The Astor Orphan

by Alexandra Aldrich

  “He’s upstairs, getting changed. We’re . . . going . . . out.” Here was Mom, on the other side of the cultural barricade, enunciating English for the foreigner and being the mistress of the house, belonging to a place. The position of authority, however, was fleeting, because Giselle was gone in a flash, and we could hear her steps, as a lighter echo of Dad’s, padding up the front stairs.

  As soon as we heard the two sets of footsteps descend together, Mom and I headed out onto the front porch.

  “Teddy!” Giselle’s voice was now shrill and heated. “You said you’d come to the baptism! I told you it was today!” I was feeling a bit guilty, as the godmother, although it was obviously not my attendance Giselle was worrying about.

  “I’m sorry.” Dad’s tone was now insincere, as if he were speaking to a distant acquaintance. He walked across the driveway toward Mom’s red VW Bug. “I forgot.”

  “Oooh . . . ,” she whined, heated with agitation. “Teddy, how could you do this?!”

  Mom followed Dad with the confidence of legitimacy in her step, her black purse dancing neatly off her hip, so light in comparison with Giselle’s load. I hopped into the backseat, content that it was Giselle, and not I, who was being left out.

  Giselle ran to stand between Dad and the car. “How could you be so cold?” she pleaded. “For baby Jean!”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, assenting. “I’ll be there.” And he brushed by her and the baby. Had he looked at the infant even once?

  Mom reacted from the passenger seat. “Why are you lying? You are not leaving the lunch early!” Then she smacked him on the side of the head with the back of her hand, in her usual way. “Son of a bitch!” It was clear that her anger at Dad far outweighed any negativity she might have been feeling toward Giselle.

  “But it’s in fifteen minute!” The usually sweet bells of Giselle’s voice were clanging discordantly, as the red VW Bug pulled away with our threesome, uncharacteristically united, inside. As we left Giselle and her bundle in a cloud of dust, she trotted after us, the sack of baby now screeching, bouncing up and down.

  “Teddy! Don’t forget! C’est ton fils! Teddy! Teddy! Do you promise, Teddy?”

  “Sorry, sorry!” Mom said sarcastically.

  I felt sad for my father. Though he’d finally gotten the son he had dreamed of, he had not acknowledged his paternity. His long-awaited heir would remain unclaimed.

  We parked at the end of a long line of cars in the Simmonses’ driveway. As we crossed the wooden bridge that led to the front door, with the sound of the water rushing over the falls close by, Mom gave Dad one last jab in the side before putting on a friendly face.

  “Ala!” Our hostess floated down the S-shaped stairway onto the entrance landing, with her skinny arms outstretched inside their gauzy sleeves. “It’s so lovely to see you again!” Her voice was a soft wind, her phrases little gusts of airiness. She had wine on her breath.

  Mom put on her demure, dimpled smile as she received Mrs. Simmons’s kiss. “And Teddy . . .” Her voice was now like dry leaves crinkling under leisurely feet. “It’s so wonderful to see you again. . . . Come and cool off with a drink.”

  Upstairs was the dining room with the balcony overlooking the sofas and grand piano below, where our student recitals took place. Various guests now stood around holding cocktails. It was quite an intellectual crowd; several professors from the local college were talking about books. I was used to such conversations and knew all these people well. I put on my intellectual façade.

  “How are you, Alexandra?” I exchanged kisses and handshakes with several of the guests. “Been reading anything interesting lately?”

  “I’m reading Tender Is the Night,” I bragged. “I’m struck by Fitzgerald’s beautiful writing style. I find it quite disturbing though.”

  “Yes, well . . . the incest, of course. Quite right.”

  We made our way to the dining room and Mrs. Simmons told us where to sit. “Teddy, I have you between David and Sam,” said the wispy voice. Mrs. Simmons always seated Dad where his natural ability to converse would be put to best use. “And Ala next to me . . .” She was at one head, and her husband was at the far end against the glass sliding doors that exited onto a triangular balcony overlooking the stream.

  Mr. Simmons was a minister. He stood, head bowed, hands resting on the back of his chair. It was strange to see him without his minister’s collar. “Almighty Lord, we thank you for the food you have put before us, and for our beloved families and friends. Amen.”

  “Amen,” we responded in unison. Then chairs scraped the floor as we all took our seats.

  As the stream roared outside, the conversation circulated as lazily as the ceiling fans overhead. Beads of perspiration hung on foreheads. Wineglasses kissed lips, which were then wiped with napkins lifted from laps. Everyone smiled politely and laughed with control when a joke was told.

  Dad was now telling the story of how he and his friends had gone on an archaeological expedition on the neighboring Delano estate when he was twelve.

  “There was a rumor going around that slaves had been buried in a field directly south of our place, on our cousin’s property, near a patch of trees in the middle of a field where there was a rock pile. My father had identified that spot as the likely location for slave burials. And so, together with the usual suspects, we decided to mount an archaeological expedition, to see if we could uncover these tombs. We thought that in the interest of science, we would not tell our cousin that we were doing this, because the scientific project was too important to be stopped by a mere landowner. So we marched over there, and we set up our camp—like any good colonial-era archaeological expedition—with a flag and tents and all that kind of stuff, and we started digging. We didn’t find anything, but we dug some test holes, and we laid out our trenches in good style, figured out what we wanted to do, and then we decided we’d had enough for that day, so we camped out. Then, later on that night, my father came over and woke us up. It seemed that the superintendent over there had spotted us and turned us in to his boss. She wanted to know why we were there, and what was going on, so this caused a lot of trouble. She didn’t know about the slave-bone project. So we had to withdraw; we could not proceed with the digging. And we never did find out if there were slaves buried there or not. We were hoping for jewelry, possibly gold teeth, whatever else might have been buried with them, like chains and pendants.”

  I suddenly noticed one of the other guests freeze as his eyes locked on something outside. I followed his gaze.

  It was Giselle.

  She was trying to walk quickly but gingerly down the path, so as not to trip on the stones with her bundle in her arms. She stopped about twenty feet from the glass doors behind Father Simmons and squinted into the dining room. Father Simmons’s body was blocking her from most guests’ view; their powers of observation had probably been dulled by the alcohol anyway.

  Giselle’s eyes met mine. She waved.

  Facing the house’s southern windows, Mrs. Simmons, whose sentences were growing increasingly drawn out, and whose breezy voice was more whistly and hissy with each glass of wine, suddenly opened her eyes wide with surprise. She waved her arm in a spastic gesticulation, as if to signal, All eyes on me, please!

  “Excuse me, everyone.” She lifted her glass as she tried to maintain composure. “I would like to make a toast. To family, and children!”

  “Hear, hear! To family and children!”

  “Now, who would like dessert? Um . . . yes. Let’s see. . . . There’s orange sorbet. . . . Teddy, I know you dislike fruity foods, so I also have vanilla ice cream. Oh! And fudge sauce, and whipped cream, just for you! In fact, Teddy . . . I could use your help in the kitchen.”

  Within minutes, I heard the front door creak open and closed. Then the figure outside retreated from view.

  After the baptism, Giselle returned to her family in France with the baby. But she would pop in unexpectedly from time to time, with no regard for the live
s of the people at Rokeby. Now she had the excuse she needed to come there.

  “Aside from her claim, there’s no indication whatsoever that the child is Teddy’s.”

  This remained the party line.

  PART VI

  IN SEARCH OF SELF

  Courtesy of Charles Tanguy

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  BLENDING IN

  Courtesy of Ania Aldrich

  It was the first day of seventh grade.

  Boys were playing kickball on the blacktop of the schoolyard, while girls were gathered in groups against the school building. I stood on the margin of one well-formed group of girls.

  All these girls had new hairdos, feathered and layered, while only I still had the apparently unfashionable style: the long straight hair down my back, held by a barrette to each side of my middle part.

  Nobody acknowledged me. Like the runt of the litter, I was unable to squeeze into the huddle the girls formed with their backs turned outward. Although fitting in was never something that came naturally to me, I tried to laugh along at all the jokes.

  They, of course, all knew that I’d always been a proud nonconformist—a dirty word in their book. It was blatantly insincere of me to be sheepishly trying to blend in now, when I’d always been at the very top of my class and self-assured about standing out.

  But I’d lost that assurance. I had lost Grandma Claire to both alcohol and the more worthy half of the family. I had lost my younger cousins as housemates. I had lost my bohemian refuge. I felt I had nowhere to go except straight into that huddle.

  I WAS DRAWN TO a boy named Arthur, who had failed seventh grade, listened to heavy metal music, and often got into trouble at recess, for which he would be forced to stand against the wall as punishment.

  But it was his suffering to which I was most drawn. His mother had recently died of cancer. Heartened by my spiritual, almost angelic role, I looked him up in the student directory and gave him a call.

  “Aren’t you the chick with the fiddle?” he asked.

  “Well, technically it’s a violin. . . .” I felt myself grow nervous about running out of things to say. “I just wanted to tell you that you can call me whenever you need someone to talk to.”

  “Yeah, maybe . . . Hey, what’s it to you anyways?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re okay. But you know . . . you’re not really my type. You’re . . . smart. You know?” It was true that I rarely spoke to kids who weren’t part of the school’s honors program. “Like, you have that long straight hair, and you wear skirts. But you’re kinda cute. . . .” His voice changed when he said this. Lower. “Maybe we could meet at Rocky’s sometime.” I panicked. Rocky’s was the local roller-skating rink where junior high school kids hung out on Friday nights. I never went there.

  “Yeah!” I didn’t feel I could say no, since I was the one who’d called him.

  “Hey, what’s your phone number? Maybe I’ll give you a call soon.”

  I suddenly felt that I was not my type.

  Arthur agreed to “go out” with me only if I got my hair cut and styled. And he told me he was going to call me “Alex.” These requests didn’t seem excessive to me at the time. All he wanted me to do was step into an identity that was recognizable by contemporary standards. It was what I longed to do anyway.

  I asked Christa, the girl who sat next to me at choir practice, for some advice about the best place to go to get my hair styled. Christa was popular, and her hair was, of course, feathered.

  “Regis, at the mall,” she whispered, and smiled. “Ask for Heather.” She winked.

  I thought about how I would look with feathers running diagonally along each side of my head. In truth, I preferred straight hair. I’d been raised to believe that worrying about one’s appearance was bourgeois. And no one from my family needed to prove their worth by the way they dressed. We were above that.

  At the same time, I was desperate to fit in, desperate for a friend, and even more desperate to escape myself. So I asked Grandma Claire to drop me off at the mall with some money, explaining that it was urgent for my social survival.

  The salon smelled of sulfur.

  “Are you sure you want to cut off all this gorgeous, thick hair?” the hairdresser asked when I told her to feather my hair.

  As she clipped, I recalled how Mom used to make me a French braid, how it pinched my scalp when she pulled my hair tightly away from my face, exposing my forehead and making me look sophisticated, adult, and European.

  When I returned to school the next day with my feathered hair, all blow-dried and sprayed, girls came up to me in the schoolyard, like pigeons to a crumb, smiling and telling me how “gorgeous” I looked. They touched my hair’s fine feathers, crisp with hair spray.

  “Do you have a comb?” One of the girls touched my butt. “Oh, no! When you have feathered hair, you just have to keep a comb in your back pocket! And what about mascara?”

  I quickly learned to dab foundation out of its frosted glass bottle into the palm of my hand and spread it evenly over my face with my index finger: under my eyes to cover up the dark circles, over my bony cheekbones, into the crevices between my nose and cheeks, under my nose, on my forehead, between my eyebrows. And I learned to coat my eyelashes, top and bottom, with charcoal-black Maybelline mascara, draw a black line under each of my eyes, and powder my eyelids blue and silver. It was like fairy dust: instant beauty.

  Grandma gave me money for black Capezio dance shoes and prewashed, skintight Guess jeans, with cropped ankles so narrow that it was a struggle to fit my feet through. I loved how tight jeans transformed me from a scrawny, insubstantial girl into someone with shape and weight.

  ROCKY’S SMELLED OF polyurethane. Its atrium was dark, with multicolored disco lights scattering along the walls and floor in purples, blues, yellows, oranges, reds, as if they were little bugs also on roller skates.

  Arthur and I ordered our skates.

  We rolled out onto the crowded, polished floor, where the disco light scattered more color bugs. Since we were “going out,” we held hands as we slipped between couples, single skaters, and groups three and four people wide. Whenever we rolled around the bend, crossing right foot over left, it was difficult not to trip.

  “You wanna go in the corner?” Arthur asked. I didn’t say no, because a date at Rocky’s had a protocol. This much I knew. We pulled into a private enclave, where there was a bench to rest on. We sat.

  When Arthur put his hand on my shoulder and his face up to mine, the image of a pregnant Giselle suddenly flitted through my mind, and I withdrew from him in horror.

  “You wanna skate some more?” I asked.

  The roller skates were heavy, clunking as they hit the floor, wheels still spinning when, with each step, they were lifted into the air.

  “Watch this.” Arthur suddenly took off, speed skating. Crouched low, bent forward, he zipped inside the ring of skaters. In half a minute, he was back next to me. I smiled indulgently, maternally.

  Grandma picked us up at nine thirty. As she drove along the unlit back road, with the two of us in the backseat, I felt embarrassed. Did she know we were holding hands, despite the near-total darkness?

  GRANDMA CLAIRE REACTED to the changes in me with suspicion. She would look disapprovingly over her horn-rimmed glasses at my tight jeans and low-cut, V-neck shirts, then purse her lips and lower her eyes. Perhaps she forgot that she had been the one to buy my new clothes.

  “It’s obvious from your clothes and cosmetics that you are boy-crazy.” This was all she needed to say. To her, boys were depraved, and being called boy-crazy was tantamount to being called a harlot. Giselle and I were now the same in Grandma Claire’s book. Just as Dad wore shirts with mismatched name tags, I had been assigned my own inaccurate label.

  LOVE AND SEXUALITY had long been controversial in our family.

  Uncle Lewis Chanler carried on an affair with Julie Benkard for many years, until his wife, Alice (Chamberlain),
finally agreed to grant him a divorce. It was his eventual marriage to his longtime mistress that was the cause of Uncle Lewis’s banishment from Rokeby, as Great-Grandma Margaret disapproved of “plural marriage.”

  Then there was Uncle Bob’s infamous marriage to Lina (Natalina) Cavalieri, the famous Italian soprano. When he asked her to marry him, she reportedly stated, “Mr. Chanler is very nice, very kind, very good. . . . He is very rich, too, and that is a nice thing.” The Chanlers were horrified by the idea of Bob’s marrying Lina, a lower-class Roman who used to dance naked at a club in Paris. None of them attended the wedding on June 18, 1910.

  The story appeared in the papers that three days before they married, Lina demanded that Uncle Bob sign a prenuptial agreement in the presence of a lawyer and a notary, which would transfer all his money to her to manage for him. (What he had was in trust, providing him with an annual income of thirty thousand dollars.) After their wedding, Lina decided to give him a weekly allowance of twenty dollars, at the same time that reports started to surface that Lina was seen frequently in the presence of Russian prince Paul Dolgorouki. Lina finally agreed to have the prenup nullified on condition that Uncle Bob pay her eighty thousand dollars—which he had to mortgage his New York property to get—and grant her a divorce.

  When his Chanler siblings learned how Uncle Bob had been duped, they stopped speaking to him. The only one who would communicate with him was Uncle Archie, who, after his escape from Bloomingdale Insane Asylum eight years earlier, could not resist teasing his brother. In response to Uncle Bob’s having once called Uncle Archie “loony,” Uncle Archie wrote, in a letter to his brother, the words “Who’s loony now?” This soon became the catchphrase of the decade.

  Uncle Archie’s love life was fraught with controversy as well. Twelve years earlier, he had fallen in love with the beautiful Amelie Rives, a writer from an old Virginia family. When it was discovered that she had based the male character in her shockingly sexy novel The Quick or the Dead? on Archie, the Chanlers were horrified. Archie invited none of them to the wedding. It was not long afterward that Archie’s brother Wintie had Archie locked up in Bloomingdale, barring his access to his own money and property.