The Astor Orphan

by Alexandra Aldrich

  I could, however, imagine a different life. I’d thought so much about what I called “my New York City plan” that I almost believed it was about to happen.

  I would be living in the city with a rich, childless aunt who would pay for my private school education and violin lessons at Juilliard. She would have a brownstone like the one Great-Grandma Margaret used to own. I would have a small room, with heat in the winter and lots of privacy, where I could do my homework and practice my violin undisturbed.

  The only problem with this plan was that all my relatives had been accounted for.

  When Grandma Claire finally came home after a week in the hospital, her face looked plumper and had its color back. Her eyes gleamed when she smiled. There were no more visible stress lines around her eyes and mouth, which previously had appeared so devastated by exhaustion and toxicity.

  “I’m going away again for a few weeks, dear,” Grandma told me. “Your uncle is sending me out to a resting place in Minnesota.”

  I knew Minnesota was a state, but I thought of soda.

  I thought of the way Grandma Claire’s facial skin looked like caked baking soda. Though she powdered it every morning with a powder puff, she missed crucial spots such as the middle of her cheek to her ear, or the tip of her nose. And I thought of the soda fountain at the old-fashioned diner and ice cream parlor in town where Grandma would take us kids. We would sit in the deep, highly varnished mahogany booth and eat grilled cheese sandwiches with ketchup. For dessert, Grandma would order a vanilla ice cream float with root beer. I never liked drinking soda because the fizz would hurt my tongue.

  The news of Grandma’s departure burned me in a similar way.

  “Why?” I whined. Of course I understood. “Can I come?”

  She had gone away before, each return beginning with hopeful expectations. I remembered one golden autumn day at Edgehill in Rhode Island, where we’d dropped her off. There had been a chill in the air. My heart sank as Dad’s car pulled away from Grandma, who waved to us. Her silhouette and long shadow as she stood in the middle of the driveway are in my memory still. I continued to wave through the car’s back window until her silhouette disappeared completely from view. I don’t know if I saw a tear roll down her face, but I wanted to remember her lonely figure with that tear.

  “No, dear. It’s not for families.” Her long fingers rested on her knee and tapped in a semiconscious, gentle tic—from guilt and embarrassment, I knew. “Grandma has a problem and needs to get well.”

  I preferred Grandma’s version, which omitted the gore. Still, I couldn’t get the thought of that bloody vomit out of my mind. I thought I could detect hints of its acrid smell in the house. She probably had been unable to lift her frail, six-foot frame out of the recliner and gotten some on her clothes. Had she passed out? Mom had forgotten to tell me.

  “I’m going to return these to the library tomorrow. I checked them out for you before I went away.” She handed me The Life of Paganini and “something on the Dreyfus affair, to supplement your social studies unit. . . . Of course I could renew them for another two weeks, if you don’t end up devouring them by tomorrow. . . .” She pursed her lips. “Meanwhile, how ’bout a game of Scrabble?”

  So much a child herself! Maybe she had made herself sick with alcohol because she, like me, hadn’t really had a childhood. Maybe the alcohol took her back to it, or helped her forget it.

  Dad seemed to view alcoholism as a family tradition. That evening, he reminisced about his pop’s alcoholism and the many rehabs he had visited: the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut; Austen Riggs in Stockbridge, Massachusetts; and Stony Lodge in Ossining.

  “At Stony Lodge, they took the patients on tours of the neighboring maximum-security prison, where they would show them the electric chair. My father was a total failure in that place, and they kicked him out eventually. He always told them that he wanted to be an alcoholic. And that really cut the ground out from under his psychiatrists. Maybe Pop’s drinking had something to do with the fact that my grandmother had never allowed alcohol into the house. So Pop went to the other extreme, I guess. . . .

  “Pop would get so drunk! When it came time for me to graduate from high school in 1958, my mother snuck out of our New York apartment early in the morning while Pop was still sleeping something off and locked up all his clothes so he wouldn’t be able to come later, as he would inevitably be too drunk to attend the graduation. So when he did wake up, he borrowed clothes from our elderly neighbor, Captain Barlow—of the British army and the Bermuda line—which were several sizes too big. Then he caught a flight up to Boston from LaGuardia, then another to Lawrence, and a cab to my boarding school. He arrived well before my mother, who was driving up. He had already gotten into the sauce on the plane, so the assistant headmaster, who was a close family friend, kindly locked him in his office until the graduation was over. You know, the odd thing is that my mother only started drinking after Pop died of it.”

  WHEN GRANDMA CLAIRE returned from rehab in early December, I felt hopeful for a changed life, hopeful that in her new sobriety, Grandma would assert some parental authority and establish order. I even became chatty and affectionate with her again. The usual current of rage and betrayal that her drinking triggered in me had stilled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  MIGRATIONS

  Courtesy of Ralph Gabriner

  Boxes of books suddenly appeared in the third-floor hallway outside our apartment. There were so many of them that we could hardly pass. Old Cousin Chanler had just died. His death had left Dad with quite a funeral story, and Uncle Harry with additional archives for his Rokeby collection.

  Mom had been ordered to vacate the billiard room—which had served as her bedroom for many years—to make space for these new Chapman archives. Dad and I would be moving into two of the old storage rooms, which Dad would renovate, to make space for Mom.

  “Your uncle wants to keep history about that branch of the family away from strangers,” Mom joked, seemingly unperturbed that she’d been displaced.

  I WENT DOWN TO Maggie and Diana’s part of the house, as usual, to borrow some of their domestic stability. I found them in the middle room, reading together in their father’s leather recliner.

  I picked up an old Talbots catalog that was hanging out of their magazine rack. “Let’s look at Talbots. Shove over.” I squeezed into the recliner next to my cousins and opened the catalog.

  “I call her,” I said as I pointed at the model I wanted to be. She was, of course, the most glamorous one on the page.

  “Not fair,” Maggie complained. “How come you always get to be the prettiest?”

  “Because I’m the oldest, and I know the most.”

  “I call her, then.” Maggie was always the red ribbon behind my blue. And Diana happily accepted third place.

  “And she is Anna.” We assigned an older model to our absent cousin Anna, who was overseas and had no say in the matter.

  Suddenly, a burst of agitation came from their kitchen. Aunt Olivia was crying, and Uncle Harry’s voice was growing louder.

  Then both grown-ups rushed through the middle room, Aunt Olivia scurrying on her husband’s heels.

  “How could this have happened on a school trip?” my aunt sniffled, holding a napkin next to her nose.

  Uncle Harry, wearing his official-business face, said nothing.

  They blustered quickly down to my parents’ kitchen, from which came more moaning and caterwauling. Then Uncle Harry spoke, sounding like Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg address.

  “. . . might be the greatest tragedy this generation has endured . . .”

  We rushed to the top of the staircase that curled down to the old pantry outside my parents’ kitchen so we could eavesdrop.

  Behind us hung Uncle Bob’s sinister painting of Death, on a canvas about ten by fifteen feet. In it, a skeleton played the flute to the marching of pilgrims up the mountains of their respective religions. In the dim light, t
he whole canvas looked totally black.

  We tried to make out the phrases between Aunt Olivia’s sobs.

  “. . . on a ski trip . . . neck’s broken . . . may never walk again . . .”

  “It’s Ben,” Maggie whispered, wide-eyed, violently gnawing on her thumbnail.

  Diana whimpered. “Ben’s going to die. . . .”

  “Where is Ben now?” We could hear Dad ask.

  “Mass General,” Uncle Harry answered. “We’re going to drive up to Boston tonight. . . . The girls can stay at Mommy’s house. But just for tonight, so as not to alarm her this late, they’ll have to stay with you on the third floor.”

  “Let’s go back up to the middle room before they find us here,” I suggested. We quickly reopened the Talbots catalog as if we hadn’t heard a word. Except that Diana was now moaning.

  The air was tinged with the excitement of a big event, as it must have been when the ambulance had come to rescue Grandma Claire from her bloody vomit.

  Later that evening, Diana came up to our apartment in her pajamas, dragging along a torn mini patchwork quilt that she called her “little blankie.” She didn’t speak, but rather stared at all of us: Mom, Dad, Maggie, and me, sitting in a row on the green leather sofa.

  My parents had never hosted Maggie and Diana before. The only time my cousins ever came up to our apartment was to play with dolls in my room. I believed that their parents didn’t think our apartment was a suitable environment for their children. They were the respectable family. Thus, I would eat with Aunt Olivia and Uncle Harry and go on trips with them, but their girls never ate with us or accompanied us to the movies or the A & P.

  Diana’s face wrinkled up as she started to cry.

  “What does the kid want now?” Dad asked nobody in particular.

  The next day, Maggie and Diana settled in at Grandma Claire’s house. Maggie slept on the rock-hard horsehair mattress in the peach-colored guest room. Diana slept on the daybed in the long front room. We all lived in a mood of frozen dread, not knowing how long Aunt Olivia would remain with Ben in Boston, how long Maggie and Diana would remain at Grandma Claire’s, or when to expect Grandma Claire’s next relapse.

  I only caught snippets of information about the accident. From what I gathered, Ben had been skiing when he broke his neck. Now he was paralyzed from the waist down. What made him a quadriplegic was the fact that, as Uncle Harry explained it, he also had lost all fine motor function in his hands. None of us had been permitted to go up to see him, but I imagined him broken and stretched out in traction on a hospital bed, wrapped, mummylike, in bandages.

  Shortly after Ben’s accident, Aunt Olivia decided to buy Cousin Chanler’s red ranch house, which would be easier for Ben to navigate in his wheelchair, and which had been subdivided from the rest of the Chapman estate after Chanler’s death. They would move in when Ben returned from the hospital. In the meantime, Uncle Harry was always at work, Aunt Olivia was living in Boston with Ben, and Maggie and Diana were staying at Grandma Claire’s. This left Uncle Harry’s part of the big house empty, with the feeling of a place that had been abruptly evacuated.

  It was now Uncle Harry’s family that had become fragmented. This would have been the perfect moment for my family to move into the spacious back of the house. What stopped us from claiming it, now that Uncle Harry and Aunt Olivia were away and planning to move to Cousin Chanler’s old house for good?

  Fear and indebtedness stopped us. Uncle Harry had always had more de facto rights and authority than his older brother. And while, in some ways, Dad was a rebel, he was terrified of Uncle Harry and would never openly defy him.

  I knew that if I suggested moving to Mom, she’d echo Grandma Claire: “What do you have against your aunt and uncle that you want to steal their space away from them? Can’t you be just a little bit grateful for all they’ve given you?”

  We would never ask for more.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  PRACTICALLY ORPHANS

  Courtesy of Ania Aldrich

  By late December, I was walking between the big house and Grandma Claire’s at least once a day, in search of warmth, food, and company. Like a Gypsy, I’d carry my luggage with me—violin, homework, music stand, and clothes—with the expectation of sleeping over. Each time I was sure that I’d find peace and productivity in the warm, familial environment of Grandma’s house. Each time I was disappointed.

  I redoubled my efforts to enforce order. With Maggie and Diana’s parents away, I armed myself with an agenda for my young protégés. I had Diana, a first-year Suzuki violin student with Mrs. Gunning, on a strict practice schedule: twenty minutes per day.

  “Okay. Let’s get the violins out.” Diana and I would open our violin cases on the cast-iron guest bed. “First we do what?”

  “Tighten the bow.”

  “Good.” Each of us would turn the small, metal screwlike part at the bottom of the “frog,” or base of the bow, to tighten the horsetail hairs.

  “Now what?”

  Diana shrugged, her lips pursed, her eyes looking down at the floor, reminding me of my “conferences” with Aunt Olivia, but with a different cast and story line.

  “We have to rosin the bow.” As we rubbed the horsehair over the hard, amber-colored rosin, it squeaked and sent dust flying.

  I enjoyed being the teacher.

  “Okay, now let’s tune.”

  “I can’t tune myself.”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll do it for you, but you do need to learn how.” I would try to move the sticky black tuning pegs on her tiny quarter-size violin. “Okay, let’s go over ‘Lightly Row.’ First play it for me.”

  She would scratch it out, plunking her fingers down mechanically. I’d roll my eyes. “This sounds bad. Try not to press the bow so much against the string. And relax your hand.”

  She would try again. Her half brother was half dead, her parents were away, and her overbearing older cousin was forcing her to relax her muscles for a less pressed sound. She did not relax.

  Diana had kept quiet throughout this ordeal with Ben, though I imagined that she felt trapped at Grandma Claire’s. Her soft skin had become blemished and oily, as had her hair, which appeared to go unwashed for weeks at a time. She had black owl eyes with swollen circles around them. Yet I envied the fact that she could show her sorrow. Unlike me, she apparently did not feel the need to maintain a façade of nonchalance.

  Maggie suffered too, and again, not in silence. She would howl in her bed every night, knowing that she couldn’t go home to her parents. Maggie cried easily; she would even bawl freely at sad movies. I envied her ability to cry out loud, unembarrassed. But most of all, I envied the attention Grandma Claire lavished on both of them. I understood even then that the ease with which they showed their feelings came from an innate sense of security, an earned faith that their pain wouldn’t be ignored by the grown-ups in their lives.

  “No. Listen as I play it. Then try to imitate. Imitation is the basis of the Suzuki method.”

  She tried again. More scratch. This time she missed some notes. I felt myself tense up. Lenience, encouragement, and patience were eluding me.

  “No. Check the notes. You’re doing it wrong.” As her sound and intonation deteriorated, I swirled into a rage. “Why can’t you get it right?”

  I was angry at my mother for never supervising my violin practice, at my father for ruining our nuclear family, at Aunt Olivia for mocking me, at Aunt Liz for taking my dollhouse and making me feel I had no part of Rokeby, at Uncle Harry for humiliating Dad, and at Grandma Claire for choosing the bottle over me.

  Small, obedient Diana was the only person I could safely abuse with my fury, and as I yelled at her, it grew.

  “No! No! No!” I hurled my own violin bow across the guest room. Diana’s face wrinkled up, and she ran out of the room. When I went to retrieve my bow I saw that I had chipped the wooden tip.

  “What have you done to her?” Grandma Claire rushed out of her kitchen, gritting her tee
th and glaring at me like a wild dog, certain that I was bullying “this poor child,” who was “practically an orphan.”

  If anything, sobriety, grim and real, had made Grandma Claire meaner and edgier. The clouds in her eyes had dissipated.

  “Leave this house at once! I won’t have you torturing your poor cousins. You know they have nowhere else to go!”

  Every time Grandma Claire turned on me, I’d trust her a little less. Didn’t she understand that I too was a child? And yet, what I resented most as I was getting kicked out of Grandma’s house again was the way she had undermined my authority as a teacher and parental figure.

  I grabbed my reversible blue/red puffy down vest. Banished, I wandered out into the blue wintry dusk, toward the ice-encrusted field north of the farm road.

  They’d be sorry if I died.

  I stumbled over the frosty surface of the snow. As my feet broke through the crust again and again, the powder underneath drifted into my shoes and chilled me with the cold and wet.

  My eyes burned, but I could not cry.

  The first time I ran away from home, I was three. I had just been punished by Mom for pushing the cork inside her treasured brown-glass bottle—rendering it unusable. She grabbed a leather belt and folded it. “You want the belt?” she asked me in Polish. Then she snapped it under my nose with a loud crack. “You smell the belt?” At which point I took off like a jackrabbit through our attic apartment. Although she chased me—over beds, under tables, around chairs—she couldn’t catch me before I escaped into the cavernous halls and stairwells that lay like their own wintry landscape outside the walls of our apartment. Later, when things had settled down and while she was taking a bath, I furtively packed some things into my shiny, round aquamarine suitcase, put on my pink satin nightgown and slippers, and walked out into the snow. When I found Dad at Sonny’s house, I asked him to call our friends the Johnsons to see if they would foster me for a while.