fidelity to passing emotions.

  Afterword

  The diaries appeared at an auspicious moment in my life, at the midpoint of a journey lasting nearly seven years. There was something homeopathic about receiving a strong dose of sadness to relieve a strong dose of sadness. Still, the loss of my mother, my father, and the Irishman within eighteen months required several changes of scenery. Between bugs, ex-boyfriends, and terrorists training on flight simulators, I’d decided that one more day in Florida was too many. Thankfully, I found a perfect escape vehicle in an unlikely place. Beneath the palms on Ocean Drive in Palm Beach, shoehorned between the Bentleys, Jaguars, and convertible Mercedes, I spotted a pristine bright green 1966 Volkswagen camper van with vintage Oregon plates, and more important, a sign in its window that read FOR SALE. Two days later, I gave the owner a check, he gave me the keys, and I gave my car a name befitting its green-ness, the Turtle. I hadn’t read far enough into the diaries to know Rosamond had named her bright green car “The Green Bug.”

  Oregon wasn’t my first stop. In January 2003, I made my way to a little apartment facing the Flatiron range, in Boulder, Colorado, where I set up my library. In one corner, I kept books on spirits, saints, and the suicides of famous women. In another I assembled books on Broadway, birds, and Gifford Pinchot. I designed an altar to Rosamond that men found macabre and women found exciting. One day, I looked around and realized that I was living in a sarcophagus of family memorabilia. “So what are you going to do with all that stuff,” someone asked me, “shove it in a drawer somewhere?” I didn’t have drawers because I barely had furniture. I had bookshelves and piles on a drafting board. One night, realizing there was no backing out, I sat down to write about my father, Rosamond, and what it meant to outlive the tragic legacy of talented and beautiful women in my family.