Savage Grace - Natalie Robins

by Savage Grace- The True Story of Fatal Relations in a Rich

  I went down. It was my father. The Grand Duke. A rare and fluttery event. What to do with him? A glass of port? One always had to entertain him—like royalty. He had no conversation. One ended up chattering, feeling a perfect fool. That is perhaps the principal reason royalty has been almost universally suppressed: it is utterly useless and makes intelligent people feel stupid.

  And then I had an inspiration—nothing else had worked. I took him up to my study to show him the wonderful photos I had brought back from Snug Rock. I was also hybridizing orchids up there, under all sorts of artificially simulated climatic conditions. The orchids did not interest him in the least, not even the fact that I had some growing in conditions approximating fourteen thousand feet in Peru and Chile and, in a glass case right next to them, some growing at sea level in Sumatra—different pressures, sunrise and sunset times, temperatures, humidities, and seasons. I began to take out all those photos showing him as a small boy on the knee of Zeus, etc.

  And he would not, he could not, it almost seemed as though he dared not, look at a single photo of his father!

  That was when I first grew up, so to speak, insofar as understanding my lifelong problem with Father was concerned. After that day I no longer feared him. I pitied him. I understood his tragedy and it horrified me.

  He was first and always the beloved apple of his mother’s eye. My grandmother was so besotted she told my mother when she married my father that “George is a combination of Leonardo da Vinci and Jesus Christ.” I concluded that he was protected early from Zeus and that he was not intimate with his father, that eccentric tyrant figure, whose lava outpourings of speech and learning and whose intolerance of folly must have made him a dreadful person in the house, an awesome parent. A man who could not stand noise, save it issued from his own mouth. Zeus, the terrible.

  Judging from the fact that my father always hated and distrusted “intellectuals” and read with the slowness and concentrated effort of a peasant, and from the fact that the interests and style he soon developed were totally opposite to his father’s—that is, all things physical and sporting—and that he spent enormous sums of money all his life on things elegant and beautiful, and became what I call a high-class redneck, to the right of Right—from all this, I take it that he had made, and perhaps with his mother’s connivance, a classic revolt against his father.

  But—and this is what interests me—my father apparently never actually defied my grandfather. In fact, he obeyed to the point of wrecking his own happiness. You might interpret his obedience to what he feared and loathed as showing a lack of courage, but I think there was a still stronger influence that made defiance unthinkable. Despite his efforts to separate himself from everything that had a foreign accent, so to speak, to be a real—but tip-top-class—American, or even better yet, a noble Englishman, Snug Rock was a thoroughgoing piece of bourgeois Europe, and in Europe, Victorian Europe, filial obedience was total. The only alternative was to “run away to sea”—leave home forever. With his mother’s devoted protection, that would never have been necessary. All he had to do was to see as little of his father as possible, and that was easy, for LHB was always working or away.

  And then, in the few years before he joined what was then I think the Signal Corps and went to Italy as an aviator, he met and fell in love with the most beautiful girl in the Hudson River Valley—my mother, Cornelia Fitch Middlebrook, a thirteenth-generation American, descended from founding fathers and from governors of New York State, etc., etc. They were engaged shortly before he went off to war. He was the happiest man in the world.

  He was unlucky in being sent to Italy. The great Italian immigration to America had already begun, and to him, Italians were fellows in undershirts and paper-bag hats who dug ditches or labored in his parents’ gardens and greenhouses. He was sent to Foggia, where he flew Caproni bombers and where his commanding officer was Fiorello La Guardia, later mayor of New York, a small, talkative, emotional man whom he despised. I remember, as a boy, hearing him brag how he would shoulder “wops” off the sidewalks in Italy. Of the Renaissance, of ancient Rome, of Italian science, music, philosophy, mathematics, he knew nothing. “What did Italians ever do?” he would say, in later years. I would tell him. “Oh, artists!” he would say with contempt. I would then cite for him Italian figures in America who were distinguished scientists, politicians, bankers, industrialists, and even—best of all—multimillionaires. He would stare at me in disbelief, offended by such disgusting paradoxes. He felt the same about the Jews—or any immigrant people. When I was doing graduate work in physics he asked me once, in a lowered voice: “Einstein is a fake, isn’t he?” And these were all idées reçus, not gotten from his parents but from twentieth-century America as it was then.

  My father hoped he was a total conformist. In fact, he was not only a right-wing radical but a misanthrope, who never had any friends, except those who could flatter him. Flattery was the only road to him, but his cruelty closed that road for me. He ended up sincerely preferring dogs to people.

  But he was not quite the two-dimensional figure that I was then still persuaded he was. No one is. He was a man born out of his place, out of his time, and a man with superb—unused, curdling—gifts. He was, for instance, gifted with his hands—he loved cabinetwork—and he had a love of speed, was as quick and coordinated as a cat. He could be fun and even witty when he was happy, and he loved jokes—when they were on others. He was a man who on a camping trip would nail some friend’s shoes to the floor by his bed, his friend presumably drunk and deaf to the hammering, but would be red-faced mad if someone had done that to him. He was a wonderful practical joker and gave me some bad examples in that line, but he was never one to see himself in a funny light. I thought, even as a small child, that that was weird—mad, somehow. I could not understand it. I am not sure I do now.

  He also had—but alas, it was superficial—dash, or what the French call panache. It was show. He was always, metaphorically speaking, standing at a mirror. He was totally conscious of his own style. But finally, his arrogance and his misanthropy were ego-saving rationalizations for a deep shyness and sense of his social incapacities. I know this because I am his son and have inherited many of the same disabilities.

  My father roared out in the dark to keep the demons away. It was easy, being such a rich and protected man. As my grandmother used to say, “One of the uses of money is that it allows us not to live with the consequences of our mistakes.” He even fooled himself. I do not think he ever suspected that he had lived his whole life through at bay. Think of this. It is sad. After all, we do not have much time here, and to spend it all with our backs against the wall…But I suppose a large part of humanity does, and that is even sadder.

  After my father and mother were married they went out to Golden, Colorado, then a village, where he entered the Colorado School of Mines. He had decided to be a geologist—geologists lived out of doors, hammered rocks, prospected for gold, built bridges over rushing torrents in darkest Africa and other romantic parts of the world. It was my father who gave me my romantic interest in faraway places—the Arctic, Africa, South America, the sounding seas—ships, adventure, the noble savage, etc.

  In Golden, my mother bore him two children—first my sister and then, fifteen months later, myself. Upon graduation, with the aid of my grandfather, he was signed on to go down to Tunisia and Algeria and prospect for oil.

  Engineering was the romantic thing in those days. It was the engineers, in their open-necked shirts, riding britches, boots, and pipe in hand or mouth, who were pushing civilization out into the “native” parts of the world. It was the tail end of Cecil Rhodes’s world, the do-gooding-but-ohso-much-money-making world of the British Empire. It was “a man’s life.” My father had made a choice that I could have certainly made myself—one part of me would have, for I have always had both sides in me, the active and the intellectual, and they have often been in conflict.

  Eventually my grandparents decided that
my father was to return at “a very good salary” and become vice-president of the Bakelite Corporation in New York, then headquarters for the German, English, American, and Japanese branches, and that “the young people” were to live in Yonkers, not far from Snug Rock, while my father made “a splendid career” in Bakelite. In the summers my mother and her two small children would move up to the Adirondacks.

  My father ought to have pursued his open-air, adventurous, super-masculine life. But the promise of that “very good salary” and that “splendid career” and—what?—shame?—hope?—made him take a decision that embittered and diminished him for the rest of his life. In every blow that he beat his two young children there was the rage and bitterness of a man who hated himself—and so hated the world.

  After his “very good salary” and other perks became so fabulous in the roaring twenties that he could move away from Yonkers, he bought a place surrounded by woods in Scarsdale where he built a swimming pool—a novelty in those days—and, on the same property, another house for himself, the Doggery, where he lived with his dogs and mounted heads, coming to “our” house only for meals. He did not stay with his wife after dinner but, always in dinner jacket, worked in his shop, making, for instance, sailing boats. He was an insomniac all his life, and, crazy with frustrated sexuality, would swim at night for hours up and down his pool to exhaust himself sufficiently to sleep.

  We two—and later, three—children took it quite for granted that on our property there should be two separate establishments, one for my father and one for us and our mother. We always dreaded the black-cloud returns of “George” from his office on Park Avenue. Once, I saw with amazement a rat, not a squirrel, jump from the big sycamore near my bedroom window to the roof of the house. I could not wait to tell my father, for I had not known that rats could climb trees. I imagined it might please that man I so feared and whom, even then, I had to entertain and—I did not know it yet—be superior to. Not easy at five or six. Calling me a liar and saying he would teach me a lesson, he beat me with the back of a hairbrush. He could never keep his temper and knew no other recourse than the Gestapo ones—beatings, threats, reprisals. And we were all so weak, in our own ways—such sinful creatures, so culpably misguided, so unable to do right in my father’s eyes, so wanting to please, so terrified of doing wrong.

  On the other hand, and sadly for my father, I was a person born with an inordinate and growing pride, and I began to stiffen and resist as time passed. As my darling Sylvie has pointed out to me, a child that knows it is loved will accept any punishment from the person who loves him, even when it is unjust, but no child will accept even just punishment from a person who dislikes him. And my father detested his children.

  Geoffrey Parsons

  They were three of the brightest children I’ve ever known. Little Cornelia—the family called her Dickie—was the most marvelous child. Very beautiful, and full of creative imagination—a real original. She was wounded permanently by her father. She was a brilliant girl and he cut off her education with boarding school, saying that she was not worth educating. Her response to this was the usual one—she married the first eligible man who asked her in order to get free of family. She’s been married three times, I think. Without that father, there’s no saying what her life might have been.

  As for Fred, the younger boy, he always wanted to be a composer, but George told him in no uncertain terms that music was an avocation, not a vocation, and threatened to cut him off without a penny if he pursued a musical career. So Fred became a doctor, choosing psychiatry as his specialty. I believe he has written numerous scholarly papers. He’s also an accomplished art historian.

  Brooks was seven years older than Fred and about a year and a half younger than Dickie, and he was always the most brilliant of the children. He had a quick eye and a vivid curiosity. He could have been anything he chose to be. Instead, he’s spent his entire life running—from or after something.

  Brooks Baekeland

  I was a hunter, I smelled a kill far—oh, far indeed, perhaps one life would not be enough. I was running fast always on fresh snow.

  Each of my father’s children had to make his own kind of defense. I chose—I had no choice—a sulking, black defiance. My whole spirit was in opposition to my father, with whom ironically I shared many physical gifts: alertness, quickness, coordination, speed of decision—all animal things. But nothing else, though way down in him there was a sweetness that some, even my mother, recognized was there. There is a child in everyone; it is the child we love. It was the child in Barbara that I had always loved. I love my mother, too, as I love children. She was and is the quintessence of the feminine—loyal, sentimental, fragile, beautiful.

  Geoffrey Parsons

  Brooks’s mother is much too beautiful for her own and everybody else’s good. Her whole life has been theater, with her own charming self always at stage center. She’s just as smart as vinegar laced with a good mustard but it’s all buried beneath a foot of the best goosedown. The only relation that anyone—man, woman, child, even her own children—can have with her is a flirtatious one, in my opinion. As you can imagine, she’s always had a score of admirers—including, I must confess, myself.

  Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

  A lot of pressure to marry money had been put on Brooks’s mother by her family, who’d lost all theirs. Poor Cornelia, you know—she was really sacrificed. She was a very sensitive romantic creature and there was just never any rapport between her and George Baekeland.

  How she left him is a fascinating story. She wanted to get away one winter and her friends were all going down to some club in Florida, and George didn’t want her to stay at this particular club. He said, “You can go only if you stay at my club.” So she went to his club—alone—and one night there was a fancy-dress ball and she was coming down the stairs and she suddenly caught the eye of this man. He just looked up at her—you know, across a crowded room. Pong! Just like that—love. He went over and asked her to dance.

  His name was Penn Hallowell, N. Penrose Hallowell, and he was from Boston and he was married at the time. Now, Cornelia is a very honorable person—I have tremendous love and admiration for her. I think she’s the kind of person who probably, once she met Penn Hallowell, couldn’t bear to stay with George Baekeland and just said to him, “Look, I’m in love with somebody else, let me go.” I mean, she wouldn’t make any bones about it. So anyway, he let her go, but on one condition—she had to give up custody of her children. Fred was only seven at the time, Brooks was fourteen, and Dickie was almost sixteen.

  George gave her three thousand dollars a year to live on. And Penn Hallowell didn’t support her, because that was against his principles. He would bring her gifts—he would bring her very nice gifts—but he never gave any money. So she was strapped in those years.

  The children were all away at boarding school, and on vacations they were with Cornelia as much as with George, even though he had the custody. The only problem the boys ever had with her was getting to see her. They always had to make a date two weeks in advance or something, she had so many admirers. She was a good mother, though—so charming and so gracious, and so beautiful!

  For years after she left George, Penn Hallowell did not marry Cornelia, because, as I said, he already was married. Everybody knew about them but they didn’t know that anybody knew and they were always so careful. And when they finally “came out”—after twenty years, which was when his wife died—everybody said, “Oh, finally Penn Hallowell has married his lovely mistress.” He was eighty then and she was sixty-five. He died five years later and she was absolutely distraught. They were lovers right up to the end of their lives.

  Sylvie Baekeland Skira

  He was her man, yes. Brooks told me that she kept his room just the way it was before he died. His little slippers. His little bathrobe, exactly where it was, and so on. I have never been in Brooks’s mother’s apartment in New York. I’ve never been to camp. I was never invit
ed. Brooks never took me. This is why I keep saying, the story is there but I am not in it, I have been a bit player.

  You know, she always spoke of her husband as Buck—that was her nickname for him. That’s where she was rather touching and sweet. To marry Penn Hallowell was—I don’t know—the dream of her life.

  Elizabeth Archer Baekeland

  George Baekeland married again about two years after the divorce from Cornelia. His new wife came from out West—good American stock, though I heard her father sold watches and inexpensive jewelry. She was absolutely beautiful. And very musical—she played the piano. She’s about eighty now, I guess.

  I remember Dickie saying about her, “She’s lovely to look at, delightful to know”—you know. So the children gave their stepmother a hard time but they liked her. Of course, they adored their mother.

  Brooks wrote a story about his mother called “The Shrike.” I don’t think it was ever published but we all read it. A shrike is a bird that kills its prey with its beak, and the story was based on the fact that five men were supposed to have committed suicide over Cornelia. There was one, definitely. And all this upset the kids terribly.

  Brooks Baekeland

  The story was “The Grosbeak” and it was pure invention, although the protagonist, Zachariah, his father, and his mother, were all modeled after myself and my parents. Nothing ever happened in my mother’s life like what I told in that story. At least not that I know of.

  Sylvie Baekeland Skira

  Brooks’s mother was a great beauty. That’s one of the reasons she and Barbara got along so well—Brooks says because of that Great Beauty Club that you have in America. Also, Barbara was, I think, very clever with her mother-in-law—she tried to please her very much and did.

  Brooks’s mother is a very difficult person. She came to visit us in Brittany. Brooks had said to me in advance that she was a prima donna. All these Baekelands have egos that are tremendous and there’s not much room for anybody else.