by Marion Meade
No. 214 West Seventy-second Street was a four-story townhouse with striped awnings hooding the windows on the street and red roses in the backyard. A decade earlier the area had been open fields, but by 1894 it had been transformed into one of the city’s most exclusive residential districts. It was bisected by a broad, tree-lined parkway layed out in the style of a Parisian boulevard and accordingly named the Boulevard (until 1901 when the avenue was renamed Broadway). Prestigious Seventy-second Street was flanked by private residences, a few august apartment houses like the Dakota, and a collection of churches designed by eminent architects. The Rothschild house stood on the south side of Seventy-second, only a few doors from its intersection with the Boulevard, a corner dominated by the Hotel St. Andrew and an elite men’s club called the Colonial. Both of these immense buildings were as gaily swaddled with American flags as Fourth of July bandstands.
Dorothy was Eliza and Henry’s fourth and last child, their second daughter. Harold, Bertram, and Helen were twelve, nine, and six when she was born. She later attributed her sense of estrangement from them to the age difference. Their house was spacious, but there was little room to spare with four children, Eliza’s widowed father, and four or five Irish servants, the latter group apparently given to high-spirited insubordination and sudden departures. Her parents would, Dorothy said, “go down to Ellis Island and bring them, still bleeding, home to do the laundry. You know, that didn’t encourage them to behave well.”
If Henry had once been found undesirable as a son-in-law, he was now a prosperous gentleman, respectable and respected. Lean and strikingly good looking as a youth, he had since acquired a stomach but still cut a dashing figure with his handlebar mustache and a gold chain across his vest. He behaved like other well-to-do bourgeois. A coachman drove him to his office in the Lower Broadway business district. In the evenings he dressed for dinner and afterward might visit the Progress or Criterion clubs, where he would pass a dignified hour with brandy and cigars. He served on the board of trustees of Mount Sinai Hospital, one of his few remaining concessions to his Jewish roots. Now known as J. Henry Rothschild, he had reached a proud middle age in which the fruits of struggle and American capitalism had combined to give him his heart’s desire.
Ready-to-wear cloaks—styling, producing, and selling them—were the chief passion of Henry’s life. It was an extremely competitive field, more notable for bankruptcies and nervous collapses than for philosophic contemplation or the reading of great literature. Beginning as a stock clerk at a time when cloaks were still custom-tailored or imported, Henry had foreseen the possibilities of manufactured women’s apparel and had associated himself while still in his twenties with the former owner of a retail cloak shop, Meyer Jonasson. The pioneering Jonasson, also a German Jew, saw no reason why fine cloaks could not be mass produced. He had need of a bold young man with ideas and energy, and in no time at all Henry was established as a partner in the firm. By the time Dorothy was born, Meyer Jonasson & Company had been a household name, the General Motors of the cloak and suit industry, for nearly fifteen years. The garment industry called J. Henry Rothschild “the greatest salesman of them all,” a man whose name was synonymous with “personal magnetism, good fellowship, and loyalty to his friends.”
While Jonasson and other German Jews controlled the manufacture of cloaks, they relied for labor upon tens of thousands of Jews who had emigrated from Eastern Europe in the 1880s and 1890s and settled in a half square mile on the Lower East Side. The second-generation Germans welcomed these Russian and Polish co-religionists as they would have greeted a plague. The immigrants, they believed, gave all Jews a bad name: They were filthy and diseased, had no objections to crowding ten to a room in tenements that stank of onions and urine, and were grateful to work eighty-five hours a week doing piecework for pennies. At 358 Broadway, Henry Rothschild proudly conducted out-of-town buyers through the Jonasson factory, which appeared to be a model of sanitation and employee comfort. In fact, practically none of the work was performed on the premises. It was farmed out to small contractors who operated the sweatshops where Jonasson’s garments were made up by the newly arrived immigrants.
Jewish New York, by the 1890s, was a dual universe. One half was the uptown refuge of the Rothschilds, with its cheeky Irish maids and seaside houses, the other was Jewtown’s Essex and Hester streets with its old-world samovars and menorahs, its rag peddlers and Pig Market, its hives of cutters, pressers, basters, finishers, and embryonic anarchists. Henry Rothschild, family legend says, had a holiday ritual. Every Christmas Eve, it was his habit to ride through the streets of the Lower East Side in his coach. In his lap lay a stack of white envelopes, each containing a crisp new ten-dollar bill. These tips he distributed to the neighborhood police officers.
Conflicts and a sense of shame persisted throughout his youngest daughter’s life. Never once was she heard to refer to the invisible backdrop of her early life, the humid, steamy pressing rooms where the temperatures reached 120 degrees. It was not only her father and his Philistine friends she would disdain, it was also the whole disorderly Rothschild tribe. The aunts and uncles were dedicated wisecrackers who loved a boisterous time. At family gatherings, the table would be in an uproar—choleric Sam unable to enjoy his money; Simon, who never took a job or a woman seriously; practical Hannah, who always made sure that telegrams arrived on Dorothy’s birthday; dapper Martin, having wooed and won a Catholic heiress, trying to pass for one of those Rothschilds; Dorothy’s cousins Ethel, Harold, and Monroe. They ate and argued and laughed. They traded funny stories at the tops of their voices. Even their depressions could be apocalyptically clangorous. From another perspective, the Rothschild horseplay might be interpreted as healthy merriment. To Dorothy, her relatives were absurd, noisy figures, “silly stock” whom she shrank from acknowledging as part of her emotional geography. As an adult, she was careful to speak quietly and regally, possibly so that no one would ever mistake her for a Rothschild. She had, one of her friends remembered,lovely speech, a little drawl that was very attractive, very upper-class. It was finishing-school talk, but not the Brearley accent, not the West Side private-school accent, it was her own. She talked like a woman who as a little girl had attended a very good singing school. That was what made her use of the words fuck and shit so amusing, because you simply did not expect it.
Eliza Rothschild was forty-two when Dorothy was born. Seven years earlier she had put infants and feedings behind her and must have taken care to avoid another pregnancy. Approaching menopause, unhappy about growing old, she quietly subtracted three years from her age.
In the innocent world that Dorothy was born into, Grover Cleveland was president, little girls wore middies and brown stockings, little boys sailor suits. Although manners were expected of both sexes, mealtimes at the Rothschild table were often rowdy because it was a lively, affectionate family much given to laughter and activity. Dorothy, at an early age, mastered the art of spitting through her teeth, and Bert and Harry liked to dare their sisters to hold ice cream under their tongues, contests that invariably ended with the girls shrieking.
Their lives had slow, familiar rhythms. In winter they rode sleighs and drank hot chocolate. July and August were spent at the shore. None of their residences had either electricity or telephone. All housework was performed by servants, and the Rothschild girls were brought up in the expectation that people would serve them.
In 1897, their summer at West End was cut short by Thomas Marston’s death. Back in the city, Eliza conferred with her lawyer and composed a will that divided her estate of fifty-two thousand dollars into four equal trust funds for the education of her children.
The following summer, when Dorothy was five, the Rothschilds looked forward to unbroken months by the sea. All day long, week after yellow week, the sun throbbed against the dunes, their world all striped into bands of pale-blue sky, crystal water, and the sand the color of straw. The band played medleys of Strauss waltzes. In mid-July Eliza fell sick
with persistent diarrhea that grew worse. She also had coughing fits that left her so weak she could barely speak afterward. A Dr. Simmons was summoned to Cedar Avenue. For several days Eliza kept to her bed. A curious silence permeated the house. Even the children played quietly. On July 20, a thunderstorm clattered at the windowpanes. The children remained inside all day, restless in the silent house. Later that evening, or perhaps the next morning, Dorothy learned that Eliza had gone off to a place called “the Other Side”—terrible words to her. She was told that Eliza would not come back, but surely they would meet again, because Eliza was waiting there for Dorothy.
Dorothy screamed her head off, but Eliza did not reappear. Afterward, it occurred to her that the last sound her mother must have heard was the friendly hissing of the rain falling from the sky. That was a comfort to her because the rain always had seemed magical to Dorothy.
It rained every day the rest of that week. The family accompanied the coffin from the funeral parlor in Long Branch, across the gray water on the ferry, then uptown to the Bloomingdale Reformed Church near their house. It was still pouring on Saturday when they gathered on a muddy knoll at Woodlawn Cemetery and watched the coffin sink into the soggy ground. Due to the swiftness of Eliza’s demise, an autopsy had been performed. Her death certificate gave the cause of death as “diarrhea with colic followed by weakness of the heart. Postmortem showed artery disease.” As some of Dorothy’s adult behavior suggests, she could never rid herself of the guilty suspicion that she somehow had caused Eliza’s death.
Her mother, Dorothy said, “promptly went and died on me.” Her short stories were understandably devoid of loving mothers—indeed, there is not a one in the whole lot. Hazel Morse’s mother in “Big Blonde,” a “hazy” woman who had died, most closely resembles her own situation with Eliza. Many of her mothers are either indifferent or actively abusive to their children. Camilla, in “Horsie,” dismisses her newborn daughter with the chilling words, “Good night, useless.” Fan Durant, a woman intimidated by her husband, can’t prevent his disposing of the children’s pet while they sleep.
Most autobiographical in Dorothy’s gallery of mothers is Mrs. Matson, in “Little Curtis,” who adopts a four-year-old boy for questionable motives, then treats him so sadistically that one could almost applaud matricide. In the story of young Curtis, first called “Lucky Little Curtis,” Dorothy drew on her experience with the second Mrs. Rothschild.
Eleanor Frances Lewis, a retired teacher, was forty-eight, the same age as Henry Rothschild. Never married, she lived with a younger brother a dozen blocks from the Rothschilds. Coming from working-class people—her father had been an upholsterer—she had managed by thrift, hard work, and living as a maiden aunt in the homes of her brothers to accumulate a nest egg of nearly five thousand dollars, plus her investment of five shares in a teachers’ building and loan association.
For Henry, Eliza’s death had been a catastrophe. He alternately struggled to remember and to forget her. Finding unbearable the memories associated with the house on Seventy-second Street, he quickly sold it and moved to a rented house a half-block away, then six months later gave that up and purchased an exquisite limestone row house on West Sixty-eighth Street near Central Park. By this time, Henry had met and decided to marry Eleanor Lewis, the second Christian schoolteacher he liberated from spinsterhood. The new house symbolized his determination to build a new life for himself and to have someone care for his children. On the first business day after the start of the new century, January 3, 1900, Henry and Eleanor were married at City Hall. The bride stated that it was her first marriage. So did the groom, an unconscious mistake on Henry’s part or else the clerk’s pen slipped.
None of the Rothschild children liked Eleanor, and Dorothy hated her. Never would she be able to understand or forgive her father for what appeared to be his unaccountably hasty betrayal of Eliza. Harry, Bert, and Helen, now eighteen, sixteen, and thirteen, expressed their coldness by addressing their stepmother as “Mrs. Rothschild.” Although she urged them to call her mother, explaining that “Mrs.” hurt her feelings, they had no interest in soothing her feelings. Dorothy refused to address her at all. “I didn’t call her anything. ‘Hey, you,’ was about the best I could do.” It is not difficult to imagine the size of the problem facing the new Mrs. Rothschild. Henry, sensing his wife’s frustration, bought her jewelry and groped for special ways to please her.
Henry had remarried to make a bad situation better; he had only succeeded in making matters worse, and now it seemed he could do nothing right. On Sundays, he took Eleanor and the children on excursions to the Bronx, where they visited Eliza’s grave at Woodlawn. “That was his idea of a treat,” said Dorothy. It was a five-minute walk from the cemetery entrance to Myrtle Plot. The moment he caught sight of the marker wreathed with its stone flowers, emotions overrode dignity, the grief came rushing back, and he would start crying. “Whenever he’d hear a crunch of gravel that meant an audience approaching, out would come the biggest handkerchief you ever saw, and in a lachrymose voice that had remarkable carrying power, he’d start wailing, ‘We’re all here, Eliza! I’m here. Dottie’s here. Mrs. Rothschild is here—’ ” At these moments Dorothy hated him.
Judging by her numerous poetical references to graves, coffins, and the Dead—a term that essentially meant Eliza—the Woodlawn outings had consequences that would have astounded Henry, for they provided food for his daughter’s ripening fantasies. While he blubbered and waved his hankie, she observed him and inwardly smiled to think how her mother “would laugh, could you have heard the things they said.” Unlike her husband, Eliza would not permit herself, living or dead, to make a fool of herself. Dorothy imagined her with hands crossed, lying quietly underfoot in shiny wood and eavesdropping on the dramas taking place above.
When Dorothy was six, she idealized her mother. Twenty-five years later, carrying the same pictures in her head but no longer able to disguise her angry feelings, she decided the dead “do not welcome me” and furiously denounced them as “pompous.”
Dorothy and her sister attended Blessed Sacrament Academy, a private parochial school run by the Sisters of Charity. Academically, it was one of the city’s finest schools and had the added advantage of being located close by in a double brownstone on West Seventy-ninth Street. She walked there with one of the housemaids. She never forgot the laundry smell of the nuns’ robes, the desks covered with oilcloth, Sister Dionysius’s cold-eyed glances, the haughtiness of her classmates.
Helen had no trouble fitting in, but she was that sort of person. Dorothy had no intention of belonging. She referred to the Immaculate Conception, which struck her as sounding a little fishy, as “spontaneous combustion” and felt enormously pleased at having thought up the joke. She made a special effort to criticize everyone and sought reasons to find them ridiculous. “They weren’t exactly your starched crinoline set, you know. Dowdyest little bunch you ever saw.”
There was another girl who hated Blessed Sacrament. Mercedes de Acosta, the daughter of a wealthy Spanish-Cuban family, had a married sister who was suing her husband for divorce. The newspapers were full of sensational stories about the suit, which prompted the children at school to gossip maliciously that Rita was trying to sell her son to her husband for a million dollars. Mercedes, squaring off against her persecutors, traded taunt for taunt, in which endeavor Dorothy was only too eager to aid and abet. Before long, the nuns had cast them as the school troublemakers, parts the two scrappy little girls played with relish. Eighty years later, a student who had been three grades ahead of them at Blessed Sacrament could still remember the pair behaving so badly that their teacher suffered “a breakdown.” Dorothy was reputed to be just as devilish out of school. She even invented a secret language that drove her parents very nearly out of their minds.
All day long the nuns talked about Jesus. When she arrived home from school Dorothy found Eleanor bustling right out to interrogate her.
“Did you love Jesus tod
ay?” she asked Dorothy.
Despite her piety, there must have been times when Eleanor felt like strangling the miserable brat. Instead, she admonished lucky little Dorothy to count her blessings: Didn’t she have everything a child might want? Eleanor naturally was talking about herself, the lonely woman reincarnated into a prosperous man’s wife and the mistress of a dream house. Even though marriage had brought unexpected miseries, precisely because it had brought them, she had to work hard to deny them and prescribed gratitude as a worthy attitude. Dorothy laughed when Eleanor turned her back, and sometimes before she had.
Dorothy did not feel lucky. Eleanor made her say prayers and lectured her about regular bowel movements. The nuns were mean, her friends few, her brothers too grown up to play with her. One day she glimpsed Harry, or else it was Bert, swaggering down the street with a friend, who pointed at her and asked, “That your sister?”
“No,” her brother said.
She remembered this snub with great bitterness for the rest of her life.
After her birthday in August, there was Christmas to look forward to: working herself into a frenzy of anticipation, crossing out the days on her calendar, then finally Christmas dawn and crawling downstairs groggy with sleeplessness. But to find what? That Santa Claus and Jesus and Eleanor had remembered her with a pair of galoshes she needed anyway, a board game called Dissected Wildflowers, a copy of Sylvia’s Summer in the Holy Land, and “a fountain pen that ceased to function after the third using.”