Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  While the house was undergoing construction, the Stokeses set up in temporary digs, calling on their well-appointed fellow cottagers and being called upon in return. A community had sprung up, a clan of friendly millionaires, who instead of relishing the Newport sand between their toes (figuratively, of course—they would never remove their shoes on the beach) would experience the rapture of leaves turning in October.

  Eventually, seventy-five cottages of millionaires would stud the Berkshire Hills. Henry James dismissed such houses as “grand mistakes.” The term “cottage” was not only satisfyingly droll, it paid homage to a less ostentatious era when Hawthorne, Melville, Longfellow and other literary figures took up humble residence in the area. These luminaries set themselves up in relative shanties when they came to Tanglewood (another Hawthorne locution) to scribble, scribble in balsam-fragranced quietude.

  The grandiose proportions of the Berkshires cottages and the decadent doings within them became legendary, at least in the pages of the popular press. Their names were as overblown as their dimensions: Blantyre, Wyndhurst, Orleton, Naumkeag, the Winter Palace.

  One of the splashier efforts was Erskine Park, built by George Westinghouse. The mansion’s frosty-white contours were designed after the 1893 Columbian Exposition, for which this particular cottager had installed the lighting. The drives on the estate were laid with crushed white marble, the fountains and bridges were white, and the interior walls and ceilings were stitched of tufted white satin. Guests who weren’t wowed by the place’s stark palette would surely be impressed when they found that their hostess, Marguerite Erskine Walker Westinghouse (clad in white from head to foot), had folded a $100 bill as a favor into each starched dinner napkin.

  The concept of the weekend as a time to travel, adventure and relax had just begun to take hold. The workweek had shortened to five and a half and then five days, and Americans entertained new ideas about leisure. Visitors took the Friday train from New York City. The dining room at Shadow Brook, paneled in imported English oak, could accommodate a hundred guests. From Saturday morning through Sunday eve, visitors rode horses through the woods and explored the mansion’s charming gardens. They played the newly introduced game of tennis on the estate’s immaculately groomed courts, hiked to the Stokeses’ private quarter-mile stretch of beach along Lake Mahkeenac or simply gazed down at the lake from the promenades that surrounded the house, admiring what was generally considered the most beautiful view in the Berkshires.

  That end-of-year weekend in 1894 represented Shadow Brook’s holiday season debut. The laborers had gone home. The house’s enormous ballroom formally opened. The Minturn sisters arrived. And that Sunday, December 30, Newton and Edith went for a sleigh ride.

  IT MAY HAVE been the absurd excess of the setting that put Edie off, the looming faux-Tudor edifice the size of a grand hotel. She was a Minturn, after all. She may have felt as dwarfed by the Stokes family wealth as she was by the family seat. She was known to be progressive, a suffragist, interested in the rights of man and woman both. The Minturns were well-off, but not in the same financial stratum as the Stokeses. She may have thought that the young scion, jug-eared, earnest, undashing Newton Stokes, was attempting to buy her. In response, she pronounced the one word he did not often hear.

  No.

  The Victorians had a name for it: the Refusal. They uppercased it that way, and developed the trope in popular art, literature and theater. Engravings dramatized the moment: the supplicant cowed, unmanned, the woman imperious, pointing a phallic finger the way out the door. The idea of a female asserting dominance over a male held a level of lurid fascination. Etiquette books treated the “unsuitable suitor,” indexing “Refusal on the grounds of dislike,” “Refusal on the grounds of unsteadiness of the suitor,” “Refusal on the grounds the suitor is much younger than herself.”

  No matter what sensible reason she might present, in the popular imagination a woman’s rejection of a man’s offer of marriage boded ill for both. She would wither on the vine; he would descend into morbid disappointment. The Refusal meant that the social engine had somehow been derailed. Chaos threatened. The concept held the faint flavor of the forbidden, as well as the titillating appeal of the taboo.

  In the nineteenth-century view, Edith Minturn headed into her late twenties as though into her sunset years. Next stop, oblivion. That she had a full, in fact an extremely well-packed, life and social calendar mattered little. She lacked the single defining characteristic of the Victorian woman. There were other roles available, such as that of the spinster, but all those were stigmatized. It was bridehood or nothing.

  The Refusal also memorialized the last moment when the female possessed power over a male. After its more sunny flip side, the Acceptance, a woman disappeared, subsumed legally and socially into her husband’s sphere. “Feme sole,” as the Normans had it, transforming into “feme covert.” Her very name would be extinguished along with her rights. She would no longer be Edith Minturn. She would be Mrs. I. N. Phelps Stokes. The Refusal staved off this moment of abnegation. Was it any wonder that Edie bridled when the moment came?

  “My sister Edith is a fierce little thing,” Bob Minturn told Newton after the Refusal at the Shadow Brook house party. “My advice to you is to stay right here and win her, and then to carry her off in a blaze of glory.” But Newton tucked tail and left.

  After the rebuff, he decamped for Paris, leaving behind family, business prospects and his infatuation with Edith. In 1890s America, architects were unquestionably numbered among the swelling artistic class. Paris was the new capital of bohemia. It would make sense that a student architect would immerse himself there. Paris was the perfect place for a rejected suitor to lick his wounds.

  The City of Light was just then celebrated as the setting for a novel, le grand succès populaire of the year. George du Maurier’s Trilby, the sentimental saga of a painter’s model in the Latin Quarter of the 1850s and the bohemian types who fall in love with her, sold 200,000 copies within months of publication. Un succès d’estime as well: “The whole thing swims in tender remembrance and personal loveliness,” wrote the always-on-point Henry James in his New York Times review; “even the dirty, wicked people have the grace of satyrs in a frieze.”

  As if under the spell of Svengali himself, American readers were especially bewitched by the novel. The Latin Quarter milieu tapped into the social anxiety over the status of independent young single women, women much like Edith Minturn, loosed into a world of artists and poets. The character of Trilby instantly became central to the tableau vivant repertoire at charity functions. Barefoot young ladies such as Edith clamored to play the quirky heroine. Satyrs in a frieze indeed.

  Newton found himself in the thick of romantic Paris, at that moment the hottest locale in the world if you were a young artistic type. More to the point, he still hadn’t passed the exam to enter the École des Beaux-Arts, which was deemed next to mandatory for aspiring architects. He was distracted by love. He couldn’t stop himself from dispatching letters to “Miss Minturn,” one, two, half a dozen over the course of the winter. His efforts earned him nothing but chilly rejoinders. He began to believe that it might prove too difficult to win this woman.

  Newton immersed himself in his studies and tried to forget her. He took classes.

  In late spring 1895, prompted by a side-door plea from an interested party, Newton sailed home to renew his assault on the citadel Minturn.

  8. Rich and Romantic

  With the erstwhile lovers separated by an ocean, Edith’s younger sister Gertrude took matters in hand. She favored Newton’s pressing his suit. Impatient with Edith’s rebuffs of this eligible though quirky young man, Gertrude decided to play a variation of Austen’s Emma Woodhouse. She wanted to get things started.

  Gertrude hit Newton with her best shot: a photograph of Edith. Just her lovely face, actually, snipped from the James Breese portrait of the beautiful Minturn girls. Gertrude’s attached note commanded Newton to return
at once to renew his suit, and told him where to find the family. Somehow the sly, sisterly Cupid sensed that Edith might now be amenable.

  The evening he received Gertrude’s letter, Newton had plans to host a formal dinner at his Paris apartment. Her missive pricked him into action. He canceled the party and embarked immediately for America, stopping only in England to cable the Minturns that he was on his way. Ever the clothes horse, he used his London layover to commandeer some new garments from his London tailor and haberdasher.

  Gertrude had informed Newton that the Minturns had gone for the warm season to Murray Bay, Quebec. A Canadian resort region on the northern shore of the St. Lawrence River, Murray Bay was only just being discovered by Americans, with Edith’s family leading the charge. One of the area’s charms was that it was devilishly difficult to get to.

  On the shores of Murray Bay lay an inlet that the French Canadian inhabitants called La Malbaie. The environs had an aura of romance that pleased vacationers. Even La Malbaie muck was magical. When the tide receded from the bay each evening, the exposed shoreline displayed an eerie, iridescent sheen under the setting sun, all blues and pinks and lavenders, the product of protozoa. The bay’s name was in fact a judgment on that mud, by the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who sailed a bark down the “flat river,” Canada’s great St. Lawrence, from Quebec in 1608. He named the place Malle Baye, terrible bay, for the shallowness that could ground a ship.

  Another perspective would come some years later from Henry Dwight Sedgwick, the lawyer-author who would marry Edith’s elder sister, May, the year after Edith and Newton’s wedding. With his typical fin de siècle panache, Sedgwick likened La Malbaie’s sunset to Cinderella, when she “dropped the rags she sat in by the kitchen fire to put on the ball gown that won the Prince’s heart, clothe herself and glow, rose-tinted flats and sparkling pools, in beauty.”

  For Edith, this strange place with its polychrome mud offered a refuge like no other. It was her equivalent of Newton’s Birch Island, where she could indulge her earthier, more poetic side. A mutual need for such a haven would be a bond Edie and Newton shared throughout their lives.

  Murray Bay’s craggy beauty had first been discovered by wealthy Canadians escaping cholera outbreaks in Montreal and Quebec during the 1830s. Plentiful salmon and herds of caribou were a draw for sportsmen. A contemporary tourist guide touted sea baths in the icy waters of the St. Lawrence as “salubrious and hygienic.” City folk delightedly took in the crystalline mountain air, the fields of wildflowers and the entertainingly odd country ways of the habitants. Another early guidebook, published in 1807, promoted the bay as a “rich and romantic” destination.

  Susanna Minturn and her brood, alerted to the region’s charms by a Staten Island friend, rolled into town in 1895. Renting in Murray Bay would be adequate for a time, of course—that was the unpretentious side of the Minturn approach to life. Susanna soon decided they would be the first of the seasonal visitors to erect an American-style summer house.

  She chose to build at Point-au-Pic, a shoreline hamlet immediately to the southwest of La Malbaie. Of the little villages dotting the hillsides above the St. Lawrence, Point-au-Pic appeared to Susanna as the most charming and unspoiled. Another draw: a Protestant church, a relative rarity in the heavily Catholic area. Built in 1867 as a haven for summer visitors who disdained the papist alternatives favored by the habitants, the chapel featured a plain wood exterior, a charmingly simple interior and an intimate graveyard overlooking the rock-strewn strand.

  To create the Minturn villa at Point-au-Pic, Susanna hired a fellow American, Charles Follen McKim, of the fabled Beaux-Arts firm of McKim, Mead & White. McKim designed many of the Berkshires cottages (but not Shadow Brook), and became known as the preeminent creator of the summer cottage aesthetic in the United States. Then forty-eight years old and an informal suitor of May, he turned out a generously proportioned, white-trimmed, shingle-sided villa in colonial revival style.

  When Edith’s family went there, the simple rituals of a Murray Bay summertime held sway, especially for visitors her age. Edith and her friends went on picnics, gorging themselves on hard-boiled eggs and sandwiches filled with wild strawberry jam. Nighttime meant driftwood campfires under the Northern Lights, with rousing singalongs of “Alouette” and other French Canadian folk songs. There might be a hayride or a children’s rodeo or a vaudeville production staged by the younger generation at the local hotel. Treks to the waterfall known as Le Trou offered a special attraction, because here, deep in the woods, girls and boys alike stripped off their clothes and swam.

  With the coming of more Americans and the advent of outsize summer houses, Murray Bay took on the usual trappings of fashionable Gilded Age style: black-tie dinners, afternoon teas and plenty of golf and tennis. As the age of the steamboat came to an end, people took motorcars up the coast highway. The local Indians, the Micmac, dwindled to a few. The old ways declined. Eventually the bluffs above Point-au-Pic showcased a subdued yet elegant chain of vacation properties, some clad in clapboard, like the Villa Minturn, some faced with stucco or stone. Boatloads of vacationers arrived, eager to chill themselves in the salty waters and to relish that strawberry jam. The new popularity of “their” spot didn’t bother Edith and her siblings, secure in the knowledge that their house boasted the most felicitous view, the handsomest aspect, the most private location. They were there first.

  Newton Stokes arrived in Murray Bay at the beginning of June 1895, a half year post-Refusal. He had traveled on the fast transatlantic steamer from London to Quebec. His route took him up the St. Lawrence directly past La Malbaie, where he knew Edith stayed with her family. It was night. He could see the lights of the little towns around the harbor. An impatient Newton petitioned the steamer captain to allow him to disembark onto a fishing vessel and sail to shore. The captain, no romantic, declined.

  The steamer did not pause. The lights of Murray Bay slipped away behind him. When Newton arrived in Quebec City, he sent word to the family, only to be informed that Susanna and Edith were in the same town as he, “on business.” Was this a ruse? A “coincidence”? Or had they come to Quebec City expressly to meet him?

  A reunion of sorts. Susanna discreetly absented herself, and the unchaperoned couple rode a carriage eight miles north along the shore of the St. Lawrence to Chute Montmorency. The great falls, near the Île d’Orléans, named by Champlain for his patron, represented one of the wonders of the area, ninety feet higher than Niagara Falls, always veiled with mist, an enormous priapic plunge of water over a stone shelf into the receptive current of the river.

  Now Newton’s memoir turns shy. Edith never noted what words passed between them. Even if they wanted to speak, they would not have heard each other above the roar of the falls. He pressed his suit. He asked again.

  This time, she did not say no.

  But neither did she say yes, so the couple transported themselves, mother in tow, downriver to the Minturn seasonal rental, where the family awaited the completion of the new summer cottage from McKim. The well-known architect’s courting of Edith’s sister May took the form of assiduously absorbing her notes on the progress of the house. Meanwhile, the other architect-suitor, Newton, appeared to have no place, professionally speaking, except, as he would later grumble, regarding the proper character of a single stair rail. He would stay with the family nearly three months.

  The Minturns, it seemed, knew everyone who summered at Murray Bay, a group mainly composed, in those days, of Canadians. The days were full of picnics, while the evenings held informal parties “where the habitants sang their native songs and danced their simple, rather awkward, dances,” Newton wrote later. Maison Rouge, the rental, had a big wraparound porch—in the vernacular of the time, a piazza—that gave out on the vaunted dreamy bay view at dusk.

  After supper, the girls attended to their sewing. Mama Minturn, her silvery-white hair handsome in the parlor lamplight, read aloud. Newton and Edith affected calm demeanors, “div
iding our attention,” he would recall, “between the story and our own thoughts.” Not exactly the “blaze of glory” that brother Bob had envisioned at Shadow Brook.

  Once, after church, the couple made their way along the coast road in a drizzling rain, the big, red silk-lined hood of Edith’s cape pulled over her head. They stopped to rest, seating themselves on a wayside log. Newton thought Edie looked even more beautiful than usual. But the two of them could manage only to gaze out silently over the gray river.

  Edith had welcomed Newton to her family’s home. She was friendly, though not overwhelmingly so. She was not a flirt. She had a wonderful smile, but most of the time her expression was dauntingly serious.

  A few days later, they again took to the road for a walk, and climbed over a low fence into a stony pasture. The river spread out below them, a basin of cool, mirrored metal. They talked of nothing—then, suddenly, of everything. After the gush of Montmorency Falls, after two weeks of picnics and parties, after carriage rides and soulful hikes along the rocky shore, after attending the progress of McKim’s immense riverfront confection, clumsy Newton Stokes finally won over fierce Edith Minturn.

  Reader, she said yes.

  With a show of newly mature dignity the couple returned to Maison Rouge. Edith ran upstairs to Susanna, leaving Newton with her brusque, sardonic older brother. After hearing the day’s news, Bob Minturn chided his old friend and new in-law. “I have never seen so weak and unimaginative an effort on the part of a Harvard man,” he said.