The Astor Orphan

by Alexandra Aldrich

  WHILE MY “RELATIONSHIP” with Arthur soon came to an end, my standardized beauty improved my social standing, until I came up against Colleen O’Shea.

  One afternoon, I was staying after school with a new friend to watch a basketball game, when Colleen, who was a year or two older than I was, approached us in the hall. She was accompanied by two sidekicks.

  “Stay away from Jimmy, you bitch!” Colleen ordered.

  “Jimmy who?” I asked.

  Her thick black eyeliner made her blue eyes look aglow and demonic. “You know. And if you even look at him, I’ll kill you!”

  I felt flattered for a moment that she saw me as a romantic rival, and I laughed lightly.

  But then one of the other girls, whose mouth was too small to hold all her teeth, lumbered over to me. She pushed her face into mine. “You think I can’t kick the shit outta ya?”

  I attempted to move away from this girl, as I sensed that with her, confrontation of any kind would get physical.

  “Hey! You listen to me when I’m talkin’ to you!” She grabbed me by the back of my baggy Esprit sweater, to keep me from running. “You will learn to listen.” She then began to spin me around while she stood in place and turned. I circled around her, facing outward, scurrying on my tippy-toes to avoid slipping in my Capezios. She spun faster and faster, as if we were doing a bit of ballet.

  The other two were hooting. “Way to go, Joyce! Little rich bitch ain’t gonna stand up to you!”

  Then, as suddenly as she’d begun, Joyce let go. My knees hit the tiles as I fell.

  “Get off your knees! You’re pathetic!” And as they walked off, their cackling echoed through the empty after-school halls.

  The next day, the furious threesome—who looked like a heavy metal version of Charlie’s Angels, with their feathered hair flying outward like wings—blocked my passage through the school hall.

  “Slut!” Colleen cried like a crazed witch as she shoved me into a locker.

  “What did I do to you?” I asked, shaken. Was I a slut for having briefly dated one boy?

  The bullying quickly became a routine. Just the thought of going to school would make my muscles tense, my breathing shallow, my step unbalanced, my thinking frenetic and scattered. So I tried to stay home from school as often as I could without Grandma or Mom noticing.

  Clothes were now strewn all over my new bedroom floor, which still smelled of the polyurethane Dad had used when he renovated it. Like Dad, I’d stopped picking things up. What was the point of keeping my things tidy when nothing here belonged to me? I would probably be moving again, and things could be taken away at someone else’s whim.

  Formerly, the safety and order of school had balanced out the dark squalor of home. But the more I stayed home from school to feel safe, the more the squalor of Rokeby overran the walls even of the private world I had previously worked so tirelessly to construct.

  It was midwinter and the cast-iron radiator was always cold. Only Dad knew the secrets of our antiquated heating system, and he was usually nowhere to be found. Day after day, I tripped over mountains of detritus in my room as I’d retreat to my bed. I’d crawl under my electric blanket with a box of chocolate-covered cherries, which I would eat one after the other, cracking the hard shells with my teeth and letting the sweet liquid, slow with sugar, leak down my throat. As I’d finish the box, I’d be filled with a warmth.

  This must have been how Grandpa Dickie felt in the final decade of his life, how Mom felt most days, and how Grandma Claire felt on vodka-soaked afternoons.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  INTERVIEWED

  Courtesy of Ania Aldrich

  There was more and more casual mention of my going away to school, until one day it became a serious prospect. “I think you’re good and ready to consider going away. I’ll help you make a list of boarding schools,” Grandma offered.

  “But what about the money, Grandma?”

  “First, get accepted. Boarding schools are very selective these days. Then we’ll worry about the tuition.”

  “Even if you do get into one of those fancy schools, who do you think is going to pay the tuition?” Mom asked when I told her of my plan. “And you’re not going to get in with the grades you’ve been getting lately! If you do get in, it’ll be because of family connections.”

  I PRACTICED FOR MY boarding school interviews in front of a full-length mirror, like a con artist working on my story. It drifted farther from the truth with each embellishment.

  I wanted to convince the admissions officers that I was an intellectual.

  “I know that my grades have dropped somewhat this year, but I’m sure they’ll improve once I’m in a more academic environment,” I told the mirror. “I’m a big reader.”

  I sat with my legs crossed, my elbow on my knee, and my chin resting on my knuckles, the way the genteel, literary guests at the Simmonses’ lunch parties would sit when they’d speak about books they were reading or writing.

  Despite my significant academic decline in the past year, I still held on to the myth of my perfection. This was why I had chosen to apply to the most elite boarding schools—Exeter, Andover, Groton. I had only one “backup school”—the Brooks School, which happened to be Dad’s alma mater. I believed that the admissions officers would see through my low grades. They would surely recognize what an accomplished person I had been, and could be again with the right support.

  “I’ve begun to read Eastern European literature.” I had recently picked up a copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short stories off a night table in one of the guest rooms. There was something bizarrely familiar to me about life in the Jewish shtetls of Poland as Singer represented it. The yeshiva boy—pure, aloof and studious, proper and modest—had joined the Chinese conservatory student as part of my ideal of a sheltered, disciplined life focused around the spiritual pursuits of study and prayer.

  “My roots are Eastern European, you know. Oh . . . you thought I was all-American? That’s only on my father’s side. I grew up on an old Hudson River estate, in an eccentric family of Astor descendants who are obsessed with their heritage. My home is a mansion that was built in the early nineteenth century but is now in considerable disrepair. People tell me that it’s every child’s dream to grow up in such a ‘paradise,’ with such an interesting family, but I actually feel closer to my Polish/Russian heritage on my mother’s side. I plan to return to Poland someday. . . .

  “I also write. I’ve kept diaries for years. And I write stories and poems. . . . People often tell me I should write the story of my family’s more recent history. What’s so interesting about it, you ask? Although my family is directly descended from American aristocracy, my parents are rather . . . bohemian.”

  Reconsidering, I decided not to admit the truth about my bohemian identity to these preppy schools. I should, rather, hide the lack of middle-class order and rules, the decrepit vehicles, the inability to match clothes, the countless skinny-dipping parties, the pageants full of creative hippies dancing through the fields in costumes and carrying fruit- and vegetable-shaped pieces of cardboard, or banners that would stream through the wind. All of this was surely a liability.

  I decided I should not appear too desperate for normalcy by mentioning that I had always wished I could have grown up in a three-bedroom ranch house with employed parents, siblings, cable TV, and functional cars. I still wished to convey a conservative, respectable, self-disciplined image.

  My elementary school years had definitely been my best. But I couldn’t very well write in my application about the story I wrote in first grade about an elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus, and how impressed my teacher was by the fact I could spell these words. Nor did I tell about how I’d learned to write perfect cursive in third grade, or how I wrote as neatly and correctly as my teacher by fourth, or how I got 100s on all my long-division tests.

  I did decide to mention fifth grade, my most successful year: how I won the school talent show with the Vival
di violin concerto and a first-prize medal from the Daughters of the American Revolution for my paper on Fritz Kreisler.

  “I’m an accomplished violinist. I’m working on the Bruch violin concerto and Bach’s Partita Number One. . . .”

  I thought guiltily about how my lessons had been going with my new violin teacher, Ms. Crowley, on to whom I had graduated after eight years with Mrs. Gunning.

  Half of the time Ms. Crowley had to remind me to stop staring at my made-up face in the mirror. I had not been practicing my very challenging repertoire nearly enough. A perfectionist, she would have been the ideal violin teacher for me a few years earlier. But now, I felt oppressed by her demanding, critical style.

  Watch your left hand in the mirror. Lift your elbow. Relax your shoulders.

  As I would try to play better, my eyes would wander away from my fingers or notes and back to the large mirror over the fireplace. I couldn’t help admiring my eyelashes, rich with mascara, and my skin, smooth and pale with foundation. I found the glamorous beauty I had achieved with makeup and a haircut reassuring, as the only achievement left to me.

  “I’m not much of an athlete, but I am an advanced swimmer. . . .”

  All the applications asked if I belonged to any clubs or committees. I didn’t think I should discuss how, now that she was sober, Grandma Claire sometimes brought me to Alateen, a twelve-step program for children from alcoholic families.

  The applications also asked me about my travels. I didn’t write about the winter Uncle Harry let me come along on their family vacation to the Adirondacks, where we stayed in a heated cabin with showers and cable TV. Or Cape Cod, where Aunt Olivia had rented a beach house one summer, and where, in Provincetown, I saw gays and lesbians publicly kissing and holding hands for the first time.

  I wrote, instead, about my trips to Poland, where I believed I could be myself, where the Communists had wiped out vestigial aristocrats and old estates, and where a place like Rokeby would have been divided up into hundreds of utilitarian living units. I believed that had I grown up in Poland, I would have been both free of my heritage and free to distinguish myself exclusively through work and study.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE ELUSIVE EDGE

  Courtesy of Ania Aldrich

  In the end, the only school to accept me was the Brooks School.

  It was late August and the day before Mom and Dad were to drive me to eastern Massachusetts. I slipped in through Grandma Claire’s kitchen door for one final visit.

  Grandma’s kitchen, as always, smelled of mildew and the old brick garage. The dishes were piled up in both halves of the sink. The cast-iron skillet on the stovetop still had a layer of hard, white cooking fat. Flies were buzzing around the butter melting in its open butter dish.

  Grandma Claire was sitting in her recliner in the long living room, among her musty antiques and dog-hair-covered sofas with their misshapen cushions. She was turned sideways in her recliner to view the fuzzy black-and-white lights of the TV on the shelf behind her, with an open book on her lap. The dusty wooden blinds, which would clatter when moved, were closed against the late-summer sun, their flat, horizontal pieces directed at a slant to send the sunlight to the floor.

  “Hi, dear . . .” Grandma’s speech was slow. She was thin and diminished. Still, we played the friendly “hi” game.

  Maggie and Diana had moved away to the ranch house on the neighboring estate, and now I too was leaving Grandma, alone with her photo place mats and granddaughters’ fading art projects still hanging on her walls. I could see that she had begun to adjust to this new phase of her life, one of solitude and sober old age. She seemed more stuck in her chair, more attached to this dark room, with its antiques, photographs, fireplace, disarray of magazines and papers on the dining table, lumpy sofas, and ragged rugs. Grandma Claire’s head was now leaning against her chair, and her eyes were drooping. She had no choice but to loosen her grip.

  A daddy longlegs moved slowly, barely perceptibly, in the corner.

  I could eat supper here, but Grandma hadn’t prepared for a guest. I could set up an organized spot, an island in the sea of papers on the dining table, with a place mat, plate, and silverware. But, feeling guilt and sadness about abandoning Grandma, I had no appetite. I looked at one of her photo place mats that held pictures of relatives both close and distant, made meaningless to me by excessive familiarity. Aunt Janet in her wedding dress, Uncle Steve waving from behind a ship’s helm, Grandma Claire as a wildly curly-haired infant on her father’s lap, all her granddaughters in our square-dancing dresses under the maple on the western lawn, and so many more that had been ingrained in my memory from long study during dull dinner table conversation.

  “Now, don’t forget that it is thanks to your aunt Liz that you are going to this school. She contributed a substantial sum toward your tuition. I want you to remember that the next time you feel the urge to complain about her taking things from you.”

  Why hadn’t anyone told me that Aunt Liz was involved? This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be. Going away to boarding school was supposed to be a liberation from my family. It was supposed to be Grandma Claire who would rescue me. Now I would have an unpayable debt—like the one Dad owed to Uncle Harry.

  As Grandma Claire walked me out after my visit, the late-afternoon sun elongated her shadow on the front stoop. She stood in the doorway, hunched over, her spindly fingers pushing against the screen door’s Plexiglas.

  “Well . . . Bye, dear. Write often. You’ll be home before you know it. Thanksgiving is just around the corner.” Grandma was already an expert at sending children off to boarding school.

  When I tried to hug her—which I didn’t think I’d ever done before—her shriveled body recoiled from the physical contact. She patted my shoulder with her gnarled hand instead. “I’ll come visit you soon.” Her kiss barely touched my cheek. She waved as I walked away, then called Bianca in off the stoop and let the door slam shut.

  Other than Grandma Claire, there seemed to be no one around to send me off—no friends, relatives, balloons, cakes. The inanimate objects in the big house had always been more present for me than the human beings.

  I decided to climb the big house’s tower and bid good-bye to Rokeby from a great height.

  To reach the fifth floor, I walked through the library and along the creaky back staircase with its collapsing plaster walls and dangerously low banister. The room just beneath the tower was the old schoolroom, where the Astor orphans used to have their lessons with a hired tutor—until they were old enough to be sent away to boarding schools. In the middle of this old schoolroom was a metal spiral staircase with wide wooden steps. I ascended, crunching dead wasps underfoot.

  Rokeby stretched all the way to the Hudson River and beyond—we even owned some of the land under the river. To the north was Cousin Chanler’s estate, and to the south, the estate that had once belonged to the Delanos.

  Around the tower, some crows were now coasting on the wind like kites, flipping sideways, then flapping to straighten themselves again, seeking their balance. I felt the warm wind hitting my face, blowing through me and softening me momentarily. It was like swimming underwater. I wished it could blow through the house as well and gently undo the loneliness that ruled there.

  From here, I could see the parts of Rokeby I loved and knew so well—the forest paths and streams; the niches in the brush where I used to hide and chase wild rabbits; the giant, craterlike puddle in the barnyard in whose oozing mud my cousins and I used to bathe after rainstorms. I loved those days—before I’d grown stern and angry, before I’d turned my back on the squalor at Rokeby as an enemy against which I felt compelled to build a fortress of order, hygiene, and self-discipline. I loved those days when my cousins and I used to run around the property all summer long, unsupervised, shirtless, barefoot, wild—little orphans all.

  The Rokeby trees, favorites of generations, were dancing in the wind. The languorous, sprawling ginkgo, with its ma
ny tiers in which we kids would lounge and read for hours, waved its long branches. The giant white pine, which had provided shade for countless picnics and croquet matches, tried to bend its trunk slightly in a courtly bow. The double white cedar, all alone in the field between the house and the river, swayed in sad good-bye.

  THE NEXT MORNING, grasshoppers were buzzing in the surrounding fields. The cool Catskills were silent as I struggled to stuff my bulky trunk through the back door of Grandma’s Plymouth.

  By eleven, we were ready to depart. I was dressed conservatively, in a kilt and blazer.

  I’d tried desperately to make Mom and Dad look fashionable. Dad was wearing a suit, which I’d insisted on preapproving. I’d had to work hard to cover up his dirty white shirt collar with his jacket collar. Mom had recently cut her hair short. Today, she was sporting punky sunglasses.

  Initially, Mom hadn’t wanted to come along, but she agreed after Grandma Claire had explained to her that the presence of two parents would make a better impression. And Grandma wanted me to start off on the right foot.

  Giselle and the baby hadn’t affected our ability to act like a unified family when circumstances required it.

  As we rolled along the carriage drive, I was reminded of a recurring dream that featured this driveway.

  In this dream, I would walk toward the front gate. My right leg was shorter than my left, so every time I’d step on it, I’d dip low. Then I had to drag my longer leg along the ground, position it, and heave my body up again. High, low. High, low. I was privileged yet impoverished, cultured yet squalid, past yet present. My family was united by a common heritage and property, yet torn apart by alcoholism, competition, and infidelity. I had so many caregivers yet so much neglect. I strove to find the edges that defined me, but the lines remained blurry.