by Gay Talese
But Royal, thirteen years younger than Richard, was reared in less mournful times, and grew up to be as spoiled and undisciplined as he was tall and handsome. Unlike his stocky and resentful brother, Royal was not pressed into attending the college of pharmacy, where the doctor was a trustee; and when Royal decided to drop out of the University of Pennsylvania after his sophomore year with the intention of getting married, his parents not only failed to dissuade him but immediately celebrated his decision. His bride-to-be was the lovely, genteel daughter of a minister who preached during summers in Newport, and on her maternal side she hailed from an old Philadelphia family that had enjoyed personal and professional ties to the great statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin.
The wedding gift to Royal and Florence from his parents in 1914 had been a twenty-three-room mansion on Lindenwold Terrace, complete with a gardener and maid billed to the doctor’s castle account. But now, while Florence Mattison was devoted to raising young Royal, whom she would forever call “Bubbles” and would unreservedly adore as her only child—spoiling him no less than his father had been spoiled, and prompting by her indulgence the walkout of so many nurses and maids that finally she could employ none at all—her husband was involved in a sexual affair with a married woman who lived across from Trinity Memorial Church and whose husband commuted each workday to the Philadelphia branch office of Keasbey & Mattison.
From her turreted vantage point, with the aid of her binoculars, the doctor’s crippled wife could watch her tall and deceitful stepson paying noonday visits to his lady friend, parking his Packard convertible tactlessly at the curb in front of the modestly substantial stone residence near a corner on Highland Avenue; and an hour or so later, Mrs. Mattison would focus upon his departure, watching as he stepped back into his car and readjusted his tie in front of the dashboard mirror, the door to the house having been slowly closed a moment before with a soft wave of the hand from his bathrobed paramour.
If Mrs. Mattison did not keep the doctor abreast of such details, it was because she suspected he was already aware of his son’s dalliance and was responding to it in his own way; or, if he was not aware, that he deserved to be shielded from such unpleasantries: he had experienced enough sadness and disappointment within his immediate family. The doctor’s only other close living relative, an older brother named Asher, whom Mrs. Mattison had never met, and probably never would, was also a source of discomfort to her husband. The brothers had not had much contact since their early upbringing on the farm, and this was not surprising given the vastly different circumstances of their adulthood; but at least they had been on cordial terms. Now this was no longer true. Mrs. Mattison had not heard this directly from the doctor during their marriage (the doctor had not even told her that he had a brother); instead she had learned of it years earlier, when the doctor had still been married to Esther, who was also the present Mrs. Mattison’s closest confidante—and the source of most of what she knew about the doctor’s rarely discussed humble origins.
Richard and his brother, Asher, who was four years older, were the only children born to a Quaker farmer and carpenter in Pennsylvania named Joseph Mattison and his wife, the former Mahala Vanzeelust—whose Dutch surname the doctor would always account for with his middle initial on his stationery and business cards, on the doors of his cars and carriages, on his gold cuff links, the brass plate of his church pew, and other surfaces on which he wished to reflect his identity fully. His mother had been born in 1819 on a farm in central New Jersey along the Delaware River, where her ancestors from the Netherlands had settled during the previous century; and although Mahala’s insistent and overbearing manner as a married woman gave neighbors the impression that she was more astute and better educated than her kindly husband, the fact remained that she went through life without ever knowing how to read or write.
When Mahala married Joseph Mattison in 1846, at a Quaker ceremony held in the county seat of Flemington, New Jersey, it was he who had to sign her name next to his own on the marital document. Then he packed her few personal belongings into the back of his buggy, waved good-bye to her dry-eyed kinfolk, and transported her over a wobbly wooden bridge to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, onto the eighty-two-acre Mattison family farm. It was bordered along the east by the river and was three miles north of the community of New Hope, in Bucks County’s Solebury Township. The farmland was of superior quality, being of alluvial soil in the eastern half and limestone soil in the western half, but the boundaries of the family property had shrunk more than tenfold since one of Joseph Mattison’s ancestors had arrived on a Quaker ship from England in the autumn of 1682, to claim the thousand-acre tract he had purchased from the English Quaker leader William Penn, who was then in the process of founding the colony of Pennsylvania. Mattison’s pioneering ancestor, related to him through the female branch, was a yeoman named George Pownall. Accompanied by his wife and five children (the oldest his thirteen-year-old son, Reuben; the youngest of the four daughters three-year-old Abigail), George Pownall braved the Atlantic for three stormy weeks on a vessel aptly named Friends’ Adventure, before sailing into the calmer currents of the Delaware River and leasing two wagons along the shore to carry his family and possessions uphill onto their newly bought and patented piece of America.
Thirty days later, while the Pownalls and their hired laborers were hastening to complete the construction and furbishing of the shanties and sheds that would shelter them temporarily through the winter, a tree fell on the head of George Pownall and killed him instantly. But after eleven days of mourning, the Pownall family spirit was brightened by the birth of a sixth child and second son to the widow Elinor, and she named him in memory of her deceased husband.
George Pownall, Jr., was born on November 11, 1682, on the northern section of the property that he would never leave during his long lifetime; and in 1707, in his twenty-fifth year, after being deeded this portion of the property by his siblings, who had settled to the south or had dispersed to more distant places, he married a neighboring farmer’s daughter named Hannah Hutchinson. From this union would come four children; then twenty grandchildren; then more great-grandchildren than old George Pownall could shake a stick at, although he often waved one threateningly in an effort to keep them from running wild over his productively planted, and now cooperatively owned, five hundred acres of property. One of the more frisky and attractive of his great-granddaughters, Mary Pownall, as a budding teenager in 1805 would meet a young wandering farmer and tinker who was robust and hearty, and who told charming tales even taller than himself—and he was six-feet-two in his bare feet, which was his constant condition since he failed to own a pair of shoes. His first name was Richard; his surname was presently spelled “Mattison,” but it was really Mathieson, he explained, adding that his ancestral line was linked to the Mathieson feudal clan that still dwelled on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, off the western coast of Scotland, and was in possession of 650,000 acres. On this island resided his kinsman Sir Kenneth Mathieson, at Andross Castle, with 400,000 acres; and also Lady Mathieson, who occupied Stornaway Castle at Loch Alsh; and the family also owned other large tracts in the county of Ross and Cromarty in Scotland, he said. But what most impressed Mary Pownall about this barefoot prince named Mattison or Mathieson were not his high-flown claims or his engaging voice with its Scottish burr, but rather that he was a big handsome hunk of manhood who stood in pleasant contrast to her short, stout male relatives and the similarly shaped prospective Quaker suitors who were their friends. So Mary Pownall took whatever initiative was necessary to get Richard Mattison to marry her, which he willingly did on January 1, 1807; and they would have ten children—one of whom, Joseph Mattison, born in 1813, would marry Mahala Vanzeelust in 1846 and have two sons: Asher Mattison, born on Christmas Eve in 1847; and, on November 17, 1851, Richard Vanzeelust Mattison, the future doctor.
The brothers grew up in a two-story white framed colonial house that had been built more than
a century before and had been little improved since. It had a high peaked roof with a brick chimney, two small shuttered windows on each side of the second floor, an equal number of larger windows on the lower floor, and a white door with a wooden knob and no lock on the porch that stood four steps above the ground. A white wooden banister and widely spaced vertical columns extended the length of the porch, which was six feet deep, and arranged haphazardly along the deck were a half-dozen rocking chairs. The chairs appeared to be as old as the house, and possibly had been rocked back and forth millions of times by five preceding generations of Pownalls. When the former Mahala Vanzeelust arrived here in 1846 as Joseph Mattison’s bride, the seven-room house was occupied by two of her husband’s orphaned nieces and his spinster sister, Martha Mattison.
Martha Mattison was two years older than thirty-three-year-old Joseph; his delay in marrying Mahala, and Martha’s not marrying at all, were partly attributable to the devoted care they both gave to their ailing mother, Mary Pownall Mattison, whose once vigorous health immediately declined following the birth of her ninth and tenth children. Mary died a year before Joseph’s marriage to Mahala, and six years after she had buried her tall, hyperbolic husband Richard, the scion of Scottish feudal nobility—who died, rather appropriately, of an advanced case of the scrofulous illness known as the king’s evil.
When the newly married Mahala, following repeated breakdowns of her husband’s buggy, arrived after midnight at the Mattison farmhouse, she found her spinster sister-in-law Martha ensconced in the largest bedroom, with no intention of relinquishing it to the bridal couple. Mahala sulked for days but accepted it as her first and last concession to the status quo among her in-laws. From then on—as she joined her husband in the smaller bedroom he had used as a bachelor, which was next door to the bedroom occupied by his noisy and nosy nieces—Mahala Vanzeelust Mattison exerted her will over everyone in sight: she turned the nieces into scrubwomen, got her sister-in-law to do all the cooking and mending, and harangued her husband until he and a few male relatives rebuilt the buggy, repainted the house, and replaced the broken boards on the porch and front steps. As her two sons were growing up—Asher and Richard slept on hay-stuffed mattresses in the attic—neither knew a day of leisure, although her effect on her sons was radically different. Her prodding of Asher seemed to make him more primitive—hardworking, yes, but little motivated in the manner he went about working; he attacked outdoor chores with tools from the Stone Age, or no tools at all. He dug dirt with his hands, he hammered nails with a chunk of rock, he fished in the creek with his fingers, always catching more than anyone could eat. He never in his entire life would don a pair of socks, and he invariably wandered around outdoors without shoes, developing calluses thick as any leather. But Asher Mattison was not quite as tall as the late barefoot pretender who had been his paternal grandfather. He did not reach five feet, ten inches, and in later life his frame seemed to revert to the stout, slope-shouldered shape of the earnest Pownalls.
It was his younger brother, Richard, who inherited the height of his forebears, and even added to it; but everything else behind Richard’s appearance and achievements in later years remained largely a mystery. What was the source of his scholastic brilliance, his mercenary zeal, his unswerving optimism, his scientific inventiveness, his conquering spirit? No less interesting was the origin of his passion for opera and poetry (he claimed he could recite every line written by Byron, trying to keep in practice often to the tedium of his sons); to say nothing of the fact that while in medical school he taught himself not only to read and write German, but to speak a refined Hochdeutsch so naturally, and without grammatical errors or dialectal detractions, that it astonished his aristocratic doctor friends at Cologne University even more than his regaling them (while sailing past the cliff of Lorelei on the Rhine) with Heinrich Heine’s lyrical lines to the nymph: Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten, / Dass ich so traurig bin.
Dr. Mattison’s first wife, Esther (the daughter of a retired British career officer whom the doctor met at her home in Cranbury, New Jersey, through an introduction by his college classmate and colleague from Morristown, Henry G. Keasbey), was one of the rare individuals who could perceive the great length of his upward spiral, since he permitted her to accompany him during his infrequent visits back to where he had been born and reared. The most memorable, if not the first such occasion in Bucks County, was on February 12, 1885 (a date she noted well in her diary), for this marked his brother’s elevation to domesticity: At the age of thirty-seven, Asher was finally getting married. And while the groom did not wear socks for the occasion (although no one could tell, for he wore one of the doctor’s old suits, which was long in the cuff), Asher did appear at the Friends’ ceremony in Solebury Township wearing, in addition to a borrowed bow tie and shirt, a new pair of shoes. Asher’s bride was a neighboring farm lady named Hulda Pearson, who was close to his own age, and who would bear no children; but she was tidy and cheerful, and self-possessed, too, in the way she entertained the guests as a folk dance soloist after the ceremony, and accepted the applause with gratitude but hardly a semblance of modesty. She seemed to agree that she was good.
At this time the doctor and Esther had been married about ten years; the Keasbey & Mattison plant in Ambler was beginning to prosper; and the couple had just moved into the multitowered Victorian mansion that the doctor had not yet thought of reconstructing into a Gothic castle. The doctor had recently marked his thirty-third birthday, but because of his size and stalwart manner, his walrus moustache and thick peppery-colored beard (which he had begun growing a few years before to hide the jaw scars incurred during his nighttime tumble down a trap door while snooping around a pharmaceutical competitor’s plant in Philadelphia), he appeared to be much older than he was, and certainly more patriarchal than the multitude of elders in the room, including especially the smallish, wizened Pownall-related octogenarians who were gathered in one corner standing with the aid of their canes. Also there was the doctor’s seventy-two-year-old father, Joseph, who had boasted to Esther before the ceremony that he was wearing the same shiny black suit he had worn some forty years before, when he had journeyed to Flemington to marry Mahala, and he was almost right when he claimed that the old suit still fit him perfectly. There was a sense of merriment about Joseph Mattison that seemed totally absent in his son Asher, who, posing with the bride in a semblance of a receiving line, seemed as cheerful as a man doomed to the gallows. Asher’s sixty-six-year-old mother looked only slightly less grim. Mahala was stocky and square-jawed, with a crown of closely cropped black hair hanging down as straight and thick as the bristles of a paintbrush, and the only sign of emotion she communicated during the entire outing, as far as Esther could see, was a slight tightening of her lips when Asher’s bride did her folk dance. This was apparently unseemly behavior for a Quaker, even though Hulda was not a practicing Quaker.
Nor was the doctor, having become an active Episcopalian even before meeting Esther. But he seemed quite comfortable among the Friends at the community center in Bucks County, moving easily among all the wedding guests as he made polite inquiries about their personal welfare and the economic conditions of their properties; and finally, when he heard the sounds of hoofbeats and bells coming from the path in front of the building, he invited everyone to join him outside for the presentation of his gift to Asher and his new bride. It was an elegant English carriage trimmed with floral wreaths and pulled by four high-stepping caparisoned horses. After a short speech, in which he wished the couple the best in health and happiness, the doctor insisted on serving as their coachman as they sat in the vehicle and were driven down the path to the main road and back again, while the other guests stood watching and applauding from the lawn. Esther had never before seen her husband holding the reins behind a team of horses, and she was again impressed by how comfortable he seemed in this rural setting. Nearby she noticed her mother-in-law watching her; Mahala said nothing but nonetheless made her feel like a
tourist from a faraway place who had strayed in to watch some quaint rustic sideshow.
The wedding guest whom Esther liked most was her husband’s spinster aunt, Martha Mattison, who was now seventy-four and still occupied the largest bedroom in the old house she shared with Mahala and Joseph. Martha was high-strung and verbose, and a malicious gossip especially in matters regarding Mahala; but unlike Mahala, she could read and write—a fact that Martha was not wont to keep secret—and she also possessed in her bedroom a stack of illustrated Gothic fairy tales and poetry books that she said she used to read to young Richard when he was growing up. Esther saw some of these books when they stopped briefly at the doctor’s boyhood home after the wedding; while the doctor toured the farmland with his parents and his two children, Esther spent time alone with Martha and sensed that she had undoubtedly been part of the reason why young Richard had developed along different lines from Asher.
Martha Mattison had apparently been a second mother to Richard, his literate mother who not only read to him but encouraged him in believing that he had a destiny to fulfill in places far from the farm. Martha was the oldest daughter of that big barefoot fantasist, Richard Mattison or Mathieson, who, while he might have been eight-tenths malarkey, had nonetheless stimulated her imagination to a degree that captivated young Richard, who would later try to transform family myths into reality. On some of his grade school books, which his aunt Martha had kept, Esther could see his boyhood drawings of castles in the margins of the pages, and his listing of his classmates’ names with noble titles, and the ostentatious Gothic lettering he used in printing on the back of one book the name of the former farm boy who was then serving as president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. Some of the family folklore that Martha recalled hearing from her father was familiar to Esther—who had heard her husband, the doctor, essentially repeat it in bedtime stories to their son, Richard Jr.—tales of a noble family who lived in a castle by a great lake in Scotland called Loch Alsh, which as Esther realized was what the doctor had named the deepest lake on their estate in Ambler.