Images and Shadows

by Iris Origo

  Here, in their childhood, my father, his brother and sisters and their friends canoed and fished and ran wild in the woods during their holidays, here my grandparents gave tennis and croquet-parties and dinner-parties for Long Island neighbours in the 80’s and 90’s and entertained friends from New York for the week-end, with much fishing and driving and some sailing in the bay, visits to the model farm with its herd of Jersey cows, and, for the more energetic, the exercise of blazing new trails with a hatchet through the woods—thus satisfying the nostalgia for ‘the primitive life’ which afflicts the well-to-do, while also acquiring an appetite for the excellent dinner to follow.1 Every week-day morning, my grandfather would drive his tandem to the little station at Islip to take the two-hour journey to his work in New York, so it was really only at week-ends that he and his wife were able to plan the improvements to the farm and garden, or to the landscape planting of the rest of the grounds. The pinetum, indeed, gradually became one of the finest collections of exotic trees in the United States, containing rare specimens from China and Japan, from Europe and Africa and Asia Minor—among them a towering blue cedar from Mount Adas, an eighty-foot Cilician fir from Asia Minor, a dawn redwood from Western China and a stone pine from Siberia. Strangely enough, the hot, damp climate and sandy soil of Long Island appeared to suit them all.

  The other chief feature of the place in those days was the stables, to which family and guests (since of course no horse was allowed to work on Sundays) all paid a formal visit on Sunday afternoons. “We would find the carriage house decorated,” my aunt Justine has told me, “with bright coloured sands, red, blue, yellow and green, and braided straw. The passage behind the horses’ stalls was decorated in like manner. It must have taken hours of completely useless work, but it was tradition. Each Sunday we exclaimed about the brilliant splendour of the carriages, the suppleness of the leather, and the brightness of the bits—a tribute to the coachman and the grooms. The grooms were everywhere, ornamental rather than useful. They sat on the box beside the coachman and sprang to the ground before the carriage stopped, to open the door. They sat back to back with the driver in dogcarts. They galloped thirty yards behind me when on horseback, throwing my horse into a panic. They stood with folded arms before the heads of stationary horses.” And there were also, of course, a proportionate number of carriages, from the humble buckboard and buggy to the four-horse brake or coach and two-horse victoria and brougham. When they finally were crowded off the roads by automobiles, the splendid horses were shot and the carriages sold for a song. Our coachman, retired on a pension, was inconsolable, and could not understand that anyone should prefer a hideous automobile to the beauty of another age.

  “What would you have done with the carriages?” Justine asked him. “I would have built a shed at the foot of the lawn and kept them all there, just to have something pretty to look at.”

  “I wonder,” Justine added, “whether he was not right.”

  Westbrook, however, had not always been my grandparents’ home. In their youth they had first known some lean years—which were not perhaps entirely necessary, but may have added a flavour to the possessions that came in later life, and which were certainly entirely in accordance with the American principle that ‘young people should begin simply’. Although both of them, later on, belonged to the society described in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, neither of them spent their childhood in New York. My grandfather, William Bayard Cutting (since his mother had died when he was a child, and his father, for some reason which was never revealed to us, lived in France), was brought up, with his brother Fulton, in a small town in New Jersey called Edgewater, just across the Hudson, by his maternal grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bayard. His grandfather was distinctly well-off, having inherited the fortune made by his father in trade with Europe and with the East and West Indies, as well as having substantial railroad interests himself; but he was also frugal, and both William Bayard and Fulton were brought up in an atmosphere of industrious austerity, and—in the words of my aunt Justine—of “high if narrow standards”, with the understanding that they would have to make their own way in the world. My future grandmother, too, Olivia Peyton Murray, had had an austere upbringing. Born in Illinois in 1855—the second pretty daughter of a family of six—she possessed a Presbyterian father whose own education, in Jamaica, Long Island, had been ‘enforced dexterously with a flat ruler’, and who disapproved on principle of all gaieties, ‘dreading for his daughters any association with children more wealthy than they’. Even after the family had returned to New York, he restricted their acquaintance to an extremely small circle, and it was quite exceptional that Olivia should have been permitted to attend the Commencement Exercises at Columbia College, where she had a first glimpse of her future husband, as he delivered, with great fire and aplomb, the year’s valedictory address. ‘From that moment he became her hero.’ There was a brief exchange of words, followed by one happy evening, when, having come to call upon her elder sister (since Olivia was not yet old enough to have a caller), Bayard was entertained by the younger one instead—and then—seven years of waiting. Even when their marriage at last took place, they had so little money that they were at first obliged to live with Bayard’s grandparents in Edgewater, and it was not until the following year that Bayard could at last afford to rent a very small house of his own in 24th Street, only twelve and a half feet wide, but absorbing nearly half their income. When one of their first visitors asked Bayard why he had brought his bride to so very small a house, he replied, “I cut my coat according to my cloth.”

  When, however, Bayard was twenty-five, his grandfather turned over his business interests to him—largely in railroads, which were then opening out in the Middle West and Far West—and after this prosperity came swiftly. The young man was certainly both judicious and fortunate in his operations, and at twenty-eight he was already the President of the St. Louis, Altona and Terre Haute Railroad, while later on he also became a director of the Southern Pacific and opened up some new railroads in Florida. The extent of his interests in this field is suggested by the fact that, whenever he and his family travelled on any of these railroads, a ‘private car’ was put at their disposal, which included a sitting-room with bunks, a ‘master’s bedroom’, a drawing-room and kitchen, and an observation car in which you could enjoy both the soot and the view—and which (though some people preferred to take their own chef with them) was also equipped with a Negro waiter, a porter, and a cook. In such a car one could live in the greatest comfort in any siding in the Middle West, where the roads were still few, and the hotels both few and bad. In the words of Mrs. August Belmont, who also belonged, after her marriage, to the small number privileged to travel in this manner: “A private railroad car is not an acquired taste: one takes to it at once!”

  My grandfather was always extremely scrupulous in his business dealings and indignant against the sharp practices of the ‘Robber Barons’ of his time, who bought out the little land-owner and cheated the small investor—so much so, that his children were never allowed, later on, to accept invitations to their houses. He was responsible for the development of a large tract of what was then worthless land in South Brooklyn, the digging of the Ambrose Channel, which opened up New York and Brooklyn Harbour to large shipping interests, the starting of the sugar-beet industry in the Middle West, and later on he became a vice-president of the New York Chamber of Commerce. But he also found time for many other interests. A lover of the country and of sport, he was a keen fisherman and a good judge of horses, and for many years drove his own four-in-hand and tandem. He was one of the founders of the New York Botanical Gardens and the Zoological Society, and he also belonged to a small group of men of taste—John Cadwallader, Egerton Winthrop, Walter Maynard, Stanford White, Pierpont Morgan—who were beginning to change the life of New York by their active interest both in art and letters, in architecture and old furniture. He became one of the founders of the Metropolitan Museum and of the New
York Public Library, and a Trustee of Columbia University. By then he and his wife were living in the square, massive brown-stone house (“the ugliest stone ever quarried,” as Edith Wharton justly remarked) on the corner of 72nd Street and Madison Avenue which remained their New York home for the rest of their lives, and which contained also, like many others of its kind (for their taste, though not ostentatious, was also not distinctive), a Louis Quinze drawing-room, a dark panelled library, a dining-room hung with French tapestries, and a large central hall which could also be used for a dance (as occurred, for the last time, on the occasion of my ‘debut’ in 1920). The rooms were well-proportioned, the furniture ‘good,’ the upkeep, as at Westbrook, perfection itself, but the total effect was curiously impersonal, and to me, at least, somewhat oppressive. But to my grandparents the house was undoubtedly a source of much pleasure and pride, and to gather fresh treasures for it was one of the chief objects of their almost yearly journeys to Europe. Such trips, indeed, were by then becoming part of a habitual pattern of life for the small section of New York society to which they belonged. ‘From my earliest infancy’, wrote Edith Wharton, whose background was very similar, ‘I had always seen about me people who were either just arriving from abroad or just embarking on a European tour’—but she added that these journeys were generally artistic or sentimental pilgrimages in the wake of Scott, Byron, Washington Irving or Hawthorne—or, of course, shopping expeditions to the dressmakers of Paris or the tailors and curiosity-shops of London. It was only very seldom that they also became an occasion for forming European friendships. ‘The Americans who forced their way into good society in Europe were said to be those who were shut out from it at home.’ One might of course have a few personal friends in England or France, or, like my grandparents, one might become connected with a European family by the marriage of one of one’s children (though this was still comparatively rare) but for real social life one came home again.

  This life, as I have heard it described, seems to have possessed at least one quality notably absent in the New York of today: leisure. Many of the men, of course—my grandfather among them—worked extremely hard in office hours, but there were also some (such as the Astors and Goelets) whose fortunes, made in previous generations by the purchase of real estate and automatically increasing with its rapid rise in value, chiefly required fostering by careful administration. Others were bankers, lawyers, architects (never politicians, except in the case of Theodore Roosevelt, whom some considered a traitor to his class), and certainly many of them enjoyed sufficient leisure for week-day lunch parties of both sexes to be possible, as well as long weekends in their country places in Newport, Lennox or Long Island.

  For the women, the standard of housekeeping was extremely high. However polished the English butler and French maid, however efficient the housekeeper and the large staff, a careful hostess was expected to take a personal and expert interest in her linen-room, garden and kitchen, and most of them possessed a number of carefully-guarded recipes transmitted by their grandmothers or aunts, written out on yellowing pages in exquisite copper-plate hands. The cellar, of course, was the province of the master of the house, but it, too, was a matter for specialised knowledge and grave ceremony—a taste and a tradition which my grandfather transmitted to at least two of his children. Engraved invitation cards to formal dinners were usually sent out at least three weeks in advance, and the menu would often include, as well as every variety of oyster, such delicacies as terrapin and canvas-backed duck, broiled Spanish mackerel, soft-shelled crabs and peachfed Virginia hams cooked in champagne. Great care was taken not to give such a dinner on an ‘Opera Night’, when instead a small party of six or seven (the men always a little difficult to find) would sit down in the house of one of the box-holders to a somewhat earlier and shorter meal. My grandfather was one of these box-holders—men who had founded and financed the Metropolitan Opera Company of New York, and who paid its annual deficit. Each of them was entitled to a first-tier box in the ‘dress circle’; but here trouble arose, for when the architect’s plan was examined, it was discovered that there were not enough boxes for them all; and no-one was willing to move to the second tier, where one heard better, but was not seen so well. So the architect was asked to extend the horse-shoe circle, providing a few more boxes, but damaging the acoustics—a matter which only distressed a very few music-lovers, since most of the audience merely considered the singing ‘an interruption to good talk’. For indeed the Opera House in New York (as in Italy in the eighteenth century) performed a more complex function than that of providing fine operas. In a society lacking a king and court, it became the focal point of social life, providing occasions for the display of the first essential of an aristocracy, exclusiveness, for hospitality to distinguished guests, and for such a show of evening gowns and jewels as would elsewhere have graced a court ball.

  In all this, of course, there was a great emphasis on possessions—country houses, horses, carriages, yachts, gardens, pictures, furniture—but certainly not (except among the more ostentatious new arrivals, who, precisely for that reason, found it difficult to penetrate the inner circle) on money in itself, and I think that most ‘Old New Yorkers’ instilled into their children, at least by implication, the precept taught to Edith Wharton by her mother (and which is, of course, in itself, one of the privileges of the rich): “Never talk about money, and think about it as little as possible.” There was also a very strong sense of charitable duty; not only in terms of money, but of time and trouble. My grandfather purchased some large blocks of slum-tenements on the East River and replaced them with decent, cheap apartments, and from the earliest years of her marriage, my grandmother belonged to a weekly ‘sewing-class’, which was still flourishing when she and the other surviving members were over seventy, and still referring to each other as ‘the Girls’. During the whole of their life, my grandparents—both devout Episcopalians—devoted a great deal of thought and care, as well as a large proportion of their income, not only to gifts to public charities but to individuals in need, and my grandfather was also a member of various hospital boards, a Trustee of the Children’s Aid Society and the President of the Improved Dwellings Association of New York.

  My own recollections of him, since he died when I was ten years old, are very nebulous. I think he must have been a charming man—wise, humorous, and urbane, with an unusually happy touch with people, a cultivated mind, and a tender heart. But I can only remember a warm voice and a kind smile, a pointed beard which pricked—and on my own lips, the unattractive sentence, “Granapa will pay”, which became a family saying. Certainly he had paid, by his hard work and his foresight, for the luxury in which we all lived, and which some of his children, later on, found oppressive, but which I suspect he himself chiefly valued as an adornment and setting for his young wife.

  Very lovely my grandmother must have been, according to the portraits I have seen, and also animated by a vivid zest for life and by strong, possessive affections. When first I clearly remember her, in her late forties, she was handsome still, but sometimes a little formidable—a skilful and experienced hostess, an elegant woman of fashion, a loving but rather imperious mother, a leading figure on charitable committees and art exhibitions, very much the mistress of her household and of her life. I can see her sitting very erect, as was required of a well-bred woman, with her long-gloved arm resting on the red plush rim of her box at the Metropolitan Opera House, most elegantly gowned, gloved and bejewelled, in the company of friends of equally irreproachable character, breeding, and appearance, entertaining some distinguished (and often more dowdy) foreign guest, and receiving a little court of callers during the interval. Any wish or whim of hers that my grandfather could satisfy, he always did: but I am told, too, that, for all his gentleness, it was always his hands that held the reins. Certainly, in the long years after his death, she constantly referred to his opinions and felt the loss of his guidance so much that, at one time, she had frequent recourse to au
tomatic writing by planchette and received nebulous messages which it was difficult not to consider merely emanations of her own need, rather than an answering voice. But she also retained, until the day of her death at ninety-four, a bright glint in her eye and an eager interest in any new guest or fresh event—whether a visit from Dr. Schweitzer or the first bloom of a new rhododendron in the garden. And so, too, she continued to take a constant pleasure both in the appurtenances of her house and in her own appearance, and remained, with her beautifully-dressed, snow-white hair, her well-cut suits of white frieze or purple tweed, her summer dresses of trim prints and her black velvet evening gowns, the most decorative and soignée of old ladies. It is not, I think, sufficiently recognised—since it does not occur to them to put it into words—how sensitive young children are, not only to the appearance but the fastidiousness of the grown-up people with whom they live. Certainly both to myself, and later on to my children, one of ‘Granama’s’ chief attractions was, not the warmth of her embraces, which I think very few children enjoy, but the fact that she always looked so pretty and smelled so good. She became, too, the centre of the whole family life: it was at Westbrook or in 72nd Street that large family gatherings took place on Thanksgiving Day or Christmas—dreaded by her own children, but I think enjoyed by the uncles and aunts and cousins—and it was to her little pale grey sitting-room upstairs, with its family photographs and Whistler etchings, that brothers and sisters, nephews and nieces, and in due course great-nephews and great-nieces, too, came to tell the story of their lives, attracted not only by the generosity that often solved their problems, but by the unfailing eagerness of her interest, and the common sense of her comments.