And in the dream, the driveway had changed. Instead of the winding gravel road with mild inclines, it was a series of endless, rolling hills. Each time I’d climb another hill in my crippled state, a new one would rise up before me like a wave. In this way, the edge of Rokeby kept eluding me, and I never did reach the public road.
Dad was exuberant about revisiting the institution he considered to be a great “molder of men.” Mom, on the other hand, was in her usual foul mood and kept interrupting Dad as he tried to recall his own boarding school experience.
“When my mother decided to send me off to my first boarding school, I was ten. I was simply informed one day that I would be going, and was dropped off the next.”
“You couldn’t have taken a bath before going on this trip?” Mom complained as she rolled down her window.
“So sorry, dear . . . ,” Dad said in his appeasing voice. “I thought I had taken a bath this morning.”
“A bath without soap doesn’t count.”
“Of course, dear. I hadn’t realized. . . . Speaking of bathing, at this same boarding school—where things were rather bleak and didn’t really get better with time—the students had obligatory showers and haircuts. When one master complained that my hair was unclean, I got even with him by rubbing waste oil into my hair so as to make it waterproof. It was black and smelled terrible, and wouldn’t wash out!”
“Ugh!” Mom moaned. “Why ever did I agree to come along? I think this whole business is disgusting. Someone could come up with twelve thousand dollars for boarding school tuition, while all these years we’ve gone hungry! And why? Why, I ask you? Because boarding school is more necessary than food in this family?”
Dad continued, unfazed. “There was one master, Mr. Jones. . . . He was particularly cruel to the boys he found pathetic or unattractive. He’d hit them with books. There was one boy named Gooding whom this master didn’t like, so he used to say, ‘Gooding, you’re nothing more than a great suet pudding!’”
“Suet pudding?” Mom made a contemptuous grimace. “Was that something your ancestors used to eat? Ridiculous!”
“Mr. Jones would insult the boys until they cried. If they complained, he’d write out demerits for insolence or insubordination. One time, I decided to read Lord Charnwood’s biography of Lincoln and write a report on it, because my pop had been reading it. When Pop complained to Mr. Jones that he thought he’d given me too high a grade on the report, Mr. Jones replied, ‘I wasn’t giving him the grade. I was giving Lord Charnwood the grade!’”
Mom addressed me. “And you think we’re bad parents? You’ll appreciate us after spending some time in a school where the teachers will hit you and call you all sorts of names!”
“They’re not allowed to hit kids anymore, Mom,” I said with a sigh.
“Oh yeah? You’ll see.”
It was clear to me that Mom didn’t want me to go away and she thought she could scare me out of it. I couldn’t understand why she cared, as she spent so much of her time alone and so little of it with me.
To alleviate my own guilt about abandoning Mom to the devastating loneliness of Rokeby, I rationalized that I needed a fine education in order to make the fortune necessary to rescue her one day.
“The school nurse was also cruel, and a drinker,” Dad continued. “She was a large, imposing, mean woman, who gave injections and enemas with relish. She and her husband both drank, and after eight P.M., they wouldn’t come out of their apartment, where they lived as the dorm parents of a certain dorm. They would also lock the bathroom at night, so it was necessary to pee out the window, or into a boot to be taken out in the morning. In the winter it was a problem because the dining room was right under this dorm and the pee would run down the windows and freeze yellow.”
“So that’s where you learned your nasty habit of peeing out your window onto the gutter!”
MOM WAS AWED into sedation by the abundance of limousines that were delivering students’ trunks. “The rich kids fly up, mostly from Manhattan, and arrive separately from their luggage,” Dad explained.
“Why can’t I be rich like that?” Mom asked.
Not wishing to keep Mom and Dad here a moment longer, I remained distant as they got back into Grandma Claire’s car. It was essential not to display to the other students anything from our life together. Any incriminating language or behavior would taint this clean slate I’d been given.
“Not everyone is so lucky, I guess,” Dad—ever viewing himself as the luckiest man alive—said sarcastically.
I felt very lucky that day.
The Brooks School looked like a country club. Its sprawling lawns, its air of affluence and privilege, filled me with a sense of unlimited possibilities. Here, I would be free from the shame and chaos of Rokeby, while I could use the more glorious aspects of my heritage to my advantage. After all, as an Aldrich, I belonged here, among other students with famous names, most of whom hailed from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where they had attended day schools like Chapin and Buckley.
As my parents pulled away, I envisioned the self-assured and intellectual person I would become here. I would spend every spare minute of my day studying, writing in my journals, and practicing my violin.
Although Rokeby, like a lonely orphan, would inevitably call me back, for the moment, I was free.
Courtesy of Ania Aldrich
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank Jeanne Fleming for helping me make the necessary contacts to get this book published, and for spending endless hours on the book’s photos. And Harlan Matthews for supporting me through the whole process. A big thank-you to all my editors: Ann Patty, whose editing helped make the manuscript fit to be sold; Daphne Abeel, for believing in the book’s potential; Hilary Redmon of Ecco, for her brilliant insight. My agent, Joy Harris, for being a terrific advocate. My father, for sharing his great stories, and my mother, for sharing her photograph collection. And, last but not least, I am very grateful to my son, Shlomo, for being so patient with me while I wrote this book.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALEXANDRA ALDRICH, a direct Astor descendant, lived at Rokeby, the house at the heart of this story, until the age of fourteen, when she left to attend boarding school. She later moved to Poland, where she studied violin and history, and then back to the United States, where she taught high school English and converted to Orthodox Judaism.
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CREDITS
Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Illustration of girl © by Helen Cingisiz/Shutterstock
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of nonfiction. Though all the characters’ names have been changed, the events and experiences detailed herein are all true and have been faithfully rendered as I have remembered them. In some cases, composite characters have been created and time lines have been compressed to retain narrative flow. I rendered the dialogue as accurately as I could, but as none of it was electronically recorded, I cannot guarantee that it is a word-for-word representation of conversations that took place more than twenty years ago.
THE ASTOR ORPHAN. Copyright © 2013 by Alexandra Aldrich. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-06-220793-7
EPub Edition © April 2013 ISBN: 9780062207968
Version 02282014
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