The Astor Orphan

by Alexandra Aldrich

  I nodded my consent to Uncle Harry’s request and proceeded across the front hall, where I came upon an unfamiliar couple drifting around in the drawing room.

  The man pointed out the giant, gilt-framed mirror behind the Steinways. The mirror itself was so aged that it was gray and no longer reflective.

  “I think that mirror has seen so much vanity that it decided to close for further business. If someone tried to search for himself in it, he’d only be swallowed up.”

  “A mirror that consumes images . . . ,” the woman said. “I’ll bet that’s what this place will do to a person after a while.”

  WHEN THE CALL for performances began, I was asked to play something on the violin. I felt self-conscious about asking the guests to stand still and listen quietly and respectfully as I performed the first movement of a Handel sonata. But everyone clapped politely when I was done.

  Next, two of Dad’s friends, both named Bob, got up to sing some World War I songs, as they always did at our parties.

  It’s a long way to Tipperary,

  To the sweetest girl I know!

  Good-bye, Piccadilly . . .

  The final act tonight was Mimi doing her famously hilarious Louis Armstrong impersonation, which she would agree to do only once she was good and drunk. She puffed up her cheeks and puckered her lips, and her naturally deep voice grew much deeper as she began to sing “Blueberry Hill.”

  She held up an imaginary trumpet. “Blow that horn, Louis!” the spectators shouted, cheering.

  Throughout the generations, the family’s greatest challenge had been coexisting amicably and equably at Rokeby. With co-owners living under one roof, there was bound to be a struggle for dominance. At Rokeby, the nonconformists had always lost the contest.

  In the past, Aldriches and Astors had banished family members under the pretexts of bohemianism and insanity. In fact, artists had always been viewed with suspicion at Rokeby. John Jay Chapman perhaps expressed the family’s distrust of artists best when he wrote “[Artists] are invariably corrupt and irregular in their private lives and in their ideas. . . . Most of them are foreigners—Italians, Frenchmen and Russians and you know what foreigners are. They don’t speak the truth, or pay their bills, or keep the Sabbath.”

  Mom was an artist. But while she was foreign, she was not at all irregular. When she wasn’t chasing after Dad to fix things or give her money, she sat at her drafting table for hours, drawing, etching, painting. As a child, Mom—like me—had been a high achiever. She’d always been the very best student in her class—diligent, precise, and serious. She’d filled albums with incredible childhood drawings. When I was little—before her sadness and powerlessness set in like a disease—Mom had had lots of energy for self-improvement. She’d taken swimming and driving lessons, and consumed Agatha Christie novels to learn English.

  Like the old creamery, our apartment was a bastion of bohemian living on the estate. Only there did Mom freely display her tapestries, engravings, and paintings, as well as her posters from Bread and Puppet—a folkish puppet theater with politically leftist leanings. These latter were rough paintings of some of the central characters of the idealized Communist society: washerwomen in kerchiefs, with oversize papier-mâché heads, and garbagemen in gray workers’ uniforms, gloves, and boots.

  “I thought you wanted to get away from the Communists,” Dad would chide.

  I did not choose to view myself as bohemian. I understood that in my own family, being an unconventional person with artistic leanings was grounds for exclusion, a reason to be deprived of everything, including the right to identify as an Aldrich.

  Surrounded by whimsical, unstructured people who did what they pleased whenever they pleased, I genuinely idealized a respectable and disciplined life. I longed to live in a house with modern heating and plumbing. I dreamed of having a presentable car and parents with jobs.

  But what could I have been, really, if not bohemian? I was a free spirit who watched unrated, arty foreign films with Mom and dressed in vintage clothing from the local thrift shop. Our living quarters were furnished with random, broken hand-me-downs. We didn’t live by rules that coincided in any way with those of the outside world. We never had a dinnertime or matching dinnerware. I had no set bedtime. I did not own pajamas or a nightgown.

  THE MOST FAMOUS bohemian to be exiled from the family was Sam Ward, brother of Julia Ward Howe. “Uncle Sam” had married Emily, one of W. B. Astor’s daughters. He had been a Renaissance man, infinitely charming and social, loose with money, open-minded, and always looking for a good time. Emily died when their daughter, Maddie, was just two years old. As soon as Uncle Sam remarried—to a Creole woman—the W. B. Astors took custody of their granddaughter and raised her as their own child at Rokeby, banning Uncle Sam from the property and forbidding him from ever seeing his daughter.

  While the vivacious Uncle Sam had clashed with his cheerless, conservative Astor in-laws, he had been extremely popular with most everyone else, according to a Vanity Fair article published January 10, 1880, as part of a series entitled “Men of the Day.” A copy hung in the big house’s home parlor.

  Every traveler to the United States, whose lot has fallen to pleasant places, is sure to have met with Sam Ward . . . uncle of the human race. He is the one man who knows everybody worth knowing, who has been everywhere worth going to, and has seen everything worth stepping aside to see . . . a sound scholar, a thoughtful reader, a man of much experience, observation and wisdom, he is yet seen at his best in some act of gentle ministration to the poor and afflicted. His fund of anecdote is inexhaustible. His very presence in a room is enough to put everyone else in good humor. . . . His wit is ready, and his good nature is so great that most Englishmen who have seen New York bring back from it, as one of the most pleasant of their reminiscences, their memory of Uncle Sam.

  It was not difficult to see why such a man would not have gotten along with the parsimonious W. B. Astor, the slumlord of lower Manhattan who had left hardly any of his massive fortune to charity. But despite his banishment, Uncle Sam’s free-spirited genes seem to have been passed down through the generations.

  In the Astor orphans’ generation, the line between bohemian and straitlaced had become blurred, as all of the orphans had been unconventional to varying degrees. Only Great-Grandma Margaret had stood apart, a guard of order who kept alive the family tradition of banishing family members at will.

  John Armstrong Chanler, Great-Grandma Margaret’s brother, known to us as Uncle Archie, was ostracized on the grounds of insanity. He had been left extra money by his mother because, as the eldest Astor orphan, he was expected to take care of Rokeby. She also hoped he would settle at Rokeby and keep the Chanler name alive in the Hudson Valley. But he moved far away, settling in Virginia.

  Archie was admittedly a bit odd. He reportedly drove a car that contained a kitchen and a bathtub. When he visited Rokeby, he was said to have eaten grass on the Astor china in the dining room and climbed in and out of his second-floor bedroom window in the middle of the night by way of a ladder, then slept all day. He also experimented with psychic phenomena. For instance, he attempted to channel the spirit of Napoléon Bonaparte. He believed that his subconscious, which he called his “x factor,” would send him messages, which he could express through “automatic writing” while in a trancelike state.

  But Archie’s alleged lunacy was likely a fabrication. His troubles began when he invested money, together with his brother Wintie and Wintie’s friend Stanford White, in a few enterprises in Virginia. Archie soon asked Wintie to step down as chairman of the board of the company.

  To prevent being deposed, Wintie conspired with their brother Lewis and Stanford White to have Archie declared insane and incarcerated in an asylum. This move put a temporary stay on Archie’s power of attorney over Rokeby’s finances and cut him off from access to his own money and property.

  For four years, Archie stayed at Bloomingdale Insane Asylum in White Plains, New York, under
round-the-clock supervision. When Archie appealed to his other siblings for help, they all deferred to Wintie’s and Lewis’s judgment in the matter.

  When Archie finally managed to escape from Bloomingdale, he left the following characteristically witty note for the asylum’s medical superintendent.

  My dear Doctor:

  You have always said that I am insane. You have always said that I believe I am the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte. As a learned and sincere man, you, therefore, will not be surprised that I take French leave.

  Yours, with regret that we must part,

  J.A. Chanler

  Feeling his family’s betrayal keenly, this Chanler, who was meant to carry on the family name, took his revenge by changing his surname to Chaloner.

  Was Uncle Archie more mentally ill than Great-Grandma Margaret’s brother-in-law John Jay Chapman, who had to be kept in Rokeby’s billiard room on the third floor for eighteen months due to delusions and imagined paralysis, and who purposely burned his hand so severely that it had to be amputated? John Jay Chapman was never institutionalized for mental illness. The primary difference between the two men seemed to lie in their relationship to the Astor fortune.

  In our generation, the law entitled Dad to the same rights as his brother, so his nuclear family could not legally be sequestered and denied privileges. Yet, really, we had been banished—to the third floor. We lived in the eaves.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A SEED IS PLANTED

  Courtesy of Michele Michahelles

  Fortunately for me, the family did not associate classical music with bohemianism. My great-grandparents Aldrich had made a life of music respectable.

  It was the middle of June. Giselle was now at Rokeby every day. She and Dad were taking me to my end-of-the-year violin recital. Dad rarely attended my various recitals or school events, because Rokeby’s needs always came first. Today, I was too excited that he was finally coming to one of my recitals to worry about why Giselle was joining us instead of Mom.

  When I’d asked Mom if she planned to come, she’d snorted in bored contempt. “You know I don’t like the sound of children playing the violin. I don’t like being around kids at all, if I can help it.”

  “But I’m a kid.”

  “Yes, but you’re different. You’re my daughter.”

  Mom would occasionally try to disguise her indifference to my activities by telling me how much she valued my independence and my freedom to make my own decisions. She would explain how she had promised herself that she would not be an overbearing parent as her own mother had been. But even then I knew that it was simply easier for her if Grandma Claire took care of me, or if I took care of myself.

  Dad, on the other hand, was pleased that I was so self-motivated and musically talented. He doled out compliments about my playing freely as long as he didn’t have to pay for the lessons.

  Giselle seemed to have permanently claimed the middle seat between Dad and me in the cab of the Chevy. As we started down the carriage drive and Dad shifted the gears, his hand knocked against Giselle’s fleshy shin. With each jolt of the truck’s shifting gears, the nose of my violin case stabbed her in the arm.

  I was wearing my special red concert dress. It had two layers, both red, with satin underneath and stiffened gossamer on top. The top layer was covered with white polka dots that felt bumpy where they’d been painted on. The way it was tight at the waist, then blossomed out into a full skirt, made me think of flying.

  But just as I was picturing myself impressing the parents with my performance of the Vivaldi A-minor concerto, we heard a telltale flapping sound.

  “Yup, I was afraid of this!” The gears began to grind as Dad hastily shifted down. He swung out to look. “She’s flat.”

  I felt the familiar symptoms of panic—it was as though my heavy heart was leaning against my lungs and making me short of breath. Grandma Claire wouldn’t let Dad use her car if Giselle was with us, and Dad would never tell Giselle that she couldn’t come. So I’d have to get Grandma Claire to drive me to my recital. I hadn’t even told her about the recital because she’d been hitting the bottle so hard lately. While I was ashamed of her red nose and cloudy eyes, at least if Grandma Claire drove me, Giselle wouldn’t be there. I didn’t want the extra worry of having to explain Giselle to people, especially since no one had really explained her to me. And I didn’t want the shame of Giselle’s being at my recital while Mom wasn’t.

  As the passenger door wouldn’t open from the inside, I stuck my arm out the window—which was always open because the crank had fallen off—to reach the outside handle. I opened the door and started race-walking down the hill to Grandma Claire’s house, my violin case rocking like a buoy in choppy water. The dusty driveway quickly powdered my shiny black patent leather concert shoes, whose slight heels made me feel grown-up.

  “Grandma?” My shoes clicked into her musty, salmon-tiled atrium.

  “Yes . . . ,” a faint voice called in alarm from her room. I found her seated on her bed, slightly slumped over, with her feet on the floor. I didn’t want to look at her. Whenever she was “in a state,” as Aunt Olivia called it, I had a strong impulse to sit down with her and write up a schedule and a set of rules—a plan for us to follow.

  But there was no time for that now. She was dressed in her blue-and-white-checked pants and red polyester blouse—J. C. Penney specials. Her thick horn-rimmed glasses were sliding off her reddened nose. The skin of her neck hung loose like a turkey’s. Her eyes looked out at everything at once, overwhelmed as if by something swarming around her.

  “Do you need help getting up?” I asked, though it made me queasy to see her, of all people, looking so lost. But I had to suppress my fear, as well as the surge of rage that made me want to beat her sober. I could not fall apart before the recital. We had fewer than fifteen minutes to get there.

  “No, no. Just go watch some TV and I’ll be right out,” she said, not registering that I was dressed up and holding a violin case.

  “Well actually, I came to ask if you could take me to my recital.”

  She stared blankly. “Oh, dear.” Her voice was hollow. She stumbled a few steps as she heaved herself up, as if the alcohol had tilted her brain.

  “I’ll just wait in the hall,” I said. From there I could hear her hiccup loudly, so I hummed the opening to the Vivaldi concerto to block out any more of her sounds.

  As she made her way into the hallway, I noticed how her bony hands—crooked with arthritis—were shaking. Slouched way over, she leaned her spidery fingers, white with pressure, against the soot-darkened wall.

  Grandma Claire’s dry cough reeked of mouthwash. I knew that when she was like this, her driving was life-threatening.

  Nevertheless, I preferred Grandma’s drunk driving to Mom’s expressions of maternal indifference. So I rushed Grandma Claire to the Plymouth. As she lowered herself into the front seat, she left her storklike legs and knobby arthritic knees outside. Then she pulled her legs in one by one—they were too long to fit comfortably—and squeezed them under the steering wheel.

  “There, now. All ready.” She pulled down the sun flap to look in the mirror, put on her red lipstick, then pursed her lips with a smacking sound. She had smeared some over the top and bottom of her lip line and hadn’t quite reached the edges of her mouth. But I guessed it made her feel presentable.

  Since we took the farm road, we avoided Dad and Giselle, who might still have been with the Chevy on the front drive.

  Once we were on the public road, with only minutes to spare, Grandma Claire drove at a snail’s pace and braked as she approached each driveway along the way. As she weaved back and forth over the divider, I focused all my psychic energy on the gray pavement moving toward us, and my right hand grew white from squeezing the door handle. Just stay right. Just stay right. Just stop at the stop sign. Fortunately it was less than two miles to Mrs. Simmons’s house, where both her piano students and Mrs. Gunning’s violin students would be
performing.

  By the time we arrived at Mrs. Simmons’s house, the violin students were sitting on the floor next to the glassed-in green room for plants and the piano students sat on the sofas against the wall, all ready to perform.

  There was a balcony overlooking the open living room below, which had a black baby grand in its center. Grandma Claire stumbled up the stairs to join the parents seated on the balcony. They were peering over the railing, each one eager for his or her own child to perform. I attempted to ignore Grandma as she gesticulated, pointing out a spot on the floor where she thought I might take a seat.

  “And now, we will hear . . . Alexandra,” Mrs. Simmons announced in her wispy, whispery voice. She clasped her hands together and smiled in my direction as I rose clumsily, trying not to step on someone’s violin or bow.

  Mrs. Gunning, my violin teacher, who doubled as an accompanist, was seated at the piano. She was short and slightly stooped yet nimble. She waited for me to set my sheet music on the stand, then played an A so I could tune.

  Five years before, on a golden summer afternoon, Mrs. Gunning had ridden her horse across Cousin Chanler’s estate and through the fields to Rokeby to ask if I would be interested in taking violin lessons. She had three students for her new Suzuki group and could use a fourth.

  Now, I lifted the violin to my chin and nodded for Mrs. Gunning to begin the introduction to the first movement of the Vivaldi concerto. Within moments, I came in with a proud, unapologetic sound. I played with the passion of proving myself, each note clear and bright. I could not play softly, for fear of losing my audience’s attention.

  As I closed my eyes and imagined Mom sitting up in the balcony, listening with bated breath to my every note, I was suddenly distracted by an awareness of how people must see me. I felt exposed, as if all these people knew about Dad’s crazy ways, Mom’s depression, and Grandma’s drinking. Were they all feeling sorry for me? Were they judging me? I could feel their heavy stares weighing on my hands, my arms, my back.