The Astor Orphan

by Alexandra Aldrich

  And for the first time during a performance, I lost my self-confidence. My teeth clenched, my left hand balled up, my chin rest jabbed into my neck, my bow hand trembled. My sound became squeezed, my bowing unsteady, my fingers slippery with cold sweat. In that moment, the whole terrible shame of my life at Rokeby seemed on display, and I began to worry that I would drop my violin.

  After the recital, over refreshments, I could hear Grandma Claire—who obviously hadn’t noticed the change in my tone and confidence during my performance—proudly responding to people’s comments and questions. She could pass for sober now.

  “Well, yes, I am very proud of my granddaughter. She certainly doesn’t get it from me. . . . Oh, why I know she’s talented! But what is it they say about genius? Ninety percent perspiration? My granddaughter is entirely self-motivated, you know. No one ever has to tell her to practice!

  “You know, her great-grandfather, Richard Aldrich, was the music critic for the New York Times from 1902 to 1923. He was the closest musical relative.”

  Everything proceeded as it always did. But a seed of something ugly had been planted.

  PART IV

  ALL IN A SUMMER’S PLUNDER

  Courtesy of the Margaret Livingston Aldrich Papers

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  A PARALLEL UNIVERSE

  Courtesy of the Margaret Livingston Aldrich Papers

  With the arrival of summer came the fun that was so lacking the rest of the year. It was the only season when the big house felt lived in, as cousins and family friends would come to stay.

  Rokeby in the summertime was the ideal place for children, with its expansive lawns and many dusty and uninhabited rooms to poke around in. We’d have picnics by the river at Astor Point and take afternoon swims at our cousin’s private pool.

  MO-OM, CAN WE go swimming now?” Maggie and Diana begged Aunt Olivia.

  “Ugh!” Aunt Olivia had learned to moan and groan like Grandma Claire. “Oh, awll-right. Just go wait in the car.”

  “Yeah!” We all cheered, then poured like a flood out of the house, down the back steps, and into Aunt Olivia’s black Jeep Wagoneer.

  We rolled down all the windows, placed our towels on the hot vinyl seats to protect the backs of our thighs from burning, and left the doors open.

  “Mo-om! Can you come now?” Maggie shouted up to the kitchen window.

  “Awl-right! Just wait a minute, will you? . . . Damn children,” we heard her mutter.

  We waited another fifteen minutes. I told Maggie to honk the horn. She honked.

  “Awl-right!” Like a peeved hornet, Aunt Olivia shouted out the kitchen window. “If you’re going to be so rude, we won’t go!”

  None of us believed her. We sat there for another five minutes, sweating and fanning ourselves with our hands.

  “I’m going to die of heatstroke, damn it!”

  “When are we going?”

  I told Maggie to call her mother again. She called up.

  Then Ben, Aunt Olivia’s teenage son from her first marriage, who was just home from boarding school, ran down the back stairs. He was tall, wiry, and shirtless. His chest was concave, as if a meteor had landed there, or as if he were slowly imploding. Ben was the only boy at Rokeby.

  “Oh, no! Ben’s coming!”

  “Ben, you can only come along if you don’t play shark attack!” Maggie ordered.

  “I’m scared of shark attack,” Diana whimpered.

  Ben forced us to shove over in the backseat.

  “It’s too hot!”

  “I feel sticky!”

  Ben drilled Diana in the arm with his knuckle. She screamed, then cried.

  Finally Aunt Olivia came, huffing and moaning, down the stairs. She had on a one-piece bathing suit with skinny shoulder straps, a frilly skirt printed with a jungle of vivid flowers, and a sun visor. She was carrying a canvas bag on her shoulder.

  “Okay. Is everybody ready?”

  “We’ve been ready for an hour!” Maggie rolled her eyes.

  “Don’t you be fresh with me, young lady! Why’s Diana crying?”

  “Ben punched her for no reason at all!” Maggie tattled.

  “Ugh . . . ,” Aunt Olivia moaned as she heaved herself into the driver’s seat.

  Once we reached the neighboring estate, Aunt Olivia let us ride the rest of the way on the open tailgate.

  This had been the estate of Great-Grandma Margaret’s sister Aunt Elizabeth Chapman, subject of the famous John Singer Sargent portrait. Aunt Elizabeth had married John Jay Chapman, the famous man of letters who was descended from John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States and one of the nation’s founding fathers.

  Whenever the question of mental illness in the family arose it was the Chapmans who came to mind. John Jay Chapman was subject to frequent bouts of both serious depression and irrational, impulsive behavior.

  Aunt Elizabeth and John Jay Chapman’s son, Chanler Chapman, who now lived on his mother’s estate, was also known to have episodes. Once he was arrested and placed in an asylum for shooting up a local tavern. And on the morning after his mother’s death, he reportedly came over to Rokeby with a shotgun to see his aunt Margaret. He found Great-Grandma Margaret having breakfast in bed, and, without explanation, aimed the gun right at her. At this, she nonchalantly continued chewing; smiled her squinty, condescending smile; and calmly pushed aside the barrel of his gun.

  COUSIN CHANLER CHAPMAN’S pool was a rectangle of blue in a lonely, prickly brown field, and he sat beside it in a portable lawn chair, Jamaican home attendant at his side. He was an eighty-year-old Scottish terrier of a man, with fuzzy salt-and-pepper hair and bristly whiskers. A Polaroid camera hung on a string against his sparse gray chest hair, as he was always hoping to catch some shots for his private gazette, the Barrytown Explorer.

  Cousin Chanler had started the Barrytown Explorer, a newspaper substantially about himself, in 1948. It mainly chronicled his thoughts and deeds but occasionally featured articles about people in the local community. As Cousin Chanler’s newspaper was paid for exclusively with his own private funds, he could afford to write whatever he wished. And this had been his general philosophy of life: to say, write, and do anything he damn well pleased.

  Like Dad, Cousin Chanler had created his own universe. Yet as he had been the sole heir of Aunt Elizabeth’s estate, he had no vigilant co-owners to thwart his autonomy.

  Our posse now approached like a wolf pack in our beautiful bathing suits—mine was white with green leaves interspersed with stunningly red ladybugs—our towels over our shoulders, threatening to create a ruckus of splashing and screaming.

  Since he’d become old and infirm, Cousin Chanler had been living in the red ranch house on his estate, while his mother’s mansion remained uninhabited. Only once, before he moved out of it, had I seen the mansion’s four square rooms on the ground floor, with their handsome French doors; twenty-foot-high ceilings; gigantic, threadbare Oriental rugs; and ornate marble mantelpieces. While it was small in comparison to Rokeby, it was cozier.

  Cousin Chanler now started to pull himself up on his walker to properly greet our posse. We were frequently reminded to be polite or we wouldn’t be allowed to come swim there anymore. During our patient ritual of shaking hands and repeating our names, he grunted approval with a wet streak of drool in the crack of each corner of his mouth. By the time we had thrown down our towels and were running for the water like animals fleeing a forest fire, he had the boxy camera pressed against his focused journalist’s eye.

  Within minutes, we were all screaming in terror of the “shark” in the pool. Ben’s idea of fun was to swim under us, grab us by the legs, and pull us down. We screamed, swallowed the chlorinated water, and struggled to the surface to catch our breath, panicked as much by our unfazed chaperones as by Ben’s strong hands.

  Since Ben’s teasing ruined my plan to swim laps, I climbed out to practice my back dives off the diving board instead.

  I got onto the board
and stood with my arched back to the pool, gripping the edge of the diving board with my toes and letting my heels hang over. I held my arms up straight with my fingers together and bounced slightly. Then, like melting wax, my head and back collapsed backward. My hands entered the water first, without a splash. They were followed by my arms, head, torso, legs, and finally, my perfectly pointed toes, like a dagger silently entering into flesh.

  “Fine form, whatever your name is!” Cousin Chanler shouted at me when I resurfaced. “Whose daughter are you?”

  “Teddy’s,” I answered from the water. I knew to be wary of this grumpy old man.

  “That old son of a bitch Teddy? Has a pretty daughter, does he? Do you read Shakespeare, Teddy’s daughter?”

  Saul Bellow had once rented the apartment in Cousin Chanler’s coach house. Bellow reportedly had been so affected by this cranky character that he’d modeled Eugene Henderson in Henderson the Rain King after him.

  “No, not really,” I answered, slightly ashamed of myself.

  “What do you mean, no? Didn’t Aunt Margaret ever read Shakespeare to you?”

  “I never knew my great-grandmother.”

  “No, no. Course you didn’t, course not! Damn foolish question! A shame Ophelia couldn’t swim as well as you!”

  A few years earlier, Cousin Chanler had paid Dad to go to Florence and rescue Sty, his son, from the flea-ridden storefront where he’d been slowly dying of alcoholism and malnutrition amidst piles of newspapers and dog excrement.

  “Once Sty had sat down in the plane, he got into the hooch and went absolutely haywire.” Dad loved to repeat the story. “He upset a cart of drinks and started screaming obscenities at one of the stewardesses and throwing bottles around inside the plane. The stewards got all the other passengers out of our part of the plane and approached us with CO2 fire extinguishers. The plan was to freeze us with the CO2, grab us, tie us up, throw us into the bathrooms, lock the doors, and head for the nearest airport. I had to placate the captain with the lie that this man was my patient, and he would die if he were treated that way.”

  When Sty first arrived back in the States, he was unsteady on his feet and shuffled obsequiously through our apartment door, his long, spidery fingers resting on his bloated abdomen. His frizzy grayish-brown hair had grown into an afro, and he wore a simpering, vacant grin. Ever since then, Sty would call us—the tolerant relatives who were his only connection with the outside world—on a daily basis, drunk and in need of someone to vent to about his “son-of-a-bitch father.”

  After an hour of swimming, we all piled into the backseat of the Jeep, where we sat on our damp towels.

  “I s’pose I am feeding everybody today,” Aunt Olivia mumbled to herself. “Claire’s been sucking on the bottle lately and is in no condition. . . .” The expression sounded so crass: “sucking on the bottle.” It made Grandma Claire sound like a drunk passed out in the gutter.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  AN IMPORTED ORDER

  Courtesy of the Margaret Livingston Aldrich Papers

  In early summer, Grandma Claire would start frantically preparing the house for her daughter’s annual visit from Paris. We would begin our cleaning with the formal guest rooms on the second-floor landing.

  “Ugh! Oh damn it all! This, ugh, damn mop!” Grandma Claire had fallen into her usual frenzy. In Paris, Aunt Liz and her husband, Uncle Alessio, lived in style, with a Mercedes sports car and au pairs for their daughters. Grandma’s fear of comparison between their comfortable accommodations in Paris and the tattered state of things back home made her panic. She needed things to look as they once had, but the pressure to transform Rokeby overnight was overwhelming.

  “Ugh, dear me!” Grandma now moaned, her buckets overflowing with cleaning fluids and her mop. As she heaved her weight up each dirty step leading to the second-floor landing, the mop’s stick would knock into her fluffy hair. Two new pillows, still wrapped in plastic, were under her arm, and a fan hung off her fingers. “Here, Alexandra. Can you relieve me of some of these?” Her glasses kept slipping down her sweaty nose, and their lenses were steamed up. “Oh, these damned steps! How can anyone live in this godforsaken house?”

  As she spoke, Grandma didn’t look at me once. Clearly her thoughts were not on the present but on a dreaded possible future: I am a source of disappointment and shame to my daughter. Liz will be displeased. I must transform this house.

  Aunt Liz was the only one from the younger generations who had really gotten away. She had married an Italian architect who wore ironed slacks, polo shirts, loafers, and Swiss watches, and smelled of cologne. Whenever Uncle Alessio walked, loose change would jingle in his front pockets, while the wallet in his back pocket would form a square outline. None of the other men I knew ever carried change and a wallet, wore a watch, or smelled of cologne.

  They had two daughters. Anna was six and Judy was a toddler.

  Grandma and I dispelled the stillness of the front rooms by opening all the windows and setting fans whirring on the sills. We made the beds with sheets newly purchased from Caldor and took Great-Grandma Margaret’s moth-eaten bedspreads out of the linen closet. We put soap and toilet paper in the summer bathrooms. Then I swept the white stairs and front hall and oiled the parquet. I enjoyed watching the oil transform the dusty, worn wood into something shiny and new.

  When summer began and the third floor became unbearably hot, Dad and I would move into our “summer rooms”—which were among the formal front guest rooms off the second-floor landing. Mom chose not to move down to the second floor for the summer, perhaps savoring her privacy.

  Each of the four front guest rooms had a name. My summer room was known as the “rosewood room.” Where the building had settled, there were rips in its beige wallpaper. The paper was covered with the motif of a pheasant whose small head and condescending eyes faced a highly dignified woodpecker on another branch. The woodpecker’s crest of feathers fluffed around its neck like the fashionable collar of a proper nineteenth-century gentleman.

  Dad’s summer room was still known as “T’Amey’s room,” although Aunt Amey Aldrich—Great-Grandma Margaret’s sister-in-law—had long been dead. The room always looked as though it had been ransacked, with Dad’s clothes, books, and newspapers strewn about the bed and floor.

  We called a third room “Grandma Aldrich’s room,” as it was where Great-Grandma Margaret once slept. With a stubbornness that matched her spirit, the room had remained unchanged since her day. The bed, the table at the foot of the bed, and the large framed mirror were all matching pieces of the same set: light chestnut, trimmed in a darker brown. I was sure I never wanted to recline in this bed and see my lounging reflection in the tall standing mirror directly opposite. The floorboards, partially covered by a moth-eaten green rug, were faded from the sunlight that constantly streamed in from the east. As there were no objects on any of the room’s surfaces, aside from two table lamps, it was clear that no one lived in this hollow ghost of a room. I often imagined my great-grandmother in her old age, sitting upright against the high headboard of her bed, white with age in her cotton nightdress, her tight jaw snapping like an alligator’s as she ate her breakfast.

  DAD’S LATEST BOARDER, Walter, had been given notice that the guest rooms would be off-limits during the summer months. After his alleged grave-robbing career in Mexico, Walter purchased an abandoned and decrepit mansion down the road from Rokeby, perhaps in the hopes of one day joining the ranks of the Hudson River aristocracy. He was to live with us while he worked on renovating this new house of his, but it seemed to me that he was always at Rokeby and never working on his renovations. What Dad found most entertaining about Walter was that his history was opaque. Dad liked to joke that Walter had several pseudonyms because he was running from the law.

  Walter was one of the few men whom Grandma Claire did not see as a potential danger to her granddaughters. “He’s one of those, you know . . . homos!” she tried to explain to us.

  Walter
had never said he was gay. People assumed he was because he spoke in a mock British accent and brushed back his naturally greasy hair so that it appeared to have been gelled, with a bump waving out to each side. He would slide like a shadow through the halls and stairwells, descending the stairs or slipping through doorways silently.

  We knew about “homos” from one of Grandma’s stories, about the “Barrytown Boys,” who were a gay couple who lived down the road. They were, in Grandma’s words, “perfectly nice, even if they were—you know . . . homos . . . ,” so she had invited them to a long-ago Rokeby picnic. Everyone was out on the western lawn when Grandma suddenly noticed activity on the roof of the big house. “It was little Teddy leading those homos around on a tour of the roof!” At that point, Grandma almost fainted with fright at what they might have done with her son up in the tower.

  But now it was the 1980s, and although there was no need to worry about Walter molesting us, she perceived another threat.

  In Grandma Claire’s defense, this was when HIV was still first being discovered and very little was known about how it was spread. During our big cleanup that year, Grandma pinned a sign on the guest room where Walter had been staying for the past few months. It read: KEEP OUT. AIDS!

  She then proceeded to spray all the rooms and bathrooms with Lysol.

  Aunt Liz brought with her the kind of rules and structure I craved. Her children had bedtimes, bath times, and mealtimes—during which she and Uncle Alessio enforced table manners: no elbows on the table, no talking with your mouth full, no using your fingers to pick apart food.

  Though Aunt Liz’s family shared our kitchen, I remained on the margins of this temporary, imported order. Their food would be stored neatly on one untouchable shelf of the fridge, in the midst of our scant supplies. At mealtimes, Aunt Liz would parcel out very precise portions: half a hot dog, half a slice of bread, a glass of orange Tang or Ovaltine, two baby carrots. I would go to the fridge during my cousins’ feeding time and grab a cold leftover chicken leg or a piece of Wonder bread and sit on the periphery of their ordered meal.