The Astor Orphan

by Alexandra Aldrich

  Mom—veiled by her damp hair—was pretending not to care, pretending to be asleep, or indifferent enough to fall asleep. Pretending that Dad had never uprooted her from her mountain village in the Polish Carpathians and transplanted her here in the first place. Pretending not to hear her sister-in-law as she passed with her menagerie of horses and goats in tow, dressed in her expensive, stiff black riding boots and skintight beige riding breeches. Pretending to have forgotten the storm.

  If she were asleep, she wouldn’t have to acknowledge anything that had happened here.

  Uncle Harry’s green Pinto appeared over the final rise of the carriage drive. The car sped toward the house trailed by a cloud of dust, then pulled up in front of the house. Uncle Harry slammed his car door, briefcase in hand and dressed in his usual suit and tie.

  A second car followed. Two men got out.

  Uncle Harry approached them with a toothy smile and gave each one a firm handshake. “Welcome to Rokeby, home to Livingstons, Astors, Chanlers, and Aldriches!”

  Dad slid out from under the car he was working on. Today, the name tag on his used blue worker’s shirt read ANGEL.

  “Hello,” he said from his prostrate position on the gravel. “You must be the fellas from New York magazine.”

  “My brother, Teddy.” Uncle Harry waved a hand in Dad’s direction. “We’d better get started, as I know we are only one of several Hudson River families you will be visiting today.”

  We had all been warned that New York magazine would be doing an article about the descendants of the Hudson River aristocracy who still resided on the original estates. Mom was not to be sunbathing on the front steps, Dad’s friends were to be out of sight, and Dad was to be cleaned up.

  I leaned my bike against the porch wall and followed Uncle Harry and the two men into the house. Mom slipped away, as she had not been invited to participate in the article. Uncle Harry had made it very clear that only the direct descendants of General Armstrong were of interest.

  “General John Armstrong, the house’s original builder, can be seen in this portrait over here.” Uncle Harry had stepped into his role as the family historian. “In addition to his propitious marriage into New York’s aristocratic Livingston family—his marriage to Alida Livingston provided him with more than seven hundred acres of land on both sides of the Hudson River—Armstrong had an extensive political career, serving as U.S. minister to France from 1804 to 1810, and then as secretary of war in Madison’s cabinet, which was his position when the War of 1812 broke out with England. He was eventually blamed for the burning of Washington and lost his job. That was the last position he held in government. When he left France, he returned with several merino sheep, a personal gift from Napoléon, for his new homestead in upstate New York. Thus the estate’s original name, ‘La Bergerie.’ It was later renamed ‘Rokeby’ by his wife, Alida Livingston Armstrong, after the eponymous poem by Sir Walter Scott.”

  The photographer seemed enchanted by the crystal ball seated at the foot of the solid mahogany banister, whose dusty balusters dangled beneath like spiders’ legs.

  “Hey, Dad,” I called. He was standing in the front doorway. “Tell them about how you almost killed the maid with the crystal ball!” I wanted the reporters to get a balanced picture.

  “Oh, well, I doubt that’s the kind of story these gentlemen are looking for.” Dad’s eyes shone mischievously as both our visitors hungrily insisted on hearing the story. “Okay then. One day, when I was about four, a lady employed by my grandmother to clean the house told me what a good boy I was. This was a dreadful mistake, as I felt compelled to prove her wrong. I thought I’d pretend to hit her over the head from behind with the crystal ball while she was on her hands and knees scrubbing these front stairs. I figured I could raise it over my head and begin to aim it at hers, but it was so heavy that I was unable to stop its descent at the last minute as I’d planned. The ball hit her head. I’d only managed to soften the impact. She made a horrible groaning sound. I had inadvertently knocked her unconscious! Needless to say, she never returned to work for my grandmother.”

  “Yes, well . . .” Uncle Harry snorted. After hinting that Dad should probably go tidy up for the photographs, Uncle Harry led the men into the reception room.

  The reception room was the most formal of the front rooms. It had a set of very uncomfortable armchairs and a sofa, all with scratchy wool upholstery, unyielding stuffing, extremely straight backs, and shallow seats, arranged around a white marble mantelpiece under a mirror that extended to the ceiling. Maybe these seats had been custom-made to mold to the bodies of the early inhabitants, who perhaps had short torsos, or perhaps the ladies, in their tight nineteenth-century corsets, only sat on the edges of these seats anyway, as they sipped their tea or listened to each other read the latest Dickens installment.

  One of the reporters tried to play the grossly out-of-tune upright piano. It reportedly had been part of John Jacob Astor’s original instrument inventory—he had made his fortune on musical instruments as well as furs. The piano now produced a tinny twang like a starving cat. An eighteenth-century wooden flute rested on top of the dying piano. A pianoforte in similar condition occupied the other corner. In front of the French door was a white marble statue of a floating cherub, resting on a wobbly wooden stand.

  “This woman looks familiar,” the photographer said of a white bust balanced on the radiator.

  “Julia Ward Howe—the famous nineteenth-century activist and intellectual who wrote the words to ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’—was the great-aunt of the Astor orphans,” Uncle Harry began, “and sister of ‘Uncle Sam’ Ward. Following Aunt Julia’s example, my grandmother Margaret Chanler Aldrich had rolled up her shirtsleeves to do charitable work and fight for social and political reform—as befitted a young aristocrat of infinite wealth and energy. Grandma Margaret taught reading and writing to freedmen and -women as a volunteer at the Tuskegee Institute, under the auspices of Booker T. Washington—whom she later invited to lunch at Rokeby.

  “During the Spanish-American War, Grandma Margaret joined the Red Cross as a nurse’s aide and paid to have a hospital built in Puerto Rico in 1898 for soldiers wounded in the fighting in Cuba.”

  Uncle Harry’s lecture was interrupted by a crashing sound, then Mom’s voice projecting from the pantry door under the front stairs. “The icebox is empty, so you’ll have to eat shit for dinner if you can’t dig up any cash!” Cursing in English gave Mom a sense of power.

  “Why don’t you come out and speak to the reporters,” we heard Dad say, knowing full well that the last thing Mom wanted was to speak to them.

  “I don’t give a damn who’s here! Let them put in their article that we have a mansion full of marvelous antiques but nothing to eat!”

  It was at times like this that I wished Mom was as skilled at pretending as I was.

  Luckily, just then, Aunt Olivia bustled in, wearing Great-Grandma Margaret’s black gown for the photo shoot. The dress fitted her buxom body better than it had Diana’s. It featured lace frills along the waist, sleeves, and hem, and was lifted aloft by many rustling petticoats. Maggie and Diana, dressed in torn jeans and T-shirts, appeared in her wake.

  “The Armstrongs’ daughter, Margaret, married William Backhouse Astor Sr., the son of the first John Jacob Astor. J. J. Astor soon bought out Armstrong’s shares of the estate for a reported fifty thousand dollars.” Uncle Harry slipped in a last essential morsel before his wife took the stage.

  “Where do you want me?” Aunt Olivia asked loudly. “We’re doing this in the library, aren’t we?”

  Aunt Olivia knew how to carry on like a movie star, with her face expertly made up—subdued but elegant—and her dark brown hair pulled up into a tight bun on the top of her head. Pearls dangled from her ears and encircled her neck. Although she wasn’t a descendant of the Armstrongs, Aunt Olivia had ancestors among America’s great railroad tycoons and bankers illustrious enough to earn her the right to participate in t
he article.

  She passed under the overlarge portrait of Great-Grandma Margaret as a young lady, dressed in the same dress. Great-Grandma Margaret would never have allowed Aunt Olivia, a divorcee, in the big house.

  For the first photo, the photographer wanted us to pose in the octagonal library. Dad and I were arranged on a chair and sofa in front of a shelf displaying a photograph of Teddy Roosevelt, as well as a bust of a Roman senator, a piece of brocade from China’s Imperial Palace and a lamp with its tattered shade askew. I wished I could somehow distract the lens away from Dad’s wrinkled jacket and the residue of dirt on his hands and face and under his fingernails.

  Next, Dad and Uncle Harry were asked to pose for a modern-day family portrait with the younger generation on the sprawling western lawn. This was where Victorian children used to play tag while guests lounged in wicker chairs, smoking cigars, talking politics, and watching the sun set behind the distant, blue Catskill Mountains.

  “Yes, we do plan to keep the property in the family.” We children answered the reporters’ questions.

  “No, we don’t see ghosts.”

  “No, we never met our great-grandmother.”

  The photographer placed me in the middle of the front row between my younger cousins, Maggie and Diana. I was holding a bouquet of purple wildflowers, slouching into myself, wearing my usual squinty smile, passive and benign. I was dressed in a plaid wool skirt, with varying shades of gray and maroon, which clashed grossly with my turquoise terry-cloth top, my pink elastic belt decorated with strawberries, and my pink hair band. Maggie’s jeans were torn at the knees.

  But this was just the kind of shabby detail that the author of the article wanted to stress. Here were the survivors, mismatched and impoverished, of an obsolete aristocracy, still clinging to the worn elegance of a bygone era.

  “What does it feel like to be aristocrats?” the reporter asked.

  “Um . . . interesting.”

  “This must be an amazing place to grow up!” he said, marveling.

  “Yes . . .”

  “Okay, I guess . . .”

  “Why yes,” Uncle Harry chimed in. “Rokeby is a children’s paradise!”

  PART V

  OTHER EXILES

  Courtesy of Ania Aldrich

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  HOME AND AWAY

  Courtesy of Sarah Stitham

  If the barn fire at first seemed to have consumed the summer’s drama, it turned out to make way for a much grimmer time than any that had come before.

  That fall, even the bright oranges, yellows, and reds of the autumn leaves seemed the result of a nasty chemical experiment rather than a natural turning of the seasons.

  With Giselle’s departure, Grandma’s ferocity faded, as did her sense of purpose. Robbed of those brave, violent encounters with Giselle, she spent her lonely afternoons binge-drinking in her bathroom or bedroom. By the time I got home from school, she’d be passed out on the bed.

  I still preferred the environment of Grandma’s house, with its TV and junk food, to that of the big empty house and its rusty, vacant fridge.

  On a cool October afternoon, I made my solitary way from the school bus stop to Grandma’s house. The air was eerily calm.

  I walked into the atrium and dropped my school bag on the salmon-colored tiles. The living room was unusually dark, its reading lamp off and its wooden blinds closed.

  Assuming that Grandma Claire was sleeping something off, I made a beeline for the fridge. I took a chocolate pudding from the door shelf, turned the oven on to preheat for two squares of frozen pizza, grabbed a spoon from the dish rack, and headed for the TV at the far end of the living room.

  Before I could settle into my after-school soap-opera-watching stupor, I heard the storm door slam. Mom burst in, her face full of panic and fury.

  “Grandma Claire’s in the ICU with alcohol poisoning. . . . The ambulance came. . . . She was throwing up blood. . . . Looked like shit! Almost died right here in the house.”

  Crisis made Mom manic. She spent a lot of time envisioning disasters, end-of-the-world scenarios. For her, each crisis was like a little messiah, lifting her out of her own trapped existence and into the heat of someone else’s moment.

  She marched over to turn off the TV. “I know you’d rather sit here and eat Claire’s junk food!” Mom didn’t understand that I needed to spend my afternoons here at Grandma’s, that it felt more like a home than the big house. “She might not make it in the hospital,” Mom added. She hadn’t looked at me once with her tiny, squinting eyes, whose angry expression was accentuated by her blue eyebrows.

  I tried to picture it—vomiting blood. Throwing up was disgusting enough, but blood? It sounded as if she’d been shot. My muscles tightened.

  “What can you expect, when a person abuses their body that way?”

  I doubted that Grandma Claire wanted her life to be saved.

  “Let’s go. You’re coming with me. . . .” She grabbed the pudding container out of my hand. “What’s that cooking smell? You’re just like your father, with a taste for American junk food. And let the dog out, so it doesn’t piss in the house.” Mom was already rushing out the door with near-deadly force.

  There had never been an exact moment when I suddenly understood that Grandma Claire was a drunk. I had been very lightly aware of it from watching Aunt Olivia’s son Ben empty bottles of Jim Beam and Jack Daniel’s down Grandma’s drains, from hearing Aunt Olivia’s mocking remarks about Grandma’s “sucking on the bottle,” and from the scent of liquor and mouthwash on Grandma’s breath. My awareness, like a cake in the making, had grown gradually richer with each additional layer.

  Not wanting to let that day’s events interfere with their plans, Mom and Dad were going to a dinner party.

  “Hi, A-lex-an-dra.” My half–Puerto Rican cousin Veronique greeted me from our apartment’s doorway. She was here to stay with me while my parents were out. Veronique was Cousin Chanler’s twenty-year-old granddaughter. Her mother was Puerto Rican, so even though Veronique had a wide mouth and dimples, like me, her lips were much more voluptuous.

  “Hi,” I grumbled, uncomfortable around her positive energy. It was hard not to like her, though, with her lovely cocoa skin and soft-looking, fluffy afro tied back with a kerchief.

  “Don’t worry,” she whispered, and winked. “Your grandmother is a tough lady. . . . Hey, can we go exploring through the house?”

  “It’s cold everywhere.” I felt little excitement about roaming around the house. I was irritable with worry about Grandma Claire. She was so thin and fragile, so desperate to fix her family and yet so destructive. “We’ll have to wear our coats. Most of the house is like a refrigerator.”

  We walked out into the third-floor hallway. It was lit by a single bare bulb.

  “Where does this lead?” She pointed to a door.

  “There’s an old-fashioned elevator behind there.”

  “It’s too bad you can’t use it all the time, instead of walking up and down three flights of stairs every day.”

  “There are a lot of neat things in this house that we’re not allowed to use. . . . Be careful!” I warned, as she opened the door to the empty elevator shaft, a dark void.

  Standing on its precipice, Veronique started to pull on one of the frayed ropes dangling at the side of the doorway. At first, it was resistant and needed tugging. Then it started to slide quickly through her hands, threatening rope burn, whirring loudly as it sped along. Soon, the top of a wooden box appeared from below, then more of it, until a tiny room with a wooden bench against the back wall stood before us. It was the first time I’d ever seen the inside of the elevator.

  Veronique sat beside me, still holding the rope, which had a locking mechanism so that we wouldn’t go flying as soon as we sat down. Then she started tugging on the rope for us to move; we surged upward with each pull.

  The elevator soon stopped. “We’ve hit the top,” Veronique said. It was pitch-black.

>   “Where are we exactly?” I asked, disoriented.

  “We’re at the edge of the house.”

  “What are we doing?”

  “Just sit still and feel the energy of this space. It’s so quiet. I’m sure your great-grandmama never came to this part of the house. The house ghosts don’t roam here.”

  “How do you know?”

  Veronique’s brother had been killed in a motorcycle accident a few years earlier, at the age of seventeen. As one of the only black kids in the local school, he had been very badly treated by his peers and had turned to drugs and risky behavior.

  “Because ghosts revisit spaces they used in their lifetimes, spaces that had meaning for them. It is not logical for a ghost to explore new spaces. It is dead. It is not motivated by curiosity or desire for new experiences.”

  I didn’t like novel experiences either.

  “I guess that makes sense.” In fact nothing was making sense to me.

  My feet were cold in my Polish slippers, and I hadn’t brought gloves; sitting on my hands on the hard wooden bench of the elevator didn’t help. And I didn’t want to tell her that I tended to get claustrophobic. So, with my body tense from cold and the discomfort of being in a tight, pitch-black space, I kept still.

  “I think you’ve had a rough go of it.”

  “No, it’s not so bad.” I despised being pitied. But in truth, I was miserable. The only person I could rely on to take care of me had nearly died that day.

  In fact I had more in common with Veronique than I did with most people. She understood how difficult it was to be raised by people who inherited property without money, and who themselves were raised in privilege. Both Dad and Veronique’s grandfather Cousin Chanler had caught the tail end of the old glory days. They had watched as their parents and grandparents had thrown dinner parties, gone to clubs, traveled the world. So although they both got the requisite Ivy League education, they never learned any professional skills. And of course they each had too strong a sense of entitlement to do a single job day after day and take orders from others. While they believed they were independent and could do whatever they wanted, they didn’t inherit the money to support that attitude. Veronique and I would have to learn how to make it like regular people. But how could we be normal when we had no normal role models?