by Gay Talese
Dr. Richard V. Mattison himself was in the process of being forcibly relocated from his castle and losing control of the company as a result of a series of economic and other misfortunes visited upon him even from within his own family. Although it occurred many months before the Depression, the death in 1927 of Dr. Mattison’s first son, Richard Jr., at forty-six, would signal the start of the doctor’s financial nightmares, burdening him in 1928 with a very costly equity suit prompted by his son’s vengeful widow, forty-four-year-old Georgette, who attributed her late husband’s alcoholism to his father’s overbearing nature, and who further charged the doctor with deliberate executive mismanagement that denied large profits to the stockholders (she being one of them), and with misappropriation of company funds for his own use in the amount of several million dollars.
Even before her husband’s death, which had been preceded by periods of hospitalization, Georgette Mattison had privately communicated her misgivings about the doctor to his expatriate partner in the south of France, Henry G. Keasbey. Keasbey at first paid no attention to her complaints, for it was generally known that she drank nearly as much as her husband, and that her opinions regarding Dr. Mattison were tainted by a personal malice she had often expressed about him in public during her thirteen years of marriage to his son. Georgette, in marrying, saw herself as entering into a nouveau riche industrial family headed by a social-climbing physician whose first son, her husband, was his father’s senior vice-president and heir apparent. Only after her wedding did she realize that her husband, despite his title, was little more than his father’s errand boy; and that while she lived in splendor on a seventy-acre estate abounding with servants and had access to several elegant automobiles with or without chauffeurs, everything at her disposal was legally listed in the doctor’s name, and would remain so throughout her years of marriage to his son. Her wrath toward Dr. Mattison was hardly assuaged when, a week into her widowhood, she learned of his intentions to evict her from her marital estate.
The doctor saw no reason to continue subsidizing a hostile daughter-in-law who had no children of her own to support, and who apparently had nothing better to do with her abundant leisure time than to pry into his personal affairs and malign his character. He had heard from his old friend Keasbey about her allegations; and although he believed he retained Keasbey’s trust after deluging his partner with indignant cables and letters of refutation, he nonetheless ordered the destruction of all corporate records in Ambler that might embarrass him should they come to the attention of lawyers hired by people bent on causing trouble. He commanded that all such data be tossed into a bonfire.
In 1927, Keasbey finally reacted to Georgette Mattison’s criticisms by hiring a team of investigators who uncovered sufficient evidence against the doctor to warrant an equity suit filed in early 1928 at the Montgomery County Courthouse in Norristown, Pennsylvania. The allegations against the doctor included mismanagement and deceit—using company funds to create profit-making corporations under his own name without feeling obliged to share the wealth with the K&M stockholders, to say nothing of withholding dividends on their K&M stock; and, similarly, using K&M capital toward the construction of the town’s homes and mansions while maintaining discretionary control over these properties by listing himself as the proprietor. In his turn the doctor denied any intent of wrongdoing; if he was guilty of anything, it was perhaps his expeditiousness, his promptness in responding to business problems and opportunities without prior consultation with Keasbey—but then how could he consult with Keasbey, when the latter refused to serve with him on the board of directors and spent all his time overseas? Mr. Keasbey, the doctor rightly pointed out, had not contributed an honest day’s work to the firm since 1892, the year Keasbey had left Ambler for France. Mr. Keasbey, having come to America, was not disposed to a drawn-out feud with his old friend. He just wanted a financial settlement so he could extricate himself from the complex web the doctor had spun around Ambler; and when the judge suggested that Mattison buy out Keasbey’s interest in K&M for four million dollars, Keasbey agreed. Had he been a less wealthy or a hungrier man, he might have haggled for a much higher price; but Keasbey eagerly anticipated leaving behind forever the polluted skies of Pennsylvania for the Côte d’Azur—a journey the doctor just as eagerly wanted him to take. And as an indication of the doctor’s eagerness, he severed all connections with Keasbey in a single day—a gray afternoon in the autumn of 1929, when he surrendered four million dollars to Keasbey in one lump sum, denying himself the option of paying off his partner in several installments that could have been spread over many years.
Shortly after Keasbey had pocketed the money and returned abroad, the Crash of late October 1929 arrived to reduce the doctor’s liquidity to a trickle, making him damn the day he had allowed Keasbey to escape the industrial debacle richer than ever and leave the doctor alone with the problem of saving the company from bankruptcy. Four million in cash would not have been an overwhelming sum in the prosperous twenties; but the absence of that money after 1929, in a period of declining asbestos production made worse by the fact that the doctor was already mightily mortgaged because of expansionist decisions he had made years earlier, left him cash-poor and vulnerable to being taken over by the banks. He had invested heavily in building a new asbestos brake-lining branch in Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania; an asbestos textile division in Hoboken, New Jersey; and in Saint Louis, Missouri, an asbestos shingle, slate, and sheathing plant that was to manufacture products for the western half of the United States and thereby avoid the increased railroad delivery costs from the East, while also undercutting the cost of Belgian-made asbestos that began substantially invading the American market during the mid-twenties. But these and other of Mattison’s decisions that had seemed so wise in the pre-Depression years now, after the Crash of ’29, merely hastened his departure from the helm of K&M.
By 1931 the bankers had officially replaced him as president of K&M with an executive named Augustus S. Blagden. Dr. Mattison was now eighty years old, losing his eyesight, but still proud and bold enough to believe that he was out of power only temporarily. Under the auspices of the cost-cutting Mr. Blagden, K&M functioned for three years on a modest scale, reducing jobs continuously in Ambler while gradually closing most of the firm’s out-of-town sales offices and subsidiaries, and, of course, eliminating all the frills and privileges to which Dr. Mattison had long been accustomed. Although the doctor did vacate his castle, which was immediately put up for sale, he moved no farther away than across the street—beyond the castle’s main gate into a corner mansion at No. 1 Lindenwold Terrace, a three-story twin-turreted Gothic edifice that years before he had prudently placed in the name of his second wife, the crippled Mary Mattison, who now nonetheless lost her lofty perch in the castle tower from which she had previously enjoyed a wide-ranging view of community life through her binoculars.
Mr. Blagden did fulfill the doctor’s desires in banishing Georgette Mattison from her bosky retreat west of the castle (determinedly keeping her late husband’s Packard roadster, she resettled in Philadelphia, where in subsequent decades she would outlive two other husbands before retiring to a nursing home in the Chestnut Hill section of the city, where she died at seventy-six in 1961). The doctor’s other daughter-in-law, Florence—wife of his wayward younger son, Royal—would retain the mansion at No. 8 Lindenwold Terrace, which had been the doctor’s wedding gift on the occasion of her marriage to Royal in 1914.
The bankers finally sold the firm to a leading British asbestos-manufacturing enterprise (Turner & Newall, of Rochdale, England), which foresaw a profitable future for asbestos in America beyond the bankers’ expectations. (The public outcry against asbestos as a health hazard was yet decades away, and the cautious medical advice that was being disseminated was largely ignored not only by management but also by workers, much in the way that the risks in cigarette-smoking long went unheeded in a later period; indeed, during the 1930s many K&M factory workers refused to wea
r a face mask because it interfered with their smoking.)
Dr. Mattison lived until a few minutes after his eighty-fifth birthday, victimized by a fatal heart attack on November 18, 1936, at No. 1 Lindenwold Terrace, where his poor eyesight for many months had prevented him from having a clear view from his window of the castle that loomed in the near distance on the other side of the street. Earlier in the year, after a prolonged period of vacancy, the castle and a bit more than seventy-five acres of surrounding land had been sold by the bankers for $115,000 to a Catholic charitable order on the outskirts of Philadelphia, the Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth. So many homeless children had been taken in by the nuns during the early years of the Depression that the order was forced to find a larger center with more land, and the nuns saw the castle as a blessed discovery.
After they had demanded the removal of the voluptuous nude female statue that had stood boldly in a sunken garden (it was sold to a local artist), and gotten rid of the Civil War cannon that the late Mr. Devine, while Dr. Mattison’s aide, had positioned near the front steps, the estate was renamed Saint Mary’s Home for Children. The doctor’s eyesight notwithstanding, he was fully aware of what was transpiring behind the gates of his old domain, but he had no comment to make except to request that certain possessions he had left behind now be delivered to him. His list included the cannon, which was rolled onto the doctor’s front lawn; the framed motto that had hung in his castle office (in Gothic letters, Sans souci—Without worry); and countless pieces of valuable glassware and silver he had brought back from his many trips abroad. Although the doctor’s residence at No. 1 was the most spacious of the eight mansions that lined Lindenwold Terrace (it would be converted into an eight-unit apartment building after his death), it was hardly large enough to accommodate all the Oriental rugs he had bought for the castle. He nevertheless ordered them returned to him, and after this had been done he instructed that most of the floor space be covered with three levels of rugs, which produced such soft-footed unsteadiness throughout the mansion that those within (including the doctor himself) were frequently losing their balance and toppling almost soundlessly to the floor.
During most of his five years in retirement at No. 1, Dr. Mattison shared the mansion with his wife, who spent much of her time in a wheelchair in a large upper-floor solarium that the doctor had had built for her, overlooking a garden of roses and daffodils, and with two English servants, a married couple of whom the husband had formerly worked as a K&M plant manager until the bankers had eliminated his job. The doctor also employed a caretaker who lived in the Gothic carriage house in the rear of the property, where there were also hundreds of square feet of soil devoted to vegetable gardens and fruit trees, and chicken coops as well, that provided much of what was consumed at the doctor’s table. The caretaker not only tended to the farming and gardening but also served as the doctor’s chauffeur. He was a lanky, ruddy-skinned Virginian named Bayne Girthious Rowe, popularly known as “Gus”; a widower for many years, he lived with his teenaged daughters, Clara and Elsie, who attended the local schools. They were questioned regularly by Dr. Mattison about their homework, and were often asked to show him their report cards. Much of the doctor’s tender remembrances of his lost daughter were enacted in the affection and attention he bestowed upon Gus Rowe’s girls; and they in turn came to see a side of Dr. Mattison that went beyond the self-centered authoritarian figure most people assumed was his full embodiment.
At night, from their windows in the carriage house, the girls could glance across the courtyard into the rear windows of the mansion and see the doctor seated in the library, white-bearded, dark-suited, radiant in the light flashing down from the tall tableside lamp that also reflected across the pages of the book he was reading to his wife, and that illuminated as well her expression of contentment. The girls were aware that each morning he placed a flower next to his wife’s breakfast plate, and that under the plate was a love poem he composed to her every day. After Mary Mattison died in the late summer of 1935, fifteen months before his own death, Dr. Mattison was never remiss in bringing fresh flowers to her gravestone to replace those close to withering; and as depressed as he was by her absence, he remained cheerful toward Clara and Elsie Rowe, and he also succeeded during the final weeks of his life in helping his late brother’s adopted children, who were then residing on the old family farm in Bucks County, where the doctor himself had been brought up as a barefoot farm boy in the 1850s.
The children adopted at the turn of the century by the doctor’s childless older brother, Asher, and Asher’s wife, Hulda, had been part of the neighboring Ely family, who had been struggling to support the offspring of one female relative who had died in childbirth after producing twelve children. A male child from this family, Reuben P. Ely, was raised in Asher and Hulda’s home, and he remained on the property as their adopted son after he himself had married and had two children of his own. But with Hulda’s death in 1935 (Asher had died in 1922) there was some question as to the legal entitlement of the Ely family to the Mattison farmland, since the doctor and his heirs in an earlier will had also been recognized as having proprietary claims to the Bucks County land. During Hulda Mattison’s lifetime, the doctor had ignored this matter, knowing how much she disliked him—she had never forgiven him for allowing his guards to block her and Asher at the castle gates that day when they tried to visit. But on the morning of October 6, 1936, he told Gus Rowe to dust off and gas up the old Packard, which had not been driven in weeks; they would be taking a few hours’ drive out to Bucks County to see what was left of the thousand-acre tract that in 1682 a maternal ancestor from England, the Quaker yeoman George Pownall, had acquired from William Penn.
Only eighty-two acres were still under family control in 1936; and while the stone house and the porch furniture looked exactly the same as when he had sat at the feet of his aunt Martha while she read him Gothic tales, he was somewhat saddened by the endurance of its simplicity, and he wished that somehow more had been made of the place, that the walls of the house and the porch deck had been spruced up with fresh paint and a few new floorboards, and that the soil had been better cultivated, and that perhaps some of his own energy and vision had flowed through the veins of his late brother. But as the doctor strolled around the property, accompanied by Reuben and Virginia Ely, and their children and visiting nephews, who respectfully called him “Uncle Doctor,” he suspected that the only hope for improving this land lay with these young people who now occupied it—people who, if they owned it outright, would take personal pride in developing it beyond the limitations of tenant farmers and squatters. So he impulsively turned to his traveling companion and onetime castle employee, Charles Hibschman, whom Gus Rowe had also brought to Bucks County, and discussed the idea of bequeathing the whole estate to the Ely family for a single dollar. Hibschman conceded that this was a most generous act, and Reuben and Virginia Ely—and the inheritors nearby—could barely express their gratitude.
In the car on the way back to Ambler, the doctor was clearly a happy man; the old homestead would remain in the “family,” it would remain true to its original intentions, enriching the earth while nourishing its cultivators—it would not fall prey to land developers who might pave it out of existence and destroy its natural function. (Which is what did happen; the Ely offspring would one day sell the property to developers, who would in turn pave it in anticipation of the population growth that might make the land suitable for a shopping mall.)
But Dr. Mattison went to his grave never thinking this likely—no more than he could have thought, after he had purchased the Mattison family burial land within the Laurel Hill Cemetery in North Philadelphia, selecting a scenic spot overlooking the Schuylkill River, that this would in future years be blocked by a grand highway bordering the river below.
44.
Being an Italian in Paris had been a pleasurable and profitable experience for Antonio Cristiani, but in the fall of 1937, during the week in which vari
ous examples of his tailoring had been placed on display at the Paris International Exposition of Arts and Technique in Modern Life, he was uncharacteristically morose. He had recently had premonitions of disaster; the light autumnal breezes that whipped the flags atop the exposition’s many pavilions carried a touch of eerie calm that reminded him of the atmosphere in Maida hours before an earthquake.
Early in the week, feeling chest pains and vertigo, he had hastened to his doctor; but after an examination, he was pronounced in good health for a man of forty-three—and that opinion only made him feel worse. Either he had been struck by a malady that was eluding detection, or, like so many of his Italian countrymen whom he had mocked in the past, he too had fallen victim to the curse of southern pessimism, to his village’s time-honored habit of inventing illnesses about which to complain.
But there was nothing imaginary about his nightmares. They invaded his sleeping hours and sent him bolting out of bed, waking up not only his wife but their three children; and yet in the morning he was reluctant to discuss with Adelina what was bothering him, partly because he himself was not entirely sure, and partly because what awoke him was too alarming to reveal.
In his nightmares she was always dead, along with their children and dozens of other people and animals, all of them piled in a pyramidal heap cluttered with skeletons, with a few squirming arms and fingers reaching toward the sky; and always Antonio was separated from them, prone, powerless, but alive. In his diary he had tried to describe it, each time crossing out what he had written; and then, one afternoon, while walking around the exposition grounds, Antonio was stunned to confront his nightmare in a painting. He recognized and identified with the artist’s rendering of a man who lay at the bottom of a pile of people victimized by calamity: the fallen man’s arms were outstretched, his eyes and mouth were open, and he held a broken sword in his right hand next to the hoof of a horse and near the bare feet of a stumbling figure whose posture resembled that of one of the bleeding penitents Antonio had seen decades earlier in Maida. What Antonio saw was Pablo Picasso’s Guernica in the pavilion of the Spanish Republic, the painting named in memory of the Basque village that had recently been bombed by Hitler’s fliers in the civil war in Spain. Hitler was allied with the Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, as was Mussolini; and some of Antonio’s relatives were now soldiers in Spain, including his twenty-three-year-old cousin Domenico Talese, Joseph’s youngest brother.