The Astor Orphan
Page 1
DEDICATION
To my parents,
Rokeby’s current guardians
CONTENTS
Dedication
List of Illustrations
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
Rokeby Dreams
1. THE LEGACY
2. GUARDS OF ORDER
3. THE MENTOR
4. VENISON STEW
5. THE CONFERENCE
6. A METICULOUS RECORD
PART TWO
Elements of Disorder
7. SUNDAY MORNINGS
8. THE OUTLAW
9. PAST PERFECT
PART THREE
Artists and Drifters
10. THE IRREGULARS
11. A SEED IS PLANTED
PART FOUR
All in a Summer’s Plunder
12. A PARALLEL UNIVERSE
13. AN IMPORTED ORDER
14. REPOSSESSED
15. INDISPUTABLE
16. ANIMAL WARS
17. A MANLY ENDEAVOR
18. LIKE PROPER ARISTOCRATS
PART FIVE
Other Exiles
19. HOME AND AWAY
20. MIGRATIONS
21. PRACTICALLY ORPHANS
22. INTO THE MOUTH OF HELL
23. A DREAM FULFILLED
PART SIX
In Search of Self
24. BLENDING IN
25. INTERVIEWED
26. THE ELUSIVE EDGE
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
ILLUSTRATIONS
The big house
The Astor orphans and their cousin Mary Marshall at Rokeby. From left: Willie, Alida, Archie, Elizabeth, Wintie, Cousin Mary Marshall, Lewis, Margaret, and Bob. Photo c. 1884.
Great-Grandma Margaret
Dad and me
Dad has Mom in the backhoe bucket
Me in the barnyard
Me playing dress-up on the third floor
One of the third-floor storerooms
Grandma Claire surrounded by her grandchildren
Dad in the drawing room
“The Honorable Hamilton Fish,” from Vanity Fair, 1872
Mom and me
Debbie and Mimi in the dining room
Me playing the violin in the drawing room
Mom in the garden
Aunt Elizabeth Chapman with her infant son, Chanler Chapman
Great-Grandma Margaret in her bed
The Victorian dollhouse
The rosewood room
Dad in the field
Dad preparing for the pig roast
Mom and Dad on the front porch
The front field leading to the Hudson River
Grandma Claire in the front doorway of the big house
Paths leading to the Hudson River
Me looking down at Diana
Me preparing for a pageant
Victorian rocking horse in the old playroom before Dad converted it into my new bedroom
Searching for self in Dad’s summer room
Me after my first haircut
Armchairs in the drawing room
A panoramic view of Rokeby
Rokeby’s historic landmark sign
PROLOGUE
The Declaration of Independence was signed by—among others—our ancestor Robert Livingston,” I lectured my younger cousin Maggie as we crunched through the snow on our way to the pond. It was mid-December.
“You forgot about the tea.” Maggie yawned.
“I didn’t forget. That isn’t what I’m discussing. But I can tell you about the tea if you’d like.”
“I already know.”
I was ten and used instruction of various kinds to assert my authority over my younger cousins—Maggie, six, and Diana, five—as frequently as I could. I was determined that they shouldn’t grow up to treat me with the same disdain with which they treated my father. But it seemed the damage had been done.
Maggie eyed me slyly. “Who bought you that new down vest?”
“Grandma did.”
“Grandma says your daddy can’t get a job.”
“That’s not true. He fixes things, plows and mows the fields . . .”
“He’s poor. That’s why Grandma buys you clothes.”
I had no answer.
Our skates, tied together so we could carry them on our shoulders, went clickety-clack as they swayed with the rhythm of our walking. We used secondhand figure skates that Grandma Claire picked up at church rummage sales; they were, therefore, only our approximate sizes. Too big won’t matter, because you wear layers of socks, anyway. And you’ll grow into them soon enough.
Mom was with us, her red two-piece snowsuit swishing as she strode along. Mom came to life in the dead of winter. Her Polish cheeks grew rosy, and her breath grew strong with the exertion of hiking through snow or skiing cross-country. She seemed to be back in her native element, the wintry Carpathian paradise where she’d grown up.
Mom skated onto the ice first. With her snow shovel, she rode along the surface, pushing aside the light, fluffy snow. She started a counterclockwise path from the center, creating an ever-widening spiral.
We three hobbled, trying to get our balance. Diana could only take halting steps, couldn’t yet push and glide. Maggie was a bit more adept: she pushed and glided, lost momentum, then pushed again, gliding a few feet before she stopped.
The ice was bumpy and mostly black, with some white swirls where air had been caught, so we seemed to be floating above the Milky Way.
Suddenly, Diana started hollering and pointing at the ice in front of her.
“It’s the devil! Ahhhhh!”
Accustomed as we were to Diana’s tantrums, none of us felt any alarm. But when I skated over to her, I saw two faces frozen in the ice.
Dad’s goats were staring up at us, with expressions of what was either panicked terror or ecstatic delight. Their toothy, open mouths could have been calling out either “Save us from the black abyss!” or “Ah, wow, the universe is so vast and miraculous!” The rectangular irises of their eyes were popped wide, and their front hooves rose as if they were reaching for a hand up.
“So that’s where they went,” said Mom stoically. “Don’t tell your father.”
“I want to go home!” Diana whimpered.
None of us wanted to continue skating; it didn’t seem right to skate over the faces of these creatures that seemed still to be alive, their eyes and mouths wide open.
So we walked back up the hill to Grandma Claire’s house. The crisp snow held our skates in balance, and when we came to the driveway, we had to bend our ankles and walk on the outer edges of our feet.
Mom helped Maggie and Diana unlace their skates on Grandma Claire’s front stoop.
“Back so soon?” Grandma Claire poked her head out the storm door.
“There are devils in the ice,” Diana informed Grandma Claire.
Grandma laughed. “Devils, really?”
“She means the dead goats, Grandma. They’re in the ice.”
“Oh! Ugh! Oh, dear me.” Grandma Claire grimaced. “That sounds just frightful!”
Even more frightful was that I knew Grandma Claire had killed them.
PART I
ROKEBY DREAMS
Courtesy of Ralph Gabriner
CHAPTER ONE
THE LEGACY
Courtesy of the Margaret Livingston Aldrich Papers
As one tops the final rise of the gravel carriage drive, the eastern wall of the forty-three-room mansion appears. Even from a distance, one can see the brown water stains that streak the mansion’s off-white stucco walls and the missing slats in the peeling black shutters tha
t edge its long-paned windows. Layers of slate tiles cover the mansard roof like the scales of an armadillo.
The house’s wide stone steps lead up to the porch and the faded frescoes that adorn its sandstone walls. One fresco depicts the Algonquin who dwelled on this land before it was granted to the Scotsman Robert Livingston Sr. by King James II in the 1680s. Another portrays Napoléon giving a flock of merino sheep to General John Armstrong Jr.—U.S. minister to France from 1804 to 1810, secretary of war in Madison’s cabinet, and the man who built this house.
Known to all as the “big house,” this mansion last rattled with life when the eleven Astor orphans, the great-grandchildren of William Backhouse Astor Sr. roamed free here, wild, willful, and beyond their guardians’ control. The big house, with its high ceilings, vast open spaces, and secret niches so tempting to children, has never been conducive to discipline. The 450 acres of land surrounding the house have always served as a buffer against the outside world.
It was William Backhouse Astor Sr.—son of John Jacob Astor and the richest man in mid-nineteenth-century America—who brought great wealth to Rokeby, when he married the daughter of John Armstrong Jr. and Alida Livingston. And it was Astor’s granddaughter Maddie Astor Ward and her husband, John Winthrop Chanler from South Carolina, who orphaned the large brood when they both died of pneumonia in the space of two years.
These free-spirited Astor orphans left us, their descendants, our legacy: the house, its history and contents, and a sense of entitlement and superiority. They were the original eccentrics of the family, each one unconventional and adventurous.
Of the eleven orphans, eight lived into adulthood. Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler—“Uncle Lewis”—reportedly saved ten men from the electric chair as one of New York’s first pro bono attorneys, and later served as lieutenant governor of New York. William Astor Chanler—“Uncle Willie”—Teddy Roosevelt’s classmate at Harvard and fellow explorer, reportedly hobnobbed with Jesse James in the Wild West, worked as a gunrunner in the Spanish-American War, and discovered sixteen new species of deer during his hunting expeditions in East Africa. Robert Chanler—“Uncle Bob”—was a well-known painter of murals and screens, and onetime sheriff of our town. John Armstrong Chanler—“Uncle Archie”—was incarcerated in a mental hospital by his brothers for his bizarre behavior. Winthrop Chanler—“Uncle Wintie”—was also a hunter, and his daughter Laura married the son of Stanford White. Aunt Alida Emmet was presented to the queen of England as a girl and had the distinction of being the last living member of Caroline Astor’s original list of the four hundred most elite members of New York’s high society. Aunt Elizabeth Chapman, who married John Jay Chapman, was the subject of a famous portrait by John Singer Sargent that is kept at the National Gallery in Washington, DC. Finally, my great-grandma Margaret Chanler became the sole owner of Rokeby as a young woman, after buying out her siblings.
Evidence of the orphans’ exploits surrounds us and offers us a standard to live by.
Today the Astor money, which has supported generations of aristocrats ill equipped to earn or invest, is gone. While that undisciplined, orphaned spirit still abounds, it is depressed by the house’s sterile air of preservation. Aside from its continuous deterioration, the house has changed little since Great-Grandma Margaret’s death in 1963.
To keep the house as it was then, we sacrifice any resources that might have been invested in current generations. In return, the house gives each of us—the impoverished descendants—an identity. And we live off the remains of our ancestral grandeur.
CHAPTER TWO
GUARDS OF ORDER
Courtesy of Town & Country magazine
Taffeta rustled and crackled as my little cousin Diana ran, dragging Great-Grandma Margaret’s black gown across the drawing room’s radiant orange Oriental rug. My cousins and I had slipped from the mansion’s servants’ quarters into its formal front rooms—usually reserved for tours and parties—in order to practice for a play.
Beethoven rippled from my violin and over the room: lamps shaped like elaborate candelabras, folds of torn wallpaper, peeling paint, tattered lampshades, and warmly lit mirrors that towered over the room’s two gray marble mantelpieces.
As the provider of background music, I was not dressed in a gown.
This, the drawing room, was the largest room in the house, a continent unto itself, with two Steinway grands—black and brown, one for each of my musical great-grandparents. The pianos slept, cheek to jowl, at one end of the room. At the other stood a gilt table with a bare-breasted cherub astride each of its front legs. The rest of the room was uncluttered, waiting for an audience to convene for a recital on the several armchairs upholstered in lime-green silk.
Diana was carrying some dolls from my extensive collection. Her short, dirty-blond hair had been chopped unevenly in a self-inflicted haircut. In one arm, she held my Jenny doll—a two-foot-tall, soft-torsoed toddler whose beige plastic folds of chubby flesh collected at her knees and elbows and whose eyelids rolled open and closed with a little clicking sound as she turned. In the other arm, she held both Eva, a wooden Polish doll with an itchy red woolen skirt and two ruddy brown braids, and the Russian soldier doll with a coarse olive army uniform and crumbling plaster face.
Maggie lay on a sofa with a torn floral slipcover, dressed in a gown of robin’s-egg blue and inhabiting the role of our great-great-grandmother Maddie Chanler. Her eyes were closed and her arm was draped dramatically across her forehead.
“Come see your Mama Maddie now,” Diana, in the role of Cousin Mary, said to the babies in her arms. She then placed them gently around Maggie.
“Thank you, Cousin Mary,” Maggie said to her sister. Then she turned to her babies. “Your mama is dying. She has ammonia.”
“It’s pneu-monia,” I called out over the music. We all knew the story from Maggie and Diana’s father, who lectured historical societies as they toured the house.
“You see? I’m dying, and she’s still correcting me!” Maggie momentarily lost her composure, then resettled into character. “Rokeby has always taken care of its orphans. My mother . . . What was my mother’s name again?”
“Emily Astor,” I called out over the decrescendo as a chip of ceiling paint fell onto the piano.
“My own mother, Emily Astor, died when I was just two years old. And my grandparents . . .” She paused.
“The William B. Astors,” I called over the trill.
“. . . raised me here at Rokeby as their own daughter.”
Diana bit her lip as she fished for the next line, then blurted out, “And they banished that vile father of yours!” Diana was playing Mary Marshall, a cousin who became the orphans’ primary guardian. “Sam Ward! His name should not even be spoken in this house!”
“But what did my daddy do?” asked a languishing Maggie.
“He was a bohemian spendthrift!”
Hanging like an idol on our drawing room wall, a youthful Great-Grandma Margaret—one of the youngest of these bereft babies—looked on from her gilt frame. She was seated on the front porch in a raven-black gown, poised and self-righteous with her back ramrod straight and her thin, elegant hands resting on her full, bombazine-coated lap. It was the same gown Diana now wore.
GREAT-GRANDMA MARGARET WAS Rokeby’s ancestral guard of order. In reaction to her undisciplined and tragic Rokeby childhood, she had developed rigid rules and unyielding opinions. As an adult, she never varied from her schedule of reading, meals, and visiting hours at teatime. These had been the pillars of sense and sanity for her, if not for her relatives, who had simply kept their distance—some by choice and others by force.
As the sole owner of Rokeby, Great-Grandma Margaret had had the power to banish any disorderly elements, namely family members who defied her standards and expectations. For her, the greatest threats to the family’s respectability were divorce and religious conversion. Her fanatically strict principles superseded any emotional ties with even the closest of family members.
IN MY MIND, I, too, was a guard of order, perpetuating the family’s image of class and refinement with my violin playing and outstanding academic record.
“Maggie, that dress should not be so tight fitting on you,” I prompted as the girls gathered up the dolls after rehearsal. “You don’t see anyone overweight in the portraits, do you?”
“I’m telling my mommy you called me fat!” She stamped her foot and stalked away. Maggie always went over my head to those with the real power.
I often wished we were orphans, with enough inherited money to live on. But money was the only thing we hadn’t inherited.
I now picked up my violin and began to play again, this time loudly, just for the pleasure of hearing my own sound resonate through the massive room.
When I played my violin, there was no past, present, or future. The sense that we lived on the brink of disaster was suspended, as was the sickening feeling that there was nowhere else in the world we could possibly belong. When I played, all that existed for me was the firmness of my bow’s horsetail hairs as they glided and bounced on the steel strings; my left hand gently cupping the violin’s smooth wooden neck and rocking, sometimes slowly and other times intensely, with vibrato; my thumb sliding up and down the neck as my hand changed positions; the piney smell of rosin powder as it floated off the dancing bow hairs; the deep, low notes, so solid and strong, and the high notes, vulnerable and brave; my fingers curling over the fingerboard as their callused tips pressed down and released with each note. How I admired the agility and obedience of those happy fingers!
“Olivia!”
Uncle Harry’s voice woke me from my trance. Uncle Harry was Maggie and Diana’s father; Olivia was their mother. He stood now on the western lawn, just outside the French doors, dressed in his usual suit and tie. His straight hair was smooth, oiled and brushed over to the side, and he wore round, steel-rimmed glasses.