The Astor Orphan

by Alexandra Aldrich

  Dad never brought home TV dinners in the summertime because Aunt Liz didn’t approve of them. This was probably because their name implied that one should watch TV while eating them. To Aunt Liz, anyone who watched TV—or chewed gum—was some sort of degenerate, and she would let them know it. “Chewing gum is for the lower classes and watching television rots the brain!”

  Needless to say, we did neither during the summer.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  REPOSSESSED

  Courtesy of the author

  I made many trips between my winter and summer rooms to carry down my books, music stand and sheet music, summer clothes, bathing suits, toothbrush, record player, and records. Among the recordings I couldn’t spend the summer without were David and Igor Oistrakh playing Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, the Beaux Arts Trio playing Beethoven’s Archduke, Stern playing the Beethoven and Brahms violin concertos, and Rudolph Serkin playing Beethoven’s Emperor piano concerto.

  Apart from what I’d carried downstairs, nothing in my summer room belonged to me. There was an elaborately engraved writing desk between the windows—from the era of inkwells and feather pens—that I wouldn’t dream of touching. Great-Grandma Margaret’s linens still occupied a closet to the right of the bed with a full-length mirror in its door and a brass key that was never to be removed from its lock. Between the fireplace and the door was a low, hard chair—on which I would never sit—with a very tall back and springs leaking out the bottom.

  OUR COUSINS FROM France had been at Rokeby for about a week when, on one of my trips to my third-floor bedroom—which boiled with heat and wasps—I instantly sensed something was wrong. I took a cursory inventory: all my big dolls were resting comfortably on their sofa. Even the antique Russian soldier was there. But I froze in my tracks when I noticed an empty space next to the sofa. Gone was my dollhouse with its furniture and inhabitants, my miniature family and home. The one thing I identified as mine alone.

  This was an act of war!

  Panicked like a mother whose child has gone missing, I started searching the third floor. Past the elevator; among the trunks packed with Great-Grandma Margaret’s undergarments; through the several storerooms stuffed with broken chairs and unusable, urine-stained horsehair mattresses.

  Nothing.

  Then down the steps. Past Aunt Liz’s room and the winding passageways. Onto the second-floor landing and past Aunt Alida’s portrait under the webbed skylight. Into Dad’s summer room, where the bed was piled high with newspapers. Into Great-Grandma Margaret’s chestnut-brown ghost of a room. Through the dressing room and around to Aunt Liz’s back door. Knock first. Poke your head in. Nobody and nothing but the pale yellow peeling walls and dusty bookshelves. Then into the little hall at the foot of the third-floor stairs again, and across to the room with the three little beds, where Anna slept.

  And there it was. Intact. “Oh, thank goodness!” I said aloud.

  Then the heavy heart and shortness of breath. You’ve been repossessed. No longer mine.

  AUNT LIZ TOOK my dollhouse and put it into Anna’s room,” I complained to Mom.

  She just shrugged her shoulders. “That dollhouse never belonged to you anyway. It’s the property of the house.” Mom felt she had no choice but to side with “the owners,” which to her meant Grandma Claire—who, in turn, never dared oppose her daughter.

  How could a house own property? And surely I had a long-term lease on it. It had been in my room all these years.

  “And what about my dolls’ furniture?” I asked.

  “The furniture goes with the house,” Mom informed me.

  When I told Grandma Claire about the dollhouse, she said, “You’re too old for dolls anyway. And your cousins don’t get to be at Rokeby very much.”

  In any conflict I might have had with my aunts or their children, Grandma Claire would always take their side over mine, and I was always outnumbered.

  “But she should have asked me at least,” I protested, still seeking validation.

  “She doesn’t have to ask you for permission. You are a child!”

  But wasn’t the point here that I was no longer a child? “But you just said I’m too old for dolls. . . . Anyway, it means a lot to me.” In fact, together with my violin and musical recordings, my dollhouse and dolls were my most prized possessions. They could take the big house and all its portraits, but leave me my dollhouse! But it had begun to sink in that mine was an army of one and that I had neither voice nor rights. I felt numb with resignation. One child, unskilled in the art of domination, untrained in the art of taking back what was hers.

  “Now, please!” Grandma Claire pleaded desperately, as if I were trying to force her to commit some unspeakable act.

  I would never get my dollhouse back. It would remain in their summer quarters until I’d lost the urge to play with it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  INDISPUTABLE

  © by China Jorrin

  Grandma Claire had sworn during her third pregnancy that if she gave birth to another boy, she’d take it down to the river and drown it. It was fortunate, then, that she gave birth to Aunt Liz.

  For a hundred years, Rokeby had been controlled by women. Like Victorian children, men in the family were expected to be seen but not heard.

  When Great-Grandma Margaret—at the advanced age of thirty-six—married Richard Aldrich, the New York Times music critic from Providence, Rhode Island, she did not move to live in her husband’s home. Contrary to convention, Great-Grandpa Richard moved to Rokeby and agreed to keep all the property—both Rokeby and Great-Grandma Margaret’s house on Manhattan’s West Seventy-fourth Street—in his wife’s name.

  She, of course, had chosen a spouse who was easy to dominate. Great-Grandpa Richard had a severe stammer and hardly spoke, so Margaret did the talking. She decided on the topics to be discussed. And they lived in her houses.

  Great-Grandpa Richard was busy writing musical criticism for the New York Times, anyway. The only rules he ever laid down were these: they were never to invite a musician to play or sing at their house in New York before he had written a criticism of their public performance that year, and Margaret could not influence his thinking by discussing a performance with him until after he had written the criticism.

  Great-Grandma Margaret never needed to banish her son, Dickie, as she had so many of her family members. Grandpa Dickie had been quiet, amicable, compliant. The drinking, in fact, would send him off to sleep. He was never a threat to her control of Rokeby.

  Likely because Great-Grandma Margaret had found it easier to deal with her son when he was sedated by alcohol, she failed—or refused—to see how sick he really was. Even as Grandpa Dickie’s face fell into his dinner plate, Great-Grandma Margaret continued to assert that there existed a strong no-drinking policy at Rokeby, ever since she had taken up the cause of temperance around the time of the First World War.

  “If the boys in the trenches can’t drink, then neither will we!” she’d say.

  Dad, on the other hand, did threaten Grandma Claire’s control of Rokeby. Unlike his male predecessors, he would not allow Rokeby’s matriarchs to cramp his style.

  ONE DAY IN July, I found Grandma facing the pump house, where Dad had been replacing the antiquated pump. “Get out!” Her voice cracked like a young adolescent boy’s, her engine in high gear. “Get off my property!”

  Several open beer bottles were scattered on the grass, a sure sign of the presence of “riffraff.” Grandma picked up a bottle and hurled it. Her movements were stiff and uncoordinated, like an insect’s, and she missed the pump house on her first throw.

  Dad was on the tractor on the other side of the pump house, pulling out a long pipe from inside the well. The roof had been temporarily removed.

  “I know you’re in there!” Grandma Claire struggled to make herself heard over the roar of Dad’s tractor engine as she threw one bottle after another at the pump house and at Giselle, who was evidently inside.

  Dad
was gunning the engine of his John Deere to drown out his mother. He backed down the hill, the end of the fifty-foot-long pipe tied to the tractor bucket, like an endless, shiny black esophagus being ripped from the deep throat of the well.

  “Go back to France, you harlot!”

  I needed some confirmation of the situation between Dad and Giselle. No one spoke to me about it, and I was too embarrassed to broach the subject with any of the adults at Rokeby.

  Along with their mother, Giselle’s children were constant visitors that summer. One day, when all the kids had been playing in Grandma’s backyard, I’d followed Patrice—at seven, Giselle’s oldest—to the swing set and positioned myself in front of her so she couldn’t swing.

  “Patrice?” I asked, impatient for the truth. “Have you ever seen Teddy and your mother kiss?”

  Patrice shook her unbrushed head of hair and avoided making eye contact with me. “Je ne comprends pas.”

  “You know, kiss?” I frantically made a kiss in the air. “My papa and your maman?” I pushed the tips of my index fingers together and twisted them around. “Kissing? On tractor? In barn?”

  “Non!” The little girl shook her head fervently, still not looking me in the eye. “Non,” she protested.

  As Patrice tried to get off the swing, I held the two chains. But just then Grandma Claire stepped out into the yard. “What’s going on over there? Alexandra, why are you harassing that poor child?” Apparently, the child of Grandma’s enemy was not her enemy.

  ONE MIDSUMMER’S NIGHT in the rosewood room, reading The Hobbit in bed and listening to my Great Performances recording of Isaac Stern, I got the confirmation I’d been craving.

  Stern was playing the Beethoven violin concerto. As the kettle drums boomed at the beginning of the first movement, I imagined the goblins riding through the forest, getting ever closer to the hobbits and their friends. When the solo violin entered, spiraling upward, I imagined the little hobbits themselves climbing up their treacherous mountain paths, trying to get to the ring before the goblins found them.

  I put my book down, but I couldn’t sleep at first. Here in my summer room I was often distracted by the menacing wooden canopy that hung over my bed. Its purchase on the wall was mysterious as it had no visible hooks or cables. The room’s two curtainless windows were gaping black holes that I always imagined might conceal someone peeking in from the muggy night.

  Once I’d finally managed to doze off, I was awakened by voices. I heard Dad in his summer room next door. And I heard a familiar lilting voice, soft and feminine. I thought I could recognize the jingling of bangles. I heard Giselle’s laughter.

  My eyes were wide open now. Their romantic relationship was indisputable.

  Dad had abandoned Mom and me. I thought of the way Dad’s own pop had abandoned him, Uncle Harry, Aunt Liz, and Grandma Claire by fading into alcoholic oblivion. Perhaps the cycle had begun long before that. Did Maddie Chanler feel abandoned by the death of her mother, Emily Astor Ward, and the banishment of her father, Sam Ward? And what about the orphans themselves, when they had been left parentless?

  In Giselle’s defense, it was obvious that she had found her soul mate in Dad. Neither was fond of bathing. Both came from money but chose to live and dress like beggars. Both did exactly what they wanted, without any regard for what anyone else had to say about it. And clearly, Giselle needed to be with Dad constantly and was willing to suffer greatly to that end.

  I didn’t know why Giselle was this way, but Dad’s defiance, lack of personal hygiene, and low self-esteem could be explained by the severe alcoholism of his parents. It explained why he let himself be the family’s whipping boy. It explained his dysfunctional love life. It was at the heart of the mess in both his bedroom and his barnyard.

  It is likely that Dad’s first attitude toward Giselle had been his typical one of indifference. He had never been known to tell anyone not to come around; in fact, I doubted if he was even capable of saying the word “no.” But when Dad saw the violent reaction Giselle’s presence incited, it seemed to have turned into a gratifying rebellion for him. Both of them thrived on being a notorious duo.

  I’D OCCASIONALLY CATCH Mom complaining to Dad about Giselle, telling him to send her home where she belonged. But Mom would stop talking about it whenever I appeared. Even Mom—queen of the inappropriate ejaculation—had a sense of propriety about this shameful subject. I was flattered by this rare effort to protect me.

  Mom—usually so confrontational—also appeared to be afraid of saying anything directly to Giselle. Perhaps the insult was too painful for her. Perhaps Mom was more sensitive than she let on.

  I wasn’t sure if Uncle Harry even knew about Giselle, so preoccupied was he with his work, and so oblivious to the details of Dad’s private life. Aunt Liz tried to get Giselle to leave by telling her sternly that she wasn’t welcome. But since Dad wouldn’t agree to force her out, Giselle seemed destined to become yet another item in Rokeby’s large collection that would remain there, unwanted, collecting dust.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ANIMAL WARS

  Courtesy of Charles Tanguy

  Dad kept his Rokeby dream alive, in part, by maintaining a semblance of the former farm. He grew corn and hay, he harvested and mowed the fields, and he kept farm animals: a pig, a horse, and two goats.

  Working within his limited resources, Dad had to be creative about keeping these animals. His giant pig, Egbert, ate the rancid pie dough discarded by the local pie factory. He lived in the old cement icehouse, which had been used to store ice cut from the frozen river before the advent of electric freezers. Dad almost never let the pig outside to eat. Instead he boarded up the large rectangular entrance to the icehouse with a slab of plywood, which he would slide open and reach around to drop in the pie crust. Whenever I asked Dad if I could get a peek at the pig, which had taken on legendary proportions in my mind, he’d respond, “If the board gets moved over too much, seeing the light might cause him to charge. And he is big!” Whenever I passed the icehouse, I’d imagine the mad, massive pig charging through its barricade, impaling me with its giant tusks.

  Dad had rescued his goats from a laboratory. The research they’d been subject to had left them with plastic intestines. Dad kept the goats in the yard of the milk house surrounded by a makeshift chicken-wire fence and fed them, among other things, aluminum foil from our TV dinners. “They’ll eat anything. Watch this!”

  It made Grandma furious that Dad kept goats when he couldn’t feed his own family.

  GRANDMA ALSO HATED that Dad kept a horse named Cricket—his favorite pet—and often threatened to euthanize the animal.

  She would rationalize: “You don’t feed that creature properly. That horse is all bones, half dead already.”

  To save Cricket from his mother, Dad secretly brought him to live in Cousin Chanler Chapman’s barns. As I got older, the horse began to take on a tragic aspect, banished as a proxy for Dad.

  Aunt Olivia, on the other hand, kept four horses in Rokeby’s stables. She gave horseback riding lessons in the lower field below the big house, where she would stand with her long black whip in the middle of the track created by the horses’ hooves and shout instructions to students in the ring around her. She was often dressed in beige riding britches and black riding boots.

  Aunt Olivia’s horses included a sixteen-year-old bay, a palomino, and two white ponies. The bay had dignitas. He was very tall, with a black mane and tail. Sometimes I would see him get into kicking fights with the palomino out in the pasture, and I’d wonder why Cricket couldn’t be out there with those horses, rather than penned up alone inside a dark stall all day.

  Sometimes, I’d go with Dad down to Cousin Chanler’s empty barn to feed the lonely horse. Cricket’s rarely brushed coat was usually caked with mud.

  “Good boy.” Dad would pull a soft dirty carrot out of his pants pocket and hold it out on his flattened palm, while Cricket’s fuzzy lips nipped at it, leaving a bit of drool on Da
d’s palm.

  ONE AUGUST EVENING, Dad entered our kitchen wearing—beneath the usual layer of motor oil, dust, and sweat—an unfamiliar pall. In his hair were stray pieces of hay, and his gray eyes had the cold, open stare of an Arctic wolf.

  “What did Grandma do with Cricket?” I knew only what anyone from the family would know: if Cricket was missing, the only explanation was that Grandma had made good on her threat to put the horse down.

  Dad bore down on me.

  “Where’s Cricket?”

  He expected me to give him a straight answer. But would he have given me a straight answer if I’d asked him about his relationship with Giselle?

  “I’m not sure,” I answered.

  Dad rushed off. His steady footfall, which usually thundered through the front hall, had been replaced by something faster and lighter.

  WHEN I WENT down to Grandma Claire’s for church the next morning, she was standing on the front stoop calling her white Labrador retriever.

  “Bi-aan-ca! Yoo-hoo! Here, girl . . .” She shook some dry dog food into a metal bowl. “Yoo-hoo. Bianca!” She whistled. “Oh, good morning, dear! Have you seen Bianca? It’s the strangest thing! I don’t know where she could have gone.”

  We both knew Bianca wasn’t capable of going far. She was very overweight because Grandma Claire fed her three times a day.

  Grandma Claire moaned plaintively.

  “Oh, dear me . . .”

  That Sunday afternoon, in the hot August sun, Mom and I took a walk on the dusty farm road to look for Bianca. Nature had grown still, as if holding its breath. The fields were brown with dead grass.